“Yesterday I got so old I felt like I could die.” - In Between Days by The Cure.

Warning: Curses! Everywhere!

I awoke to golden sunlight streaming through the curtains of my hotel room. I felt lazy. I lay around reading for a while then forced myself up from the bed to become a moving shadow in the sun’s glittering beams. I showered and headed onto the balcony. Before me lay a narrow street aligned with both old French colonial buildings and modern tower blocks. A stark purple colonial house opposite hosted communist flags draped from the outside walls, while children played on the balcony. Builders danced precariously on shaky scaffolding aligning one new building, hammering and welding with little or no safety equipment. In the road below, a few rickshaws idled, waiting for passing trade. A grocery moped tooted down the street with an annoying siren. One or two people ambled from surrounding buildings and shuffled over to buy freshly picked wares. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.

The purple house...

The annoying fruit seller...

I was in a new country: Laos, the land of hard beds and soft smiles.

It was ten in the morning but even though I had a whole new culture to explore outside my window I really didn't feel like flexing any muscles. I wanted to take everything slowly. Little did I realise that I was already making great strides to fit in with the culture here.

I lay around reading until hunger spurred me into action. I went in search of a vegetarian restaurant I had found listed on the Internet. Being a veggie traveller can be time consuming on occasion (some would say frustrating), but when I reach a new place I always try to find at least one bolt hole where I can have a good meal. These places are usually found away from tourist areas and are a great way to see real life happening before your eyes.

I made my way down side streets lined with buildings of differing styles and colours, past That Dam Stupa (great name) which was to become a lovingly familiar landmark in the next few days, as it had been to the inhabitants of these lands for seven hundred years or so.  It was probably built a few centuries after the Laos people originally settled here a thousand years ago after migrating from South East China. Rumoured to have once been covered in gold, That Dam now stands blackened and gaunt in the sun, testament to the sacking of the city in the 1827 by the Siamese at which time Vientiane (or Viangchan) was abandoned. The city was gradually overtaken by forest until French explorers arrived at the end of the 19^th Century and claimed it for France, eventually repairing and restoring it as best they could.

That Dam Stupa

I travelled on past thoroughfares and small shopping complexes until I found the shambolic bus station. Here, people queued and buses never came. Still they queued, patiently, often silently. There was a certain Zen to the whole place. One old man rested stoically on a walking stick, shoulders slumped, face cast to the ground. He looked like he had been waiting here since before buses had been invented.

I slipped past the station and dived into a flood of people on the pavement outside the local shops. They all shuffled along slowly, pausing to admire clothing hanging on rails and large woven baskets standing in the street. I was patient. I waited for people to shuffle forward or move out of my way, which of course they didn’t. Any small space that could be taken up with a leg or an arm was quickly consumed by the wavering crowd. I jumped from the pavement and walked around everybody in the narrow space between the gutter and a million static motor bikes. I turned a corner into a narrow lane and found the tatty old Talat Khua Din market where my restaurant – the Khouadin Vegetarian - was located.

It only cost me a pound to stuff myself from the buffet style menu and the food was good. Afterwards, I waddled around the market like Jabba the Hut, eyeing the stalls warily. I wasn’t here to buy, just eye. Every kind of household item could be purchased. Toilet rolls were piled high next to industrial strength floor cleaner. Dead fish – and a few live ones – were proudly displayed in plastic buckets. Fruits and vegetables of all description were piled on tables. This was predominantly where the locals came to shop, but there were a few tourists around too. One couple I spotted had attempted to go native by wearing lovely embroidered silks that most of the locals couldn’t possibly afford (Vientianites, like myself, mainly wore mass produced clothing from China). Another male tourist I spotted had grown a short, scrubby little beard that covered his chin and throat the like of which I was to see time and time again growing on tourists in Asia. It was the kind of beard you would find on those weasel-like pop pricks the Spin Doctors back in the nineties, and for some reason it really offended me. Perhaps it was because we were in South East Asia where men aren’t genetically predisposed to being hirsute. Either way, I found myself laughing at the extent to which I felt sickened by all of these Noel Edmonds loving motherfuckers. I mean, here we are in a relatively poor land with a deficit of facial hair, so what do the tourists do to integrate? I know, let’s wear silk shirts and sport tidy beards to show Johnny Foreigner how superior we are. Yes – we’ll wear clothes that look like yours, but they’ll cost a fucking fortune, and we’ll grow a shitty little beard to look world weary and wise while drinking frappuccinos in the tourist bars, because we’re incredibly wealthy and can grow hair out of our anal sphincters if we please.

