OUR NEWS

We'll be updating this page regularly while we're away for anyone interested in keeping track of our travels

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PART ONE – AN INDIAN ODYSSEY

We were 45 minutes late getting to mum's for our lift for the airport. Suddenly there seemed to be a whole lot of stuff around the place that needed to be packed in the loft or the shed. It has to be said there was a bit of a last minute panic. After all, we weren't just going away on holiday – we've given up work, Dan's selling his car, our cats had to be found a new home and the entire house had to be emptied and cleaned ready for tenants to move in.

It wasn't ideal that there wasn't a tenancy arranged by the time we went. Our estate agent had cocked up and let us think that something was going ahead when actually the guy we thought we were renting to hadn't turned up at their office to pay any money. There wasn't a lot we could do since it was going to cost four hundred pounds to alter our flight dates – we decided to leave the agents to do the job we were paying them to do and go anyway.

Despite our late arrival for our lift, we arrived at Heathrow in plenty of time for our flight to Doha, in Qatar in the middle east. This was to be a six and a half hour flight, so it was fortunate that the airline was quite luxurious. The plane was half empty and the flight staff kept us well supplied with food and drink throughout the journey of about 4,500 miles.

On arrival at Doha we had half an hour before our connecting flight to Trivandrum, Kerala, Southern India. Naturally with both of us being smokers we decided we had time for a quick ciggy before boarding our second flight. We didn't see any smoking area so (as you do) both dived into our respective loos for a top up of nicotine. It wasn't until we'd finished and returned to the departure lounge that we noticed a sign on the wall threatening six months' imprisonment for smoking! Whoops! This was our first lesson in realising that foreign cultures that far away from home are very very different ;-)  Anyway, we were fortunate and boarded our second plane just as a Last call was being put out.

Dan has traveled long distances in the past, but this was my first experience of a very long journey. Our second flight out of Doha took four and a half hours and took us around another three thousand miles further away from home. We weren't as lucky this time – the plane had less leg room and felt a good deal more rickety than the first. It was full of Indians coughing and sneezing and by the time we arrived it has to be said I had just about had enough of flying for one day. By this time it was 7.30 the following morning.

The baggage hall had 3 tiny baggage carousels. By the time we had been thru customs (a very closely packed nose to back affair), our bags were waiting for us. We wandered outside. It wasn't incredibly hot as it was still early (around 26C), but still the humidity was noticeable and we immediately peeled off a few layers, knowing that they wouldn't be needed again until some months down the line.

The Indian roads have to be seen to be believed – I think “terrifying” is the word that immediately springs to mind and we were seriously glad that we had only a 13 kilometre drive to our first hotel, which my friend had very kindly arranged for us so that we wouldn't have to trudge around in the heat looking for accommodation after such a long journey.

We asked Aji, our friendly taxi driver, if there were any rules of the road. “Yes”, he replied, “but nobody takes any notice of them”. It seemed to be a case of find a gap and get in it, no matter what side of the road it was on – we still haven't figured out which side of the road one is actually supposed to drive on! Needless to say, we have absolutely no intention of hiring a car or bike while we are here. The Indians believe that there's no need to be careful, because if today is the day they are meant to die then they will, otherwise the Gods will keep them safe. We haven't quite been here long enough to believe in that philosophy and I'm not sure we ever will be.

The roads from Trivandrum to Kovalam Beach were filled with a melee of very large trucks, buses packed to overflowing. cars, mopeds with seemingly unbelievable cargoes (3 people? No problem. Baskets of chickens? Fine. Stacks of crates rising up 4 foot above the driver's head? Perfectly normal) We even saw an elephant on the back of a truck.

The scenery struck me as a) amazingly lush and green for what I had always imagined to be a hot, dry country, b) exceptionally colourful – although most of the people we passed seemed to live in shacks by the roadside made of bamboo and palm leaves, the women in particular are dressed in saris in a myriad beautiful colours, all looking clean and fresh.

The poverty of the country was immediately noticeable and yet all the people seemed to be incredibly happy. There were women walking along the roadside with enormous aluminium pans balanced on their heads with all kinds of (very heavy-looking) cargoes. Everyone who noticed us as we passed gave us great big (often toothless) grins and waved a friendly greeting.

Our hotel was the Hotel Peacock, reached down a very steep and rutted track which took the taxi driver quite some negotiation. We were greeted on arrival with a very friendly “Namaste” - palms together in front of the chest and a slight bow, and led to our room. This was a good size with a large bed, table and chairs, 2 arm chairs and coffee table and a little balcony overlooking lush jungle with a cane hanging chair suspended from the ceiling. Although everything was very old, it was all very clean and we were more than happy. We tried not to look too hard at the electrics, but vowed that we would never get in the shower while the water heater was switched on!

By this time, the heat and humidity were both soaring and the first thing we did was to take off all our clothes and have a cold shower. We have been doing this at every opportunity since. Neither of us has ever visited a tropical climate before, although we had been warned. We're hoping we'll get used to it after a little while, although at this time of year, temperatures are still rising and we can expect another ten degrees on top of the 35C we have now before we move north from here.

In addition to the heat and humidity, we immediately noticed how much more directly overhead the sun is here – and boy is it strong!

Despite neither of us having slept much and both feeling a bit dazed and exhausted, we got ready to go out exploring. My first concern was what to wear – I've read that Indians don't take kindly to women with uncovered shoulders and legs, however it was actually too hot to contemplate wearing any clothes AT ALL! In the end I settled for a long sarong which covered my legs and body, and a short sleeved top that covered my shoulders. Dan was OK in his shorts and T shirt.

First Explorations of Kovalam Beach

What funny people the poorer Indians are. On the first day we were sold 2 lunghi's for 700 rupees, but 5 mins later the same guy wants to sell us another 2 for 1200 rupes? seems obsurd that these people just don't see or want to see that we have 2 already and the fact that he had just sold them to us really doesn't matter to him? In fact another seller of the same products would stand by waiting for the original seller to finish his pitch before starting his. Completely mad thinking and perspective.

We soon realized that this is the way here and maybe 20 people would try and sell you exactly the same thing as you were wearing at the time and give it no thought whatsoever.

Badgering for that little extra rupees is the way here and even the shop keepers try and barter. They like to get a little book out and write their best offer down, which may be 4 times that final buy price, 20 minutes later. I have seen this type of buying/ selling style in Tunisia, but no where near on this scale.

First experiences of illness in India

We had the most amazing fish curry one evening – sear fish in coconut milk. We'd never had a fish curry so good. Unfortunately after about 20 minutes my stomach started to complain bitterly. Within a few hours I was feeling quite ill. We were in the process of changing rooms to a place nearer the beach and as soon as we arrived I collapsed on the bed and stayed there for the rest of the day in between numerous visits to the toilet. I was unable to even keep water inside me, something of a problem in this heat and humidity.

Dan returned to the bar where we had eaten and the manager there (another Aji) explained that coconut milk is very very bad for a sensitive stomach – I suffer from IBS. This surprised me a little because we often have coconut milk at home, but Aji said that the fresh milk is in no way similar.

We took my temperature with our digi thermometer and it had risen to 38.8C.

He gave Dan a concoction of very strong teamixed with ginger and lime to bring back to me and said that this was the natural antidote to too much coconut milk. Aji's remedy made me immediately violently sick but I began to feel better almost straight away. I took it easy for a while and Dan went out to eat in the same bar later that evening.

Crabs that bury themselves in seconds

The Mysteries of Kovalam Alcohol Laws

Beer is only allowed to be sold in one licenced bar here

All the other bars buy their beer from this licenced bar to sell to their customers

Because they're not supposed to be selling it, they serve your beer in a coffee mug and insist that you must keep the beer bottle hidden under the table

BUT, if you complain about the coffee mug and make noises about going somewhere else, you can have a glass!

Guests in our room

We are sharing our room with several little lizards. They make a high pitched squeaking sound to each other and stick to the walls and ceiling with big suckered toes. They're about 3-4 inches long, almost translucent with yellowy/greeny patterns. We don't mind them at all because they eat the insects.

We're well prepared and brought a double mosquito net with us which is set up over the bed but we've been surprised that there doesn't seem to be that many mosquitos here – you'd see a lot more in the Greek Islands or parts of Spain.

Yesterday we had to venture out on to the roads for the first time because our debit cards weren't working here and we needed to get to an HSBC bank. We were lucky that there's one about 15 km away in Trivandrum. We opted to pay a little extra for the safety?? of a taxi rather than getting an auto rickshaw, or tuc tuc.

We've now figured that they are actually meant to drive on the left here just like at home, but boy was it a scarey journey when we got into town. The roundabouts are particularly distressing – you don't give way, you just wait till there's a gap big enough to get in and then go for it. The taxi driver took us to a cashpoint, but we needed to cross the road to get to it. We waited for the biggest gap we'd seen in minutes and then just ran! The taxi driver had offered to hold our hand for us, but luckily we managed OK LOL

Wednesday 12th March
After the stresses of international banking the day before, we decided to do nothing at all yesterday and spent a few hours sitting on the beach. The skies were cloudy and we thought we'd be safe enough not to burn. Wrong! After no more than a couple of hours, we both looked like lobsters. Dan was under an umbrella with the famous factor fifty and still got lobstered.

My skin doesn't usually burn and I can happily sit out in the sun for 8 hours in the Med using no more than a factor 8 sun cream. Not here – we're on the factor 50 and still getting burnt even when the sun isn't properly out. The sun simply has to be treated with the utmost respect here.

The beach is no more than 50 metres from our room. It's beautiful sand of 2 colours – part golden blonde and partly almost black. The 2 colours mingle together in beautiful patterns as the waves pull in and out.  And what waves! The sea here is very rough with strong undercurrents. There are always 2 lifeguards on duty and they blow whistles as soon as anyone gets too near to a dangerous swell. The waves are strong enough to knock you off your feet even when you're only knee deep in the water and their backpull is just incredible. This is definitely not a place to venture very far out into the sea unless you were a very strong swimmer and understood the currents.

The sea is the Lakshadweep Sea and it's the first sea I've ever known to actually be warm – it's pure luxury to feel the waves and the bubbling of the currents. We've taken to beginning each day with a dip – I couldn't really call it a swim because it's simply too rough to swim – simply trying to stand up against the waves is exercise enough for us.

There's a lighthouse at one end of the beach and the beach is known as Lighthouse Beach. We've been told we should climb the lighthouse for amazing views so that's something we must get around to doing while we're here.

Flora and Fauna

It is fantastically green here. We're surrounded by coconut palms and what a useful plant that is to the people here – they eat its flesh, drink its milk, rub its oil into their hair and skin and even carve the cutest little elephants and monkeys from its shell. What's left of the shells is used to make fires on which to cook food. Nothing is wasted.

Many of the back-alleys of Kovalam are overhung by coconut trees, sometimes with as many as twenty or thirty ripe coconuts waiting to fall. We asked a local if many people get hurt by falling coconuts as this seems a very real possibility. He told us that coconuts NEVER fall on people because the God of coconuts considers people her children and would never hurt them. We haven't seen one fall on anyone yet, but we had a close miss one day when one fell a few feet behind Dan, worried?. Perhaps it would be prudent to have some faith in the God of Coconuts while we are here.

There are awesome eagles wheeling and rolling in the skies, sometimes only 15 foot overhead. By the tuc tuc stand we stood and watched about 15 eagles chasing crows the other day – an incredible sight. I've never seen either so many eagles or at such close range. Apparently there's only one kind of eagle here but nobody knows what type it is.

I'm on our balcony now. I've just watched the most beautiful black and cream butterfly flitting through the plants in the garden. The cobbler told us yesterday that in around August, the butterflies can reach the size of a bank-note.

We've seen a few cockroaches after dark, but not too many. There are many many crows and their cawing is a constant background sound here. They don't look like the crows at home – they're black with grey heads rather than black all over. 

You see plants here that we grow as houseplants at home – but with a difference – the cheese plants wrap themselves around the coconut trees and grow to eighty foot tall. The leaves grow to 10 times the size they would at home. Just outside our balcony grows the same Devils Ivy plant that's in our kitchen at home – this also has leaves ten times the size of ours. There are beautiful hibiscus plants and other very tropical looking flowers you would never see growing in England. The jasmine smells out of this world and the women wear garlands of it in their hair – who needs perfume when nature's scents are all around?

We have a little garden just outside our room and I'm sitting here watching a beautiful brown and cream butterfly gathering nectar. There are salvias, hoyas, oleander, palms, unusual looking firs and many other plants I don't recognise. The little ladies in their bright saris come and water the garden several times a day and sweep the sand with brooms made of twigs. The diversity of what will grow in this dusty sand is just incredible.

There are fish we've never seen or heard of although Dan has been a keen fisherman since childhood. Each evening the beachfront restaurants lay out the day's catch in tanks to be chosen for dinner – kingfish, searfish, butterfish, red snapper, black snapper, barracuda. Lobsters, crabs and tiger prawns the length of your hand and king prawns that are even bigger still. 

Apparently there are sharks here, but not big enough ones to harm anyone close enough to the beach. A local guy we were talking to was telling us that not long ago a blue whale was beached just down the coast at the next cove and that hundreds of local people and tourists gathered there to help push it back out to sea.

Thursday 13^th March

We took a long walk this afternoon past the lighthouse at the end of the bay as we'd heard there was another beach beyond. As soon as you get half a mile away from the beach front at Kovalam there's no sign of tourists whatsoever and the real India begins.

We wandered thru the coconut groves and out on to the road. Stopped to roll a cigarette for an old fisherman that asked for one and were amazed to find that he didn't even know how to work the lighter. He didn't speak a word of English but was really friendly and smiley and grateful for a smoke.

We came across a tiny little village with steep steps that led down to a beach with a few fishing boats. The children came running out to see us, asking for school pens and eager to practice their English. All the children in Kerala go to free state schools and the literacy rate here is one of the highest in India at 91%. Even the smallest children from the poorest homes can manage a few words of English. There were a lot of goats trotting around the village, some so young that their umbilical cords were still there. The houses are made of whatever they can find to build them with – sometimes brick, sometimes mud, but they all have roofs made out of coconut palm leaves – this seems to be a very important building material here.

We wandered on further down the road, drawn by the sight of a huge decorative mosque in the distance. We came upon a very large fishing village with literally hundreds of brightly coloured fishing boats. The fishermen were in the process of bringing in the day's catch and the women were sitting on the quayside noisily bartering to sell the fish.

Immediately it was obvious that the people here don't get to see white people often. Everyone stopped to stare at us as we walked by. The people didn't seem at all hostile, just curious. One little boy ran up to me and touched my hand and then ran away again as quickly as he could – I think he just wanted to see if white skin felt the same as his. 

A guy came over who spoke very good English and welcomed us to his village. He told us they were happy for us to wander around and have a look and told us that this was one of the major fish markets in the area and that trucks came here twice a day to collect the fish and take it off to the busier tourist areas along the coast.

The smell of fish was overpowering. There was a real hustle and bustle about the place and there must have been around five hundred people there buying and selling the fish. It was a very smelly, noisy and colourful scene, definitely a taster of the real India beyond the reach of most tourists.

We spent an hour or so wandering around, watching and taking in the colours and smells, taking photos and then decided we'd get a tuk tuk back to Kovalam. We're starting to get  a little more used to these now, although there are still decidedly terrifying moments. When the schools close for the afternoon, it's not uncommon to see a tuk tuk with as many as 15 little children all hanging on for dear life inside, all their school bags hanging on the outside.

Friday 14^th March

Yesterday we hired our favourite friendly taxi driver Mani to take us on a magical mystery tour. We are getting tired of the tourists here and wanted to see something of the real India. So off we went in his little white taxi.

First stop was for an elephant festival going thru a village. There were about 20 or 30 devotees marching from village to village with an elephant, stopping at all the temples on the way and collecting money for them. They banged drums and chanted as the elephant plodded slowly up the road, beautifully decorated with coloured paints, bells and garlands of flowers.

On next to an old Roman Catholic church which looked strangely British despite its incongruous setting amongst the coconut palms. One of the main differences between this and an English church was the lack of rich ornamentation. The altar was richly dressed and a few pilgrims were there to pray, but beyond the alter, apart from the simple stained glass windows, the church was unusually plain for such a large building. The graves in the graveyards were simple mounds of the very red local earth with black wooden crosses on top, usually showing only Christian names and the dates of the people's lives. It feels quite strange to see such an English looking church in such a tropical setting.

We drove thru a local fishing village which Mani explained was all Christian. This was real India. No tourists here and Mani said that they don't get to see white people there. The name of the village was Poovar and it spreads along a golden sandy beach for miles, the beach covered with the traditional brightly coloured wooden fishing boats with their curved prows. We noted the other day that these boats seem to be bound together with rope, possibly made from coconut fibres.

In the village it was interesting to see the people living their life – making food on the step in front of their house, sitting in the shade playing cards, washing their big metal cauldrons in the taps by the roadside which draw water from the local wells.

There are many jack fruit trees here along with the coconuts and mangoes. Neither Dan or I had ever seen or heard of a jack fruit before – it's a large (up to a foot and a half long) spikey yellow looking fruit. We haven't tried one yet. Mani said you can tell when they're ripe because they start to go brown, and that they're full of seeds with fleshy fruit around.

We were taken to a viewpoint high above the village and from here could appreciate the sheer extent of the coconut palms here – just coconut trees and beach and sea for as far as you could see. Mani said that there are many snakes in the forests around here and that it not uncommon for people to be bitten and die. He said if you are bitten on an arm or leg, you can go to the snake doctor in the village who applies a special kind of stone to the bite which draws out the poison. If the area can be tourniqueted you're lucky and will lose only the part below the tourniquet, however, he said that often bites are on the backside or back because they happen while people are going to the toilet in the forest.

We stopped at a tiny beach that had nothing apart from some very expensive looking holiday homes – you could tell they're expensive because they had beautifully maintained gardens and were built of new red brick with slate tiled roofs. Mani said that these rent for 6000 to 7000 rupees per night – over a hundred pounds and that they're mainly let to Italians and Germans who pay for them from home before they're aware how little things cost here – our room is currently costing four pounds a night. To me it feels obscene for these people to blatantly spend so much money in a country where people are so poor and manage with so little.

Next, Mani took us to the backwaters where we haggled to arrange a short boat trip. We sat like maharajahs on the ubiquitous plastic garden chairs while a little man punted us around the waters. This is the most tranquil place we've been since we arrived – nothing but the sound of the bamboo pole in the water as we glided along, and the birds in the coconut palms. It was soooo peaceful. We saw sandpipers, some stork type birds and the most stunning turquoise blue kingfisher. It was a beautiful relaxing hour.

Dan wanted to stop at the liquor store so Mani led us down a steep sandy track by the side of the road to a little shack hidden well back off the road, where they were doing a roaring trade. Whisky, rum, brandy, beer. Dan bought some whisky and some rum for around four pounds.

We were exhausted by the time we arrived back at Kovalam. Our taxi had cost around ten pounds for 5 hours of Mani's time and guiding experience. He made a great guide, answering all our questions as we went along.

As we sat and caught up on some food and soft drinks, the sky turned black overhead and the most amazing thunderstorm began. We sat and watched as the lightning struck the sea, taking pity on the poor fishermen we'd seen going out to sea earlier in the evening. The rain came down like a power shower – a serious deluge. Kovalam beach was empty in minutes and the restaurants along the front did poor business. The rain continued for about two or three hours, causing a power cut in the bar we were in. In view of the state of the Indian wiring, we were happier with the power off while there was that much rain coming down. The restaurant kitchen carried on cooking by candlelight and Calor gas lanterns. Its floor was flooded in minutes. Just a small taste of what the monsoons must be like, we thought.

It's been very humid and overcast for several days prior to this, so we were glad of the rain. The air felt clean and cool once it stopped and I could hear the plants in our hotel garden breathing a sigh of relief at a proper drink. Sure enough, the weather has cleared out and the sky is clear blue once again today – we're going to have to take great care not to burn.

We've decided to move on from here in the next couple of days and have been reading our Lonely Planet to try and decide where to go next. It's too touristy and expensive here for us – a lovely place to be whilst acclimatizing to the tropical climate, but really its like the Benidorm of India, with lots of English and Germans on package holidays, and prices to reflect this. Our house in Pinner still hasn't been let so we're living on our savings at the moment. We've been told this is one of the most expensive places in India so we're ready to move on to somewhere that better suits our budget now. The prospect of carrying a heavy backpack in this climate is something I can't say I'm looking forward to, but traveling is what we came here to do and now is about the time to do it – we'll manage.

Tuesday 18^th March - First Indian train experience
We decided to get out of this tourist trap now and travel north up the west coast to Cochin, a five hour train ride.

Mani got us safely thru the traffic to Trivandrum Central Station. There had been heavy rain overnight and some of the streets were flooded; a few sets of traffic lights were out so the main road was even more chaotic than usual. The cross roads were particularly interesting!

We were headed for Cochin, a five hour journey northwards up India's west coast. The instant we arrived at the station, 2 red-shirted porters appeared, grabbed our bags from the taxi boot, loaded them onto their heads (ignoring our luggage trolleys) and literally ran off to the ticket kiosk.

Our tickets cost 460 rupees for two, in air conditioned class. As soon as we had our tickets, the porters were off again, and we had trouble keeping up with them as they trotted down the platform. The platform was crowded with people – there were sinks for hand washing, filtered water drinking points as well as stalls selling food and water.

The train pulled up at the platform within 5 minutes and the porters rushed off again with our bags after checking our tickets.

The train is great – there are 3 layers of seats/bunks and so far we have had 6 of these between us, with our luggage on the opposite seat. We have a little table, a mirror, a fan, a power point, blankets, drinks holders, even curtains. The air conditioning is bliss – it's the first we've had since we arrived.

The Indian man next to us chatted for a while and bought us a coffee. The ticket inspector eventually arrived and said that we each needed to pay an extra 25 rupees because we hadn't reserved a ticket in advance.

The porters that had carried our luggage on to the train and seat us had charged us 300 rupees (nearly four pounds) and we soon figured that they'd ripped us off big-time. Our fellow passengers and the ticket inspector confirmed this. Oh well, you live and learn – we didn't know much better but we sure will next time!

I don't think I've mentioned Indian toilets yet. Some places have Western style loos, but generally they are a stainless steel or ceramic hole in the ground, about 5-6” diameter with raised foot plates on either side that you stand on. You soon get used to squatting. Indians don't use toilet paper – each toilet is provided with a jug and tap for washing. We tend to carry a ready supply of loo roll wherever we go, not keen on the washing with your hand principle. The toilets on the train are particularly “interesting” as all waste simply drops out thru a tube on to the track (Dan says his mum would absolutely LOVE this!) There's a sign on the wall asking you not to use the toilet whilst in the station.

The scenery thru which we're passing is typically Keralan, with coconut palms, banana, mango and acacia trees. We've seen some of the biggest lagoons and backwaters of our travels so far – enormous expanses of water on both sides of the train, punctuated by only the odd one-manned fishing boat here and there. The waters look as though they should contain crocodiles and alligators, but apparently they don't.

The train is really comfortable – British Rail could learn a thing or two from Indian railways, particularly the fares. A similar length train journey in England would cost the best part of a hundred pounds and I wouldn't fancy my chances of being able to write anything on the Met line!

At the stations of big towns people get on with trays of food and drink. We've just had lunch – some roti (Indian bread) and some kind of mildly spiced sauce with potato and onions presented in a little plastic bag inside. Not too easy eating curry with your hands ( right hand only because here the left is reserved for toilet duties), but more than edible for a little under 20p each – better than British Rail food for sure.

There are quite a lot of cows in Kerala. We thought cows were sacred all across India, but Mani told us that's only in the north – in the south they're kept for both meat and milk. They all seem to be pretty well fed and cared for, mostly tied to trees at the roadside.

