A project that I've been working on lately is to transcribe all of my old travel journals into the computer by dictating with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the project is going along pretty well.

I was recently dictating the journals from a trip around India and Nepal concluding in a bus trip across Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and back into Europe in 1974 and I wanted to throw out a few tidbits here and there about the trip.

I was in the Cardamom Hills in the central portion of southern India at Lake Periyar, a reservoir surrounded by protected forests where I had gone to get away from the crowds and to see some of the flora and fauna of the area.  At the time, I could only find a single lodge that was renting rooms on the edge of the reservoir.  The area was not particularly well-developed and there weren't many tourists that ventured into the forests; the visitors there seemed to be mostly middle-class travelers from Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the surrounding states.

The point of the story is that I stayed for three nights and had two meals a day, breakfast and lunch.  I'd go into the forest early in the morning and usually stop back around the lodge for tea and a snack and then repeat the process sometime midafternoon; all very pleasant and relaxing.  When I went to check out at the front desk at the morning of the fourth day I was surprised to see that my total bill was the equivalent of US $8.

Not that anything was particularly expensive for western tourists, but had I realized it was going to be that inexpensive when I got there, I might still be there today.

I've recently done a search on the Internet and found that it was much, much more expensive today and is a regular tourist destination that I would tend to avoid these days, so I'm glad I got to see it in the old days.