travelling over a hundred countries has left entrepreneurturnedauthor vilas kale with experiences to last multiple lifetimes and he hopes that the chronicle of his journeys will open up the world for readers and see things from an unbiased perspective in an interview with toi the septuagenarian kale talks about the travel treasure vault stored in his diaries for the last 50 years which culminated into a book excerpts q very few people maintain such meticulous records of their travel and that too over such a long period of time how did you do it a since i started travelling around 50 years ago every single trip i took got chronicled in my diary every night without fail i would write down not only about the places i visited but also about the people culture food etc its a habit which stayed with me and now i have so many diaries in whose pages lie some of the most precious moments of my life q while you have travelled over a hundred countries apparently your first one was immemorablea it was 1968 and my relative was a diplomat posted in afghanistan i was 17 years old and decided to visit him along with two of my cousins aged 15 and 14 our parents allowed us to travel without any adult supervision and then started the long process of getting a passport which is a story for another day we ultimately got the visa and in those times the afghanistan visa used to be printed completely in their language even the numbers the moment we landed in kabul all three of us were detained for travelling without a valid visa apparently the visa had expired because we had got it well in advance to be on the safe side in new delhi the immigration officer too did not understand the script and allowed us to board q so three teenagers on their first journey abroad get arrested upon landing a that was seriously an experience no one will forget anyways i called up the indian embassy and my uncle reached the airport and after completing the paperwork all of us were allowed to proceed q but such an experience would have led any other teenager to abandon all future travel plansa quite the opposite happened because while in afghanistan i saw these european hitchhikers and was fascinated with this mode of travel basically you just travel on foot and hitch a ride for free with any vehicle that is going to your destination after this the three of us of which one was a girl undertook a 15country hitchhiking trip q travelling to different countries over the last five decades has also given you a chance to witness historya the first was in afghanistan itself in 1968 because back then kabul was a very modern city the place teemed with liberal men and women and was in sync with the fast changing world what i witnessed firsthand in kabul is totally opposite