Anyway, I digress.

The market wasn’t bustling - nothing bustled in Vientiane, not even bustles - but it was a great place to hang out and explore to get a taste of the working culture of the town.

I wandered back through side streets, soaking up the atmosphere, and found myself at a pleasant but soulless fountain near my hotel constructed purely for the recent tourist boom that Laos is experiencing. I lifted some Laos currency (Kip) from a nearby ATM. Kip is worth less than the paper it is printed on and can’t be exchanged for other currencies anywhere in the world, so it’s important to only obtain an amount you are going to spend before leaving Laos.

The Nam Phou Fountain

I ambled back to the hotel and spent a lazy afternoon on the balcony watching the day go by. In the evening I grabbed a quick curry from the grandly named (but not so grandly built) Taj Mahal on Rue Yonnet. The food was basic but tasty enough. I then walked down Rue Sethathirat where there was a choice of bars to dive into. I wanted to feel invigorated, to shake off the stillness of the town around me. I was hoping the Samlo Pub was going to rejuvenate and energise me and provide a crazy, wild night I would never forget. With some trepidation, I pushed open the front door and entered.

The pub was empty. I sighed and asked what beer they had.

“Beerlao” chimed the upbeat barman.

“What else do you have?” I asked plaintively.

“Beerlao” beamed the barman again.

“In that case, I’ll have a Beerlao please.”

The pub itself was clean and well decorated. I sat at a table and pulled out my phone. I had a Thai sim, and could still pick up a Thai signal so I had internet. I got busy texting and Facebooking my friends back home. Well if no one was going to physically join me, I was going to have a virtual piss up!

During my second pint, something amazing happened. The barman had slung on a mix CD, and the first tune to blare out of the speakers was “What Difference Does it Make?” by the Smiths. Here I was in a little bar in Laos listening to one of my favourite bands of all time. And it was to get better – “How Soon is Now?” and “This Charming Man” quickly followed. Then, The Cure came on – “Lullaby”, “Lovesong” and “In Between Days.” Marvellous!

I sat in an empty pub, drinking beer, dancing in my seat and texting friends. I’ve been accused of being a sad git before, but here is the ultimate proof!

Then suddenly – dangerously on my third pint – the bar door flew wide and a stampede of rather large Laos women blew through the bar. I was genuinely surprised that many of these girls were on the large side; it’s not something you often see in Laos. They congregated around various tables throughout the bar, chatting raucously with each other.

Before long the bar began to fill out. It seemed this place only got going after ten. I started chatting with a British bloke called Brian and his tall Belgian friend. Brian looked and spoke remarkably like Billy Bragg, and as I drank another pint, I actually started to believe he was Billy Bragg.

One of the Laos girls in the bar that Brian knew came over and started chatting with us. She was a bright, flighty girl, very skinny with a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. She introduced herself as Noi, and I would nickname her crazy Noi for the rest of the time I was in Vientiane.

By midnight, I had finished my sixth pint and the town was closing down. My alcohol tolerance was at an all time low, and I was all over the place. Outside the bar, I dropped my mobile phone and a concerned Noi managed to work out where I was staying so she could give me directions back. To be honest though, I have a “beer compass” that has never failed me yet. However, one thing you have to watch out for in Vientiane is the state of the pavement. Sometimes, the cracks are gaping holes that lead into the sewer.

The next day I awoke to the sound of imaginary crows tapping their beaks on my skull. I prised my eyes open and looked around my room. It had gone all wibbly-wobbly. I groaned, and contemplated ways of ridding myself of the pain from this terrible hangover, such as impaling myself on a ten foot spike, or hacking off my genitals with a rusty axe.

“Curse you Beerlao, you poisoned, seductive mistress,” I would have muttered under my breath had I the energy to do so.