Ernakulum Town and Fort Cochin

We arrived at Ernakulum Town station amidst a torrential tropical downpour just as dusk was falling. (In fact it has rained for the last 10 days or so and we've seen very little sun – it tends to rain in the late afternoon, being humid and muggy earlier in the day. When it rains here it really rains – the heavens open and you can be drenched in moments. We've been told this is most unusual for this time of year.)

The station was crowded with people and we were the only Westerners here. It certainly didn't seem as friendly as Kovalam. We paused on the platform to dig our waterproof jackets out of our packs and made our way to the entrance where a large crowd of people was waiting for taxis. A tuk tuk driver came over to us and insisted that he would fit both us and our packs in the back. It would have been a long wait for a taxi, so we took his word for it and squashed in. He was right, we did fit, but only with my luggage trolley sticking into Dan's back.

What followed was the most terrifying tuk tuk journey we've encountered so far – the roads were flooded with water and in a very poor state with huge potholes everywhere. By now it was dark. We had no idea where we were going, or where we would be staying that night. Our Lonely Planet told us we should get a ferry to Fort Cochin which was apparently the old part of town, much more tranquil than Ernakulum Town. That seemed a good idea to us – Ernakulum was total mayhem – smoggy, smelly and dirty with throngs of people filling every metre of pavement, and the roads too. We'd arrived during rush hour and the main roads were blocked with traffic. Our tuk tuk driver fortunately knew all the back roads, but of course the condition of these was much worse than the main roads. Luckily, he seemed to know where all the potholes were as well, but there were times when the tuk tuk lurched frighteningly and Dan said to me “If it falls over, make sure you hold on to the frame at the top”. We made our way across town and the 7km we had to travel felt much further. Other vehicles were passing so close to the tuk tuk that I hardly dared hold on to the side for fear of getting my hand squashed. Big sprays of water came up either side of the tuk tuk – we were already soaked thru from the rain, so this wasn't much of a concern. At least it's still warm here when it rains.

After what felt like a frighteningly long time, the driver announced that we were at Fort Cochin. This came as something of a surprise as we had been expecting to take a short ferry ride. We figured that since our Lonely Planet is a few years old, a bridge must have been built in the meantime. He asked where we were staying and we told him to take us to the nearest cheap hotel. He dropped us off at Hotel Park Avenue in Princess Street and we left our packs in the care of the guys on reception while we went to check out some rooms.

First the guy tried to sell us an air conditioned room with a TV and hot water but this was going to cost 850 rupees a night – nearly a tenner. We told him we were looking for something cheaper and he led us up three flights of stairs to the floor where the smaller cheaper rooms are located. He offered us one for 350 rupees a night – that's more within our budget. To be honest, after the tuk tuk ride we were glad to be alive, and all we wanted was a bed for the night.

Indian hotel rooms

The rooms we've stayed in so far are simple and reasonably clean. All they contain is 2 single beds pushed together, a table and 2 chairs. Luckily we've brought our own mosquito net with us – there seem to be more mozzies here than there were in Kovalam. Strangely, none of the rooms we've stayed in so far have any covers on the beds. They have an under sheet, a pillow (generally resembling a breezeblock) and a pillow case, but that's your lot. At Kovalam we bought a beautiful embroidered bedspread with elephant designs and sequins all over it, so we don't need covers now. Perhaps they think it's hot enough not to need any covers. Mostly we don't but as the fan is running all night, it's nice to have at least something to keep the draught off your legs.

The bathrooms leave something to be desired. Hot water doesn't come as standard here unless you want to pay almost double the amount for a room each night. The bathroom is generally just a wet room with a drain in the corner. We're starting to get used to the cold showers – it's not so bad if you wash a bit at a time! Everything in the bathroom gets soaked when you have a shower though, so you have to get used to sitting on a wet loo seat. Still, all in all the rooms we've had have been clean and bright and we really can't complain for four pounds a night – we don't spend much time in them anyway. Luckily they all seem to have big ceiling fans – I think we'd have trouble sleeping without these as it really is very warm and sticky, no doubt made even more humid by all the rain we've been having. The last weather forecast we checked online showed 97 percent humidity and it really does feel that way – your clothes are stuck to you pretty much all the time.

19^th March – out and about around Fort Cochin – central Kerala

Lonely Planet says that there are 1.36 million people in Cochin. This older part of town where we're staying is thankfully a good bit quieter than that. It's an eclectic mix of medieval Portugal, Holland and an English country village, grafted on to the tropical Malabar coast. Definitely not the domain of the package holiday maker – although there are a lot of Westerners here, they're mostly backpackers much like ourselves and it's much less touristy here although still busy with souvenir shops and pavement cafes.

The mainland part of town is Ernakulum, where we arrived. Around this are several small islands linked by ferry. Fort Cochin is on the southern peninsular and we're close to the sea again.

This is very much a fishing area. Along the sea front are the most enormous Chinese style cantilevered fishing nets for which this town is famous. These consist of a wooden jetty extending perhaps 20 feet out to sea, on which are huge wooden triangular shaped frames holding enormous fishing nets. The wooden frames are counter-balanced with 6 or 7 hefty round rocks each, only held on by bound wire. It takes four or five men to heave each net up out of the water. There are maybe twenty of these nets and teams of men along the sea front. Health and Safety seems not to exist here and we were horrified to realise that the teams of fishermen stand directly under these huge rocks alll day lifting the nets in and out – surely there must be accidents.

The catch from the nets is displayed in (smelly) stalls along the promenade. You can choose which fish you want to buy and then take it to the restaurants to be cooked however you want it. There are squid, octopus mullet, snapper, barracuda, crabs and the biggest tiger prawns we have ever seen. We also noticed some bright green mussels yesterday, something we've never seen before.

Everywhere you go you are accosted by tuk tuk drivers offering to show you the sights of the town for around 50 rupees. This is something we'll take them up on tomorrow, but for today we just wanted to relax and unwind from our journey and have a wander around to get our bearings.

While we were having breakfast, a student from the local art college came to sit with us to show us maybe 500 traditional Indian paintings. These are beautifully painted in acrylics and vegetable dyes, mostly depicting traditional Indian scenes and Gods. We have been surprised that a lot of the sellers don't seem to know the stories behind the fables. We've been trying to find out why Ganesh has the head of an elephant but no one we've asked seems to know the story. We bought a couple of paintings on silk for our room back home.

The restaurants here aren't as geared towards tourists as they were in Kovalam. I've become quite used to having banana porridge for breakfast but they don't sell it here. I ordered toast, butter and jam instead and we usually ask for a pot of hot water to make our own tea – the English Earl Grey isn't running out yet so we're still treating ourselves while we can. My toast arrived as a jam sandwich LOL. Dan's scrambled eggs were good, but the bacon in India is definitely best avoided! We had trouble getting a stray dog to eat it the other day. We'd ordered a pot of hot water, 2 cups and some milk. What arrived was 2 tea cups of hot milk and no water. We managed to get our hot water in the end so didn't have to miss out on our tea.

They sell chai and coffee from big stainless steel urns on the back of a bicycle here. Both the chai (tea) and the coffee come ready mixed with about half and half milk and water, and enough sugar to rot your teeth in about a month, served in tiny paper cups. Although I can't stand sweet tea and don't generally drink coffee, both are curiously refreshing in this climate.

We found an amazing Malaysian restaurant for our evening meal, which was probably the best food we've had since we arrived. The curries here are amazing though, and it's a dream for vegetarians because there's so much choice on the menu. However it was great to have a change from curry. The fruit here tastes fantastic as it's all picked when it's perfectly ripe. We've easily become accustomed to our freshly squeezed fruit juice each morning and we had a fruit salad to die for at the Malaysian place. We've realised we need to be drinking more water than we have been doing up until now – it's very easy to become dehydrated in this humidity, which is something we don't want to do.

Our room is at the front this hotel. The Indians seem to go to bed when it gets dark (it's difficult to get a meal here after about 21:30) and get up at dawn (about 5am) so it isn't easy to sleep in the mornings. However, we do get the benefit of being able to see what's going on outside.

This evening there was a large procession of Christian Indian women in the street outside, with a tuk tuk between the 2 rows of ladies in their brightly coloured saris. They prayed and chanted and marched towards a makeshift altar which had been set up in one of the doorways. We THINK it could have been a funeral procession – there was a black wooden cupboard type affair on top of the tuk tuk which could have been a coffin big enough for a child. We'll check this out with one of the hotel staff who speaks better English when we get a chance. Most of the people here speak at least pidgin-English so we're managing to make ourselves understood without too much difficulty.

We plan to stay here for a few days. We're ultimately heading for Goa, but there's a few interesting-looking places along the way that we'll stop off at for a few days each. The sheer scale of this country takes some getting used to – we traveled for five hours yesterday, which equates to about one inch on our small scale map. The journeys are quite tiring and Goa looks a mighty long way away so it will be good to break up the huge distances by stopping along the way.

23^rd March – Easter Sunday

We will remember our stay in Fort Cochin as a very wet one. It has now rained heavily for around the last two weeks, for most of each day, the rain pouring from the sky in torrential bucketloads. We don't even remember having seen this much rain in England.  Indians keep commenting on how unusual this is for this time of year.

We're on the train again now, heading northwards up India's west coast to Calicut. Not such an interesting journey this time because the double glazed windows are filled with condensation and we can't see out. Still, it's nice to have the luxury of air conditioning for a few hours – it really is humid after all the rain. We're both suffering today with upset stomachs and cramps – we ate some prawns last night that maybe weren't good. Dan's having a sleep on the top bunk. We have allocated seats on the train, but someone else is sitting in ours and we're sitting in someone else's, next to two very well spoken ladies from Bombay. They're travelling all the way in one go and won't be getting off the train for another 24 hours – I can't imagine sitting on a train for that long, comfortable though they may be.

We're hoping Calicut will be a quiet, not a very touristy place where we can relax for a few days before moving onwards to Bangalore and Goa.

In Fort Cochin, we met another real character of a tuk tuk driver by the name of Sanju. We nicknamed him “Disco Tuk Tuk” as he's the only one we've come across with a loud sound system on board. His tuk tuk was done up with chromed trims everywhere and red leatherette interior and he drove us everywhere with music blaring. We were particularly amused by his Ferrari banners across the windscreen and the Roman chariot style spikes sticking out of his wheels.

We've decided that on the roads in India, absolutely everyone has equal rights. It doesn't matter whether you are a ten tonne truck, a cat, dog, cow, chicken, bus, bicycle, car or pedestrian, you will be treated with the same respect on the road. It's absolute mayhem, but amazingly it seems to work and we haven't seen even one of the multitude of near misses turn into an accident yet. Incredible! 

In India, the tuk tuk drivers make extra money from commission by taking tourists to expensive shops. For each tourist they take there they earn a certain number of points, and they're able to redeem these at the end of each month for petrol, T shirts, jeans, clothes.  We wanted to get some extra luggage straps made up yesterday to hold our little trolleys on to the backpacks.   We gave Sanju a limit of three shops to earn him some points as he was a great driver for us and didn't try and cheat us like most drivers . These tourist shops were interesting the first time round – full of amazing hand knotted Kashmiri rugs that can have anything from 200 to 1800 knots per square inch and cost up to 20,000 UK pounds (even in India), beautiful rosewood carvings and furniture, some inlaid with semi precious stones and jewels, others enameled with the most stunning patterns and designs. There are beautiful fabrics. A salesman yesterday was showing us some wall hangings which are like patchwork quilts. He said the fabrics used are off-cuts from the fabrics used for royal saris – some have intricate beadwork, others have precious stones stitched in, and still others are embroidered with pure gold.

Unfortunately the salesmen in these tourist “emporiums” automatically assume that because we come from England, we have huge amounts of money to spend. At one place they brought us complementary jasmine tea and asked us to sit down while they threw out a mind boggling assortment of rugs across the floor. The cheapest of these was around three hundred pounds, while the larger ones were almost ten thousand! We enjoyed the tea but weren't likely to be encouraged to buy anything! Anyway, Sanju was happy because we helped him to reach his quota of points for the month and he duly took us back to the luggage maker where we collected our straps with buckles – 2 of them hand made for 30p the pair! It will never cease to amaze me that you can have absolutely anything you like made in India.

We hadn't realised it was Easter weekend until we received email from home. We were surprised to find that just like at home, everything in Fort Cochin was closed on Good Friday. It was also a “dry day” which means that they are not allowed to buy or sell alcohol. Apparently they have these about once a month, usually on the day that the Indians get their monthly salary. A waiter explained to us that this is because the Indians don't drink very often, and that when they do, they get very very drunk, very easily and often become a menace. We saw an Indian in Covalum beach get himself arrested for the same reason. We didn't mind going without our evening glass of beer for a day – we treated ourselves to some chocolate and biscuits instead and retired to our room for an early night.

The oldest Christian church in India is in Fort Cochin – it was built in 1534 by the Portuguese.  We were amazed to see a double file procession which must have stretched for almost a mile around the town, gradually making their way towards the church. We're surprised how strong the Christian faith is here – apparently only 2.3% of the Indian population is Christian, but 75% of these live in Kerala and the south.

I've just been interrupted by a cafuffle of fussing men complaining that we are sitting in the wrong seats. The two ladies next to us told us to ignore them and said that it doesn't matter at all, especially since there's other people sitting in our designated seats. I'm quite glad to have this seat for the time being though, as it's right next to the power point and little table and sitting writing passes the time easily while we can't see out. This train is much busier than the last one we were on – we don't have the luxury of spreading out and our packs are piled on top of one another on the opposite seat. 

We refused to get ripped off by station porters again this journey, so it was our first real experience of having to manage with our packs. And boy are they heavy in this heat and humidity. The trouble is, we're having to carry around clothes for cold climates too – we have fleeces, long johns and thermal tops, which is totally laughable in this climate, but we'll be very glad of them when we reach China in the winter. Still, we've vowed to see what we can manage to send home from the next post office we reach.

Things at home are a bit of a worry. We had tenants move in on 17^th March and were told that they were a Romanian couple, which was fine by us. We've since had email from our next door neighbour, who said that on chatting with the woman whilst she was moving in, she mentioned that there would also be another Romanian couple moving in with them. We've emailed the estate agent and apparently they knew nothing about this either. This means that the tenants have broken the terms of the lease within a day of moving in – not good news. We have to trust that our agent will do the job we're paying them to do and advise us on the best way of dealing with the situation – there isn't a lot we can do about it from here.

Wednesday 26^th March – Bangalore

Well I'm glad little lappy knows what day and date it is – it's all too easy to lose track when you're all over the place and not keeping up with news.

Calicut proved not to be quite the quiet beach resort we were hoping for. We arrived there about 7.30 in the evening after a 5 hour train journey. It's difficult to get your bearings when you arrive in the dark. As soon as we came out of the station we were accosted by various tuk tuk drivers, all haggling to take us to the hotels where they get the best commission.

We asked for a cheap hotel near the beach and went off in a taxi into the darkness – there's no way I would feel safe doing this journey by myself – even with Dan it's a bit disconcerting at times, but you have to put your trust in someone.

The taxi driver took us to a hotel near the beach but as soon as we pulled up outside we could see it wasn't going to be in our price range – anywhere with a parking attendant in a peaked cap is going to cost more than we want to pay. Dan left me in the taxi with the luggage while he went in to find out about rooms. We were right – they were asking 1200 rupees a night and our budget is nearer 350.

So off we went in the taxi again to hotel number two, which the guy at the first hotel's reception had assured us was much cheaper. Unfortunately still not cheap enough, this time at 850.

We were told all the hotels near the sea were at least this price so at this point gave up on the idea of a sea view, especially since we were only planning on staying for a couple of days. On our third attempt we ended up at a hideous looking tower block type hotel a good ten minutes' drive into the heart of town

The taxi driver tried to charge us much more than we'd agreed to pay so we started our stay there with an argument in the parking area. In the end we compromised because we were too tired to row over a couple of quid after a long day's travelling and our first efforts at lugging round our backpacks. Dan's is around 20 kilos and I struggle with 16 or so. They're  going to take some getting used to carrying in this heat. We've already vowed to send some stuff home as soon as we can easily get to a post office.

We were pleased to find we actually had hot water for the first time in over a week. When there is hot water, there is a little boiler on the wall and a hot tap but the shower is still cold. You have to fill a bucket with hot water and wash from that instead. Still, hot water is bliss, and an opportunity to do some laundry. Our mosquito net gets strung from whatever fittings on the wall are strong enough to hold it and doubles as a washing line. It is possible to get washing done wherever we've been so far, but it's not that cheap – usually ranging upwards from about 12 rupees for a pair of socks – that's about 15p – so we prefer to do it ourselves.

Never mind the washing, a cold beer and some food were first priority so we headed out onto the town. We wandered for over 15 minutes and still hadn't found anywhere to eat or drink so we asked an Indian guy who was happy to show us the nearest restaurant in return for 50 rupees for a beer.

The first place he took us to was pitch dark inside and full of Indians. The owner told us we should go upstairs to the air conditioned family restaurant. We like to see what we're eating here so that was fine by us. Little did we know that this was the only place we'd find to eat or drink during our stay in Calicut and we'd be returning here two or three times a day. We never saw anyone else in there. The menu was extensive but in reality most of this was unavailable. It seemed ridiculous that they were unable to serve an orange juice when right outside the door were hundreds of stalls full of oranges! We considered buying a bag of fruit and emptying it on their counter each morning.

Calicut is a sprawling Indian town and we saw only two or three other Westerners during our stay there. It was noticeable that the locals spoke little English. Wandering around in the daylight, I was stared at everywhere we went and the one time that Dan left me alone to pop to a shop across the road, there was a traffic jam along the main road as every single vehicle stopped for a good stare. A bit disconcerting and not the most comfortable, but we didn't discern any hostility, just a lot of curiosity.

This was our first taster of an Indian town. It is hot, very smelly, noisy beyond belief and  completely filthy. There were huge numbers of fruit stalls all along the roads and we couldn't believe that it all got sold. One morning we wandered into the fruit market, which was absolutely piled high with all kinds of strange fruit and veg, some of which we'd never seen before – warty looking white things around the size and shape of a sweet corn cob, potato-ey looking things which we assumed were some kind of kiwi fruit, although not as we know them. We bought a couple of green bananas for one rupee each. There seem to be 3 kinds of bananas here – the usual yellow ones which tend to be small, but also red and green bananas. At first we thought these were different stages of ripening, but they all have completely different flavours and taste so much better than the bananas we know at home.

The smell of the huge pile of rotting leaves and old fruit in one corner overwhelmed the entire market. Although there were countless sellers, there didn't seem to be many people buying and we couldn't see how the locals managed to make any living here.

The noise in the town was absolutely unbearable – the Indians hoot at each other constantly while driving and this went on 24/7.  The smog was awful. It was very difficult to sleep. Our fan drowned out some of the noise but this cut out the first night after a power cut and we hardly slept at all. 

We took tuk tuks to the beach – a good clean beach about half a mile long, with lots of locals sitting in the shade under trees. Again no Westerners. And again lots and lots of staring. It would have been impossible to sit on this beach in a bikini, and simply too hot to sit there fully dressed. The sea here is very dangerous so we couldn't swim either although we did have a paddle and the sea was beautifully warm. We saw a couple of dolphins close in to the beach, only 70 yards or so, which was a thrill – never seen them that near to before.

We decided to ditch Calicut as soon as we could. It really wasn't what we were looking for and not in the least relaxing. Interesting, but very hard work. We went to the train station and booked a ticket on the overnight train to Bangalore which was a surprisingly quick and easy procedure. There were loads of people waiting for tickets, but we were seen to immediately. Don't suppose the Indians were too pleased by our preferential treatment. 

We knew Bangalore would be mayhem – it's India's 4^th largest city with some 60 million people, and well inland – there would be no escaping to the beach here. The journey was to take 12 hours by train and take us maybe another 3 inches up our map of India. The train was fine. We'd booked second class A/C (air conditioned) and shared a little “bedroom” of 4 bunks with 2 interesting and informative Indian guy's who were more than happy to talk to us about their country. 

We were caught out by the fact that the night train didn't serve any food or drinks and Dan dived off at a station stop to grab us some food. We slept from about 11.30pm. The train was dark and quiet and I had a reasonable night's sleep, but Dan is a very light sleeper and had maybe 3 hrs. We woke just as it got light to watch the last hour's progress into Bangalore. Houses and blocks of flats brightly painted for as far as you could see, this town is vast, massive. There were “shanty towns” on the outskirts where people lived under tent shaped tarpaulins with literally nothing.

Well, Lonely Planet said this was one of the most smoggiest cities...and they are right. We got a tuk tuk to town and were soon smothered in smog and fumes. The tuk tuk's have 2 stroke 60cc engine's (2 stroke is 4 star petrol part mixed with motor oil and chucks out serious smoke). The fumes flooding from hundreds of them weaving through the traffic soon starts to get in your lungs, up your nose, on your face and even puts a layer of it on your teeth! There is no system of monitoring fumes or MOT's here, that's for sure! 

By the time we reached town, we were coughing and rubbing our sore eyes, pretty harsh, Ventolin at the ready. Hotel's are more expensive here because Bangalore is an up and coming IT town and we settled with paying 700 rupees for our room, which is smaller than usual, but still clean and comfortable. The noise is worse than in Calicut and non stop. We dumped our bags and went for a walk. OMG, you have no idea how manic this place really is, its hard to describe. Everywhere you turn there is a sea of people trying to get somewhere in a hurry, thousands in fact. You can see the smog within a hundred yards and crossing the road can be a hazard indeed, at the least a real challenge, sometimes downright dangerous. At one point we waited for nearly 10 mins for a big enough gap in the traffic to chance a mad dash across 5 lanes of traffic. Past endless streams of bikes, tuk tuks and people, cows, dogs, buffalo pulling carts, people carts, just any imaginable transport you can possible imagine. There's a huge contrast between the bare-footed cart pullers and the smartly-dressed IT workers with briefcases tucked under their arms. 

Needles to say our main aim today was to book a train out of here ASAP, which we did. The tuk tuks here are supposed to use the meter by law, but show them a white face and they refuse to use it knowing they can make more money by pushing the prices up. Out of about 6 drivers Dan went to ask, none would agree to use the meter. Quite annoying, but we generally get a reasonable price in the end by ignoring drivers that quote a ridiculous price. Patience is a key quality when negotiating, so we generally take turns with this chore.

Not much to visit or see in this city without travelling vast distances, so we decided to visit the closer sights. One of the best things we found was a botanical garden at Lalbagh created by the English in the 1850s. This was a little piece of green heaven in amongst the chaos and definitely a place for regaining one's sanity in the mayhem. When you got far enough in, you could almost not hear the traffic outside. There were some amazing ancient trees.

For the first time in India, we saw monkeys, a whole pride of monkeys in fact, not sure what type, but what a fabulous treat. They were just roaming the gardens and trees as if in the wild. You could actually get close enough to touch (although we didn't for fear of being bitten). They were not spooked at all and simply sat there grooming, as if we weren't there. We both got some fabulous pictures. One mum had an adorable tiny baby, maybe only a few weeks old with very little fur and huge flappy ears, very cute.

Up a big staircase, a huge lake that must have taken ages to build as it was raised 20 feet above the main garden, like a UK reservoir. Many smaller lakes with hundred's of lily pads with flowers that sit out of the water a foot or more, some with carp and other species of fish cruising and jumping about. It was such a blissful place, an oasis, a huge relief in such a noisy city. You could almost believe that you were in England if it wasn't for the towering Australian trees and strange trees that we have never seen before, even in nature programs on the telly. Unfortunately our bliss was interrupted by a huge storm brewing not so far away and we decided to head back, we know how quick and ferocious the Indian storms can be.

1^st April - Hampi – Shanthi shanthi

Hampi is a place I can't do justice to with words alone – it would have to be seen to even begin to appreciate it. I guess it can best be described as an ancient Hindu civilisation. but it's  really so vast (approx 40 sq km) that it's comparable to Rome. The landscape is different from any we've seen so far. We've left the palm-strewn lagoons and backwaters of Kerala behind and are now in central Karnataka.

