I had to laugh when we were sat in a cafe in Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu and I heard a young American tourist complaining about the amount of plastic rubbish on the beach . . . whilst drinking a PLASTIC bottle of mineral water. Hey, dude, what do you think’s going to happen to your bottle once you’ve finished with it?

In a hot country, like most of India is, you have to drink a lot of water — at least two litres a day — and in India tap water is not recommended unless you’ve spent a lot of time getting used to it. And even then . . .  But if you buy two or three bottles of water a day you’re contributing to the increasingly visible problem of plastic waste. Last time I went to India I added to the mountain of plastic to the tune of about 150 bottles in two months. This track record does rather dent my righteousness on the issue.  But this time I was determined to treat all my drinking water myself.

There are a number of different ways to do this, and I chose to take along the equipment to try out three of the most practical and commonly used methods: ultra-violet (UV) sterilisation, chlorine tablets and liquid iodine.

I have been delivering the UV treatment with a product called the SteriPEN Traveler. It is the quickest method of the three, producing almost instantly drinkable water, though it does also have its downsides. The ‘pen’ is formed of a silver plastic case about 15cm long. Underneath the cover at one end is a glass tube, the bulb that delivers the UV light. It runs on two CR123 batteries which are able to treat  50 litres, or less with rechargeable batteries. This is one of the main problems with this technique -– it still produces waste in the form of batteries, and batteries run out. The sterilised water only lasts for 24 hours –- the UV light doesn’t actually kill bacteria in the water, it merely stops it from reproducing. The SteriPEN is also breakable and expensive, retailing for around 80 GBP in the UK. It has also not been completely reliable –- it should be possible to choose between whether you want to sterilise half a litre or a full litre, but the mechanism to do this does not always work which leads to wasted battery life. And then, after four months on the road, it packed up completely. I’m planning to take it back to the shop where I bought it — Snow & Rock — and either get a replacement or my money back.

Liquid iodine tincture is a very reliable method for making water safe to drink. Just add three to four drops of 2 per cent solution to a litre of water using a dropper and it takes about 30 minutes to make it safe. It is cheap and a little iodine lasts for a very long time. But it is not possible to use iodine over an extended period of time – the maximum amount of time as far as I’m aware is three months. The taste is not great but you adjust to it and it’s possible to buy neutralising tablets that take away some of the iodine tang. Also, you have to carry a dropper and the iodine is generally bought (from a pharmacy) in a (breakable) glass bottle. And the stuff stains like hell if you spill it.

The taste of chlorine tablets is also not so great and, as with iodine, you have to wait for 20 to 30 minutes before you’re able to drink the treated water. These small tablets make the water taste a little chlorinated but it’s hardly like a swimming pool and they’re extremely easy to carry — lightweight and non-breakable. You can also use neutralising tablets to make the taste a bit better. They’re available from camping/travel stores like Cotswold Camping and Nomad Travel.

There are mechanical filters available to buy also but I haven’t had the opportunity to test one of these yet. Perhaps when I do I will update this blog post.

The amount of plastic waste produced by tourists may seem like a tiny amount compared to the waste generated by the local population in a country like India but if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. So if you’re going travelling you might want to consider investing in some form of water purification method and if you don’t, at the very least, please don’t bitch about plastic pollution when you’re helping to create it.

Plastic bottles on beach no. 5 on Havelock Island, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, India

The Andaman & Nicobar (A&N) Islands, more than 1000 kilometres east from the Indian mainland,  can be astonishingly beautiful. Swimming at sunset on Radhanagar Beach on Havelock Island, when the clear sea develops a silvery sheen and the parakeets and mynah birds screech from the high forest canopy of towering Mahua trees behind the white-sand beach, I felt that I had never been anywhere that more resembled paradise. But tourism is one of the many things that is putting increasing pressure on these beautiful islands, pressure not only on the spectacular but fragile ecology of the region from pollution, logging and over-fishing, but also on the few surviving indigenous tribal populations that have lived there for tens of thousands of years.