I contemplated the last couple of days. I had done nothing, seen little, got drunk. The time almost felt wasted, but as I was to learn, taking a year off to travel is a marathon, not a sprint. You can’t expect to spend every day visiting fabulous sites, meeting new people and soaking up culture. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Like the Cure song, these first days in Laos were in-between days for me where I was adjusting to the new pace of life. Unlike the song however, it wasn’t yesterday, but today that I got so old.

A long shower brought back a semblance of consciousness, and I attempted to find a new place to eat at the Southern part of the town centre. On the way, a crowd of motorbikes were parked around a construction site, where a mobile crane was struggling to lift something from a ditch. In doing so, it had already knocked over a street lamp. A great crowd of people surrounded the ditch and the workmen looked uneasy as they worked in the mud. I thought that perhaps they had found an unexploded bomb but this was no wild speculation.

Laos is the most densely bombed country per capita in the history of the world. In the 1950s, Laotians fought a short, fierce war for independence from the French which led many unused bombs and anti-personnel devices scattered around the country. In addition, during the Vietnam War US forces carpet bombed the place to prevent the Vietnamese from using Laos to move troops and munitions so that even now, there are so many unexploded ordnances that it isn’t safe to stray from the path when walking in the countryside.

Beautiful chaos

I couldn’t really work out what was happening as the crowd was thickening all the time, so I trudged to the restaurant only to find there was no food left. Instead, I beat the weary path back to the Khouadin restaurant to fill my empty soul. Inside was another westerner – a British girl in her late twenties with waif-like curves, generous flowing hair and sensuous, deep brown eyes.

“Good morning,” she smiled warmly at me.

“’Wuuuuurrrggghhhh!” I scowled through lips that wouldn’t move. I grabbed a plate, piled it high with assorted delicacies from the buffet and found a dark corner where I could ingest my food like a fly. I immediately felt bad for being so antisocial, but the universe was determined I would behave like a dying insect for the remainder of the day.

And who am I to argue with the Universe?

This blog covers the period 19^th-20^th January, 2010.

Useful Links:

The great open source Wikitravel guide to Vientiane: http://wikitravel.org/en/Vientiane

The Travelfish take on the city: http://www.travelfish.org/location/laos/vientiane_and_surrounds/vientiane/vientiane

Danger UXB: http://www.uxolao.org/uxo%20problem.html

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My visa for Thailand expired at midnight. I had less than twelve hours to flee the country and travel over seven hundred miles. When you are travelling, your only real challenge is getting from one place to another, so why not add to that challenge by having to make a ridiculous madcap dash across the country?

Luckily, I had found a very cheap flight from Phuket to Udon Thani in north east Thailand. From there I was going to catch a bus to the Friendship Bridge between Nong Kai in Thailand and Vientiane in Laos. I wasn’t sure what time the bridge closed for the night, but I guessed it would be around 10:00pm (I was right).

The flight to Udon Thani was late and the queue for it was confusing since the queues for all the flights seemed to merge  into one big tangle of people. I found myself standing in the wrong place at one point and started panicking, thinking I had missed the plane. However, once I went down to the entry gate and looked around, the queue became more obvious: the Udon Thani district is where many of the go-go bar girls come from and the queue mostly consisted of excited, chattering girls heading home for a break. One kathoey was dressed as a man, probably as a show of respect for his family, but could hardly hide the flowing hair and long finger nails. He looked awkward. I felt sorry him.

In the end, the flight was straight forward and the minivan to the bridge was easy to find just outside the exit of the small airport. There were only a handful of foreign tourists on the bus, which made the journey more interesting as strange dialects clicked and clucked across the air. I looked out the window and noticed that the town was quite busy and industrious, and the houses in the suburbs looked comfortable and modern. Maybe the redistribution of wealth brought about by tourism and the prostitution industry had brought the place from agricultural backwater to modern metropolis. Either way, that’s a hell of a double edged sword.