The most noteworthy part of the landscape here is the absolutely enormous rounded boulders which can be seen in every direction. There are literally hundreds of abandoned temples – every way you turn your head are ancient elaborately carved Hindu structures.

The empire was in its heyday from the early 1400s and came to an end in the late 1500s when it was invaded and pillaged by opposing neighbouring religious factions. The atmosphere has to be the most serene we've ever known and the spirituality of Hampi is palpable everywhere. The instant we stumbled off the overnight train from Bangalore at Hospet station, the stress and noise of the city was replaced by rural Indian tranquility in the early morning sunlight and our stress levels bottomed out.

We're coming to the tail end of the season here now and it is absolute luxury to wander around these ancient monuments in total solitude. We've been here maybe five days now, but it's so chilled that we've actually lost track of the date and even the day of the week!

The centre of Hampi is dominated by the towering pyramid-shaped Virupaksha Temple which stretches some 52m towards the sky. It is carved with intricate depictions of various deities from top to bottom. It's staggering to imagine the stonemasons of the 14^th Century working high above the ground in this fierce heat.

The Virupaksha Temple is the only one still used in Hampi for daily puja (worship). This takes place early in the morning and again at around 6pm. We took a wander over the other evening. The temple elephant is called Lakshmi (Goddess of Wealth) and we were fascinated to feed her bananas. If you place a one rupee coin in the nostril of her trunk, she bops you gently on the head to give you a blessing. Elephant hairs are very bristly to the touch!

We've so far spent 2 days investigating the temples and ruins, but it's been about 40 degrees Centigrade since we arrived here so that's no mean feat in the heat of the day!

We've decided that we're not in any hurry to leave here – it's such a stunning place and there's so much to see that we're going to take our time and maybe spend a couple of weeks here.

Our room is tiny and painted bright blue, with a pink mosquito net and elephant patterned sheets. It's in a little guest house right next to the Tungabhadra River and run by a very happy Indian family. We have a hot shower but there's no way of mixing cold water in and it's way too hot, so we're enjoying washing from a bucket of warm water instead.

All around the centre of Hampi are ancient stone buildings. It's astounding to see the local people living in these and continuing life around priceless antiquities just as they have done for the last 600 years. If this was England, each site would be fenced off with barbed wire at a distance of 100 feet.

Dan's had plenty of opportunity for fishing and as I write we're sat by the river in the late afternoon sun. The locals have been amazed by Dan's telescopic fishing rod and other fishing gear – they use a length of bamboo and a bit of nylon. Dan asked what the best bait here was and was given a bag of mixed dried cauliflower and rice by a local fisherman. Wherever he fishes he draws a crowd of people to come and watch. He's caught some small catfish, but we're hoping for something big enough for dinner soon.

Hampi is a sacred centre, and, as such, no alcohol is allowed within a 3km radius. Fancying a cold beer the other evening, we caught a tuk tuk to the nearest town and were dropped outside an Indian drinking hole. This was a small hot room, maybe 12' by 10', with a dusty floor and a bar along one side. One of the "barmen" was only about ten years old. We were shocked to see the Indians pushing, shoving and shouting to get to the bar first. They drank whiskies one after another, half a small bottle at a time, many of them very obviously with a serious alcohol problem.

We attracted a lot of attention as we stood in our corner with a cool Kingfisher, me in particular. Every male who came in stared at me in disbelief (it's taboo for women to drink here), but we detected very little hostility. Many of them came to greet us and shake our hands. We nearly ran out of tobacco as every man and his dog clamored to have us roll an English “beedi” (cigarette) for them. By the time we'd drunk our second beer, one of the owners began to get nervous of the attention we were attracting, and, very politely, asked us to leave, explaining that it wasn't a place for English.

I was ready to leave by then anyway – it certainly wasn't the most relaxing place for a drink, but nonetheless an eye-opening experience. There is absolutely no way on earth I would have been in this bar without Dan. (We've been telling people here who've asked that we're husband and wife – they don't approve of cohabitation in India so it's easier that way.)  I very much doubt they'd seen Westerners here at all before, let alone white women drinking!

Last night we headed out again, this time to the government run bar and restaurant at the KSTDC Hotel in Kamallapuram. I'm pleased to report that this was a far more civilized venue. We enjoyed a fantastic South Indian thali and a couple of Kingfishers (beer) each. Our tuk tuk driver Lingam sat with us and we treated him to a beer and a meal – just the one beer since he would be driving us home!

He told us he lives locally with his family of 5, including an ill mother, and that since he is the only one with an income, they all survive on his wages of 50 rupees (around 60p) per day. He rents a tuk tuk for three months of the year, which is an opportunity to earn more money, but spends the rest of the year labouring. He told us he is uneducated, having left school at the age of seven to work with an ox-cart carrying bananas to market for sale. People in the west really have NO business complaining about their standards of living!

The downside of Hampi, if there is one, is the extent to which it now revolves around tourism. Little stalls selling hippy tat and clothes are everywhere and it is impossible to walk down the street without being accosted by locals insisting that you need to buy a bunch of 10 bananas, or hire a rickshaw, can't live without some jangley bells, or simply must drink some coconut water straight from the fruit. This does, however, sometimes work in our favour – although we both love Indian food, neither of us has yet managed to enjoy curry for breakfast and here we've been positively reveling in banana porridge and Tetley tea!

I am becoming addicted to Indian bananas, eating at least 3 every day. By the time we leave India, I think I'm going to be looking like one of the temple monkeys! The taste is just amazing and nothing whatsoever like the gas-ripened excuse for plantain that cost us so much in England. A perfectly ripe banana here costs between 1 and 2 rupees (not more than 3p).

The Indian version of English is endlessly amusing – my friend PaulineM would have a field day. We saw a menu the other day offering “cornflux” and “pouched eggs” for breakfast.

We were suffering a little in the heat earlier today and asked a tuk tuk driver if there was anywhere we could swim. He told us about a wonderful lake nearby and we went off with him. Unfortunately, we were put off by the signs warning of crocodiles, despite a little kid's insistence that there weren't any! Are there crocs in India? We don't know, but we weren't about to risk losing a leg or worse. We'll stick to the river where all the locals swim and do their laundry (by beating it on the rocks) in future!

5th April - Hampi at Night

As the sun sets in India, the people come once again to life. The harsh heat of the day seems mostly to be spent sleeping in the shade. The “boy” at our guest house was to be found laying on the cool tiled floor one afternoon, his belly pressed to the wall to benefit from its (limited) cooling effect.

The sun sets around 6.30pm; from around 4.30pm the heat of the sun is bearable. Washing not done in the morning commences again – the women spend hours beating their metres of saris against the rocks. Small sachets of laundry powder hang in strands from the front of every shop. Washing is laid to dry in the sun wherever there is a flat surface – on rocks or steps by the river, even on railway lines where there is no river bank.

Men return from the pastures they work in during the day, leading families of goats which trot obediently along behind, often carrying large bundles of grass on their heads which serve as evening meal for the goats.

Dusk is brief here – 20 minutes after sunset the sky is dark. There is little light pollution here and the clear skies offer excellent views of more stars than we've ever seen before.

As night falls and their evening chores are completed – pots washed and water carriers filled – the people of Hampi settle down early for the night – from around 8pm onwards. The more wealthy of them retire to one-room shacks where the whole family crowds around a colour TV. Those less well-off simply roll out a straw beach mat, or stitched-together rice sacks and settle on the side of the main street, surrounded by their goats, cows, dogs and chickens. The more lucky of them have mosquito nets, but it isn't uncommon to see young children and babies completely covered over with blankets, despite the heat.

Some of the people pull out wooden beds with woven palm leaf tops to lay on – this is known as a charpai. Many of the street vendors simply remove their wares, store the fruit or chai urns under their carts and lay down to sleep on their carts. The monsoons must certainly make for some less than comfortable nights of sleep. I have read that devout Hindus should rise at 4am and turn in at 10pm. We can definitely vouch for this being common practice – someone was sweepng outside our room way before it was light this morning.

Thursday 10th April – and so to Goa ..

There are 4 weekly trains from Hampi to Goa and these all leave at 6.30 in the morning. And so began our day at the ungodly hour of 4.30am. Still feeling half cut from our farewell drinks with our driver Lingam the previous evening, I staggered around the room packing. This is becoming easier with each time it's done, but unfortunately the packs don't feel a great deal lighter for a recent visit to the post office to send stuff home.

It still amazes me that us and our 2 packs fit into the back of the tiny rickshaws – we take it in turns to have a luggage trolley sticking into our back.

It's still very dark here at 5am and we were amazed to see that half the people of Hampi were already up and about, fetching and carrying water or sitting at the chai stalls. They're not so different from us, needing a couple of cups of tea to get going in the mornings. We're starting to enjoy the chai now, although it's definitely a tooth-rotting experience. We did actually manage to get chai specially made for us in Hampi with no milk or sugar – just strong tea leaves and a few pods of cardomom – bliss. Much as I enjoy a small cup of chai (they're usually about the size of an egg cup), they won't be convincing me to have sugar in my tea when I return home.

As we bumped and shook our way thru the darkness to Hospet station, we amused ourselves by shouting “Morning!” loudly to the Indians squatting by the side of the road going to the toilet. (I read somewhere that only 13% of India's sewage is treated in any way.)

We reached the station at 5.45am. It was light by now but the sunrise was hidden somewhere behind the buildings. Even at this time of morning it's hot enough to sweat.

Goa is very much on the tourist trail and we gathered with other Westerners on the station platform, swapping travel stories whilst sipping more chai. The Indians gathered around us as though we were some kind of zoo exhibit. A beggar with no hands, only half an arm and a stump for a foot asked us for money. We don't give money to beggars, but contemplated for a moment where we should put any money we were to give!

It's very difficult here seeing the disabilities of some of the people. Unlike England they are given no help whatsoever. Some with missing legs have bicycle/chairs to get around with, but we have seen people with stumps for legs dragging themselves along wearing flip flops on their hands for protection. We've never seen a disabled person with a wheelchair. It's incredible to see that these people do actually manage to get by – and not only that, they're still happy with their lot.

All the trains we've encountered so far have been regular as clockwork, but this one was two hours late. We could've had an extra bit of sleep! Hampi was surely no place for a lie-in and we were generally woken by noises of sweeping (endless sweeping!), or banging, or drums, or bells, or Indian music, by 7am. Sometimes I swear the family living upstairs were cracking open coconuts with a machete on our ceiling way before it was light. Coconut leaf buildings don't make for good sound insulation, and Indian babies scream just as much as English ones when they wake up! 

There are many dogs here, nearly all of a light brown, medium sized, happy looking mongrel type, no doubt inbred over generations. They mostly seem to be roughly owned and cared for by somebody – at least they're contented and quite well fed. But some nights are filled with the sound of howling and barking dogs.

If they go on for long enough, they set off the cows/yaks/buffaloes mooing loudly in complaint. There seem to be 3 or 4 different species of what we would call cows – black hairy ones, cream ones with long horns, cream ones with a big lump around their shoulders, and black ones without hair. We haven't quite figured out what's what yet.

They're all owned by someone (a cow here is a valuable commodity at fifty pounds a throw) but they're left to wander the streets at will during the day. We had some fruit that was past its best one day, so have learnt that cows don't eat oranges, but they do enjoy bananas complete with their skin.

The oranges have to be peeled and offered one segment at a time to the temple monkeys, who take these very gently from your hand and stuff them into their cheeks a bit like hamsters. We thought these huge puffed up cheeks were growths at first, but no – just oranges!

Temple elephants, on the other hand, munch mainly on bits of coconut and large quantities of bananas. On 6th April it was Hindu New Year. We went again to the Virupaksha Temple in Hampi from Lakshmi the jumbo and sat and watched her scoffing endless bananas – temple elephants are definitely well-fed on festival days!

The train arrived in a rush of three – obviously the delay had caused some – problems. Trains in India are unbelievably long – each one has at least 50 carriages. They seem to go on for miles. We haven't quite figured out the confusing array of annotations on the tickets yet, or the order of the carriages (or indeed even if there is any order!) We asked a ticket inspector where our carriage was and were told it was the first carriage, which was by this time about 20 carriages up the platform! Trying to run with 20 kilo backpack in 40 degrees is no joke! If we missed our train, the next was two days away.

We reached about the third carriage from the front and the train started to move! There was nothing for it but to jump on. We'd vowed never to travel “cattle class” here, but this time, it was what we got ;-)

We didn't much fancy an eight hour journey in a carriage rammed full of people and sitting on a hard bench seat – we'd paid for our beds further up the train and were determined to have them! Our fellow travellers were very friendly, if curious, but at this lowest class of travel, no one speaks English and we had no idea if, or when, the train was going to stop before Goa.

We were lucky, and about three quarters of an hour later, the train stopped at a station. We legged it - (as far as is possible with a heavy pack), Dan shouting at me “Come on, come on, else we'll be in a crap carriage again!” - along the crowded platform (people lay on platforms in India!) knocking people out of the way with every step.

The Gods appeared to be with us that day and we reached 2AC moments before the train pulled away. Bliss! We've got used to the heat here now and the 26C of the air con of the train had us wrapped up in blankets shivering.

The train journey wasn't as relaxing as previous ones. We shared our 4-berth, 2AC bedroom with an Indian couple and their two small children. It seemed that as soon as we dropped off to sleep the baby would start screaming, or the guy would turn on the fluorescent light above our heads to entertain the three-year old.

We gave up trying to sleep around midday and ate some less than mediocre vegetable biryani, brought along the train from the pantry car.

As we travelled further north, the scenery changed dramatically – gone were the coconut palms, to be replaced by thickly-wooded gorges and mountains – the first we've seen in India. We spotted some waterfalls around 300' high with people swimming in the pool at the bottom, and longed for our eight hour journey to be over. I can't imagine we're ever going to undertake so many long train journeys again in this lifetime ..

Arriving at Madgaon station after eight hours on the train, we got a rickshaw 7km to the nearest beach and the nearest bar, where we found arm chairs with cushions (the first we've come across in six weeks!) and cold beer at 60Rs a bottle. Had we died and gone to heaven?

Goa is much more relaxed than anywhere we've been in India so far – I can actually wear shorts or even a bikini without causing a traffic jam. I have to say that's becoming a source of irritation to me here.

There are miles and miles of cream coloured sandy beaches and the sea is warmer than the shower in our room! I can see us spending quite some time here. Today is the first time in over five weeks that we've started our day with a swim in the sea. We've found ourselves a room for fifteen pounds a week and we may never leave ;-)

Sunday 20th April - Colva Beach, Goa

The scrappy bits of paper were getting too much – I've had to buy a book for journal writing now. It isn't practical to use the laptop anywhere but in the room, and particularly not on the beach – the sand would kill it in no time at all.

So, we've been here a week today, although it doesn't feel that long. Life has temporarily settled to a slow and gentle pace. Each morning we eat breakfast at the nearest beach shack to our room, washed down with at least two cups of Tetley. After that there isn't a great deal to do – perhaps a swim in the sea, maybe a few chores – washing some clothes in a bucket of cold water (they dry in a couple of hours), or perhaps a wander up the beach to check emails or buy some more water.

As the afternoon – progresses, beer o'clock falls upon us and we'll have a couple as the sun gets cooler, before wandering back to our room for a shower, and then out for anoher glorious Indian meal. I think I'm becoming addicted to spicy food!

The weather has been amazing since we arrived here – day after day of endless blue skies and hot, hot, hot. It's becoming a little uncomfortable for sleeping at night – the fan in this room is none too effective – but I'm not complaining. When you're on the beach there's always a warm breeze, but as soon as you walk back into the groves of palm trees it's still and sultry and humid.

We're both still a little under the weather with colds, and Dan's had an upset tum for about a week, but it has to be said that life here is good.

Finances have been a bit of a problem. Our letting agent, Foxtons, told us that their commission would be payable monthly, but they've gone and taken the whole year's commission out of the first two months' rent, so we haven't had any income since we arrived, and the money we saved to bring with us has now all but gone. We have some travellers cheques but we need to keep those for places there aren't any ATM's, so we're having to keep expenditure to a minimum and put off anything we want to buy or do that isn't essential. Still, in a month's time, money should start to filter through and we can just about survive until then, so it isn't disastrous. It's possible to live very cheaply here and we're not spending much more than ten pounds a day between us, food and lodgings all in.

All the beach shacks that cater for tourists are going to be shutting up shop for the season within the next couple of weeks. Their business is over for the season (we quite often have a restaurant to ourselves). The shacks actually get taken down and rebuilt each year – they'd be washed away by the monsoons if they didn't do this. The shacks are about 40' from the sea (there isn't much of a tide movement), but we've been told the sea comes right up to them when the rains start – usually around the 5th or 6th of June.

Two nights ago we sat on the beach and watched the most awesome electrical storm. Lightning struck all around (at a safe distance) in several places at once. The palm trees were backlit against the dark blue sky. Rain came down heavily but only for a short time – it had stopped by the time we finished eating our meal, so we didn't get wet.

So, once all the beach shacks have been taken down, there will be literally nothing here. For that reason, and to keep expenditure to a minimum, we're going to try and move out of the tourist areas and rent a flat for a couple of months. We'll hire a bike tomorrow and take a look around. It will be much cheaper to rent somewhere for a longer time than to be paying nightly rates on a room, not to mention having a bit more space.

Madgaon Market

On Friday, we took the bus to Madgaon (pron. Magow) as we'd been told that the market was worth a look, that you could find everything under the sun there. The bus dropped us near the market. As we got nearer, the smell of fish became stronger and stronger – it seemed we were at the fresh produce market rather than the general market. It was well worth a look and made for some good photos – beyond the smelly fish market (where contented cats lay on every corner), were towering fruit and veg stalls full of colour and wonderful ripe smells. The stallholders shouted at us to take their photos, as people do everywhere in India. After a wander, we jumped on a bus to the general market on the other side of town. And what a market! Enclosed from the heat of the sun, little alleyways stretched in all directions with stalls selling everything imaginable, from clothes, to cakes, to huge sacks of dried chillies, to the bangles which Indian (married) women wear by the hundred.

A toothless old man attracted our attention selling little pyramids of hard brown “stuff”. He gave us a bit to try and it turned out to be jaggary, or natural sugar cane. We bought a piece of coconut jaggary, which is a rich dark brown and tastes a bit like licorice. The state of the stallholder's teeth (or lack thereof!) told us we should make it last for a while!

Onwards, and we were attracted by a stall selling strands of spicy pork sausages, each sausage about an inch long. These look like beaded wooden necklaces and we'd heard that they are a Goan speciality, so we bought a little piece to try.

After an hour or so marvelling at the diversity of produce, we stopped at an Indian workers' cafe and ate platefuls of bhajis and samosas, and dishes of hard peas similar to chickpeas in a spicy sauce. This was no tourist place and our bill came to 32 Rs (about 40p) beween us.

The bus back to Colva was an experience. Packed to the gills already, the bus man shouted for us to move up and up as more and more people crammed on at every stop. Fortunately we didn't have far to go – it wasn't something we'd have fancied with our backpacks, that's for sure!

Thursday 24th April - Agonda Beach

We'd been asking around Colva if there was anywhere the locals recommended that was a little less touristy – Colva was lovely and pretty quiet at this time of year, but there were still beach shacks and lines of sunloungers everywhere. Like everywhere we've been in India so far it was still hard to get a moment to yourself – you'd be sitting on the beach at night looking at the stars, convinced you were the only people for miles around, when, all of a sudden, a voice would pop up “You want something?” and you'd turn around to see a little Indian man (most Indians are little) standing right next to you. All we actually wanted was a bit of p&q, but that seems to be about the only thing your rupees can't buy you here – I guess India didn't become the third most populated country in the world for nothing. So we've had this dream of a deserted tropical beach with no-one on it but us since we arrived.  An English girl married to the local bar owner recommended Agonda, about thirty miles south from Colva. We thought we'd check it out so hired a moped for the afternoon and headed off.

We've got a Goa road map but the road signs here leave something to be desired. We took twisty turny roads up into the mountains as we wanted to avoid the national highway and appreciate the scenery along the way. It's extremely green in Goa, and densely wooded with lots of rivers. The mountains aren't exactly towering, but it's the hilliest part of India we've seen so far. The moped struggled and at times we wished we'd hired a more powerful bike. However, the roads are pretty good and there wasn't much traffic the way we chose, so we pootled along and arrived at Agonda a couple of hours later.

Agonda is a golden sandy bay perhaps two miles from end to end, with a green wooded headland at each side and mountains on the northern horizon. The beach is steeper than Colva, with crashing waves providing a mesmerising soundtrack. The back of the beach is a lush green canopy of pines which look more like tamarisks, palms, and mango trees – apparently inhabited by monkeys.

We settled in the nearest bar for a cold beer while we recovered from the uncomfortable journey. Within about ten minutes we'd decided that this was where we wanted to be – we counted maybe five people and five dogs along the entire length of the beach. Finally – a deserted spot in the sun to relax and enjoy!

We checked out a few rooms but we didn't have a lot of time to spare – we really didn't fancy Indian roads on a moped in the dark and the sun was starting to cool already. We hurriedly organised some accommodation and beat a hasty retreat across the mountains to Colva. We hadn't left quite early enough though, and the last twenty minutes or so of our journey were in darkness – somewhat disconcerting despite Dan's careful driving, largely because so many of the Indians insist on driving without any lights on (in addition to the fact that they're quite often on the wrong side of the road and pull out randomly regardless of what's coming!)

It was decided that we would treat ourselves to a tuk tuk to Agonda for our move the next day. After our Madgaon experience, it seemed like seven quid well spent rather than fight with our packs on two buses and a walk across town. The quarter mile walk from our guesthouse across soft sand to the rikshaw stand in the full heat of the sun was more than enough exercise for one day! We asked our driver if he could take the mountain route so we could appreciate the views, but he said we'd have to get out and walk up the hills LOL, so we let him choose the highway route.

We're staying in one of the little wooden huts that line the beach. Most of them are being taken down now in readiness for the monsoon, but the owner says we can stay for a month if we want to (visions of ours being the last hut left on the beach ;-) The hut is built of logs, bamboo with plywood walls and floors, windows on three sides and a small balcony. It's raised on stilts about 10' off the ground up a (very) steep ladder. We have a hammock and two deck chairs and shell mobiles hanging on the balcony. Beside the ladder sits a washing up bowl of water to rinse the sand off your feet (has to be said that the bed's still full of it every night though LOL). There's a mosquito net already in place, so we don' t need to use ours. There are cubby holes under the bed for clothes and we can nearly move around now that we've forced our packs into them! Best of all though, we can lay in bed and watch the sea crashing on the sand, and fall asleep to the sound of thundering waves. The engineer in Dan has been somewhat disconcerted by the build quality of the shack in view of the forthcoming monsoon storms; I'm doing well at ignoring it – well it's been here since the start of the season and hasn't fallen down yet – however, it has to be said that all you have to do is get out of bed to make the whole structure shake LOL. I could easily dream of living in a building like this, albeit slightly larger and with a garden. The hut is so much airier than the concrete rooms we've been used to and last night was the coolest night's sleep in several weeks.

We've been for a wander this morning and there isn't much to Agonda at this time of year – a few shops, an internet cafe and only two or three restaurants remaining open. This is definitely a maximum chill-out zone! Now, as I write, there's just one other person on the beach, disappearing into the heat haze at the end. There are two pairs of shoes near the water, suggesting that there could be another two people around somewhere. Other than that there's just us, the fishing boats, the crows (endless crows in this country),  a couple of eagles soaring overhead searching for lunch, and the palm trees .

Monday 28th April

Palolem Beach has a reputation for being a hippy chill out zone where travellers arrive and don't end up leaving for months. Agonda has begun to show its limitations already – it may be a paradise beach but there's only about 3 shops here, selling crisps, biscuits and loo roll. There are only two restaurants remaining open here (other than the ridiculously priced “Turtle Lounge”. We visited this on our first night here, and although the double beds next to the beach with cushions are heaven, Kingfisher at 95 Rs a bottle is a little out of our price range. Some Americans we met in the beach shack asked us to recommend somewhere upmarket with A/C and told us after checking that the Turtle Lounge charges 4000 Rs a night for a room – I'd sure like to see what it offers above our 200Rs. We have everything we need right here in this room.