After the tsunami of boxing day 2004 I heard from a number of different sources the story of how in the A&N Islands many settlers from the Indian mainland, who are mainly Bengali, had been killed by the waves whereas the indigenous tribes had escaped almost completely without casualty. There were two theories put forward as to why this happened. The first is that through oral storytelling, the memory of previous tsunamis had been retained in the collective consciousness of tribal people, who anticipated what was about to happen when they saw the tide recede far further than usual. The other version states that the tribespeople observed animals running from the sea and they decided to follow them. There were other reports of animals fleeing prior to the impact of the tsunami, such as at Yala National Park in Sri Lanka, where many tourists who were on safari died but the loss of animal life was minimal.

Though the various tribal people of the A&N Islands, such as the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese, may have demonstrated their resilience to natural disaster, they are not so immune from threats from other human beings. The recent history of these indigenous populations is one of persecution from outsiders, from the British in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, who plundered the forests and tortured political prisoners from the Indian mainland there, to the Japanese occupation in the Second World War, and finally the determination of the Indian government to bring all its territories under centralised control and introduce more and more settlers from the mainland.

The population of the Onge tribe on Little Andaman was recently decimated after a number of men were poisoned when they drank from bottles that had been washed up on the shore.

The Jarawa tribe, who live mainly on South Andaman island, had a road built through their land and loggers and poachers are destorying the forest that they have lived in for thousands of years. The Indian Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that this road should be closed but it remains open. Indeed, I travelled down that road in a bus when I was there and saw the Jarawas begging by the roadside while Indian tourists jeered and took their photographs. It was a bizarre and unnerving spectacle and of course I was part of the problem just by being there.

The Sentinelese, meanwhile, who live on the isolated North Sentinel Island have actively resisted all attempts at contact and in 2006 killed with bows and arrows two fishermen who were illegally fishing in their water surrounding the island.

The charity Survival International is campaigning for the rights of these tribal groups in the A&N Islands and across the world. The fact that they survived the worst natural disaster for a century alone indicates to me that modern societies may have far more to learn from them than they do from modern Indian or European society. And that does rather question whether modern civilizations are gaining more and more knowledge and becoming increasingly enlightened as is the common assumption, or whether they are, in fact, becoming collectively more and more stupid.

Travelling for six months meant that I was also able to indulge one of my other great passions in life — reading, particularly when I became almost immobile for ten days in the middle of Maharastra with an infected foot.

In all I read 35 books while I was away and I’ve listed them all below, for the record, including the guide books I had with me.

I read a number of books about India, both fiction and non-fiction, including the amazing though seriously flawed  Maximum City by Suketu Mehta and surely the most harrowing and utterly upsetting novel of all time: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

But there are also a few unexpected titles on this list, part of the inevitable and occasionally exciting unpredictability of what books you might find in locations such as a guesthouse in rural Karnataka (Chandler: The Lady in the Lake) or a bookshop at a small seaside town in Sri Lanka (Porridge: The Inside Story!)

I could, I guess, have bought an e-book reader and downloaded a list of titles before I left the UK but then I never would have read many of my favourite books from this list; books that I had never heard of before, like The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch; and books that I ordinarily would have had very little inclination to read such as The Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, which describes a fascinating episode of European history that my meagre school education had not even touched upon.

Here’s the list in full:

1.       White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

2.       The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

3.       Into Thin Air by John Krakauer

4.       Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

5.       Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

6.       The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

7.       Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

8.       The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie

9.       The Last Trip by Alex R. Stuart

10.   Porridge: The Inside Story by Paul Ableman

11.   Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta

12.   The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

13.   The Age of Kali by William Dalrymple

14.   The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

15.   The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

16.   The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler

17.   Small Island by Andrea Levy

18.   The Rough Guide to India (various authors)

19.   The Rough Guide to Sri Lanka by Gavin Thomas

20.   Trekking in Ladakh by Charlie Loram

21.   Life Class by Pat Barker

22.   The Elephant by Richard Rayner

23.   The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

24.   The Girl with the flame in her hair by Stieg Larsson

25.   Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks by Herge

26.   The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon

27.   The Last Jews of Kerala by Edna Fernandes

28.   Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (Introduction only)