About fifteen of us disembarked at the bridge gate two hours later. We gave our passports to the border guards and were stamped out of Thailand. At least I had made it out on time without breaching my visa agreement. On the other side of the gate was a bus queue, and feeling tired, I sat on my backpack waiting for the bridge bus to arrive. It’s funny how travelling can make you feel exhausted even though you do little more than watch the world go by through a dirty window.

Eventually a big, old, rickety bus came to take us across no-man’s land. I hadn’t bought a ticket as I should have done, but the bus driver took the eight baht directly from me. As we crossed the bridge in the twilight, I could clearly see the Industrial buildings and the houses on the Thai side; street lights twinkling, brightly illuminating the streets. In sharp contrast, on the Laos side, there was nothing but a dark tree line along the Mekong River and a couple of unlit buildings in the distance.

Five minutes later we were at the Laos border. At the customs office, we were handed entry papers to fill in and sign. There were a number of tables and benches nearby so I sat down and began to scrawl away as quickly as possible so I could be processed quickly. As I filled the papers in, a middle aged Laos man sidled up to me and peered over my shoulder. He offered me a pen when I clearly had one in my hand and I smiled and said, “No thank you.” He continued to stare at me like a dog eyeing a favourite chew toy. I continued scribbling until I became uncomfortable, picked up my bags and moved to another desk. As it turned out, he was a minivan driver who didn’t speak good English and was trying to find a way to introduce himself. One of the other travellers succumbed to his strangely polite advances and managed to snag a good deal into Vientiane for eight of us while we waited for our visas to be processed. I was the last to hand in my papers along with a single passport photo (I’d taken 16 with me from the UK) and 35 US dollars entry fee. Paying in other currencies incurs a heavy conversion penalty. Luckily I always carry at least one hundred US dollars on me when travelling abroad. It’s especially useful for border crossings, when you find yourself without any local currency and in, um, the USA.

Fifteen minutes passed and my name was called out first. They had obviously processed the papers in reverse order. I approached the office tentatively.

“You’ve been refused entry,” said the guard.

Before I had time to register the implications of what he had just said, he cracked a big grin and started laughing. “Only a joke!” he shouted jovially, and handed me my passport with the visa good for thirty days glued inside. If a border guard - normally straight laced and with an anal sphincter as tight as a wing bolt on an aircraft - could play with me like that, what would the rest of Laos have in store?

Visas processed, we shuffled through the barriers at the end of the bridge and piled into the minivan. It drove in darkness through the dusty outskirts of Vientiane and I didn’t take much in, knowing I would be here for a couple of days anyway. The bus driver stopped in Rue Pangkham, an area with plenty of hotels and guest houses, so I jumped out with two other backpackers and we trampied down the street looking for places to stay. We had already been warned that many places were already full by the driver, and after asking at four or five guest houses without any luck, we came upon the Phonepaseuth, which only had one room available. My travel buddies turned it down because it was too expensive – eight pounds a night. This was within my budget though so I asked to see the room, mainly because my backpack was already stripping skin off my shoulders and I was tired. The room was right at the top of the building – no lifts here – but was clean and had a balcony. By the time I got back downstairs I felt like Dawn French after a cake binge and was too tired to refuse it. I later learned it was the best room in the place – even the lonely planet guide name checked it. It was just as well as I later learned that most of the other rooms were windowless and cramped.

The view from the guest house balcony.

So there it was. I had travelled from Phuket to Vientiane in about nine hours without pre-booking anything other than a flight. What’s more, I did it all for less than fifty GBP and really enjoyed winging the whole thing, in addition to seeing some out of the way places that not a lot of foreign visitors get to see.

Useful Links:

The Friendship Bridge: http://www.gonomad.com/transports/0011/clontz_laos.html

Other useful info on getting to Vientiane from Thailand: http://www.laoworld.net/?mid=transportation&page=2&document_srl=4397

For visa on arrival into Laos information: http://www.laos-guide-999.com/visa-on-arrival.html

This blog covers the 18^th January, 2010.