So, we thought we'd have a look at Palolem. I've got a nasty cough that could use some antibiotics and we were told there was a chemist there.

We stood at the bus stop for half an hour or so and a bus drove straight past without stopping. Another arrived within about 20 mins and we squashed on once again. I am yet to decide whether the fact that a bus ride costs only 7 Rs (around 9p) justifies having our lives risked as the bus which states “12 standing passengers llawed” whilst cramming on over 100, and hurtles around bends at speeds I wouldn't even attempt in the ZX! Scarey journey aside, we found the chemist closed and were told that the owner was in Mumbai for the next 4 days. We consoled ourselves with a cold beer and headed off down a road marked “Palolem Beach 2km”. Palolem is clearly a lot busier than Agonda. As we walked toward to beach we enquired at the local shop as to whether there were any rooms with kitchens available to rent. The shopkeeper sent us off wiith 2 kids away from the beach. We arrived at a house where they shouted “Aunty, aunty!” and a kind-faced woman hurried out. She showed us a little house with 2 double beds bathroom, a kitchen with a single burner stove, crockery and pans but no fridge, and insisted that her “last price” (popular terminology here) was 200 Rs a night. We took her phone number and headed for the beach.

Although maybe only 10 miles away, Palolem is a total contrast to Agonda. Coconuts and bars line the beach, house music pumps from competing sound systems. There are shops every 20 yds along the beach. We didn't sit for more than 20 mins without being hassled to buy fruit or crappy jewellery. The beach was filled with European lobsters determined for a tan or skin cancer no matter what. Guess I can't blame them for sucking up the glorious Indian weather on their two weeks out from a year – I'd be the same – but somehow a fortnight's holiday is never going to be the same again.

We're having to start to think in terms of monsoon now – we have approx one month before we need to worry about it – but from around the beginning of June it's going to be chucking it down five days out of seven. Of course, neither of us has ever experienced a monsoon before, but we've been told that there are no beaches left in Goa, that the sea is so high it covers them, but that anywhere there's excessive concrete tends to flood. All we know about monsoons is as much as anyone else does – the pics we've seen on BBC news of peeps sing on their rooftops with nothing to eat, waiting to be rescued – just how bad is it going to get?

So, we sit on the (crowded compared to Agonda) beach, wondering whether it's better to be in a paradise where you can't buy a bottle of water, or get an internet connection, or whether it's easier to be somewhere you can have a choice of food for dinner whilst watching lobstered package holidaymakers go by? (We are by now the brownest people on the beach that aren't Indians and can spot a fortnight holidaymaker a mile off.) Should we move to an Indian town where fresh fruit and veg, cooking ingredients, are easily available and which will be far from scenic, or should we stay by the beach, which is gradually being dismantled around us, is more expensive, but has everything the tourist needs easily available? For now at least, because give it a month and there will be nothing left at Palolem either. We grab the number of a local barman who may be able to find accommodation within our budget, and catch a tuk tuk back to our deserted beach to ponder on the matter .

Tuesday 29th April

Today we awoke to an unfamiliar smell of oil and, looking along the beach, found a layer of tar all along the tideline. It's blowing about a force 7 with white horses as far as you can see and the water's very rough, with dangerous looking waves, and looks brown for about 20' from the shore. We assume there's been some kind of oil spill at sea.

The owner of the huts tells us they clean the beach every other day and it will be gone tomorrow. We shall see, but if it isn't then the paradise beach is no longer quite so blissful. We haven't seen any dead fish washed up as yet so fingers crossed there hasn't been too much damage to marine life – doesn't look good though. We read a local paper that said these “tar balls” have been found along large stretches of coast in the north of Goa too (we're in the far south). The report was undecided as to whether this has been caused by oil spillage at sea or whether it's something that occurs “normally before the monsoon each year”. (Indian newspapers are as badly written as the menus.)

Today was a day of chores. Anything you need to get done here becomes a huge effort when there's no amenities locally and you don't have transport. In addition, like in the Med, everything in Goa closes for a siesta around midday and doesn't reopen until 4pm. This hasn't been the case anywhere else we've been in India, but, in many ways, Goa is much less Indian than other parts of the country – the population here is largely Roman Catholic so you are more likely to see a church than a temple. There are Catholic shrines and crosses all over the place, much as you would expect to see in Spain. As many women here wear skirts and knee length dresses as saris. Goa was ruled by the Portuguese for a couple of hundred years during the 14th and 15th centuries and their influence is apparent, not only in the architecture of the old colonial buildings, but also in the people, many of whom have light brown or even almond coloured eyes – a striking combination with their almost-black skin.

We were up bright and early this morning ready to head into our nearest town (Chauri or Chaudi – both spellings are correct). We knew everything would be closing at midday, so even ordered four cups of tea at once at the beach shack so we could be done and dusted there within twenty minutes. Tea levels duly topped up, we headed for the bus stop about a quarter mile's walk from our hut.

It wasn't long before we were accosted by an old beggar man, holding out his hand and gesturing toward the bar, which also serves as the bus stop. The old man was toothless and bow-legged, probably around seventy. He walked with the aid of a stick and wore a pair of shorts with one leg cut off – we wondered why until we noticed that the inside of one knee was an open festering wound (possibly gangrene?) He smiled toothlessly at us and rattled on in an animated tone of Konkani (the Goan language) for a good twenty minutes or so.

We didn't give him any money, but he disappeared and returned from the bar doorway five minutes later with a big grin on his face. Two local girls waiting for the bus giggled and rolled their eyes to me at the old guy – we guessed he was a well known local character.

By this time we had been waiting for the bus for over half an hour. Just as in England, two arrived at once. The first was going somewhere else; the second bus to Chauri (the one that we wanted) drove straight past. We shouted for it to stop and ran up the road after it, along with a middle aged Indian lady. It pulled to a stop after 50 yards or so and although it was already packed, we thought we were in luck as the doors pulled open and the Indian lady barged her way on. However, as our turn came to alight, we were inundated with cries of “not allowed, not allowed!”, the doors slammed shut in our faces, and the bus pulled away! Aaaagh – there are times in this country when I really miss a car. Whether we missed the bus because the Indian lady had sharper elbows than us, or because it was already too full and they weren't going to go out of their way to accommodate foreigners they thought should be able to afford a taxi (we can't), we still don't know, but we muttered and grumbled our way back to the bus stop, contemplating another thirty minutes' wait.

At which point, we were greeted again by “peg leg”, who happily rambled on at us for another fifteen minutes or so. We didn't understand a word he said but he didn't seem to mind, and Dan gave a brilliant running commentary of what he thought the guy might be saying. We waited and waited. We asked a lady at the bus stop the time, and, on hearing 12:30, decided that our chances of reaching town whilst anything at all was still open, muttered our way back to the beach shack and had some lunch instead ..

.. Later that day

Duly revitalised by lunch, we thought we'd have another go at getting the bus to town for the afternoon opening. (We'd left ourselves a good two hours this time.) By now bored with the scenery at our nearest bus stop, we headed for the stop in the village by the church, where we'd heard a bus was due at 14:45. We waited under a coconut tree, until one fell onto the road. Pondering on how many people must be killed by falling coconuts, we moved away to a convenient wall. There was absolutely no way we were going to miss this bus and we were determined to have a seat. We'd been first in the queue, so as soon as the packed bus pulled up and opened its doors, we barged on and grabbed the last two vacant seats.

It wasn't until ten minutes later that we spotted the bus stop we'd been waiting at all morning from the window and realised that we were heading in the wrong direction and for Madgaon, about an hour and a half away and the nearest town from our last digs at Colva! We hurriedly scrambled off and were chased down the road by the bus man, who hadn't got around to collecting any money from us by this time. We were lucky that a bus came along in the opposite direction almost immediately and even luckier to get a seat. It didn't take us long to move forward from the back seat as we took off over each bump – we've come to believe that there aren't such things as shock absorbers on Indian vehicles.

Finally, at around 15:30, we reached Chauri bus stand. After a 15 minute walk we found a chemist and were able to buy some antibiotics for my cough/chest infection (around 50p for a course), which has been driving us both nuts for the last couple of weeks. We briefly checked email for any crises, having not had access to an internet connection for around a week. Next stop was to be the post office to send home postcards written two weeks ago, and some CDs of our photos. We asked for directions at a shop and made the mistake of following them (never trust Indian directions!). Twenty minutes of hot sweaty Tarmac later, we asked for directions again, only to be sent back the way we had come! The post office turned out to be directly across the road from the shop we had been sent on a “15 minutes' walk up there” from and was just closing as we arrived, although they did manage to sell us some stamps for our postcards. We've been carrying around our photo CDs for about three weeks now waiting for an opportunity to send them home, but today wasn't to be the day. A postcard to Dawn had to wait because I'd forgotten to write “England” on it and didn't have a pen – sorry Dawn – expect it in three months or so LOL.

We called home and then decided we'd had enough of chores for one day and headed for the nearest eatery, knowing that it would cost at least half the price to have dinner early in town rather than back at the beach bar with its two square mile monopoly. We ate gobi manchuri (look it up sometime – it's delicious), chana masala and veg biriyani. Not at all bad. We stocked up on essential snacks and cheap beer (nothing much available in Agonda) and treated ourselves to a two pound tuk tuk home – the buses are scarey enough in the daylight. A chilled evening was in order!

Saturday 3rd May

It's been quite cloudy for the last few days and blowing a gale – it's looked as though a storm is brewing over the mountains, but today the skies are clear blue again with nothing more than a few of what we call “Indian clouds” - just the odd little cotton wool ball here and there. My antibiotics are working a treat and it's great to feel halfway human again and enjoy a decent night's sleep. No more oil has come ashore on the beach and at least the area outside our huts has been swept and cleared.

A little market has come to the village today – little being the operative word. There are four stalls selling offensively orange sweets, three toy stalls and three jewellery/cosmetic stalls, one grinding machine making sugar cane juice. I don't see any of them doing much business because there's simply no one here. There must have been some kind of celebration this morning at the church as they were packing away a hundred odd plastic chairs as we walked past. Whatever it was, we missed it as we had a late start today.

There are two restaurants remaining open here and we keep trying to find out when they will close for the season. Answers vary between five and fourteen days. Shacks and cocohuts continue to be dismantled around us daily. When the restaurants are gone, we'll have to go too because we'll have no way of feeding ourselves. We haven't decided yet where the next port of call is to be – possibly the north of Goa.

Sunday 4th May - An Unwelcome Guest

Last night we'd gone to bed early – there are lots of cockerels here and they seem to wake up and start making a racket well before it's light, so every now and then we need to catch up on some sleep. I was suddenly woken from a dream by Dan sitting bolt upright and complaining that he'd been bitten – hard. The mossie net was tucked in securely all around us, so we knew there was something in the bed. We started to pull it apart and Dan saw something long and thin and very quick disappear under a pillow. Well, we weren't going to sleep well with anything like that in the bed. We pulled everything apart but couldn't find anything, so assumed that, whatever it was, it was gone. I lay back down to sleep and Dan rolled a ciggy. Within a few minutes, Dan said he'd seen something wriggling under the bottom sheet. And then I saw the sheet wriggle too. That was enough for me and we both dashed out onto the balcony to decide what to do. It had to be something sizeable to make the sheet wriggle and we knew it had a good bite on it. We thought it might be a snake. We looked outside to see if the owner and his family were still about but all the lights were off – it was going to be down to us to sort this one out.

Dan's got a bit of a phobia of bitey things and scurried off to the balcony. I pulled the mossie net up out of the way and started to take the bed apart. As I pulled a sheet off, a great big millipede, dark brown and white horizontally striped, and about 8-10cm long, ran very fast under a mattress. Well that was enough for me as well – knowing that millipedes can sometimes be dangerous (we'd seen one in Hampi and had asked), I squealed my way out onto the balcony to join Dan. We considered sleeping on the beach, but it was a windless night and we would have been bitten  to death by the mossies. We thought about seeing whether our insect repellent spray would be effective, but it was in the compartment right underneath the millipede, so that wasn't happening either.

Arming himself with a large bamboo stick, Dan reached in through the window and lifted the mattress. The millipede ran off down the gap between our two plywood block beds. I was tired and desperate to get back to sleep, so I dragged the bedding outside, pulled both the single mattresses off the bed and leant them against the wall. Anyone watching us would have creased up and we were sure the millipede was sitting in the corner sniggering. We could see it hiding between the beds and it scuttled off on its far too many legs as soon as we shone a torch on it. It didn't help that the light bulb in our room had exploded in a ball of flame the previous evening so we had very limited light.

The beds are just plywood boxes and they're heavy, but they had to be moved if we were to see where the millipede had gone. I couldn't shift them so Dan used one of our trusty bamboo poles to lever them away from the wall. This time there was no sign of the millipede. There are gaps all around the edges of the hut, so we had to hope that he had escaped through one of these.

We'd spent two hours looking for the thing and our hut looked liked a typhoon had hit it. The millipede had come up the gap between our two beds and got trapped inside the net. We took one of our bottom sheets and crammed it in the gap, then carefully made the bed up again, tucking in the net thoroughly all the way round.

It was a while before we dared to turn off the torch, but we did eventually sleep soundly. Whether the millipede is still visiting with us we don't know, but we're a little more careful walking barefoot around the hut now.

We asked the owner about it this moning. He wasn't clear as to whether it's dangerous or not (seems to depend on colour and size), but he did say he'd never known one in the huts before and offered us a change of hut. He said there's more of them when humidity is high. We're undecided as to whether to change rooms – we're only going to be here for a few more days and who's to say there aren't other millipede family members waiting for us in the other huts?

Monday 5th May - The Millipede Makes a Comeback

I decided it was time to do a bit of laundry this afternoon. I slung it all in a bucket with some cold water and a sachet of Aerial and stomped up and down on it for a while (as you do), wrung it all out, refilled the bucket with fresh water for a rinse and stomped up and down on it again. I put it all back in the bucket, took it out on the balcony and bit by bit hung it up to dry. As I got to the last bit, my black lungi, I saw something stripey inside as I shook it out, and recognised the millipede that had so rudely kept us awake the other night. You've never seen me drop anything so quickly – I squealed and chucked the lungi over the side into the sand. The owner of the huts hurried over at the sound of my squeal and we told him the millipede was in the lungi. He shook it out and the freshly laundered creature wriggled out into the sand. Amazingly, it was still alive despite being trodden up and down in a bucket of soapy water for ten minutes, although it has to be said that it was wriggling a good bit slower than the last time we had seen it – perhaps it had water in its ears ;-)

In the daylight the creature was even more revolting than it had looked in the glare of our torch – it was dark brown/black and white horizontally striped wih a bright red head and tail, about the thickness of a finger and roughly 10cm long, with all together too many legs to be pleasant. The owner tried unsuccessfully (resilient little blighter, this millipede!) to kill it with a stick, but it kept burying itself in the sand (who can blame it?). Eventually, he picked it up with a stick and took it off down the beach and buried it there.

We asked if this kind was dangerous and he responded “not so dangerous”. We took this to mean not as dangerous as some, but still fairly unpleasant. It gave me the horrors to think I had been pounding it with my bare feet for ten minutes in a bucket – I was definitely lucky not to be bitten. I'm seriously hoping that was the last episode in the tale of the millipede! I was none too pleased at seeing it again, but at least we managed to get a decent photo of it as a result ..

Monday at Agonda

When we got to the shack for breakfast this morning, we found that the usual thirty tables had dwindled to six and there was no cook.

The beach shelves steeply towards the sea causing a bank between our hut and the water,, but this morning for the first time, the waves had breached the bank and started to run down towards our hut. We may be raised on stilts, but this is a little too close for comfort. We've been told that the tides alter as the monsoon approaches, causing rising water and dangerous undercurrents. The waves are crashing hard enough now to give you a good sandblasting if you go in the water. Much as we hate the idea of leaving our paradise beach behind, we're increasingly getting the feeling it's time to move on very soon. We have about one month of good weather left before the rains arrive – if we want to explore the beautiful beaches of the north of Goa in the sunshine, we're going to have to do it soon.

Friday 9th May - Chapora, North Goa

The inevitable happened at Agonda – we went out for a meal on Monday evening to the last restaurant within two miles serving food and were told that ours was the last meal to be cooked there this season. Another restaurant remained open for drinks only, but having emptied their fridge of Kingfisher, the time had now come to be making tracks.

We'd called in at Canacona Railway Station the day before to check out train times north and arrived there by tuk tuk in good time. A little too good as it happened, because our train was running about an hour and a half late.

Dan went off in a tuk tuk to the wine shop in town for a cold beer while we waited, but the rikshaw driver stopped halfway and sent him off instead on the back of a motorbike taxi. Dan said the driver was laughing at him for clinging on to his waist, but we don't take any chances with Indian roads, particularly not on a bike.

Our train eventually arrived around 16:30. This time we'd opted for non A/C and our tickets cost only 74 Rs (about 85p) for the two of us. It was an interesting journey during which we shared our bottlee of Old Monk rum with a couple of Indian guys who didn't speak a word of English between them, but smiled a lot. In return for the rum, they gave us some of their chewing tobacco – the idea is to mix it with salt and stuff a wodge of it into your bottom lip. I found this absolutely foul and couldn't spit it out quick enough; Dan quite enjoyed it and went back for seconds.

The train journey was lovely and airy – there are no windows in second class sitting, just bars, and the doors are left open. Although we didn't have as much space for our packs it was definitely preferable (on a short journey at least) to the hermetically sealed A/C carriages, which are also about 3-4 times the price.

We jumped into a tuk tuk at Thivi Railway Station for the 23km journey to Baga. Baga is a really busy place in high season, but we were hoping to find it just the right combination of P&Q and amenities at this time of year. However, mayhem awaited us and we cringed at the sight and sound of tooting weaving bikes everywhere, Domino's Pizza and a 24-hr Subway place. Nevertheless, we found the nearest cheapest room we could for the night, having had enough of travelling for one day.

Having been on the seafront for a few weeks, we found the heat of the town completely unbearable and despite a powerful fan had the most uncomfortable night's sleep we'd had for a long while. We went out for a meal and were shocked to find the prices almost twice what we've paid anywhere else in India.

We wandered to the beach and around town the next day and it felt we had gone from one extreme to another – from Agonda with its deserted beach and nowhere to eat, to somewhere which seemed to be Goa's answer to the Costa del Sol, even this far out of season. We were surrounded by tacky tourist shops, their owners trying to haul us in off the street every two minute, and beach shacks offering English breakfasts with Heinz beans every hundred yards along the beach. We treated ourselves to fried eggs and beans on toast, but only the once at those prices

We'd known Baga was going to be something of a culture shock after Agonda and had chosen it for its close proximity to lots of other beaches we could check out within an affordable distance. Later that day we travelled over to Anjuna, about 12km north. This is the village recently made famous in the media for the murder of an English teenager, and we'd been warned that because of all the trouble, nearly everything there was now closed for the season. Although Anjuna generally has a reputation for being party central amongst travellers, just how it has a frighteningly abandoned air about it, as though locals and tourists alike have simply packed their bags and gone. We found a couple of beach shacks still open and had dinner before going back to Baga. So Anjuna wasn't going to be the place for us either – if the ghost town atmosphere wasn't enough to put you off, the oil on the beach was – the beautiful golden sand was turned nearly black – you wouldn't have wanted to walk barefoot there for sure. Another sleepless night in our boiling hot room ensued.

Yesterday morning we had an overpriced breakfast at Baga beach again and then headed off the the next beach up from Anjuna, Vagator. There are two beaches at Vagator, separated by   a rocky headland. The right hand beach nearest the road was full of bus loads of Indians, now enjoying their summer holidays. The left hand beach, down a steep and rocky path from the road was more the ticket – nothing but a few travellers and a couple of beach shacks. We asked a local bar owner if there were any flats or houses with kitchens available to rent locally, but no joy – just a few shacks/huts at the top of the cliffs which looked decidedly dangerous to be scrambling around on at night.

We had a cheap lunch at an Indian cafe and had another look around for accommodation. We passed some villas with a manager in a little hut in the grounds and asked if he knew of anywhere. He called a friend he said owned tourist homes in the local village Chapora. Five minutes later the guy arrived on a bike offering to show us some places. We weren't keen on his suggestion of both going with him on his bike, but it was getting late in the day, we hadn't seen a single tuk tuk here and it was the best suggestion we'd had this far. So we both got on his bike with him (you often see entire families on one moped in India, so it was nothing new to him), and survived the short journey  to his place. The first place he showed us was two concrete rooms with a corrugated iron roof, no windows, no kitchen, no water or electricity, and a filthy shared outside bathroom and toilet. Not quite what we had in mind!

After that he took us to meet some neighbours, who showed us a pair of small newish villas with kitchen, bathroom, fridge and cooker. These were pretty much what we were looking for, and within our budget, but we weren't quite sure where we were, having been led off down paths and tracks through the coconut groves. We decided to go and check out the village to see if it had everything we'd need for a month's stay.

A wander around the village soon revealed that it had pretty much all that we need – several food shops well stocked compared with those at Agonda, a few bars serving food at much cheaper prices than in Baga, a chemist or two, a post office, a couple of hardware stores, a juice bar and a supermarket within five minutes' walk. The beach is about a ten to fifteen minute walk from the villa – far enough that we're not going to get flooded if the monsoon comes early, but still within easy reach. We decided this would do just fine for a month. It's an Indian village but there are a fair few long term travellers here – German, Israeli, French, Russian, a few English here and there. It's obviously quite popular in high season because there are many “Rooms to Let” signs everywhere and the shops cater for Westerners' needs, but it isn't busy now. It's not based around beach shacks, so it's not going to be closing up when the rains come.

We called Sam, the guy who'd showed us the rooms, and asked him to meet us at the bar for a chat. He arrived with his taxi five minutes later and we struck a deal of 5000 Rs  a month for the little villa. He rents out bikes to tourists, and agreed to chuck a moped in on the deal for an extra 100 Rs a day on the days we want to use it. He took us there and then back to Baga and waited while we slung our stuff into our packs and then drove us back to the villa.

Our little house is lovely. It's owned by two well-off ladies who live next door and is in a little private gated complex surrounded by coconut palms. There's just our villa, the ladies' house and one more matching (empty) villa next door. It's fresh and clean, all quite new, with tiled floors and a verandah. We have a good sized bedroom with a powerful fan and table and chairs. The shower room is clean and new with lovely blue mosaic tiles. We don't have hot water but the cold tap is warm enough now for a comfortable shower anyway. Best of all, we have a kitchen! No more relying on overpriced restaurants. We have a decent sized Calor gas stove with two burners, a sink, marble work surface and a nice big fridge with a freezer compartment. It's such luxury to be able to have a cold drink when you want one, and make tea and toast in the mornings. There wasn't any kitchenware provided, but we've bought the essentials from the supermarket cheaply. They even sell brown bread there – yay! This is the first brown bread we've seen since we left England and oh how I've missed it.

There are three fresh fruit and veg stalls in the village, about a three minute walk from our villa, and, having stocked up, we've made ourselves some great veg curries the last couple of evenings. The spices here are much fresher and stronger than back home, so we need to get used to using less than we would in England – our curries have caused us some serious sweating LOL. Fresh veg here are very cheap – we bought a carrier bag full for about 70p – potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, chillies, glorious fresh coriander, tomatoes, garlic, onions. It's just bliss to be able to cook things the way you like them. There seem to be a lot of power cuts here and on Friday night I cooked my first ever curry by candlelight – challenging but not really a problem compared with trying to prepare food while knee deep in mud at at English festy!

