Around the world in 65 years

by Biku Ghosh

Literary Titan Silver Award WinnerDuring my recent community volunteering, I have been spending time with an 83-year-old engineer with severe dementia who used to travel abroad a lot. He loved looking at the world maps. He could remember nothing but only had glimpses of memory hearing the names of places or seeing them on the map. He would say, ‘I think I have been there.’ 'Memory is like a fiction' wrote Haruki Murakami.Soon as I began writing this book, memories flooded back with astonishing detail. I want to hold on to them and share it with the future generation. It all started as eight-year-old learning to ride running trains to see the world.My quest then continued for the next six decades. This travel memoir documents early adventures - travelling the Golden triangle without a ticket; training as a mountaineer and climbing lofty peaks in the Himalayas; working with Red Cross during the Bangladesh war; hitchhiking across Europe and almost thrown off a Bulgarian train mistaken as an American, and volunteering after a super cyclone in Andhra, burying rotten animals. The journey then continues over seventy-five countries in all seven continents - taking a plunge in Antarctic waters and giving away a proxy daughter in a North Pole wedding; scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef and skydiving in New Zealand; climbing Kilimanjaro, Stok Kangri and trekking to Everest Base camps in Nepal and in Tibet in my sixties. And of having close encounters with wild animals, including Galapagos seals, tigers in India, grizzlies in Alaska, gorillas in the mist and all of the big five in Africa. This book also narrates an account of the human spirit and its warmth, even in despair, witnessed and shared during volunteering in twelve countries on five continents including Ethiopia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Mongolia.After sleeping in an Igloo under the dancing Aurora in Greenland in March 2020, my world stopped temporarily.

862 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 26, 2020

About the author

Born in aJoteram village in West Bengal, India, Biku Ghosh has been living and working in the UK as a specialist surgeon for over forty years. Apart from travelling to over seventy-five countries on all seven continents, he has worked as a volunteer in twelve countries in five continents. In 2011, he was awarded an OBE for his contribution to healthcare in developing countries.
The author published his first historical fiction ‘Indian Immigrant’ in 2018. His second book ‘Around the world in 65 years’, an account of travelling in over 75 countries in all seven continents and volunteering in five continents, was published in December 2020 and its 2nd edition was published in 2021.
His latest book "How did it all start? Where did we all come from?" was launched in the last week of November 2021.