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Thailand is affectionately known as the land of smiles by many visitors. The Thai people are slow to anger but quick to temper once roused, something I can fully appreciate. However, the wizened minibus driver that transported me from Krabi to Phuket was neither. He was perma-mad. His driving was as erratic as his thought processes, and they in turn were as erratic as a rabid dog that had just licked mustard onto its balls.
My new found friend Tim needed to catch a plane to Australia via Singapore whereas I was off to Laos. We booked a minibus to take us from Krabi to Phuket, but because of the kind of incorrect assumptions that are ubiquitous in all forms of human communication, we ended up being taken to the airport instead of Patong – Phuket’s main town. After a short, furious argument with the crab-faced minibus driver who refused to take us further despite generous offers of extra coinage (and even though he was going further for the other people in the bus), I jumped out, slammed the door and ripped out my bags, cursing vehemently at the slack jawed old fuckster. Foolish pedants rile me in any country.
We promptly found a metered taxi and hightailed it to my hotel in central Patong. Tim had an evening flight, so he temporarily dumped his stuff in my room. As we were leaving to grab some food he noticed a huge cockroach scurrying around the bathroom. I tried to catch it in a glass but it scurried behind the wall mirror. Unperturbed, I grabbed my trusty gaffer tape and sealed its exit for a couple of days until I was ready to leave. Gaffer tape is truly a traveller’s cure all.
We found an Indian Curry House nearby and ate our tasteless meals while we watched a gaggle of prostitutes across the road accost any man that walked by, flirting outrageously, cackling wildly and grabbing them salaciously in an attempt to spin them into their parlour. I have to admit that it was very funny to watch – the girls were so boisterous they were chatting up men walking past with girlfriends on their arm. A couple of times, they even shouted across the street to attract lone men to cross over. All this was done with playful high spirits, though realistically, it was also a successful business model.
We left the curry house and ducked past the girls on the other side of the street, almost disappointed not to be huckstered by them. It was mid afternoon, so Tim and I wandered down to the beach to see why this was such a tourist spot. Although bedecked by cracked and bloated bags of leather smouldering slowly in the sun (or package holiday tourists as they are sometimes called), the combination of sand and sea was actually quite pretty here.

We wandered around town for a short while, then Tim grabbed his stuff and we said our farewells, with promises to meet up again when I hit Australia.
After a shower, a shave and a shit, I donned my gladrags and headed onto the main strip to see what was happening. Down Ratuhit Road in the twilight, I passed a large building draped with illuminated hoardings. These advertised massages with a happy ending. It was the kind of place where your feet wouldn’t touch the floor when you left – which is probably just as well as they would be stuck to it otherwise.
It was a Friday night and my final destination, Bangla Road, was throbbing with energy. I idled up and down the neon-sprayed street, taking my time to eye up the best venues. As I walked, the crowd grew thicker. It merged and weaved, bodies dodging to and fro amongst the throng like fish in an outrageously lit aquarium. There were lobster coloured tourists fresh from a ten hour lounge at the beach glowing gently in the twilight, the older "farang" parading their latest female acquisition like ten year olds with a new toy, families trying not to lose each other in the fray, barely clothed Thai girls working the foreign boys and an assorted number of drunken partygoers, ladyboys and general freaks. It was all good.

Bangla road just before the crowd grew heavy.

