By the end of her seven-month trip Russell will have taken in Delhi Mumbai Agra Goa Rajasthan and Ladakh as

By the end of her seven-month trip, Russell will have taken in Delhi, Mumbai, Agra, Goa, Rajasthan and Ladakh, as well as her volunteering placements.Gap Guru has representatives in each city to meet gappers at the airport and keep in close touch, giving backpackers and their parents peace of mind. It means they can strive for higher educational ideals than their parents might expect.”Russell organised her trip through India gap specialists Gap Guru, who tailor programmes that combine volunteering and travel. “They’re children who may have illiterate parents, and at home they have no facilities or motivation to learn,” she says. “At the centre there are computers, toys and games, and reading and educational tools. “Working in Oxfam gave me an awareness of what was going on in the world and the thought of making a difference myself,” she says.Recently, Russell moved from Calcutta to Bangalore, where she’s working in an after-school centre for six-to-16-year-olds. She is one of many conscientious and ethically minded young backpackers who take the opportunity to experience unfamiliar cultures through volunteer work. “I love it: the colour, the culture, the sounds and smells, the sights.”At university, Russell campaigned for Make Poverty History and volunteered at Oxfam.

All these are within reach of the intrepid gap-year traveller willing to risk the odd bout of culture shock (and tummy trouble).
“I chose India because it was a challenge, and very different to the world I’m used to,” says Lizzie Russell, 22, who has been working in a school for underprivileged children in Calcutta. Modern India is the world’s largest democracy and has its second-largest population and seventh-largest area, enveloping myriad landscapes, from the mountain lakes of Srinagar to the Himalayan peaks; from the beaches of Goa to the banks of the Ganges; from the sprawling slums of Mumbai to the deserts of Rajasthan. To his dismay, the only condition from which he suffered on the subcontinent was constipation Always expect the unexpected from India. He’d developed a bit of a paunch with all that comfort eating at A-level time, and heard that India was the best place to lose weight with a quick spell of aggressive diarrhoea. However, there is rigour in his restlessness for which the reward is insight.

Beautifully translated, the meditations on place and time in Nomad’s Hotel achieve a potent state of non-completion.. A friend travelled to India on his gap year. Nooteboom dislikes people who feel “at home exclusively in the present”. He has deve-loped a prose cleansed of living, speaking people, and can overindulge his “musings”. His take on Aran becomes a paean to the devoted writer of a definitive portrait of the place. The key is his embrace of a state of “non-being”, which opens him to the otherness of a place: mostly, its past. He enters Venice with foreboding, “like a bird” from “one watery city to another”, but leaves it distinctly renewed.

Here his “friends” are statues, zoo animals and empty churches. Yet for all the melancholic mapping by religious and literary memorials, Nooteboom’s grip on a place remains inimitable. In Europe – Munich, Zurich, Venice and the Aran islands – familiarity breeds historical riddles: “everything is charged with meaning” Europe is always a solitary place for Nooteboom. In Africa, he knows he will not return and can only sketch, but this testimony is exceptionally acute. These light-footed accounts are very much of their time, but mostly resist the kind of Occidental conceit that allows him once to identify a minaret with a “clenched fist” He marvels at Iran’s ancientness and finds much else homely. For Nooteboom, the past is the new frontier, his obsessive attraction to it “a form of sickness, surely?”.
Born in 1933, Nooteboom was 40 when he ventured up river in Gambia and Mali, to Marrakech and to the heart of Iran. He begins by drawing on Arabian philosophy for theses on “voyaging” as a “pilgrimage” not towards God, but “mystery”.