29.   A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

30.   South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

31.   The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

32.   Havoc in its Third Year by Ronan Bennett

33.   The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

34.   The Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna by Adam Zamoyski

35.   The Other Hand by Chris Cleave

I have now returned to grey, cold, rain-sodden London after a 6 month journey through India and Sri Lanka, from the snowy Himalayas to the coral reefs of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

More photos, stories, thoughts and reflections from this epic trip will appear on my blog very soon. I feel as though I learnt a lot while I was away. I was particularly privileged to learn a lot about India and Indian people. And this has also made me see London and the UK in a different way as well, something that I hope will be valuable for my writing.

At the moment I am busy reading the final proofs for PETER PAN’S FIRST XI, which is being published by Hodder on May 13 this year, as well as working on a new, secret project.

And, despite the weather, it’s good to be home.

I’ve been back in town for almost a week since finishing a three week, 170 mile journey by foot through the Zanskar Mountains from Darcha to Lamayuru during which I journeyed over seven passes, the highest over 5,000m in altitude, accompanied by my wife, horseman Tanzing Shin and his horses Mapo and Napo. It was an epic experience.

The Upper Kargayak Valley

The town we’re in now is Leh, the capital of Ladakh, though it has a population of just 25,000 people, and Ladakh a population of just 200,000 in an area the size of England. While we were trekking we imagined civilization would hold many delights for us on our return, not least tandoori chicken, cold beer and chips, as well as books, internet and telephone access and hot showers. Yet returning to town hasn’t quite been the experience we imagined it to be. When Ghandi was asked what he thought about western civilization he famously replied that he thought it would be a very good idea. Similarly, on returning to what is meant to be civilization, it seemed remarkable how uncivilized it all is, particularly compared to many of the mountain villages we had been staying in and walking through on our trek. True, none of them had Salman Rushdie novels, or pizza, or Kingfisher lager, but they were clean, peaceful and friendly, they were proper communities where neighbours helped one another with the harvest and looking after their animals, and there was no waste. Human shit decomposes in dry latrines and is used as fertiliser. Animal shit, meanwhile, is carefully dried in the sun and used as solid fuel for stoves (there are barely any trees in the mountains). The very existence of these villages seemed like something of a miracle to us when we came across them. Our trek did not dip below 3,500m altitude (the highest mountain in Britain is lower than 1500m) and as Ladakh receives on average just 40mm of rain a year, much of the region is a high, arid, mountain-desert wilderness. Yet among this wilderness there are towns bordered by glacial debris, scree slopes and vast cliff faces that look like green oases with fields of barley, potatoes and peas and small copses of willow trees. The people in these remote villages create these oases by digging elaborate irrigation channels, often many kilometres long, that feed the land with glacial meltwater, and have done so for more than 2,000 years. In many ways all this feels more like civilization than the diesel fumes, plastic waste and hundreds of stray dogs that we found in Leh.

A similar story of how ‘civilized societies’ can learn a lot from these Ladakhi villages is told in two films that I managed to watch while in Leh: Ancient Futures and The Economics of Happiness. Ancient Futures is also a book by Helena Norberg-Hodge and it is an extremely thought-provoking study.

Ancient Futures

I’ve just completed a three week trek through Zanskar in Ladakh, northern India.

I’m currently in Leh, in an internet cafe with low bandwidth, running on a diesel generator.

More soon, once we return to Delhi in the next couple of days.

Namaste!

I am in India betwen August 2009 and February 2010 and plan to update my blog with posts and photos from my trip.

Check back for more soon.

