ON ASSIGNMENT BLOG

I celebrated my 37th birthday in 1970 on Calangute Beach, Goa. Now I speed south to celebrate my 77th. The Maharashta Police has given me an advance birthday gift — permission to detour Mumbai via the Pune Expressway. Why a gift? Because bikes are forbidden. Picture a lone biker, bearded and overweight, imagining himself a teenage Easy Rider.

National Highway 37 is a biker's dream, with hill curves to swoop along and straights flanked by splendid forests and magnificent rivers. Goa, of course, has changed. So have I. 1970s Calangute was a paradise for 50 foreigners. Now it gives pleasure to thousands; 40 years on and my birthday cottage amongst the kasuari pines has become a beach bar, while I have rid myself of shoulder-length curls and beads and gained a belly.

Back then I would have derided a hotel as strictly for squares. Now I relish both the comfort and privacy of a one-bedroom cottage at the Taj Hotel Group's Holiday Village.

The resort's beach is almost deserted. Set amongst flowering shrubs and palm trees, the pool is divine. So is the food. The front desk managers call me 'Grandfather' and tease me with a band playing Happy Birthday and a scrumptious chocolate birthday cake.

Forty years ago, hotels were nonexistent outside the major cities. Strict adherence to caste forbade the use of another's mattress. Government servants on tour travelled with cooking pans and carried vast bedding rolls wrapped in green canvas strapped to the roofs of their Ambassador cars. They slept in inspection bungalows. I had left England in a VW copy of the German army's WW2 jeep. We bought a mattress and kilims in Afghanistan. My companion and I slept mostly under trees and were never once disturbed.

Were those more courteous days or do I look back through rose-tinted spectacles? On this journey, my hotels of choice range from the ultimate in luxury to Lonely Planet-recommended dosshouses. But search and you will meet with surprises: the best so far was above a lake in southern Kerala — a magnificent government guesthouse built in the time of the Raj, its pillared portico embellished with the Imperial crest. My bedroom was the size of a squash court, with a four-poster bed and mosquito net — and all for the price of a cinema seat back home.

And so to Kanniyakumari, the subcontinent’s southernmost point. Here I join with hundreds of Indian pilgrims on the beach to watch the sun sink into the Arabian Sea. It will rise out of the Bay of Bengal and I shall turn North to Kodaikkanal and Mamallapuram, Chennai, Kolkata and the Himalayas. India has changed of course: fewer cows on the road, more cars, an epidemic of mobile phones. But the kindness is the same — and the gentleness and the desire to communicate. The joy of travel is in discovering that we are not so different...

Simon Gandolfi is blogging regularly about his Indian motorbike adventure. You might also want to read: Across India on a bike, Across India on a bike: from Agra to Rajasthan and Across India on a bike: from Bundi to Dhariawad. To find out more about Simon visit simongandolfi.com