My Travels Alone

The stories presented here are neither fiction nor are they memoirs looking back from the viewpoint of later decades. This book was written in 1970 from diaries recording travels around the world during the 1960s, when the Zeitgeist was buoyantly optimistic and a young woman had no qualms about wandering about alone - in Delhi, for example (she was there in 1965 when war broke out between India and Pakistan), or in Central America, when in 1966 she crossed the border between Guatemala and Honduras on horseback. Nowadays, in 2011, with globalization, mass tourism, the omnipresence of the media, and the spectre of fanatical fundamentalism, those are experiences that could hardly be repeated, and this small book offers fascinating insights into a world that was then a different place.