Lead Review

• Book: The Lonely Hearts Travel Club (Destination India)
• Location: India
• Author: Katy Colins

Review Author: tripfiction

This review first appeared on our blog where we also chat to Not Just Travel and get the low-down on a typical day….

“Nowhere stirs the soul like India”

Georgia runs a travel agency helping people who have just come out of a broken relationship and nursing a broken heart. She is in business with Ben, for whom she has a keen eye, but her feelings don’t really seem to be reciprocated. She works mad hours, has little time for her own social life and it’s beginning to tell.

Add into the mix some bad reviews coming in for the trips they organise to India and something has to give. Spurred on by her friend Shelley, they soon book themselves onto a flight to Delhi, for a change of scene as much as anything but also to really check out what their tour organiser Nihal is getting up to! She is travelling under the guise of a tourist, not in her in capacity of CEO. Her tour group is waiting.

In Delhi it is a brisk introduction to the sights, sounds and smells of this frenetic city, and a chaotic welcome from Nihal. India is described in stark clarity, the poverty as much as the cows and dung assail the reader at every stop. But of course Delhi Belly floors the group members and it is with griping stomachs that they visit the Taj Mahal and travel on to Mumbai on a 15 hour train ride. Georgia is soon being offered love fruit – white jamun – an ideal bite on a bulging train full of the world and his wife, and it’s almost immediately off to the Elephanta Caves, the trip out of the city that many tourists take. Having visited myself I truly loved the descriptions of the statues hewn from the rock face, and of course the canny monkeys who will steal anything that isn’t firmly anchored.

A quick experience of the filming of a Bollywood movie and the group moves on to Goa. Remember, Georgia is still incognito and of course there comes a point where she is outed – at the Holi festival (when everyone throws paint at each other), things take a very different tack.

If you are going to India and fancy a light read, then this is ideal. And if you have already been, it will transport you back…

Back to book