From Africa the trail to Kathmandu starts in Mombasa, that vivid, steamy port on the southern coast of Kenya.

It’s here that young westerners come from all points of the continent to catch a boat to India – the first stage of the trek to the mystical mountain kingdom of Nepal.

Americans, Europeans, Australians, they are all here, sitting at pavement cafes on Kilindini Road or wandering the narrow, winding streets of the old town as they wait for the day their ship leaves.

Some have been working in East Africa to earn a bit of money. Others have travelled overland from the north or, like me, journeyed up from South Africa.

Their destination is a place few have any real idea of, but all have heard much about. Kathmandu . . . the name stirs the imagination.

Along the way they’ll meet other travellers heading the same way from Europe, Australia and New Zealand. It’s called the hippie trail but in reality it’s a mishmash of different trails, which converge on India and lead from there across the mountains to Nepal.

Ships from Mombasa sail regularly. Though most of the passengers are Asian, there is always a contingent of young travellers in jeans and tee-shirts, packs on their backs.

The ship a friend and I have booked berths on is the aging Lloyd Triestino liner, MV Asia.  

The voyage takes five-and-a-half days. It’s an opportunity to relax after three weeks on the road from South Africa to Kenya, and to build up strength for the long, hard haul across the plains of northern India to the Himalayas.

Almost all the deck space is reserved for the 25 first-class passengers. The 250 tourist class passengers must make do with a single deck at the back.  

The voyage is a pleasant interlude. There is little to do but eat, drink, sit on deck, read and sleep. Sometimes you play poker or liar dice with your fellow westerners or a few of the younger Indians on board. In the evenings you watch the sunset from the deck. I spend hours each day reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Each evening the clock is put forward 30 minutes. India is two-and-a-half hours ahead of Kenya.

Watching the Bombay skyline appearing on the last morning is an exhilarating feeling – something you have looked forward to for a long time.

On the dock a large crane has collapsed, crushing part of a building. It has been roped off and it’s impossible to tell how recently the accident happened. Swinging your pack on to your back, you walk down the gangway and India takes you into her clutches.

What strikes you most is the noise. It is as if the sounds of the city are being taken and fed into a huge loudspeaker.  

Taxis and rickshaw drivers throng the door of the dock customs building, each urging you to travel with him. Outside, the blare of car hooters dominates everything. Not until you leave India again will you experience any real privacy.

Life spills over into the streets. Walking is a constant dodging this way and that, threading your way through the crowds.

Everybody wants to know you. Grey-bearded fortune tellers, waving typed business cards. Shoeshine men, with their little wooden kits, charging a third of a rupee a shine. Black marketeers, usually young: “You want a student card? Hashish? Change dollars?”

Many local people call you a hippie. It’s a call you keep hearing: “Hello, hippie”. But it’s not how you see yourself. You consider yourself a traveller, as opposed to tourists, who are older and wealthier, or ‘freaks’, who have dropped out and tend to stay in one place.

After searching for a while, you find a room at Stiffles, a cheap hotel in the Colaba district near the waterfront. It’s a few streets from the Gateway of India, a huge arch built by the British in the early 20th century.

The area is one of the city’s less expensive and many young westerners stay here. From your window you see some of them in the street below sharing joints openly.

Some are down to their last few cents and are trying to sell their only pair of boots or their last shirt. Some wait outside the restaurants popular with their fellow travellers and try to beg the price of a meal from everyone going in. But most, like me, can pay their way by living cheaply.

Two or three days in Bombay are enough. You’re thinking of Nepal and anxious to move on. So you make your way down to the railway station and buy a third-class ticket to New Delhi.

It’s a 30-hour journey in conditions so uncomfortable they fall into the experience-of-a-lifetime category. You, at least, can look on it as something new, a short interlude, but for millions it’s an everyday part of life.

At each stop, people come pouring through the doors and windows, no matter how packed the coach is. Anyone unlucky enough to be near a window risks being crushed as new arrivals fight for space.

Many coaches are so full that even the toilets are packed. Sometimes it seems the whole of India is on the move. 

You see scores of beggars at each station, crawling along the platform or holding out diseased hands for baksheesh. Many are women, with grey faces and hair the colour of dust. Some clutch babies.