Yesterday we needed a cashpoint and there isn't one here. We caught the bus from the middle of the village (they run every ten minutes until 19:00) to our nearest town, Mapusa (pron. Mapsa), about 12-15 km away. This proved really convenient – the bus stand there has plentiful buses to everywhere you'd want to go and is right next to a huge market selling everything under he sun – Indian markets are just great. We bought loose fresh spices for 5 Rs apiece and a few more supplies for our kitchen. We stopped at one of the fruit stalls and were offered some small green local fruits to try. These were the shape of small pears, tasted a bit like an apple and were very crunchy. (Apples won't grow here – they are imported from New Zealand and are as expensive as at home. Apparently they grow further north around Kashmir). Then we were given a piece of jack fruit to try. We'd never heard of these before we came to India. They're a huge fruit, up to about two foot long and a foot wide, with yellow/brown spikey skin. Inside they have lots of huge seeds and pale yellow flesh. They don't really taste like anything else we've tried – perhaps vaguely pineapply with a peculiar sticky chewey texture. Not unpleasant, but we're both agreed we're not in a huge hurry to eat it again. After wandering the market and finding the ATM just across the road, we found the right bus and headed home.

Today (Sunday 11th) we've found there's a fishing harbour about 1km from home and Dan is busy trying to catch dinner as I write. There are 5 young cats at the villas who come to visit us – they'll probably never leave if Dan is successful! They aren't very tame with us yet – they don't like being touched although are happy to take food from your hand. One of them lets itself in and out as it chooses through the security bars at the window.

Sunday May 11th

This evening we found ourselves a party at a local bar. Lots of loud banging trance music and you could've almost believed you were at an English summer festy. This is the first party we've found since arriving in India and it was great to hear some loud music. Apparently this place has a party every Sunday throughout the season, so no doubt we'll be heading back there again.

Monday May 12th

We are settling well into our little villa now. It's very quiet, other than a few cows wandering past the garden wall, the “alarm cat” and of course the crows which are all over India. The ladies who own the villa are very friendly – each morning once they've heard we're up and about, they will bring us some breakfast – always very sweet and milky rosewater tea (something of an acquired taste) and a little offering of food. This can range from chapatis, to a bread roll, some French toast, or perhaps a few Indian sweets.

The garden at the villas has some stunning hibiscus and we've seen hummingbirds visiting these. This morning we saw some red and black and white hummingbirds; all the others we've seen have been black and turquoise. They're about two thirds the size of an English wren. The butterflies are becoming bigger and more diverse as the year goes on – some of them are about 6” across now and of the brightest colours. We watched some the other day with bright red bodies – they're looking more and more the way children would draw them all the time.

It's getting steadily hotter here now – our room becomes unbearable whenever there's a power cut and the fan stops working. We were so hot the other evening that we ended up taking all the food and shelves out of the fridge and taking turns at sitting in it LOL.

In the kitchen we have three bags of rubbish – one of glass and plastic, one of paper, which we burn periodically, and one of anything edible, which we feed each day to the cows. Rubbish is a very serious problem in India. Everywhere you look there are piles of rubbish. There is no refuse collection whatsoever on the grounds that pretty much everything is recycled by someone. In some places there are regular noxious fires of plastic. England would pretty quickly be in the same state if there were no refuse collection. I'm not sure that our methods of dealing with it are any better in any case – landfills just seem to be a “sweep it under the rug” ethic – after all, it's all still there causing exactly the same pollution, you just can't see it. Also, it has to be remembered that nobody pays any tax in India – income tax does not exist here.

Today was a lazy one – a late start followed by an afternoon reading a book on the beach. It always seems to be very windy at Vagator Beach and the coolness provides a very welcome relief. Amazingly, we can still burn here in a couple of hours in the sun and strong wind, although we've been here a little over two months now.

We're taking this as the last bit of relaxation we will have for a while on this trip. When the rains come, we'll be heading north for the deserts Rahjasthan and the going will be much harder there. We've heard that the temperatures there are already reaching 45C and that the air is dry enough to cause your skin and lips to crack and it's necessary to drink electrolytes regularly. Still, the awesome palaces of the maharajahs will be well worth it.

Wednesday 21^st May Chapora

There was a heavy rain shower last night for a couple of hours. Today there are woolly grey rain clouds above the mountains. And it's hot, hot, hot! The sky is that beautiful lapis blue that you hardly ever see in England and the breeze is rushing steadily through the coconut palms. Talk of the monsoon is becoming more prevalent amongst travellers and locals alike. The concensus is it will start here between 5^th and 15^th June.

 Life here continues to be shanthi shanthi whilst we await rent money into the bank. Fortunately, small meals are available in the local Indian cafe for 10 Rs each. We have been warned we should book transport out of Goa sooner rather than later. The monsoon comes a month later to the north of India and it sounds as though very many people head north for that extra month of dry weather. We've been told the season is just starting in the hills in the north and it seems that the majority of travellers head to Manali through the summer months, where apparently the climate now is like late spring in an Alpine valley. That sounds just perfect when we're dripping here before we even move!

Friday 23^rd May Chapora

On Wednesday night, one large dark woolly cloud appeared in the otherwise clear sky, with its very own lightning storm. We realised we've never seen a clear sky with a storm coming from just one cloud. We stood transfixed by the side of the road and watched the light show. 

Yesterday the storm had receded to the mountains. We took the moped out for a bit of exploring. Heading for the nearest bridge across the Baga River we visited beaches northwards up the coast at Ashwem, Morjim and Mandrem. These were all deserted with just flat patches of sand where the beach shacks had once been. Judging by the numbers of signs for cocohuts and rooms (and random bits of bathrooms everywhere – toilets sitting in expanses of sand), these places are all heaving during the season. The roads here are pretty quiet, but very potholey, so it isn't comfortable to travel too far on a moped.

After stopping for a veg thali we headed to Arambol, a bit further north. It was busier here, but this still only constituted a couple of roadside stalls and beach bars.

We've been waiting on rent money coming into the account which was due last week. On checking email today we found a paltry four hundred pounds in the account. Aaaaggggghh! We've had no statement or correspondence from our lettings agent. We've had no income at all from the rental yet and it's becoming more and more difficult to live. Now we're going to be stuck here for another month until we have funds to book a ticket out.

The skies became dark and cloudy as we headed back to Chapora – it looked as though the storm was threatening once again. Apparently it rained early this morning. We're at the beach now. The wind is blowing about a force eight – my book is doing its level best to take off. The skies are partly cloudy and the sea is coming further up the sand than we've ever seen it. The beach umbrellas are noisily flapping themselves to shreds (the bar owner says they last three months from new) and the sunlounger mattresses are taking to the air. There's a storm brewing for sure, and more rain on the way, but for now the coolness of the wind and the salty spray in the air are refreshing.

It's mango season here now. The green fruits hang in the tree to be collected by the locals in nets on long handles. This morning we watched a guy climb one of the ladies' coconut trees to collect the crop. He shinned up like a monkey, barefoot and in just a pair of shorts. He had knocked down sixteen coconuts in just a couple of minutes. The coconut trees are about 50' tall and the guy charges just 15-20 Rs to risk his life climbing each one. Doubtless he's been doing it since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, but still. The trees produce a new crop every one to two months and the ladies told us some are more productive than others. They build a well in the sand around each one and give them as much water as can be spared, presumably to increase the crop, because they don't seem to need anything much just to grow.

This evening we sat on the beach and watched the sun set. Another beautiful one – however many we see, we're still in awe. Just after sunset, a huge storm began with big black woolly clouds filling the sky halfway across the horizon. Lightning struck across an area at least 20 miles across – a spectacular light show. We sat and watched and probably should have left the beach a little earlier as it was a dangerous scramble across the rocks in the dark – we hadn't brought a torch as we'd been expecting to be home before dark. We should really know better by now!

Saturday 24^th May - The Sandhound

One evening last week a beach hound followed us home. We nicknamed her Sandhound (Sandy for short) because she was covered in it. We bought her some dog food and gave her  much appreciated meal, and then she curled up contentedly on one of our plastic garden chairs and slept peacefully all night.

Sandy is mostly black, with brown patches (similar markings to a Doberman). She's about thigh height and looks like a lurcher cross, with very long legs. She's easily the fastest dog on the beach.

We hadn't been overly keen on taking her home, but when she sat and waited patiently outside a bar for us having been sent out by the owner, we didn't have the heart to send her away. It's a bit of a problem having a dog here – there are dogs at nearly every house in the village and they're very territorial, so it's impossible to walk through the village with a dog without setting off barking and growling at every step. Not only that, but Sandy seemed to think the five cats around our villas would make a good dinner, so we had to keep our door shut. After giving her breakfast in the morning we took her back to the beach where she'd found us and left her there with her mates.

A few days later she tried to follow us home again. Deciding that we'd better look out for the ladies' cats if we were to remain on good terms, we jumped into a tuk tuk and left Sandy behind.

Last night, as we were walking through the village on our way home from the beach, Sandy appeared again. This time, she wasn't taking no for an answer and trotted off ahead of us back to the villa. No sooner had we arrived than she was off round the yard chasing the cats, to a soundtrack of much distressed hissing and howling! We were especially worried as Alarm Cat has just had a kitten – it can't be much more than a week old and would make a tasty snack for a hungry hound. We tried to shut her out, but she jumped over the wall and appeared in our doorway with big sorrowful brown eyes just moments later.

Sandy seemed exhausted – I can't imagine any of the dogs are able to relax outside – and she curled up by the side of the bed to sleep. This morning I awoke to find she had made herself a nest from my pile of clothes. We'd just made our first cup of tea and were slowly coming to, when, all of a sudden, Dan announced “The cat is sitting in the middle of the room” and dived out of the mossie net to restrain the dog, which hadn't been slow to spot the cat.

The cat hurled itself at the window trying to get out again. Unfortunately the lungi we've been using as a curtain was in its way and she scrambled up it with her claws. Dan held desperately on to the dog while I fumbled to find the door key to let the panicking cat out!

Cat safely expelled, the dog jumped all over the bed in its haste to catch it, putting holes in our precious mossie net with its claws. We've already had to make several repairs to our net with our handy travel sewing kit, and are now going to have to make several more! The net isn't going to last a year, so we're going to have to find a tailor to make us a copy.

Later we laughed and agreed this was the funniest cat/dog scenario we've seen in years. The cat hasn't been back since ;-)

We returned Sandy once again to the beach, using a luggage strap as a collar and lead to get her safely through the cat zone. She spent the whole day with us at the beach, even following Dan on to the rocks while he fished, but was chased away by another dog on the way home, saving us another tuk tuk fare.

Tuesday 27^th May

Yesterday was a cloudy one wih some rain – we spent the day at home catching up with chores and mending holes in the mossie net.

Around Chapora

Fireflies

Now that the monsoon is on its way, the night sky is filled with the magical flicker of fireflies – they are increasing all the time. They look like fire embers against the dark silhouette of the trees.

The Local Bakery

Dan was wanting some bread for fishing bait the other day. The shops being closed for siesta, we were directed to Chapora's bakery. Walking down an alley between two buildings, we found ourselves at an ordinary-looking house and saw the bread man's bike with its covered basket on the front leaning against the wall. Looking in through the door, we saw a single room, its stone paved floor covered in flour. An enormous bowl of dough stood proving in one corner, while two barefooted men made bread rolls and lay them out on the floor to rise. Enough rolls of three or four different kinds to feed everyone in Chapora are made here in this way – you do come across the odd bit of sand in them here and there – now we know why ;-)

Home Deliveries

For the first time since arriving in India, we've had the luxury of being able to arrange takeaway deliveries. The other night we asked one of the ladies' husbands to help us to order some Domino's pizza as we weren't sure how to tell them to reach us when they didn't recognise our road name. Half an hour later, pizza arrived as if by magic. After eating curry of various kinds every day for almost three monhs, it's amazing how good a simple veggie pizza can taste. Two medium pizzas here cost 240 Rs.

Our second option is a small Indian shack in Vagator. This is the first season the owner has run a restaurant and he can't do enough to help his customers. We can order whatever we like, cooked however we like it – and the Tibetan chef there really knows his kitchen. The guy's mate comes out on his bike to deliver it for us and we meet him at the local temple. One evening when we didn't have the correct change he simply told us to pay him tomorrow “no problem”. I can't ever imagine that sort of response in England!

Slowly Does It

The pace of local life here in Chapora could be said (at best) to be sedentary. It could also be said of the people here that if they were any more laid back, they would fall over. The general philosophy on life seems to be “Do as little as possible, and only do that if it can't be put off until tomorrow”.

OK, so a bit of that could be said for most places we've been in India barring the cities, but Chapora is something else – time warp factor 10. The local men can be found each day sitting in the shade beneath the Holy tree at the centre of the village, maybe playing cards or perhaps just nattering. Every now and then, one of them will wander off to the nearest watering hole. The women can largely be found sleeping – anywhere will do, the floor is favourite. Nobody, local or otherwise, walks anywhere – every journey is by moped. It's frightening how quickly and easily you can be sucked into this lifestyle, but we have at least resisted this and enjoy our walks every day to the shops or the beach.

Travellers can be found at the Ganesh Juice Bar, the village meeting point, dozing for hours over a lassi, telling tales of having just got up when it's almost three o'clock. And people get sucked into staying here too, even more frighteningly. The most extreme case we have found of this is a hippy guy we met on the beach yesterday, who has been here for 35 years! But they're everywhere – people who came for a month and stayed for a decade, sucked into the time warp until real life was nothing but a distant memory, utterly unproductive and usually fairly poor, but nonetheless quite content, and with no burning desire to do anything at all anytime soon.

This is the ninth stage of our journey and it's been good to chill out and unwind for a few weeks, but even we're starting to get sucked in now – a busy day constitutes a bus trip into Mapusa to the cashpoint, or actually dealing wih our emails. If we don't get out of here soon, you may well next be seeing us as crusty hippies who have developed almost as good a head wobble as the Indians and are firmly of the belief that chapatis and curry make a satisfying and nutritious breakfast.

Health and Cleanliness

I've said it before, but I'm more than justified in saying it again – India is a truly filthy country! We are agreed that our feet have never been so filthy – ever! - this despite as many as five showers and scrubbings in a day. We've worn nothing but flip flops for nearly three months. The combination of dirt, sand and sea water has the strange effect of making all the skin peel off the soles of your feet in sheets, leaving lovely fresh pink skin underneath. The only way to get your toe nails truly clean is to wait for them to grow and then cut them off.

Long hair like mine is hideous in this heat. The sweat makes it impossible to get a comb through, and the only way to keep it remotely clean is to plait it as soon as it's washed. All the Indian ladies have long hair and the way they get around this is to comb coconut oil through it, but I'm not much into the greasy look. When you have aa shower, you're dripping with sweat again from head to toe in ten minutes.

Laundry is another story altogether. The Aeriel packet may tell you that a half hour soak in cold water will have your whites gleaming again – don't believe a word of it! The new white is now browny grey, or whatever colour dye may have run into it. I will never take a washing machine for granted. It was our misfortune that the only colour travel towel we could find before leaving was white. The Indian dirt resists even soaking overnight in boiling water and washing powder – we are now resigned to our browny-grey towel. Likewise our new white tea towel – well have you ever tried removing tea stains in a bucket of cold water? The best that can be said of handwashing in a bucket is that it's by far the cleanest your feet are ever going to get!

On the subject of health and diet, I've already mentioned that it's overly easy to be lazy here. We manage a couple of miles' walk nearly every day and the other day we did some yoga in the yard, much to the ladies' amusement. This caused us pulled muscles all over the place for at least three days – surely this must be Chapora's attempt to force its laziness upon us?

Diet is not good. We've decided that many Indians definitely do not eat well. - huge numbers of them are extremely obese. Nearly all cooked food is fried in huge quantities of vegetable oil. There is little protein readily available – meat is of extremely dubious quality to the extent that we don't touch it, cheese is processed and prohibitively expensive and fish is in scarce supply and costly at this time of year. There is little salad (lettuce doesn't grow well here) or raw vegetables, although fruit is delicious, cheaper and easily available. We're trying to eat well by making porridge for breakfast and tuna sandwiches here and there, but we've invested in a pack of multivitamins we may be as well to start taking.

Saturday 31^st May

We took a walk up to Chapora Fort, built by the Portuguese in 1614. There are amazing 360 degree views from the top. Unfortunately it was a bit cloudy, but then we would never have made it up there in the full heat of the sun.

Sunday 1st June 1^st - And so the monsoon cometh .

I awoke during the night to a strange shivering sensation and for a moment wondered if I might be coming down with something. And then I twigged – I was cold! It is so long since I have been cold that I had forgotten what cold felt like! I still find that hard to believe. I got up and grabbed a bedsheet, the first time we've had any sort of cover at all since Agonda, just over a month ago, and only then because we were right on the beach.

Today it's been cloudy all day, the sky rumbling with menacing thunder. Each of the last three or four nights as the sun has gone down, the rumblings have begun and there's been heavy rain showers. This evening was no exception and we sat on the balcony through the power cuts watching the closest, loudest, most dramatic storm either of us has ever seen. And so the monsoon cometh. After a torrential downpour lasting about two hours, the storm has receded to its distant rumblings once again.

As soon as it rains, the temperature drops a blissful five degrees. The air tonight feels almost cool, a distant memory from sometime somewhere three months ago. Apparently meteorologists predicted the arrival of the monsoon here on 29^th May. The locals tell us that in years gone by, you could set your calendar by the arrival of the rains, which would come reliably on 6^th or 7^th June. Global warming has taken its toll here too however, and now even the weathermen can't tell when it will start in earnest.

Monday June 2^nd

The local Goan newspaper, The Herald, reports that the monsoon has “set” in Kerala on Saturday. Locals tell us it will take a week to arrive here. More heavy daily showers in the meantime.

Wednesday June 4^th

Lonely Planet had suggested that a visit to Panaji (aka Panjim), Goa's capital city, was worthwhile, so yesterday we caught two buses to get there. It is a surprisingly 'unIndian” city – cleran and modern, and we saw none of the squalor associated with large Indian towns. The old part of the city is Portuguese with narrow winding streets and little overhanging balconies. It is also a remarkably Western-looking city with a laid back atmosphere. Very few women here were wearing sarees and all the men wore Western clothes. You could almost have believed you were somewhere in the Mediterranean rather than in India. We had a wander around before catching the bus back to Mapusa. Unfortunately, when we arrived there we were told we'd missed the last bus back to Chapora, but we managed to get a ride with a local guy in his goods carrier.

Frustrations are mounting with our lettings agents, who haven't even managed to acknowledge the lengthy email we sent them over a week ago. We now have not so much as received a statement of account from them in two months and have no idea what they are doing with our rental income except for the fact that we know we have seen very little of it. We've had to ask Dan's parents to call them and find out what's going on. It's dificult to make plans to leave without knowing what our income will be. The internet cafe in Chapora has been closed for the last four days – we're hoping they haven't shut up shop for the season as the next nearest one is a couple of miles' walk away.

The shacks on the beach have also closed within the last few days, the locals hurrying to protect their buildings by tying great fanned palm tree leaves around them to keep off the worst off the monsoon rain.

The weather is cooler and breezier now – it's bliss not to be constantly too hot and not to wake up sweating in the mornings – we even have a sheet on our bed! It's sunny most mornings still, but the clouds grow as the day progresses and it's usually clouded over by mid afternoon, with the odd rain shower. The downside of the cooler evenings is the huge quantities of insects the rains bring with them – they are everywhere! Flying ants, cockroaches, grasshoppers, big locusty things, flying beetles, enormous vine weevils – you name them, there were over a hundred of them congregated in our room and on our balcony last night.

As we walked home with some food late last night, we were lucky enough to see a firefly close up – it sat on the edge of the step like a path marker – glinting on and off.

Today the sky is azure blue with fluffy white clouds scudding across. The temperature is similar to thatt of the hottest English summer's day although of course the sun is much stronger. There's a lovely breeze blowing hard enough to make the coconut palms rock on their roots. Occasionally, a coconut will fall to the ground – the noise these make when they hit a corrugated tin roof has to be heard to be believed.

Friday June 6^th

Hurray for Dan's dad – he's come to our rescue and harrassed our lettings agent into giving us some answers and refunding tax they had mistakenly taken. At last, finances should be getting themselves resolved from here on in.

Yesterday late afternoon we took a walk along the beach, having failed miserably to either book a flight, or sort out an ad for Dan's car due to power cuts and virused computers in four different internet cafes.

We were shocked to see that about a metre of sand has disappeared all along the beach, exposing enormous rocks we never knew were there. The tideline was a good twenty to thirty foot further inland than it ever has been before – as we'd been warned, the beaches are disappearing before our very eyes – quite suddenly.

Our Keralan friend John sat with the owner of the one remaining bar on the beach – they looked out to sea and awaited the monsoon, which the weatherman had promised would arrive today. The sea has turned a deep, dark grey and bigger waves than we've seen here before churned angrily against the sand. The beach was deserted save a few Indians and the resident hounds.

A gap in the darkening clouds allowed us a brief glimpse of the sunset – we'd barely seen the sun all day and this was perhaps to be the last sunset we'd see for a while. And then the clouds thickened and blackened. Very quickly they began to fill the horizon from both sides simultaneously. We could see the rains coming in from the sea and they were coming quickly on the coolest breeze we've felt since we arrived. The clouds rolled into one another, backing up against each other across the sea, forming an ever-thickening wall of darkness. We stood on the sand in the twilight as the rain began to fall and the clouds came ever closer; we were seeing and feeling the onset of the Indian north-western monsoon – definitely not something you can say you've experienced every year – this was Nature at her most awesome best.

I was standing at the top of the beach path taking photos of the new moon when all of a sudden in the almost-darkness, I saw a snake slither past my bare feet, about a foot and a half away. I have to admit I squealed like a girly ;-) The snake was dark brown/black, about three foot long and about the thickness of a marker pen. The torchlight wasn't bright enough to distinguish any markings. There were a fair few Indians hanging out on the cliff top so we thought we'd better alert someone as to its presence in case it was dangerous. A girl with the guy we told screamed and immediately jumped up a foot onto the tarmac, although the snake was by now fifteen feet away from her.

It is our experience that when Indians are afraid of any creature, they will simply kill it, so we didn't hang around to watch what would happen next. We wondered afterwards which was the better to have on our conscience – not telling anyone about the snake and risking someone being bittten, or telling someone and having the snake killed. A barman later told us that all snakes in Goa except some water snakees and some rat snakes are potentially very dangerous. Many are lethal and some can cause your flesh to dissolve just by spitting on you from a distance. I guess that answered our question of conscience well enough.

The rain eased off for a time although the clouds continued to thicken. Heavy rain fell during the night. By the time we awoke this morning the sky was leaden. At 11am the main began hammering from a featureless sodden sky; by 12:40 we'd had more than ten power cuts. The monsoon is with us – until we can get a flight out of here, we must resign ourselves to unpacking the waterproof jackets we haven't seen since March and possibly developing webbed feet!

.. Later that day

Well, we aren't a lot nearer to getting out of here – endless power cuts and “server down, not possible today” at the internet cafe. Meanwhile it's been raining heavily – if we thought we'd had dirty feet up until now, we ain't seen nothing yet – as the months of dry dust mingle in the muddy puddles with the cow poo – where's me wellies? ;-) And bang! There goes the power again – here comes the thunder!

With every further rain shower, India becomes greener, hundreds of seedlings popping up everywhere, tufty grass shooting up overnight where once there was just orange dust.

Saturday June 7^th

Socks? What is the meaning of this? There has been heavy rain all day, it's maybe 20C tops, and dark as winter. The Indians continue to splash about in the mud in flip flops – and so do we! We braved the rains to make a trip into town for essential errands (including buying an umbrella!). We managed to get online and ascertain that it's going to be too expensive to fly from here to north India, so we've decided that train it will be, just as soon as we're able to book tickets. The plan moves on.

