Travels with the Fish

The most irreverent, outrageous and hilarious travel stories you ever read in your life

With my heads full of brains, and my shoes  full of feet.

This is my first book, the one I never intended to write. In 1997, Renuka Chatterjee, heading up the small Indian office of a publisher called HarperCollins, asked me if I’d considered putting all my crazy travel stories into one book. I hadn’t — and half jokingly, I told her I’d give it a thought.

I began traveling for fun in 1982. I’d save money through the year, and blow it all in one mad month of unplanned, quixotic travel to some corner of the world that caught my attention. The guiding principle was that as long as you don’t plan your time, the city go out of its way to plan it for you.

It happened again and again — in Jerusalem, in Chicago, Sydney, Cairo, Bali, Bangkok, even in India, while traveling in the footsteps of the Buddha.