A Butterfield’s Overland Tour: Vignettes of the 1970s
A unique, outrageous and adventurous travel memoir, travelling across ten different countries on the way to India.

A humorous, colourful memoir set in the 1970s. What a Way to Go to India recounts an exciting, hair-raising adventure, executed on the very cheap, over a 6,000-mile, 28-day journey to India by public transport.

Richard Loosley and tour manager Ashley Butterfield used dodgy transport over appalling roads, ate food that was seriously detrimental to their health and stayed in inferior hotels which bordered on uninhabitable.

Together, they persuade an eclectic multi-national assortment of adventure-seeking travellers to follow them. Join them on this outrageous, hilarious journey masquerading as tourism in the 1970s. At one point they crammed 57 travellers into three old American pickup trucks, including luggage, to travel up the Khyber Pass, it seemed outrageous at the time, but this was the only way to reach the top. Follow their colourful journey through the majestic countryside, desserts, medieval cities, and bustling bazaars of Central Asia.

What a Way to Go to India vividly conjures up travel in the 1970s that can never be repeated in today’s political, religious, and post-Covid, war-troubled world with gentle humour and detailed reminiscences.