Delhi during the monsoon

That’s right. Sign up to my twaddle, or my twatter feed, and I’ll witter at you inanely in trills and warbles of 140 characters or less. lol.
No, but seriously. Most communication is full of noise. The beauty of twaddle  is that you have to really think about what you want to say before you say it. It’s pithy. It’s like writing a haiku.
Yeah, I know that people titter that twaddle is just twits wittering and twats waddling. Or something like that, lol.
But now you’ll know what I’m up to at any time of day, whether I’m coming up with a brilliant idea for a new book or trekking through the Himalayas!
God, this blog entry is so long. I really don’t know what else to say. Makes me think: keep it simple stupid!
Don’t forget to read my warbles, now!
Kevin.

I am, of course, talking about Charlie, who seems to have a knack for dividing opinion. Take his latest speech, for example: the 2009 Richard Dimbleby lecture, in which he reasserted his already well-known credentials as the royal poster-boy of environmentalism and everyone’s favourite posh greenie. Last year he came out top of a Country Life survey to find out who people saw as the ‘guardian of the countryside’ and Time magazine has called him ‘one of the world’s leading conservationsists’. Many people with an environmental agenda themselves evidently think that he is well-intentioned and also that his position outside of parliamentary politics and interest groups gives him a refreshingly non-partisan voice.

In his speech he stressed the need to ‘maintain balance between keeping the earth’s natural capital intact and sustaining humanity on its renewable income’.

‘We are not separate from nature’, he argued, ‘like everything else, we are nature.’

This is the kind of sentiment which wins Charlie praise from environmentalists. But his attitude to architecture in particular as represented in this speech is revealing, and relates to his recent clashes with one of the more prominent members of the architectural establishment.

He said, for example, that ‘I have talked long and hard about this for what seems rather a long time – but it is yet another case where a rediscovery of so-called “old-fashioned”, traditional virtues can lead to the development of sustainable urbanism.”

It’s the ‘old-fashioned’ part of this which  is most interesting. There’s no doubt that there is a lot to learn from the building methods and ways of life of the past. But I contend that Charles is interested in sustainability mainly in the sense of sustaining his own interpretation of what England is: a green and pleasant land of noble princes and toiling peasants, a land of village cricket greens and housing styles named after royals of the past few centuries: Tudor, Queen Anne, Georgian and Victorian. This sense of continuity, after all, supports his own standing as a member of the monarchy. And Charles was even keen to praise King Henry VIII as an environmentalist in his speech just to make plain to any of the less enlightened plebians that may have been listening that the royal family have a long and noble tradition of caring for nature.

The bizarre historical pastiche of styles at Charles’s pet project of Poundbury is what he would like to see in new housing developments across the country. Yet it is clear that modern, experimental technology and methods as well as far more ancient, vernacular building techniques can both play a significant role in creating better homes for people and the natural environment in the twenty-first century.

The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment has been working on an interesting Passivhaus-based design at the Building Research Establishment (BRE) recently which suggests that even Charlie can see that there is a requirement for innovation. Yet the overall aesthetic impetus behind his thinking on architecture - a kind of fudged, nostalgic, conservative classicism - is surely an impediment to change towards better housing rather than a catalyst.

And if you’re not part of the solution, as the saying goes, you’re part of the problem.

This is an opportunity that won’t come around too often.

The first earthship holiday home in Europe is up for sale. I wrote an article about ‘Perrine’, built in the heart of the tranquil Normandy countryside, for the Guardian last year.

It’s a three-bedroom, single storey building in the small but well-equipped village of Ger. The natural peace and quiet of the area is enhanced by the metre-thick tyre walls which insulate the building from the elements: a very relaxing place.

Kevan and Gillian Trott, who currently own the earthship, have decided to spend more time building up their new business, Earthbuilds Europe. They are planning to use the business to continue the evolution of the earthship idea more specifically for European conditions, which in general are very different from those of the arid New Mexico plains where the concept was first developed.

So if you fancy owning your very own ’ship then this is your chance.