Sometime in the mid - late 70s - I suspect 1976 or 77 - my mother went to the US with her sister, to visit my cousin and his family as my uncle was afraid to fly and my aunt did not want to go alone. At some point during the holiday, mum booked a self-drive tour (pre-booked motels/hotels, hire car and a suggested itinerary) of the Blue Ridge Mountains/Appalachia, I imagine to see a bit more of the US and give my aunt some time to herself with her son and his family. Mum had been brought up in a very poor family during the depression with a father who had been gassed during WW1, but she said this tour opened her eyes to the terrible, grinding poverty which people underwent when there was no semblance of a welfare state to support them. She had a few adventures during her 10 day trip, and her descriptions of driving in the mountains in one area, where on one side of the road was beautiful forest and rolling hills and on the other, the detritus of coal mining and slag heaps as far as the eye could see, were vivid. As was her description of the black family who came to her aid when she had some problems with the hire car; one of the family's members drove her to the nearest town to make a phone call but he did not dare enter the town, he dropped her off at the 'town limits' and waited there for her while she made the phone call. Some of the diners she stopped at to eat in, no-one on the staff could understand her accent and she had to resort to pointing and miming!
This was especially interesting to me at the time as I was in the Middle East and working with a majority of American colleagues; some of them seemed to have come from that sort of milieu themselves and I tried to question them tactfully.
A few years after that, I went to visit a friend in Austin, Texas. We had a wonderful time and she took me all over the place; she had come to visit me when I was living in Kent and this was a reciprocal visit. However, I never felt entirely at ease when wandering round by myself. There was something indefinably hostile, even within the overt (over) friendliness of most Americans, and a subtle disparagement of everything 'other' - be it European or Middle Eastern. Or even Canadian. And definitely Mexican ...
In the year 2000, I flew from Germany to New Zealand 'the wrong way' via LA - can't remember now why I did it, I must have got a bargain price - and the aggression from Passport Control directed at me and a German woman of similar age, who had flown in on the same flight as me and was flying out on the same flight as me, but to Australia, was simply frightening. We were in LA as transit passengers for a few hours only and I vowed then to never, ever go to the US again. The ONLY person to speak in a civil fashion to us at any time was a Latino woman in the coffee shop; neither of us were able to change any money to dollars - the machines did not accept German or UK bank cards and there were no cash exchanges open - BUT nowhere took any foreign currency. The Latino woman gave us a coffee and a muffin each on the understanding that we would send postcards to her grandson - I sent several and so did the German woman.
I have never been back to the US and do not plan to.
I visited India for the first time in the 1960s when I was a bit of a hippy; North India was fascinating and I enjoyed it. I visited it again when I was working in Saudi Arabia and it was quite terrible - the part of India I landed in seemed like a broken Saudi Arabia which was desperately poor, much dirtier, more aggressive and vastly more crowded, so I took a ferry across to Sri Lanka and was instantly charmed. I suspect if I'd travelled directly from SA to somewhere like a Goan beach resort, my opinion of India might now be very different ...
"You don't wanna go out there... they openly carry sidearms and don't like anyone who's not local!" The only people i saw carrying a sidearm were the police. And the locals in PA were nice enough... but not a patch on those down in the southern Appalachians when i visited a few years later.