Tuesday 10^th June - Monsoon Goa

Goa takes on a different persona altogether when the rains come. It's only been raining for 5 days so far and it's already a world away from the blue sky and sunshine paradise we've come to know – what a difference! It doesn't rain constantly but it rains often enough and for long enough to make you believe it's raining constantly. Get caught in a downpour and you're wet in seconds. This is proper rain, not your English half hearted drizzle. We do have rain like this in England, but never for more than a couple of days at a time and even that was enough to cause serious flooding last summer. I wouldn't like to imagine the effects there of three whole months of this kind of rain. The skies are grey, you can feel the gallons of water waiting to drop. It's dark enough to need lights on whenever there's power. The rain showers, when they come, come quickly. You can hear the rain rushing through the coconut palms just seconds before it arrives, sometimes accompanied by powerful gusting winds – a tree was pulled up, roots and all, close to our home. Fortunately it fell away from the nearest house, so no one was hurt, but it's going to take the guy chopping it up a long long time to deal with using only his small machete.

Falling coconuts have become an imminent danger and we hear them dropping to the ground, or bouncing off buildings regularly. You sure don't want to be hit by one of these. The ladies had the coconut harvesting man in again yesterday to collect any that are ripe and in danger of falling on the buildings. Goa is green all year round, but the rains are bringing a new level of growth. Seemingly overnight, bulbs and shoots and grass are popping up everywhere. By the side of the roads, beautiful deep salmon pink allium-like flowers are appearing, their drumstick heads glowing in the perma-twilight. You can feel and smell the growth in the air.

The temperature is strange – a lot cooler than we've been used to, to the point of wearing a T shirt and trousers, perhaps even a pair of socks in the evening. But then all of a sudden you'll be caught out by the sheer humidity of it all and be dripping with sweat again. And the humidity has to be felt to be believed – within three days of the rains starting, our packs, indoors in our nice, new, dry villa, have started to develop patches of mould. Everything feels damp. Clothes are taking days to dry, even beneath our industrial sized fan, and the only time they get truly dry is from your body heat when you wear them. We've developed two large wet patches on our ceiling which are growing daily. We've had to resort to sealing everything in plastic bags and zipping up our packs in their rain covers. Opening the windows seems to simply make everything wetter. And with the rain showers come the power cuts. OK, so this is India, there are always power cuts, but since the rains have started, the power has been off more than it's on – spending entire evenings in candlelight is becoming the norm. Telephone landlines are nearly as bad, so crackly that you can't hear at all.

Going outside has become a wet and filthy experience – the ground has become a series of muddy puddles, the cow pats blending it all into a kind of slushy poo soup. The cagoule type waterproof jackets we brought with us just don't cut it in this kind of rain.

Meanwhile, life for the Indians carries on much as usual. Most locals we have talked with say that they enjoy the monsoons – many of them get to close their businesses for a couple of months and take some time out before the tourist season begins once again in September. For now, they can enjoy having the place to themselves – we're virtually the only travellers left here now apart from those that have been there for years. We would have left two weeks ago given the choice – this is an interesting experience but not necessarily one that we care to prolong.

Within two days of the rains starting, every shop had stocks of umbrellas and waterproofs, but not everyone wears them – amazingly, the Indian ladies continue to slosh around in their beautiful silk sarees, which must just act like a wick and have them soaked through in no time at all. I can't imagine wearing anything so beautiful or decorative in these conditions – we're wearing the same filthy clothes every day because there's no point in making something else filthy – we'll never get it dry before we leave here.

More incredibly, no one seems to have any better ideas for footwear than the ubiquitous flip flops, and the Indians simply splash through the puddles as if they aren't there. Some even go barefoot. Mapusa market in the rain is something else. In places it's ankle deep in water. The stalls are all still there, but each of them is covered with tarpaulins so you can't see what they're selling. The throngs of umbrellas join together to form a roof so that you can just about manage without one yourself and keep dry – mind your eyes though – the Indians are masters at pushing and shoving and this is serious umbrella wars!

Wednesday 11^th June Escape from Goa

Events seem to have been conspiring to keep us in Goa. Since finances improved a week ago we've been planning on making our getaway. We had assumed we'd go by train since that's the way we've gone everywhere else. To book a train ticket in India, you either have to go to a station or use a travel agent. Our nearest train station was a 40km round trip away. There are many “travel agents” - these generally also operate internet cafes and consist of a young lad who searches online for whatever you want and then adds a surcharge. Well, we can search the internet just as efficiently as they can. So during the last week we've been searching online wherever there has been both power and an internet connection to look for ways out of here.

We were at Anjuna the other day and called in at a travel agent there which looked better organised than most. The lady there was very helpful but the options weren't looking great – we could get an overnight bus, twelve or eighteen hours respectively to Mumbai or Ahmedabad, both arriving in the early hours of the morning. Or we could get a train for a similar length of time, but there were no free seats until 19^th June! Aaaaggghhhh! The one remaining option was to fly, which sounded fine, except that it would cost the equivalent of a month's rent! In the end, we bit the bullet and chose to fly – there was no way we were risking a bus on flooded roads a week into the monsoon. Nor were we waiting another ten days for a train. So now we're on the plane to Ahmedabad, a mere one and a half hour hop from here. We hope to catch an overnight train to Udaipur. Rajasthan here we come! ...

Sunday 15^th June - Udaipur, Rajasthan

The flight went remarkably smoothly. We landed in Ahmedabad to temperatures about seven or eight degrees warmer than we had become accustomed to in Goa. As we came in to land we saw that the landscape had changed dramatically once again – gone was the green-ness of southern India, to be replaced by pale brown and yellow fields with distinctive boundaries, much as in southern France or the drier parts of Spain. The airport was very efficient and we had our bags within fifteen minutes of landing. First stop was the train station. Ahmedabad is a huge city of some six million people. We are just at the end of the Indian holiday period now and the station was absolutely heaving with people – the larger stations here somewhat resemble refugee camps, with entire families sleeping on rugs on the ground surrounded by their luggage. The wait for a train can sometimes be a long one. I waited with the bags while Dan fought his way inside. The taxi driver thought we had little chance of getting a ticket on that night's train to Udaipur, but we were in luck.

In India there is what is known as a “tourist quota” on the railways. What this means is that a number of seats on every train are reserved in case tourists want to use them. The system also enables tourists to get to the front of the queues in the booking offices. This is most welcome as there are usually several hundred people waiting to collect their tickets. Today Dan was able to take advantage of this and our ticket was quickly booked.

We had about five hours to kill before the departure of our train that night. Ahmedabad looked like a typical large Indian city – noisy, polluted and overcrowded. We weren't too keen on exploring with our packs and didn't fancy leaving them at the train station either, so our taxi driver took us to a nearby hotel to wait. Apparently internationally famous, The Green House was the ultimate in luxury. We swam in their beautiful indoor pool decorated and tiled with water lilies and had dinner there too. We certainly hadn't expected such a relaxing and luxurious wait for our train. We had the place to ourselves and it was bliss to swim in fresh water and dry off on big white fluffy towels. The only thing missing was a cold beer to wash down our food, but Gujarat is a dry state, meaning that alcohol is not allowed anywhere. Our meal and swim cost us just over ten pounds, the most we've spent anywhere in India, but it was well worth it.

We made our way to the station later that evening and struggled up the stairs and all the way across to platform twelve with our packs. The Udaipur Express is a narrow gauge train, the first we've travelled on here, and looked absolutely ancient. We shared our compartment with a couple of Indian engineers and settled down for the night to sleep. I'm not sure how much sleep we really got – the broad gauge Indian trains are pretty comfortable but we were thrown around all over the place on this one as it clunked and bumped its way slowly northwards. I awoke at 5am with our Indian fellow traveller standing five inches from my face waiting to say goodbye to us as we'd reached his stop. The next I knew was a loud bang on the door – it was 7.30am and the ticket inspector (there's one on every train) was letting everyone know we were approaching Udaipur City.

The monsoons have yet to reach Rajasthan (they're typically a month later here than in the south of the country) and flying for a couple of hours had taken us right out of the wetness. We'd been warned that temperatures here reach 45C in the summer, so were pleasantly surprised to find weak watery sunshine and a temperature at 7.30 in the morning of around 22C. We sat and supped chai outside the station, chatting with the local tuk tuk drivers as we recovered from our bumpy sleepless night.

Our driver, Bunty, took us to his house because his children like to meet tourists to practice their English, and his sweet and friendly wife made us Indian coffee in tiny china mugs. Indian coffee is much like Indian tea – very milky and very sweet, but in small quantities it does provide an energy boost – by the time we got back into the tuk tuk we were almost awake.

Udaipur is known as the City of Lakes and also as the Venice of the East. The city and its seven lakes sit in a bowl, surrounded by dramatic and high mountains on all four sides. The lakes are artificial and have been created over the centuries by different maharajahs trying to outdo each other with opulence. The oldest dates from 1559. This is the India of picture books – set on islands and around the lakes are the stunning palaces built by the maharajahs with their moslem architecture of domes and scalloped arches, balconiess and cupolas. Much (although not all) of the modern architecture has been built in the same style and the overall impression is that of a fairy tale city.

The hotel we are staying at is housed in a four hundred year old heritage haveli (nobleman's home) right on the lake in the Hanuman Ghat area of the city. It's riddled with wet rot and appears in danger of crumbling into the lake altogether at any moment, but somehow manages to retain character and even charm with its little alcoves, crenellated arches and traditional Rajasthani paintings and wall hangings. Our room has a deep window seat looking onto the lake. Unfortunately, during the months of April, June and July, the lake is almost empty. When the rains come,it will take eight hours of steady rain in the mountains to fill the lake, but for now it's only knee deep. There are apparently two crocodiles living in the lake – definitely the first time we can say we've had crocs outside the bedroom window – and it's absolutely teeming with bird life, not to mention groups of locals playing cricket around the dried and grassy edges. All around the lake are bathing ghats (flights of stone steps) where the locals come to wash and do their dhobi (washing) despite the crocodiles. This is the quietest part of town and it's very peaceful here despite the marble cutting business next door.

Udaipur is quite small in Indian-city terms, with a population of around 400,000. The tourist areas of the city are lined with little shops selling local handicrafts – textiles, paintings, handmade leather goods and shoes – and this older part of town is a rabbit warren of tiny alleys and doorways. The Indian part of town is more typical – bustling and thronging with humanity, fruit and veg stalls, a spice market, many many cloth shops and fast food stalls.

We'd been warned by southern Indians that the people in Rajasthan were aggressive and not friendly towards Westerners beyond the intention of making money from them. We haven't found this to be the case and the locals have been polite and welcoming. We haven't detected any hostility at all. On our first night here there was a sudden torrential downpour and we took shelter in the local chai shop. We got chatting with a guy who turned out to be Ganesh, Udaipur's one and only snake catcher, who trained in Chennai to rescue snakes from people's homes and return them to the wild. He showed us his book of photos and newspaper clippings of his twelve years' experience. He is well known throughout Udaipur as “The Snake Man”. There are apparently 106 species of snakes in India. Ganesh has a pretty good collection of snake bite scars on his hands and legs and told us he was once left in a coma for twelve hours after being bitten four times by a cobra – he was lucky enough to make it to the hospital within 15 minutes. He takes no payment for his snake catching, saying that he's happy just to rescue the snakes and take them out of danger. He earns his living as a motorbike mechanic in between frequent call outs to rescue snakes. He invited us into his workshop, where a rat snake waited, tied up in a pillow case in Ganesh's rucksack, to be taken back to the jungle later that evening. Although it wasn't poisonous, we were glad it remained in the bag. We spent an interesting evening with Ganesh and his friends, supping beer and swapping stories.

Wednesday 18^th June - Around Udaipur

Directly across the lake from our room stands an elephant named Rama. The biggest elephant we've seen, he's 40 years old. His ears and face are painted with gaudy temple decorations. Each day he's taken walking through the town and to stand outside the temple, a howdah on his back ready for tourists to take a ride. Ladies follow along behind him selling armfuls of vegetation for tourists to feed him. We gave him three bananas instead.

Rama looks sad and very very bored. He has scars on the top of his head presumably where he's been beaten by his mahout. We've been told that there are seven elephants in Udaipur, belonging to the saddhus (holy men).

Elephants in captivity don't get a good deal here – we were reading yesterday in the local paper that the number of elephants dying before their time is on the increase year by year. An Indian elephant's life expectancy is one hundred years and working elephants are officially retired at the age of sixty. We read that once they reach retirement age and cease to become profitable, they're often sadly neglected.

Across the other side of town, we've seen camels too, magnificently dressed in bells and tassels and embroidered saddles, waiting for tourists to take a ride. We met one called Rajesh, looking very grumpy and hugely unimpressed with his lot – and who can blame him?

The cows don't fare any better – they roam the streets covered in mud and worse, trying to find food. More often than nont, they'll end up eating rubbish from the piles that line every street – we've even seen them dining from the huge garbage dumpsters. Especially considering that the cow is a holy and revered animal in India, they are appallingly treated. We've heard that teams of European vets are forced to travel from one town to the next cutting open the stomachs of cows to remove the huge quantities of plastic they have eaten.

There are donkeys here too – smaller than English donkeys, they're seen with baskets strapped to their backs carrying sand and rubble backwards and forwards across the bridges to where building projects are underway. These poor animals are often hobbled – with one front leg tied to one back leg to stop them from going too fast, and awful sores on their legs where the ropes have cut in. The way all these animals are treated is sickening.

A few days ago we saw a young goat being dragged across the road from the market by his ear and neck. Presumably destined for the pot, he bleated for his life every step of the way. I could've cried. But this is not our country, not our culture, what can we do? Being in India for any length of time is definitely enough to make one become vegetarian, as indeed we pretty much have been since arriving here.

We've spent our few days here exploring the city. We've visited the Jagdish temple, a huge towering edifice perched at the top of a hill and carved from solid marble, its intricate designs depicting elephants, warriors and gargoyle-like creatures, flowers and birds. We've seen many, many temples now and, whilst we continue to marvel at their sculptural brilliance and the sheer amount of work involved, we doubt we'll see anything as impressive as Hampi again.

We've been to look round the City Palace Museum a colossal building carved from sandstone, dominating the skyline with its minarets and domes. The museum gives a good impression of how the Indian maharajahs lived. Inside, you can see the finest examples of Rajasthani craftwork – entire rooms decorated with sumptuous mirrorwork, glittering from floor to ceiling with popular designs of peacocks, elephants and flowers. Finely detailed paintings show elephant fights and scenes of tiger, bear and leopard hunting. Looking at these, it's easy to understand how these animals have become endangered. The last elephant fight in Udaipur was in 1951. Tigers are now a protected species, but the last tiger count in the biggest national park in northern India revealed only 35-40 remaining tigers in an area of some 1450 sq km. Despite its national park status, the maharajah was not banned from hunting tigers here until 1975.

Other rooms in the museum, the private apartments of various priviledged noblemen, are hand painted from floor to ceiling, often with floral designs favouring the opium poppy – the opium trade of the 1800s brought great wealth to the cities of northern India.

A courtyard garden on the fifth and uppermost floor of the palace has huge trees surrounding an enormous marble basin with fountains. Another room contains a solid marble bath around ten feet on each side, and three feet deep, which was once filled with rupees which were thrown from the rooftops to the commoners below.

The armoury houses terrifying-looking swords, maces and guns dating from the 1500s together with fine examples of chainmail. Curiously, the chainmail for horses included a false elephant's trunk. We'd opted not to hire a guide to show us around, preferring to explore on our own, so the reason for this is likely to remain a mystery.

The museum is just one of the palaces belonging to the maharajah and turned over to tourism. Others have been leased to international hotel chains, providing sumptuous and prohibitively expensive accommodation for rich tourists. The most famous of these, The Lake Palace Hotel, a vision of carved white marble rising from the water of the lake, is the setting of part of the James Bond film “Octopussy” - a fact you're never likely to forget whilst in Udaipur – nearly every restaurant and guesthouse offers nightly showings of the film for tourists and you're told about it so often that you're never likely to want to see the film again. A stay at The Lake Palace Hotel costs from three hundred and fifty US dollars per night, somewhat beyond our budget. Its exclusivity means that only guests are allowed onto the hotel's private island, so the best view we're likely to get of it will be from the lake shore. 

While the temples and museum are interesting to see, the most fascinating thing for me is to see how the ordinary people live. Wander for just moments off the bustling touristy main streets and you find yourself in the real Udaipur. Tall old stone buildings with tiny balconies crumble against one another in countless narrow alleys and passageways. Faded paintings of elephants and noblemen on horseback on the outside walls suggest a richer past than present.

Groups of women sit chatting in doorways in their colourful sarees. They're curious as to what we're doing away from the tourist part of town, but offer us a smiling “namaste” as we walk past, or stop to take photos. Asking to take their picture is always met with a lot of giggling and pulling of scarves over heads, but once they've arranged themselves, the ladies are generally happy for you to do so. A problem with this is that naturally they want to see the pictures you have taken and will insist on holding the camera. Unfamiliar with technology as they are, this has more than once resulted in greasy finger marks all over our lenses.

Open drains line all the streets on both sides. Udaipur is very hilly and these all run towards, and presumably into, the lakes. Dogs sleep in the shade beneath stone seats and staircases cows meander the streets looking for food, or rest to chew the cud.

In the afternoons, the numerous chai stalls do a roaring trade with the local  men, the huge pots of milky tea being heated over roaring gas flames to an unbelievable temperature and handled with huge iron forceps. You don't see women at the chai stalls. When you see them around the town, they're busily hurrying from one household errand to another, otherwise, they're generally at home. I guess they make their own chai.

We've been doing a bit of shopping ourselves – presents for people back home and some souvenirs. Shopping here is an exhausting experience – you need only glance in the direction of a shop before its owner, waiting on the street outside for business, will almost drag you in off the street. Once inside, even if only one thing caught your eye originally, you're made to sit down while they frantically pull everything in their shop from the shelves and lay it out on the floor in front of you – within minutes the shop is completely trashed.

The cloth and saree shops here are an amazing spectacle. Inside they're lined from floor to ceiling with shelves and shelves of stunning rainbow-coloured silks and cottons, all in the brightest shades, that people in England wouldn't dream of waring. As you sit on your low cushioned seat, the shopkeepers will put reams of these materials out between two of them and float them down across your lap. Within moments, you're sitting in a sea of silk.

One of the salesmen the other day wrapped me up in a dark crimson saree. There are six metres of cloth in a saree and he expertly pleated it thirteen times until it hung as it should – he said it's traditional to pleat it eight times, but I was too small for that. The saree felt beautiful, but I didn't succumb – it also has to be, for sure, the most impractical garment I've ever worn. There is no way I could be remotely functional encased in all these layers of floating silk. And yet, even the ladies smashing rocks into ballast by the side of the road, or picking up plastic waste from the dried lake beds, wear them.

Much as a saree doesn't appeal for me, the fabrics are beautiful to wear, light, cool and airy, with an exotic feel. Apart from a saree, the other traditional outfit for Indian women is the salwar kameez – a short dress worn over baggy trousers with a long scarf. (Married women wear a saree, whilst single women wear a salwar.) The salwar suit is infinitely more wearable, not to mention practical, so I bought some traditional Rajasthani cloth, intricately tie dyed and studded with little mirror sequins, in a glorious turquoise and purple. I wanted to Westernise my salwar a little, so I drew some designs and took them off to the local tailor's shop along with my cloth. The Indian ladies there discussing details of the sarees they were having made, were surprised to see me shopping there, but happy and helpful to show me different designs of trousers to aid my choices. The tailor's wife took my measurements and the tailor told me my salwar would be ready the following evening. Sure enough, when we returned the next day, the tailor handed me a bag and told me “Check, come back”. When I tried it on, I found he'd given me flared Indian hips, so it needs taking in a bit, but other than that it's perfect. His price was 130Rs (about one pound fifty) for making the whole outfit. The beautiful cloth cost around seven pounds, although I suspect I was ripped off here.

This is the worst place we've been so far for being ripped off. Careful as we are, it's happened to us a few times. The locals see that we are Western and prices immediately shoot up as much as tenfold over what the locals would pay. After shopping the other day, we found a forgotten price label showing just a quarter of the price we had haggled hard to pay. In a cafe the other day, the waiter tried to charge us 12Rs for a cup of chai (it's 3Rs on the street). When we questioned this, he simply said “OK then, 7RS”. We said “You make it up as you go along”. He just smiled and agreed. So, shopping in Udaipur is an extremely jading experience and one we're thankful we don't need to do much more of.

Eating here hasn't been all that easy either. Our hotel has a restaurant, but one look inside its filthy dark kitchen is enough to tell you you don't want to eat here. The fridge looks as though it hasn't been cleaned in a decade. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to see the kitchen before we ordered omelette and chips when we arrived – it made us both ill. Since then, we've restricted the restaurant's use to a morning pot of tea.

The street food isn't bad, provided you check the cleanliness of the oil they're cooking in but there's a limited amount of fried food we want to eat. Other restaurants are of extremely variable quality and we've both been less than well in the belly department.

Last night we checked out what is meant to be the city's best Indian thali restaurant. You are given a circular stainless steel tray and three small matching dishes, then a host of waiters appear and dollop a spoonful each of five or six different vegetable curries on to your tray, the runnier ones into the dishes. Then come papads (poppadums), chapatis (Indian bread), rice and pickles. The waiters walk attentively around the room, and each time you've finished a particular dish immediately provide more. You can eat as much as you like for 50Rs (about 65p). We thought this tasted great at the time but Dan is sick as a pig this morning and can't even keep water down. Of course, we have no cooking facilities, or even a fridge, now that we're back in a hotel room, so we're totally in the hands of others for our food.

The weather continues to be overcast, and increasingly humid. The papers say highs of 33C and lows of 27C. We read that the monsoon reached Delhi fourteen days early7, a couple of days ago. We're guessing it won't be long before it's here. We're about done with Udaipur now. We should be heading onwards in the next few days.

Saturday 28^th June  Pushkar, Rajasthan

On our last day in Udaipur, we stood and watched Rama, the temple elephant, taking a drink from a tap in the street. He wrapped his trunk around the tap and drank for about a minute until his trunk was full and then lifted his trunk to his mouth and emptied it – it sounded like he was tipping buckets of water in. He drank for about twenty minutes before he had had enough.

The 07:00 train to Pushkar meant leaving our hotel at the ungodly hour of 05:30. There were no sleeper seats on this train and it was by far the worst train journey we've encountered so far – six hours on a wooden bench seat with four or five people to each seat. The Indians are clearly used to these hard seats and didn't seem bothered at all, but our soft European bums were struggling after half an hour and we spent the rest of the journey shifting about every ten minutes, trying (unsuccessfully) to get comfortable. The journey seemed interminable and by the time we arrived at Ajmer station everything was numb. The heat was overwhelming as soon as we left the station – it's much hotter and dryer here than it was in Udaipur.

We jumped into a tuk tuk for the half hour journey up and over Snake Mountain to Puskhar. The road was so steep that at times it seemed the tuk tuk would stop altogether, or even start to roll backwards. The road was lined with rocks and wild bougainvillea. The constant overtaking on hairpin bends did nothing whatsoever for our frayed nerves.

Pushkar is a small town clustered around a holy lake. It's an important Hindu pilgrimage centre and Gandhi's ashes were scattered in the lake. Around the lake are fifty two bathing ghats and some four hundred temples. Steep mountains fill the horizons in all directions.  No sooner had we arrived than we were dragged off to the lake to perform puja by repeating Hindu prayers and throwing flower petals and coconut shells into the lake (at a cost of course). We weren't given a great deal of choice in this and were too tired to argue. The thousands of carp in the lake clustered around to eat the petals.

We are right on the edge of the desert here and the ground is sandy and dusty. Camels pulling carts of goods are a common sight. It's also very touristy and the road which encircles the lake is filled with shops and stalls selling all kinds of arts and crafts, from (camel) leatherwork to the beautiful Rajasthani fabrics, tie-dyed and studded with small round mirrors. This is the cheapest place we've found so far in India and we've spent a couple of days buying souvenirs and gifts to send home.