At times things get you down and you wonder why on earth you’re travelling this way. You’re uneasily aware that the world you left behind seems to be getting on fine without you. But Kathmandu, like a distant light, draws you on, and getting there becomes a kind of obsession.

Along the way you are likely to bump into some of the people who came over on your ship. Perhaps you meet in a hotel or at a railway station. After all, you’re all headed the same way.

The Nepalese Embassy in New Delhi is crowded with travellers. You spend a few days in the city arranging a visa and seeing something of the place, then another train carries you on your way again.

Seeing India this way has its utterly amazing moments. Walking barefoot at the Taj Mahal and feeling the cold, white marble beneath your feet, for instance, is something you won’t easily forget.

But for most of the time it’s a hard grind: arriving late in a strange town, hot and tired, seeking out a cheap hotel, catching a few hours’ sleep and moving out early to catch another train or bus.

Teeming cities come and go: Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad, Patna.

Varanasi, on the River Ganges, sticks in the mind, with its ancient buildings and colourful alleys. Also known as Benares, it’s the city where Hindus come to die. Throughout the day and night, small funeral pyres burn brightly on the riverbank and the smell of burning human flesh hangs low over the holy river.

Then there’s a 90-minute trip along the Ganges in a huge, packed river steamer, another train, and a bus crowded with 30 goats as well as scores of people. And at long last you reach the border town of Raxaul and, in the dark of evening, cross over into Nepal.

You sleep well that night.

The next morning you set off by bus on what must be one of the world’s most spectacular roads – the 200 km journey over the Himalayan foothills to Kathmandu.

Foothills they may be, but they are vast mountains in their own right. You drive slowly over range after range, each time finding an even higher range ahead.

Near the top of the main pass you catch your first glimpse of the massive main peaks. Later, the entire Himalayan range stretches out before you, sweeping out to fill your vision.

As the day wears on you make your way down through terraced rice fields, winding from one little village to another, and 10 hours after setting off the bus rumbles into the Kathmandu valley.

Your expectations of the city are high, and your first impression is good. With its temples, its old world feel and its friendly people, it seems the ideal resting place after the haul across India.

You feel that whatever difficulties and bad times you’ve had along the way, it’s all been worth it.

A whole network of cheap hotels and restaurants has grown up to serve you and your fellow travellers.

Tucked away in little alleys, you find restaurants with names like Unity and The Hungry Eye, where crowds of travellers enjoy inexpensive Chinese, Indian or Nepalese food.

Some great music is laid on at these places: Santana, Quicksilver, classical Indian tunes. Whatever your taste, you’re likely to find a little place that plays it.

The town itself is old and beautiful. You hire a bicycle for a few cents and spend days drifting through the winding streets, taking your time and doing what you want.

In the evenings you sit on your hotel roof and, beyond the temples, watch the sun setting over the Himalayan peaks. It’s a sight not to be missed.

But there’s a downside too. Nepal is desperately poor. No one would claim it’s an ideal society. What, then, attracts thousands of travellers from around the world each year?

The liberal drug laws surely play a part for some. A wide range of drugs is available legally and inexpensively at hashish shops. 

For others, it’s perhaps more of a search for an ideal: a feeling that here, in a remote, rugged kingdom opened to the west less than 25 years ago, you can escape the uglier aspects of modern life and find a real, if temporary, alternative.

On the whole, the travellers and the Nepali people seem to get on well. And the steady growth in tourism is bringing in much-needed foreign currency after decades of isolation. However, the spread of western influences over the last decade is changing Kathmandu, not necessarily for the better.  

But a sense of enchantment remains. There are times, as you wander about the city and let the patterns of its life spin round in your mind, that it seems as happy a society as you’re likely to find.

Outside the city, life is even more unspoiled. You go out east to Nagarkot: a bus ride followed by a tough four-hour climb into the mountains to a small settlement with views of huge valleys and in the distance the main peaks including Everest.

It would be hard to find many places more pleasant, more isolated from the clamour of modern living.

When the time finally comes for you to move on from Nepal and set off on the long trek back to India and beyond, you know you are leaving a magical country. It’s a place you’ll remember vividly long after the triviality of so much of everyday life has faded from your mind.

I may be destined for an unhappy life, as the Tarot cards foretold the other night. But at least I’ve been to Kathmandu.   

Header image: © Javier Ballester