‘Slowly Straight down the Ganges’ sometimes appears as an antique Newby masterpiece, alongside ‘A Brief Walk in the Hindu Kush’ and ‘Appreciate and Battle in the Apennines’. Informed with Newby’s self-deprecating humour and wry focus on detail, this is a classic from the genre and a screen into an charming piece of history.

On his forty-forth birthday, Eric Newby sets from an incredible journey: to visit the 1,200-mile amount of India’s holy river. Within a misguided try to maintain him out of trouble, Wanda, his about Gradually Down the Ganges life-long travel companion and wife, is usually to be his fellow boatwoman. Their program is to begin with in the fantastic ordinary of Hardwar and surface finish in the Bay of Bengal, but the journey almost instantly becomes markedly slower and more treacherous than either had imagined – working aground sixty-three times in the 1st six days.

Travelling in a number of unpredictable boats, as well as by rail, bus and bullock cart, and resting at sandbanks and remote villages, the Newbys encounter interesting people and glorious mishaps, including the nonexistence of large-scale maps of the united states, a realisation that queries of pure ‘logic’ trigger grave criminal offense and, on one occasion, the only person in sight for miles can be an old man who is himself uncertain where he’s. Newby’s only consolation: on a river, if you proceed downstream, you’re sure to get rid of up somewhere…