Since we arrived here, the weather has been humid and overcast with temperatures of around 38-40C. It's a very different heat to the wet humidity of Goa. The monsoons are imminent here and last night there was a terrific downpour. Unlike Udaipur, the lake here is already full, but we've been told that the water levels rise another ten feet when the monsoons come.

When we arrived here we checked out four or five hotels and guest houses looking for one with a view of the lake from the room. It was worth perservering – our room is brand new – we're the first people ever to use it – and we have a little balcony with a lake view and a wonderful breeze in the evenings and early mornings. Right below us is a large field of rose bushes – the petals of these are used for puja in the lake. Dan is most dismayed not to be allowed to fish in the lake, it being holy. With so many temples set around the lake it's a noisy place to be at both 04:00 and sunset, the times for Hindu prayers. Fortunately the fans in our room drown out the early morning noises so they don't wake us.

Apart from the temples, Pushkar is a relatively quiet Indian town as traffic is not permitted. It's pure joy to have some respite from the constant hooting. This is the first place we've been where there are no auto rikshaws and we've had our first experience of a cycle rikshaw – drinking is not allowed in Pushkar and we had him take us to the next village to the wine shop for a cool beer. We didn't do too well with the cycle rikshaw as we both felt so guilty seeing the guy struggling up a hill that we insisted on getting off and walking! When we arrived, we had a guy with a hand cart carry our luggage to our hotel for us and he told us to get on too – this was great fun although one couldn't help but feel extremely lazy!

Yesterday I was struck down with some hideous Indian illness. I was fine in the morning; by 14:00 I felt as though I was getting a cold, and by 17:00 I was ready to keel over. I had a fever, aches and pains all over and a horrible cold and cough. It's frightening how suddenly these things can develop here. I became progressively worse during the night and by this morning was on the verge of calling a doctor. Reading our travel book, the symptoms were frighteningly close to those of malaria or dengue fever. The chemists in India are brilliant – not many Indians can afford a doctor – so Dan went to see the pharmacist here this morning and came back with a big bag of pills for me.

2^nd July Pushkar, Rajasthan

I have spent the last four days bed-ridden and feeling progressively worse until yesterday. A few times I have attempted to leave the hotel to eat something, only to be turned back by feelings of overwhelming dizziness to the point where I felt I would collapse in the street. All the restaurants here are roof-top, involving climbing at least four or five steep flights of marble steps. When the sun is out, temperatures are reaching up to 45C and I have been subsisting on rehydration packs and bananas. Dan has also gone down with the same Asian flu bug, but not to the point of being bed-ridden.

Pushkar has without a dout been the most trying part of the last four months – we have been desperate to leave here for five days now, but I simply haven't been able to contemplate moving anywhere at all, let alone with a heavy pack. Yesterday for the first time I was able to make it out to a restaurant once the sun had gone down and eat something in an effort to try and rebuild some strength. This is an enormously difficult place to be ill – the heat alone is enough to make you want to stay indoors, even when you're healthy. Add to this a highly virulent Asian bug and you really don't stand a chance. Of course the bugs here are completely different to anything our bodies have encountered before and it takes time for the immune system to begin to fight them, even with the help of strong antibiotics.

Add to this the fact that food and hygiene standards are absolutely appalling – every single piece of crockery and cutlery is dirty and this morning Dan found at least three insects in one plate of food to the point where he sent the meal back and couldnt bring himself to eat the replacement.

Rajasthan is not for the faint-hearted! We knew that this part of the journey through north India would be trying, but illness really hasn't helped. For the first time on the trip so far I have actually wholeheartedly wished to be back in the cool green-ness of England. Today I am feeling just slightly more human and we've taken advantage of this and booked train tickets out of here for tomorrow. There are just two more places we want to see in Rajasthan – Jodhpur and Jaisalmer. We'll make a whistle stop tour around these before heading for Delhi and Agra (to see the Taj Mahal), and then we'll head for the mountains and clean air of Manali in the Himalayas, where hopefully we'll be able to breathe and relax once more. I still don't feel strong enough to carry a pack but there are always porters who will do this for you. I have to say I truly can't wait to leave Pushkar. Our train leaves at 15:00 tomorrow and we'll arrive in Jodhpur at 20:00. We'll spend a couple of days there and then onwards to Jaisalmer where we'll stay until we're properly well enough to contemplate the onslaught that Delhi is going to be.

Sunday 6^th July Jaisalmer, Rajasthan

On the day we were due to leave Pushkar, there was a knock at our door around 09:30. It was the travel agent we had booked our train tickets through, telling us that we wouldn't  be able to get a taxi to Ajmer that day – apparently there had been clashes between Hindus and Moslems in Kashmir that had resulted in the death of six people from Pushkar (amongst many others) and the BJP (Indian political party) had called for a bandh (nationwide strike). All businesses throughout India were to be closed for the day and road blockades would be in place. As we stood talking to the travel agent outside our room we heard a commotion outside and looked through the window to see a group of Sikhs on motorbikes shouting as they rode through Pushkar brandishing huge sticks. We already had our train tickets booked and really wanted to leave Pushkar that day. Eventually, the travel agent was prepared to find a taxi driver prepared to go against the bandh and drive us to the train station, provided we were prepared to leave there and then, because there was likely to be fighting between Hindus and Moslems later in the day and he was afraid of having his windscreen smashed. We didn't much like the sound of any of this and were eager to escape, so hurriedly stuffed everything into our packs. I was still feeling lousy and Dan was also suffering from the same bug. We barely had the strength to get our packs down the stairs and into the taxi.

We made it safely to Ajmer train station, although you could sense the tension of the people on the streets. Everything was closed and gangs of mens wandered the streets. Armed police were everywhere and road blockades waited on the verges to be deployed.

We had what felt like an interminable three hour wait for our train to Jodhpur. We passed the time drinking chai and eating samosas on the station platform. A group of elderly Indian women waited with us and washed their sarees in the filtered water points on the platform. The most toothless of them came over to me with a big grin and a dripping wet saree, motioning to me to grab hold of an end. She wanted help drying it and we stood for fifteen minutes waving it backwards and forwards in the hot breeze until it was dry. We couldn't communicate, but she sent Dan off with a wave of her hand to get chai for us both. When her saree was dry she gave me a big hug and waved goodbye as she boarded her train.

By the time our train eventually arrived, we were both about fit to drop. We'd booked sleeper seats on the train and it wasn't too busy, but it was extremely hot as we made our way further into the desert. Outside, the scenery was sandy agricultural land with scrubby brush plants. Ladies in their myriad-colour sarees tended the crops, bent double in the 40C heat hacking at the ground with axe-like tools – it is beyond belief that anyone is able to work outside in this heat – we're dripping with sweat sitting indoors doing nothing!

The six hour train journey felt as though it went on for ever. We reached Jodhpur late at around 21:00. Outside the station, hundreds of people made their bed for the night on old sheets or blankets, or just on the concrete. An old British steam train is displayed on a raised platform by the station entrance and the entire area was swarming with huge rats. We were as usual swamped by tuk tuk drivers. The rikshaws in Jodhpur are different from those we've seen elsewhere – longer and narrower with lots more room for us and our packs. Too tired to care who was driving us, we jumped into the first one and asked to be taken to a hotel. The pollution, smog and noise were overwhelming in the unbearable heat and we were both exhausted with the combination of our Asian flu and nearly twelve hours on the road.

Jodhpur's roads are by far the worst we've experienced in India so far and it was a bone-shaking ride across town. We didn't have the energy to check out hotels and agreed to stay in the first one we were taken to, a filthy grimy back street building on four floors. The beautiful Rajasthani hand paintings on all the walls did nothing to brighten the place up. We refused the first two cell-like rooms without bathrooms that we were shown, and were taken to the “Deluxe Room”. This was much bigger, with two double beds and a water cooler (these are washing machine sized gadgets lined with straw, with a tank of cold water circulated by a pump and a noisy fan), paintings on the walls and an ecclectic collection of ornaments spread around, but still absolutely filthy with old and torn bed sheets and a toilet that refused to flush. The noisy water cooler did very little to relieve the oppressive heat.

Feeling desperately ill, we had a quick bite to eat on the hotel's rooftop and hit the sack. It was an almost sleepless night – the temperature inside the room was around 40C, the beds were lumpy and uncomfortable, the noise of the water cooler was like being on an airport runway, and we would wake every couple of hours completely soaked through with sweat.

Jodhpur is famous for the huge fort perched high on the hill above the city, and its cube-shaped buildings which are all painted pale blue, the traditional colour of the Brahmin caste and said to repel mosquitoes. Even in our state of exhaustion and illness, we had to admit it is a pretty spectacular sight, towering above the scrubland of the Great Thar desert. This is not how one would imagine a desert to be – no evocative sand dunes here, but instead just miles and miles of barren flat wasteland as far as the eye can see in every direction. It's difficult to imagine a more hostile environment. Was this hell on earth?

We certainly weren't planning on staying here long and so, despite feeling like death, we made the effort to get a tuk tuk up to the fort to have a look around. This was by far the biggest mistake we have made so far. After less than an hour at the fort, keeping ourselves in the shade, we were both at the point of collapse, staggering around holding each other up. The architecture of the carved sandstone, as intricate as lace, was awesome, but we didn't have the energy to appreciate it and barely made it back to the hotel although we had only to walk a couple of hundred yards to a tuk tuk.

This was getting serious. We checked in our book and realised that we both had all the symptoms of of serious heat exhaustion despite the fact that we'd been drinking litres of rehydrating solutions for days. We were suffering from headaches, confusion, erratic pulse, dizziness, nausea, body aches and cramps, shivering and total exhaustion, to the extent that we had to ask the hotel manager to go to the shop next door to buy water for us. The only symptom we didn't yet have was a fever, and our book said that if we had this too, we'd end up in hospital. We were both agreed that we'd never felt so ill in our lives.

We slept for the rest of the day. Later we tried to eat, but the hotel food was so awful we ended up sending back three meals and could only stomach lassi and bananas. The hotel manager told us the temperature that day was 46C. Since temperatures are always measured in the shade, God alone knows how hot it was in the sun. In the last few days, we'd spent more money on antibiotics, cough medicines and rehydrating solutions than we had on food. We simply had to get out of here.

Our book told us that in India it is common to suffer from secondary respiratory bacterial infections when recovering from flu and we'd both been hit hard by one of these, coughing up endless yellow phlegm and even blood.

We asked the hotel manager to book us train tickets to Delhi – the monsoon is in Delhi and temperatures there are around 15-20C. We needed to get out of the heat and could get a bus from Delhi to Manali in the Himalayas, where the air is unpolluted and the temperatures much cooler. He went away to try but came back and told us that we had to book the tickets ourselves.

Somehow, we made it in a tuk tuk to the railway reservation office, only to be told that there were no tickets available to Delhi for another two days. We couldn't wait that long. We already had onward train tickets for that evening to Jaisalmer. We weren't sure of the wisdom of using them because Jaisalmer is even further into the desert and we'd been told it was even hotter. Jodhpur and Jaisalmer are the hottest towns in India, and this is the hottest time of year. On the plus side, Jaisalmer is a small town with much less noise and pollution than Jodhpur. We decided we'd have to go – we couldnt stay in Jodhpur where we had no chance at all of escaping the heat or finding anything remotely edible to start regaining our strength.

The guys from the hotel kindly got us a tuk tuk and carried our packs for us, and we hired porters as soon as we got to the station for our 23:25 train. We could barely manage to get ourselves up the steps and across to the correct platform; there was no way on earth we were managing our packs. We were exhausted and desperate to sleep, still knocking bacck the antibiotics and litres of rehydrating solutions, coughing and spluttering, dizzy and sweating.

We'd booked ourselves into Sleeper Class. This is non AC and has three tiers of narrow bunks on either side of a small section of the compartment. With six people and all their luggage in an area six foot by six foot, it's pretty claustophobic and there isn't enough headroom to sit up in your bunk. We got to our allocated berths and found people already packed into them with their luggage. We showed them our tickets and waited for them to move. They clearly wanted the lower bunks which had been allocated to us, but eventually resigned themselves to moving. Finally, we got our packs stowed away and were able to lay down on the hard plastic bunks (no sheets or pillows in this class of carriage!)

The train journey was less than relaxing, to say the least. No sooner had the Indian woman adjacent to us stopped screeching at her husband, than a baby down the carriage started screaming. We had just about nodded off when the ticket inspector woke us up by switching on the light and asking to see tickets. All the while you're having to keep an arm through your pack – there are countless stories of robberies on trains in northern India.

As we crossed the desert, great sandstorms blew up and into the train through the bars on the glassless windows. You could feel yourself being sandblasted as you tried to sleep. People began to stir as dawn broke and the Indian woman across the way started screeching at her husband again. We were about ready to swing for her. I looked out through the bars at the swirling sand of the desert and saw tumbleweeds blowing across the barren wilderness, and sleepy-eyed camels just waking up.

We arrived at Jaisalmer at 05:30, beds and selves covered in sand, and somehow managed to get our packs off the train. We had arranged a hotel in advance with a guy who was the brother of the Jodhpur hovel owner and he met us at the station with his 4WD car. By this point, we didn't care at all where we were staying – we just wanted to go to bed.

At this early hour of the morning it was surprisingly (and thankfully) cool and breezy. We felt slightly better to be out of the heat and sat on the hotel rooftop drinking chai as we waited to be shown to our room. Our room once again had the dreaded noise-making water cooler and a toilet that didn't flush. As we tried to sleep, four men trotted in and out of the room trying to fix it.

By about 08:30 it was beginning to get really hot again and we quickly began to feel just as ill as we had in Jodhpur. Our bodies simply aren't made to deal with this heat. We moved ourselves to the air conditioned room next door, the first time we have needed air conditioning since arriving in India. We stood no chance wahtever of getting any better whilst remaining in this hideous heat.

For the last two days, we spent nearly all our time imprisoned in the refrigerated coolness of 30C – it's amazing that this actually feels cold. There is no restaurant at this hotel, so we've been forced to go out for food. The heat hits you like a brick wall the instant you step out of the door, but we have to eat and build our strength up – we reckon we've each lost a stone in weight since being in Rajasthan. We're about to go and book tickets for just as soon as we can to Manali, where hopefully we'll be able to fully recover. We've decided that Delhi with a chest infection is a really bad idea, Taj Mahal or no. We may return to it at a later stage of our journey if we decide the extra travelling is worthwhile. Our health is more important than yet another Indian palace.

Saturday 12^th July Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, Himalayas

The only way to get to Manali is a 12+ hour bus journey. We've heard all the horror stories about Indian bus journeys and decided we're definitely not up to that just yet, although we'll have to do it sooner or later. In the meantime we decided to catch a train as far north as possible and rest up before completing our journey. We booked tickets to the farthest north station we could, Chandigarh.

This was to the be the longest journey we had attempted in one go so far, and we were hardly feeling fit to travel. But needs must. We had to get out of Rajasthan before it killed us, there was no two ways about it.

Our trains were booked for the following day and we really wanted to look around Jaisalmer before we left. We got a tuk tuk up the steep hill to take a look at the 12^th Century fort. This is the oldest continually inhabited fort in India – people have lived inside the fort ever since it was built and now approximately 25% of the population live inside the fort walls. It was well worth the effort involved and the views from the top were spectacular. There was a lovely breeze, albeit a very hot one, which we enjoyed whilst eating our last Rajasthani meal.

Most people who visit Jaisalmer do so in order to go on a camel safari in the desert. Locals kept trying to convince us to do this too and we would have liked to, but we made the decision that to spend time in the desert in our condition, where there was no shelter from the relentless sun would be nothing short of a deathwish. We gave it a miss.

The train left Jaisalmer at 23:30. We'd booked ourselves into an air con sleeper carriage this time. We didn't fancy another sandblasting and couldn't risk the extreme temperatures anymore. As soon as we settled ourselves into our seats, a man across the aisle introduced himself as an undercover policeman and said we should let him know if we encountered any problems on the journey. This was reassuring, except that the guy persistently tried to get us to drink rum from his bag that he said he wouldn't drink himself. He was overly friendly and kept on insisting that we had some of his rum. We kept on politely refusing, explaining that we were on strong antibiotics. There are stories in north India of travellers being drugged and robbed on trains, so we were suspicious. The guy kept staring at me constantly and I didn't feel comfortable in sleeping until he himself was snoring. We spent a night listening to Indians snoring loudly and didn't get a great deal of sleep in this farmyard environment.

In order to get further north, we had to catch a train back via Jodhpur. This was the last place on earth we wanted to revisit, but we had no choice. We arrived back at Jodhpur at 05:30 and  were immediately hassled by a tuk tuk driver who followed us from the train and swore at us when we refused to go with him. We asked another driver to take us to a hotel where we could spend the five hours waiting for our connecting train.

Fortunately, we were taken to a good hotel where the staff went out of their way to help us. They opened their restaurant specially, put on the fans and air conditoning, and made us breakfast despite the fact that the chef wasn't due to start work until 08:00. Nevertheless, the time passed very slowly and we were both still feeling really ill.

We returned to the station at 10:00 and had porters carry our packs to our seats. I was dreading this next journey, which was due to take nineteen hours. We did our best to sleep through as much of it as possible, this time in relative comfort with air conditioning, sheets, pillows and blankets. Nevertheless, the journey was endless. Usually there is plenty of food available at the stations enroute – you just hop off and grab what you want when the train stops. This time however, it was 23:00 before we stopped at a station with any hot food, Dan had jumped off thirteen times before we were able to eat.

Talking to the ticket inspector along the way we found we could go one station north from Chandigarh if we wanted to, to Kalka, and then could catch the toy train on the narrow gauge railway to Shimla, high up in the Himalayas. We'd heard that this is supposed to be one of the top ten most scenic train journeys in the world and decided we should add it to our itinerary whilst we had the opportunity. Shimla looked like a nicer place to rest and recover than Chandigarh in any case. The ticket inspector took a 300Rs baksheesh to ignore the fact that our tickets only took us as far as Chandigarh. Everything is possible in India if you have a little money to throw at it.

By the time we arrived at Kalka we'd been travelling for forty-one hours.  Journeys of this length are pretty much incomprehensible coming from a country as small as England. It had been bad, but not as bad as we'd thought it might be. At least we'd caught up on a bit of sleep and got out of the hellhole that is Rajasthan in the height of summer. We'd travelled almost 1500km in one go. Arriving in the green-ness of Kalka was wonderful – once again there were plants growing everywhere and butterflies flitting about. The temperature had dropped to a comfortable 25C and we immediately began to feel better.

We didn't have any tickets booked for the toy train and had a frustrating wait of four hours or so before we were able to continue our journey. We queued for half an hour in the ticket office only to be told we'd been queuing at the wrong window. We queued again and on reaching the desk were told to return to the original queue! We'd had enough by this time and Dan went to find the station manager. This usually does the trick in India as they have a lot of respect for English travellers and will do their best to accommodate us. This ploy worked on this occasion and we were given tickets straight away for the next train to Shimla, leaving in two hours. We killed time having an awful meal in the station restaurant.

The little diesel toy train chugged its way on its six hour journey up into the Himalayas. The scenery made all the travelling and illness almost worthwhile. We leant out of the windows almost all the way and used up the memory cards in both our cameras. This was surely the most stunning scenery on earth and we were lucky enough to have a clear day – we could see for miles. It was a long and slow journey, but so beautiful that we could happily have sat there for another forty hours. We felt privileged to be able to experience this and have hundreds of stunning photos.

Shimla is a very English town, largely built in the early 1900s by the British Raj. The town hall is Tudor style and all the shops and restaurants are Western. There's barely a cow in sight and the entire town is amazingly clean by Indian standards. We struggled a bit to find a decent hotel. The one we spent our first night in was mildewed and damp with wet carpets, really not the best for our recovering chest infections. The temperature here is around 20C, just about the same as England at the moment. It's amazing how cold this feels after four months of tropical climates, and we've both been wrapped up in fleeces and even socks since arriving here. Shimla is perched in the most unlikely fashion along the top of a 12km long Himalayan ridge around 2000m above sea level. It looks and feels as though the whole town is likely to topple over an edge at any moment. Although it's monsoon time and there's some heavy rain, the views are out of this world when the sky is clear. It was a fantastic decision to come here.

We had a bit of a fright with Dan yesterday. We're both slowly on the mend and were taking a slow wander around town when Dan was overcome with dizziness and exhaustion once again. People everywhere, there was nowhere for him to lie down and there was no way he was making it up the steep slopes (everywhere is steep here) and steps back to our hotel. Just across the square was the town's English style library. Holding Dan up, we staggered into the library and Dan lay down on the carpet. The little ladies in the library were hugely kind and helpful, giving Dan cushions to raise his feet on and bringing him endless glasses of boiled water. Still, he was feeling dizzy and his pulse was racing. We decided a doctor was in order and a man in the library went rushing off to get one so that I could stay with Dan.

The doctor arrived within about ten minutes and gave Dan a good check over, concluding that there was nothing seriously wrong and he was suffering from exhaustion. He prescribed lots of rest and food. It was a relief to have a professional opinion that all would be OK. Dan rested in the library for an hour or so. I went out to get cups of hot sweet tea and Dan munched biscuits and tea until his sugar levels rose. Feeling a little better, we thanked the ladies in the library for their kind help and went to the nearest restaurant for some soup and hot chocolate. Thankfully, the standards of cleanliness and hygiene here are much better.

We've moved hotels to somewhere dryer and warmer and have a comfortable little wood panelled room that feels like the cabin of a ship. We have carpet on the floor for the first time in four months, hot water, and a colour TV with English satellite channels. We still have a lot of recovering to do, but this seems like a good place to do it and we're finally feeling that there's light at the end of the tunnel. We're right up in the clouds here, surrounded by incredible mountains. It's been raining all day today – in fact the climate is very much like England. There are familiar plants growing everywhere – roses, dahlias and chrysanthemums all thriving in the cool atmosphere, along with trumpet lilies and bottle brush trees. This is going to be a good place to recover. Once we're well enough, we'll tackle the eight hour bus ride to Manali, but we're not in any hurry. For now it's just great to snuggle up in blankets in front of the TV and enjoy the room service. Our Rajasthani nightmare has finally come to an end :-)

13^th July - Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, Himalaya

We made it out of our hotel room today for a gentle meander around Shimla – thankfully it seems we are both on the mend now, and, with plenty of food and rest, we should be fine. We've started on the food front by stuffing ourselves with Dominos Pizza (anything other than curry is a treat), and, bliss of blisses, gateaux from a French style bakery – the first cake of any kind we have seen in four months!

We took some gateau to the ladies in the library who were so kind to Dan the other day as a thank you. We were amazed to be told that the man who went rushing off to get a doctor for Dan was a member of the public – who would do that for you in England?

We shared our breakfast and afternoon tea (yes, more cake!) today with a troupe of cheeky red-bummed monkeys. They're everywhere here and came to our hotel window chattering for food. There's bars on the windows to stop them coming in, but the stick their little hands through and take food ever so gently from ours. This morning we gave them toast and jam and watched as a baby sat licking jam from his fingers.

It was pleasantly warm and sunny this morning – the thermometer in the town square showed 21C and this feels just right to us at the moment. When the cloud comes down, it comes quickly, and the stunning Himalayan views are hidden in moments. Just now, in the early evening, we can barely see thirty feet out of the window.

We had some sad news today from Kitty that our poor Felix cat has lost an eye due to an incurable infection. Kitty says he's doing fine though – she's been an absolute gem and even sent Felix's mum, Charley, to hospital with him as they've never been separated. I do miss Felix and Charley, but it's a comfort to know they're being so well looked after.

Footnote: On reading this through, we realise that we haven't said a great deal about our eight days in Shimla. But we're agreed there isn't a lot more to say. It was just a good, clean, cool place to chill out, recover, eat, watch rubbish on TV and enjoy room service. Nice as it was, I still think the highlight was the gateau!

