Tuk-Tuks and Samosas - My Journey through India and the Himalayas

An often humorous, sometimes very tense, and incredibly enlightening journey through India, Tibet and Bhutan. You can taste the food, feel the heat, and the biting cold at Everest base camp. An amazing documentation of a life, a family and a career.

Tuk-Tuks and Samosas is a love letter to travel, it covers how our author caught the travel bug, her fascinating family history, and her worldwide search for the perfect samosa after tasting one on a trip to Calcutta when she was 10 years old.

Growing up in England in the seventies, Anita Mandl, who is half-Indian, longed to discover her roots, especially after meeting her grandparents. She finally went to India as a child, discovering and developing a love and passion for the country. Spanning almost a hundred years, the book tells the story of her Indian grandfather arriving in London in 1925 to study; the turbulent partition of India in 1947, which resulted in Anita’s dad leaving his homeland at the age of 7 for his own safety then his arrival in England at the age of 16 to study. Anita’s own adventures and escapades in India at the ages of 10, 18 and 23 are featured, as are her many journeys through her second homeland where she acts as tour guide to many unsuspecting guests, detailing the highs, lows and humorous events of the always unpredictable travel life. Follow her story to the dizzying heights of the Himalayas and Everest Base Camp in Tibet through to South India before the Coronavirus pandemic stopped our intrepid author in her tracks. Anita’s endeavours to help the Indian street kids plays an important part in this story throughout, as does her search for the ever elusive perfect samosa.