Former British ambassador to Nepal, Keith Bloomfield, has always regretted not following the overland hippie trail from Europe to Kathmandu during the 1970s.

After he finished his tenure in Nepal in October, he was determined to do it in the other direction and drive his Land Rover Discovery back to England. But a combination of Taliban, Al Qaeda and bureaucracy defeated the plan.

So Keith and his French wife, Genevieve, fell back on Plan B: drive around India. They set off on 19 October from Kathmandu, across Birganj into Bihar, taking six hours to do 30km on the stretch from Raxaul to Muzaffarnagar, negotiating potholes as big as lorries. Then on to Bodhgaya, on the Grand Trunk Road to Varanasi and Agra, and skirting Delhi into Rajasthan.

?By then I had had enough of palaces and forts and photographs of royalty posing with dead tigers,? says Genevieve. So they turned southtowards Baroda and Pune.

?Everywhere we went people were really curious about the blue Nepali diplomatic number plates,? recalls Keith, ?they had never seen Devnagari license plates.? Although they had a Hindi-speaking driver, this turned out to be of not much help as they made their way across Pune and Mangalore right down to Kanyakumari at the southern tip of India.

Keith and Genevieve were fascinated with the diversity, seeing Portuguese India in Panjim, French India in Pondicherry and even Danish India in Tranquebar. And British India? ?Of course, that is everywhere,? Keith replies, ?especially in Lucknow with the Residency and the buildings dating back to what is referred to in politically correct circles in India as the First War of Independence.?

In every town that they drove into for a night stop, Keith would head into the nearest internet café to check up on events back in Nepal. ?Even the swarms of mosquitoes inside the internet cafes couldn?t keep me away from news from Nepal,? he recalls.

Keith arrived in Kathmandu in late 2002, as King Gyanendra was sacking Prime Minister Deuba for the first time and was here through the turbulent post-Feburary First period and the pro-democracy uprising.

?It is like being back home, we really missed Nepal,? says Genevieve, who taught at Kathmandu University?s School of Art in Bhaktapur. The Discovery will now be freighted to Kolkata, from where it will take the sea route to England while
the Bloomfields travel back over the hippie trail? by air.