19^th July - Vashist, Manali, Himachal Pradesh

We awoke yesterday morning in Shimla to the sound of torrential rain lashing against the windows. The cloud was so low we couldn't see the tree twenty feet away. It somehow didn't seem the best of days for a nine hour car journey up and down mountains along the hairpin bends of the Himalaya.

Our driver got off on the wrong foot with us by repeatedly slamming the car boot door onto Dan's pack just about where the laptop was stowed.

It can't be said that the journey was relaxing – our driver, Raju, was reasonably careful most of the time, but we were thrown around all over the place as the tiny hatchback wound its way up and down the mountain passes. There were landslides everywhere caused by the monsoon rains and, more than once, Raju had to slam on the brakes to avoid huge lumps of rock in the road.

The journey from Shimla to Manali is 237km. There's only one road and many parts of it are no better than a farm track in England. As we passed through the town of Mandi and into the Kullu Valley, the scenery became increasingly spectacular, with towering mountains and densely wooded valleys. I was surprised to see palm trees growing this far north in the shelter of the sunny valleys, together with huge yuccas and aloes, and even willows along the water's edge.

We followed the course of the River Beas all the way to Manali – a wide and very fast flowing river at this time of year, it must be a hugely important water source for the people of the Himalaya. Pipes come down from the rocky sides of the road draining pure fresh mountain water. Raju stopped to fill his water bottles – the water was as cold as if it had been refrigerated.

All along the Kullu Valley are campsites and places for river rafting. The temperature in the sunny floor of the valley was around 30C, but this dropped sharply as soon as we gained altitude. Manali, at the foot of a valley, is 2050m above sea level, and the peaks in the valley reach around 4000m. Vashisht, where we are staying, is probably around 3000m. The mountain tops are often obscured by the dipping clouds – there are some seriously moody clouds here.

The lack of oxygen here is noticeable as soon as you do anything remotely energetic – everything has to be done slowly. We're not high enough here to be affected by AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) – 3000m is the dangerpoint, but you're certainly aware that things are more of an effort in the thinner atmosphere. In Himalayan terms, we're in baby mountains here, with Everest reaching 8848m. But, when you look at it in British terms, with Ben Nevis at thirteen hundred and something metres, and London not much above sea level, we're still a lot higher than we're used to. Walking the half mile steep road up the village, followed by the hundred-odd steps up a sheer mountain face to our guesthouse is a monumental effort, but the views from our balcony make it well worth the strain. Everywhere, there's the sound of running water; torrential waterfalls crash down the snow-capped mountains across the valley.

Manali is very much on the travellers' trail, as it's an old hippy haunt of the 60s. Today, it's still just as busy, with a combination of hardcore trekkers, a small number of Indian tourists, and most of the year-round Goa crowd who migrate here when their beaches are washed away by the monsoon. There's large numbers of Israelis, together with Americans, Japanese, Chinese, English, French and Tibetans, so it's a pretty multi-cultural scene.

Our guesthouse is in Vashisht, just across the river from Manali and 4km up a steep mountainside. It's a quiet but still touristy village with a much more laid-back feel than the bustle of Manali. There are sulphorous hot springs and baths in the centre of the village, open for public bathing between 5am and 9pm.  There are three carved wooden Tibetan temples  in the village; some of the people here look distinctly Tibetan, with oriental eyes and beautiful walnut-coloured skin with a rosy pink glow. Rather than cows wandering the streets of Manali, there are mules. They look somewhere between an English horse and donkey – bigger than our donkeys with ears too long to be a horse, but too short to be a donkey. These are used as goods carriers in the mountains and we've seen some saddled up with heavy loads of trekking gear.

The Kullu Valley is famous for its apples and sizeable orchards lay all along the valley floor and lower slopes. Apples will only grow in the north of India and it's been a long while since we ate one that wasn't hugely expensive (30p each!) and imported from New Zealand. The fresh apple juice is to die for!

The Kullu Valley was originally known as Kulanthapitha (End of the Habitable World).

Many other familiar plants grow here – hollyhocks, sunflowers, crocosmia, hydrangea, calistemon, marigolds, tomatoes, lettuce, green beans and the most healthy-looking dahlias I have ever seen. The verdancy is soothing to the soul, especially coming from the barren inferno of Rajasthan. The birds are semi-tame – they come into our room for food – and the constant roar of the river in the valley far below is restful. Generally the scene is reminiscent of Alpine peaks, except that there are more of them, they're both higher and steeper and they are less inhabited.

Having hot water has been amazing since we hit Himachal Pradesh. It doesn't seem to matter how hot you are – cold water just doesn't make you feel clean. I have to admit to standing under the shower for longer than was strictly necessary this evening! In Rajasthan, they just looked at us as if we were crazy when we complained that the advertised hot water was not available.

Whenever we go anywhere new, there's always plenty of laundry to catch up on. One of the first things we'll do on getting somewhere new is decide where to hang our washing line. The hot water is a definite bonus on that score too – you can actually manage to get your clothes clean - eventually.

If all goes according to plan, Manali will be our last major stop in India. We're glad to end our tour of this country of endless contrast on a high note, feeling relaxed and soothed by the fresh clean mountain air, and well on the way to feeling healthy again. Our journey has taken us (all but a few hundred kilometres at either end) all the way from the southern tip of India to the northern border.

24^th July - Vashisht, Manali, Himachal Pradesh

We've spent the last few days relaxing and unwinding – it's amazing how some good food, clean air and warm sun can make you feel so much stronger.

We had lunch the other day on the rooftop terrace of a cafe improbably perched halfway up the side of a mountain with the most stunning mountain views in every direction.

The weather here is extremely changeable – despite being in the midst of the monsoon, there's only been some showers so far – certainly nothing on the scale of the Goan monsoons. When the sun is shining, the skies are crystal blue, the sun is very strong, and it's hot, hot, hot but always with a clean, cool breeze. The clouds can come down over the mountains in minutes and before you know it, you're piling on the clothes – the woolly hats we've been carrying around in vain for the last four months don't seem quite so silly now!

We've explored Manali and Old Manali. Manali is a busy little town with a relaxed atmosphere and endless shops selling woolly hats, socks and shawls. Knitting seems to be big business for the Tibetan ladies – they actually wander up and down the mountain paths knitting on four needles without even looking while going about their daily duties. There are many Angora rabbits here that look just like cotton wool balls with legs – an old lady sits in the village with one on her lap all day every day, charging 20Rs for a photo with it. We object to paying for pictures (we'd rather buy socks ;-) and Dan's become a master at covert bunny photography with a zoom lens!

Old Manali is a definite travellers' haunt – it spreads down a steep hill with a whole road full of shops just like the stalls at English music festivals, selling Westernised Indian clothes, leather and wool.

Our visas for India expire one month today. The time has passed really quickly, although by the time we leave, we will have been away six months and half our travels will have gone. We've had the luxury, up until now, of not having to watch the clock, or even the calendar. We've been able to spend as much time as we like in any particular place without even thinking about it. This isn't going to be the case for the rest of our travels, mainly because visas for other countries are shorter-term.

So we're going to have to do a lot more planning. With this in mind, we've been researching Nepal and how best to get there. Although it looks only a short distance on the map, the overland journey from here involves a nine hour bus journey from here to the Nepalese border, followed by a twelve hour bus journey from there to Kathmandu. The second bus runs only through the night and we've read some frightening accounts of bus journeys in Nepal. There are no trains in Nepal and the condition of the roads makes India's sound like gold-paved highways. Fortunately, Nepal is a tiny country (only 800km across its longest dimension) compared with India.

There is an airport 50km from Manali, so our second option is to fly from Bhuntar to Delhi, and then from Delhi to Kathmandu. It seems you can't fly out of the country without going to Delhi (oh! and we've managed so well to avoid it thus far!). Unfortunately the internal flight to Delhi is prohibitively expensive, so to do the whole journey by air would use up most of our monthly budget. We've decided to compromise – we'll work our way gradually back down the Kullu Valley, stopping enroute, and work our way to Agra. We'll pay a quick visit to the Taj Mahal and then fly out of Delhi to Kathmandu.

25^th July - Manali

Yesterday we were sitting in the garden of a cafe in Old Manali enjoying a late afternoon lunch. We noticed an old Indian guy grooving away to the Western dance music at another table, and, as we smiled at him, he came to join us. He looked like a poor rural man – about 80 years old, he was dressed in filthy ragged clothes with wild flowers in his traditional Himachal cap and a grin which revealed just one remaining tooth. He didn't speak a word of English but gave a humorous chuckle as he accepted a glass of Kingfisher. We shared our food with him, and, when we'd finished, he carefully wrapped the leftover chips in a piece of newspaper to eat later. Dan got his camera out and the old boy threw an arm around me to pose for a photo. It's a great photo, but it has to be said I was praying for Dan to get on with it as the old guy smelled about as fragrant as a worse-than-average Indian toilet!

When the waiter came to bring our bill, he told us that the old guy wasn't quite as poverty-stricken as he seemed – far from needing our leftover chips for his dinner, he apparently owned three local hotels and half the apple orchards in the valley! The waiter said the guy came every day to enjoy a cup of free chai with the travellers over a toothless, wordless natter.

29^th July - Vashisht

Finally managed to get flight from Delhi booked after three days messing about waiting for the guy in the internet cafe to do it!

7^th August 2008 - Old Kasol, Parvati Valley, Himachal Pradesh

In Vashisht we came across bed bugs for the first time in India – I awoke one morning with a rash of little bites all over my arms, shoulders and lower back. We didn't realise they were bed bug bites until the next night when Dan woke up complaining of being bitten, we turned on the light and saw the little blighters crawling about in the joints in the wood behind the bed – yuk! We woke the manager and moved to another room for the night.

We made our escape from Manali on Monday 4th. Manali's a bit like Goa in that it would be all too easy to chill out there for months amidst the beautiful mountains, taking gentle strolls here and there or just relaxing in the sun reading a book. But time is not on our side here in India anymore and we had to make a move.

We're gradually working our way south again to Delhi ready for our flight out on 18th. We got a taxi 30km back down the valley to a little place called Naggar – a tiny village set midway up the sunny side of a mountain. There's nothing more there than a couple of guesthouses, a chai stall and a five hundred year old “castle” - I use the term loosely because it's not much more than a large house, built in the Tibetan style of layers of rock interspersed with layers of wood, all held up with beautiful carved wooden pillars. The castle may not have been all that, but despite it being a cloudy day, the views from the verandah out across the Beas Valley were stupendous – this surely has to be some of the most stunning scenery on earth. The Kullu Valley isn't known as The Valley of the Gods for nothing.

Our second day in Naggar we took a steep walk up little tracks through the forest to around 3000m where we found the Krishna Temple, a carved wooden Buddhist temple set high above the valley. The effort of climbing up there was well worth the panarama from the top and the sprawling jasmine bush growing in the temple courtyard was the sweetest I've ever smelled.

Yesterday we took a taxi out of Naggar another 30-40km down the Kullu Valley and off into the Parvati Valley. Apple harvesting is in full swing now in Himachal and all along the way makeshift tents have been erected from tarpaulins and are filled with local people sorting and packing.

The Parvati Valley is exceptionally steep – more of a ravine or a gorge than a valley. There is just one road in and out, hewn from the rock halfway up the valley side with terrifying overhanging rocks that appear to be about to crash down on you at any moment. The landslides all up the road are testiment to the fact that this happens more frequently than you'd like to think about whilst on the road.

The thunderous roaring Parvati River rumbles along the valley floor, crashing and foaming its way across the rocks. Pine trees and outcrops of rocks line the valley sides. Suspended across the river at death-defying angles are wires on pulleys and winches with metal baskets attached for transporting both people and goods across the water up to the little houses perched on the high sides of the mountains. You'd sure need to have some faith (or fatalism!) to get into one of those!

So, we've had a couple of weeks in the mountains and now we're going to have a few days with the rivers and valleys. We're in a small village called Kasol, midway up the south side of the Parvati Valley. Our guesthouse nestles amongst pine trees right on the bank of the crashing, broiling river. The sound somehow manages to be both deafening and soothing at the same time. Dan has been hoping to get some fishing in since Goa, but the water looks far too turbulent here and the locals tell us that although the trout fishing here is good, it's not fishing season and the water is not clean during the monsoon. There is a risk of contamination with pesticides used by farmers higher up the mountain at this time.

When the sun shines, it's much warmer down here on the valley floor and this morning we awoke to the clearest of blue skies and strong sunshine. We've been told that this is the wettest it's been here at this time of year for the past decade, but it doesn't seem wet to us. Although there are heavy and prolonged showers, the seem to come mostly at night so they don't bother us – I wish England would arrange its weather like that. And you don't seem to get drizzle in India – when it rains, it rains properly.

All in all we've done pretty well avoiding the monsoon in India so far. I'd expected to see a lot more of it, but we've really only had a week or so in Goa. I think had we not planned to avoid it we would have got a lot wetter – there are the usual floods in some of the cities at the moment. The newspapers carry stories of people falling down manholes in Delhi, never to be seen again. The manhole covers are removed by people wanting to save their homes from flooding.

Certainly, the Parvati River is in very full flow just now. This is the second heaviest time of flow for the rivers – they get fiercer in the spring when the snow melts on the mountains. We can see the water marks on the rocks in the river five feet higher than they are now. This is a perfect environment – in the summer at least. I'm not sure it would be so welcoming in the winter when all but the deepest valley floors are covered in snow and many of the roads are impassable between October and February.

We have just eleven days to go now before we leave behind this country that has been our home for almost six months, and the time is going faster than ever.

10^th August - Kasol

On Friday, we took a walk to Manikaran, the last village in the valley. Famous for its natural hot springs (hot enough to boil rice), Manikaran is a Sikh pilgrimage centre, and all along our walk we were overtaken by Sikhs on motorbikes in their orange turbans.

The road to Manikaran is a twisty turny single track with huge rocks overhanging that were none too comforting to walk under. It was a cloudy day and the steam rising up around the village added to the atmosphere. The bridge crossing the river into the village is hung with hundreds of Tibetan prayer flags. We stopped in Manikaran for a meal. The village didn't seem particularly friendly and for the first time in a long while we encountered hostile looks – perhaps the Sikhs didn't appreciate Westerners wandering around their holy places.

By the time we had finished eating, the heavens had opened. The waterproof jackets came out but we would have got soaked on the 6km walk back to Kasol, so we found ourselves a taxi. Thankfully, it was a slow and gentle drive back down the valley, although less than comfortable because of all the potholes, and with kilometre drops into the torrential river below.

On Saturday we took a walk the other way down the valley to the next village, Chhlal. The bridge across the river is a somewhat precarious footbridge, made from rotting pieces of wood suspended on iron chains. We watched a few locals trotting across first and then tenuously made our way over – it swings and bounces as you cross and the churning water below where the wooden panels are missing is none too comforting. We made it safely across though and followed the riverside path through the forest down to the village. Chhlal is even smaller than Kasol – just a few houses, two little hole-in-the-wall shops and a dhaba (snack bar) where we stopped for some lunch before heading back for Kasol and once more over the swaying bouncing bridge. I'm sure the locals think we Westerners are complete wusses picking our way gingerly across holding onto the (loose) hand rails either side – the bridge is just part of their daily walk to and from then village and they even take their cows across it to graze on the rich green grass on the steep slopes towering above the far side of the river.

12^th August – my 39^th b'day - Mandi, Kullu Valley, Himachal Pradesh

We suffered a taxi journey from hell yesterday as we made our way two and a half hours' south from Kasol. Despite our telling the driver to slow down at least seven or eight times, he took no notice and went careering around the mountain roads overtaking on blind bends with half mile drops at the side of the road and reaching speeds of 95km/hr in his filthy dented van. We were about ready to punch him by the time we reached Mandi.

Mandi is one of the larger towns in Himachal and it's a bit of a shock to the system to be back in the hustle and noise of India at large after the beauty and tranquillity of the Himalaya. We're at just 80m above sea level here and have seen the last of the mountains and valleys until we reach Nepal. From here on in, it's going to get progressively noisier and busier until we fly out in six days' time. Kathmandu's going to be pretty manic too.

It's muggy here in the valley after the cool mountain air and temperatures reached 30C today under a wet grey sky. We have fans in our room again for the first time since Rajasthan. It was getting dark last night as we wandered around Mandi looking for a hotel. We were confronted by the worst selection of dark and dirty, lumpy-bedded rooms we have seen in the whole of India. The only respite on offer was a hotel above the town which is the former palace of the raja of Mandi. The rooms are the most expensive we've had yet in India at 1,100 Rs (twelve pounds fifty) a night, but as it was my birthday we decided to treat ourselves for a night and move to a cheaper room in the morning.

The best thing about the room was that it had both hot water and a bath tub! It took nearly two hours to run a bath this morning with the hot water trickling out without pressure and the geyser running cold every fifteen minute, but we had paid for a bath and were determined to have one! It was chucking it down outside so our planned excursion to a nearby lake was a no-go anyway. Eventually, the bath was wonderful, being only the second we've managed in five months, and we were two hours past check out time when we finally moved to our cheaper room.

The other great thing about paying more than a tenner for a room was the bed – it had the first sprung mattress we've slept on in five months – at the budget end of the market, mattresses are either foam (if you're lucky), or some kind of kapok. If you're really unlucky, it's straw (probably mixed with cow poo). Not only did we have a sprung mattress, but also clean sheets! Generally you only get a bottom sheet (and a blanket in colder areas). We have our faithful “Flumpy” - the elephant embroidered sheet we bought on the beach in Kovalam in our first week in India, but he's getting a bit worse for wear and it was bliss to sleep in something machine-washed specially for you.

We've spent the rest of the day exploring Mandi – not that there's a great deal to see. This valley junction town centres around a two-storey shopping “mall” with lots of cheap dhabas and grimy hotels. There aren't a lot of Westerners here and we're having to get used to being stared at again. Unlike Manikaran, at least the stares here are just curious and interested rather than hostile.

Our main errand this afternoon was buying a new clock. We've had no idea whatsoever what the time has  been for the last five or six days, when Dan's clock died. We've simply got up when we've woken up and gone to bed when we're tired.

So we're on schedule for our flight from Delhi in six days' time. The trouble with having a schedule is that you don't know whether you're going to like somewhere until you get there. We'd probably have stay a few more days in Manali if we'd seen Mandi first. But hey, better to be early than late when there's a flight out of the country and an expiring visa to think about – we wouldn't want to find ourselves halfway up a mountain with a huge landslide that could take days to clear in between us and the airport. We'll spend a couple of days around here before catching a taxi to Chandigarh and the northern point of our railway south to Delhi.

19^th August 2008 - Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal

When it came to it, it worked out too expensive for us to get a taxi to Chandigarh – although £60 is not expensive for a 300km taxi journey, it's still a bit rich for our budget here. For almost six months we'd managed to avoid long distance Indian buses, but it seemed India wasn't going to let us escape quite that easily and we'd have one more epic journey before we could leave. We shuddered a bit, resigned ourselves to our fate and booked tickets on the following evening's overnight bus to Delhi.

The night before we left we managed very little sleep – a storage facility rght outside our room began deliveries by truck of huge water tanks before daybreak, and, in the darkness, hoisted them up to the roof, pulling them against the corrugated iron front of the building, shouting to one another all the while. Half the hotel was awake by 6am.

So, it was in an exhausted state that we arrived at the bus terminal that evening. The news wasn't good – there had been a huge landslide 50km down the valley and no buses were able to get through. The bus man smiled and shrugged, saying “natural problem” and promised to put us on the bus the next evening. We'd already checked out of our hotel and, much as we didn't want to go to Delhi, we had a flight to catch. The bus man made a few phone calls and we were “lucky” enough to get the last two seats on the last bus coming through Mandi that evening. It would do its best to get to Delhi and we were told we could expect it to take ten hours, not a soothing prospect when we'd had no sleep and were unlikely to get any that night either. We tried not to think about the heavy rain and landslides in the darkness on the mountain roads that are dangerous even in perfect conditions.

It was worse than we had expected – because of road closures, the bus had to take a circuitous route on narrow passages around the mountains. We could feel the wheels of the bus sliding as we negotiated fallen trees and huge piles of boulders by the sides of the roads. I was glad it was too dark to see the one-two mile drops we were only inches away from at times.

We didn't sleep. We had been travelling for eight hours when we crawled blearily off the bus for a chai stop at 04:30am. Dan chatted with the driver and we were told something we really didn't want to hear – because we'd had to go the long way round, the journey was going to take another eight hours, bringing it to more than sixteen hours. We were thrown around in our seats as the bus hurtled around one ninety degree bend and then another in the opposite direction.

Dawn broke at around 05:30 and the rain came down more and more heavily, the roads becoming steadily more flooded. The bus went faster and faster trying to make up time. We were like shell-shocked zombies by the time we stopped for breakfast at 07:00. It felt like the bus journey would never end.

By 10:00 we were approaching the suburbs of Delhi. The smog had to be seen to be believed – it hung for miles across the sky in a thick, grey woolly blanket. The bus's air con did little to suppress the smell. We were still 30km from the city and dreaded what lay ahead.

We hit traffic jams after another half an hour. The road into Delhi is classed as a highway. Certainly, it's as wide as an English motorway, but there are no lanes. It's a seething mass of trucks, cars, buses, cow-driven carts, people and potholes, all swerving randomly to avoid one another. By this time, we were too numb to be nervous. The M25 in the rush hour was poetry in motion by comparison.

We pulled into Delhi Interstate Bus Terminal at around 11:00. We staggered off the bus to be  greeted by overwhelming polluted humidity, taxi touts and a smell we've encountered nowhere else in India. Filth and rubbish rotted in piles on the roads and pavements; thousands of people squelched through it. Ignoring the pestering taxi touts, we made our way to the Prepaid Rikshaw counter. As we got into a tuk tuk, the heavens opened. We made our way through central Delhi in brown knee deep water and filth, as the traffic squeezed through gaps with less than inches to spare. The scarves we held across our mouths and noses did little to keep out the smells and pollution. Entire families on mopeds weaved amongst the traffic, everyone soaked to the skin in the sudden downpour and seemingly remarkably unprepared considering this was the monsoon in India. Drains and manholes bubbled filth, sewage and rubbish.

Our guidebook had warned us to expect Delhi's budget accommodation to be none-to-salubrious, so we considered ourselves lucky to find a clean hotel pretty quickly. In view of the pollution we'd decided air con was a must. Exhausted, we collapsed into a clean, cool bed for the rest of the day. Dan ventured out for a few essentials but I didn't have the energy to tackle Delhi just yet.

Having caught up on some sleep, we ventured out the next day, exploring the touristy Paharganj area of central Delhi. There are many tourists here, and, for many of them, Delhi is their first stop in India. I think, had it been mine, I may have been making a beeline straight back to the airport. The smell of rotting garbage is completely overwhelming – random mounds of it the size of a caravan sit beside the roads, cows and dogs trying desperately to make a meal from the contents.

Despite, and perhaps because of, all this, the people of Delhi are welcoming, happy and friendly. It's a very interesting city to visit, although I have to admit to being relieved that our was to be only a short stay.

In the evening, some Indian friends we'd met in Kasol who live in Delhi came over to visit us. It was a great evening - the two guys are very much on our wavelength and we enjoyed being able to openly and honestly share our experiences of India with them. They laughed at our stories, particularly when we told them that in England a few years back, a single cow which had escaped onto the M25 during rush hour had made news headlines and caused miles and hours of traffic jams. And so, our last night in India was a late and drunken one. It was almost 04:00 by the time we got to bed, knowing that 4hrs later we'd have to be up again with a plane to catch.

Inevitably, it was in a dazed state that we caught a tuk tuk to Indira Ghandi airport yesterday morning. But the God of Travel was on our side this time – the travel arrangements went entirely according to plan and we enjoyed an efficient and comfortable flight to Kathmandu. It only takes one hour and fifteen minutes and it seemed no sooner had we taken off and been fed and watered than we were landing again.

To view Part Two - The Roof of the World - CLICK HERE