A number of Sois (sidestreets) run off Bangla Road, but I didn’t head down any of them. They mainly seemed to consist of go-go bars and bar beers. Instead, for my first drink of the day I headed for familiarity - Scruffy Murphy’s - an Irish Bar that had a live band playing. It wasn’t so much that it was familiar or even that it had live music, but that it was moderately empty at this early period and I could sit down and have a drink without standing in a bustling queue for ages - something I can only tolerate after a few beers.
Inside I got chatting to a bunch of lads from the UK. I thought it funny that one Geordie boy was supporting Chelsea against Sunderland – and not because he was a Newcastle fan either. As a QPR supporter, I can categorically say I hate it when people support teams just because they are doing well. Look at the shit I’ve had to put up with supporting QPR (and Scotland for that matter) all these years! Yet still my allegiance is firm...
I left Scruffy Murphy’s and dodged into a nearby bar playing "One" by U2 simply because I liked the song. As it happened, the bar was called the U2 Bar. I ordered a Singha beer and "Going Underground" by the Jam came on – a song I love. I found myself singing along to it and just across from me, another bloke was doing the same thing. His name was Joe and was originally from Stoke but had relocated to Brisbane in Australia. Joe was a thoroughly nice bloke and we talked about music and travel in general. I bid farewell to him after a couple of beers as I was starting to feel pretty drunk and wanted to check out the Hollywood Disco across the road before full on inebriation set in.
Inside the disco, thumping dance tunes marched out of the sound system like an army of Titans on the warpath. The disco itself was a large rectangular room with a few tables and chairs on one side and wall mounted screens showing nothing of interest. The place was filled with a mixture of Westerners and Thais, all a bit drunk like myself, all intent on a good time like myself.
One of the main things about solo travel is that conversation is the best way of meeting new people. I knew that I would be drinking in Patong, so I had booked myself a cheap hotel so I could recover from the inevitable hangover the next day in peace. However, in a hotel it’s much harder to meet like minded people before going out the way you can in a hostel. Subsequently, roaming a large club trying to chat to people while music drowns out every other syllable becomes nightmarish. Additionally – and I don’t know if this is just a problem with me – but the bass sounds in a club tend to completely drown out the bass tones in people’s voices, so whenever someone talks to me they sound like they have just inhaled a lungful of helium. Nevertheless, I attempted to chat to a few groups of people, but the music was just too loud for the conversation to flow. I consoled myself by drinking Singha and watching some incredibly fit Thai girls gyrating on the dance floor before becoming bored with my inability to talk to anyone and leaving for my bed.
The next day I ached all over. My tolerance for alcohol was still pretty low – I had only drunk about six bottles of beer and yet it felt like Neil Peart was banging away on my skull as if it were his own drum kit. I lay in bed half the day with a James Bond novel, then trundled a short distance to the Kohinoor Indian Restaurant which was empty but served tasty food. As I walked back, a van seemed to follow me advertising a Thai Boxing match on Monday night – something the PA announcement made sure was lodged in my brain by repeating it three times. “Monday night! Monday night! Monday night!” Like a thirteen year old relative, it was amusing and annoying at the same time.
My stay in Phuket was a short one – I left the next day for Laos – but I think if I had stayed any longer I would not have enjoyed it. Brash and loud, the streets were scummy, unkempt and packed with people determined to enjoy themselves no matter what the cost to the environment or culture of the island. And I was no different. However, I had only stayed in Patong, which is no advertisement for the whole of the island. One day I will return to Thailand, and perhaps see a different side to Phuket, but for now, there is at least one nice thing I can say about Patong. It was sunny.

This blog covers the period 16th - 18th January 2010.

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Warning: There is no swearing in this blog. Or is there?

I travelled through winding passes bordered by thunderous mountains, crossed rivers and streams jumping and playing in emerald excitement, witnessed raw, natural beauty from craggy peaks with sheer drops. And at the end of my journey, there she lay: Krabbi Town, the shittiest old boiler of a holiday hole you could ever want to visit.
I fell out of the bus and immediately jumped on the back of a motorbike, backpack and all. The driver was a cocky son-of-a-bitch who immediately started going the wrong way down the main road until I tapped him on the shoulder and told him to turn around. Thank goodness for India - it had taught me just to give directions and not get involved in any kind of face saving activity.
I was safely though unassuredly dumped at the entrance to the River View hotel, where I was met by the very genial manager who gave me some good ideas for things to do in Krabi. Being a local, he was very informative and would make a big difference to my visit. I would book nearly all my trips with him and he actually waived his fee on one of them.
By now it was late afternoon and I was tired. I wandered down past the surprisingly named Krabi River, watching longtail boats puttering off to uncountable destinations.

I waited half an hour for this fucking shot...

I drifted back to the hotel in the twilight, wondering where the world had disappeared to. If this was a holiday town, then it must be where the dead came to spend their decrepit vacations, mouldering in stained wicker armchairs whilst talking about the state of decay, because there was little sign of life here.
The next day I strolled into town. At the central crossroads, large plastic gorillas sat atop the traffic lights. They didn't light up, they didn't move and they didn't crazily try to direct traffic into a big pile up, though that would have been funny. However, as Krabi High street is Squaresville daddio, it made a good reference point for when you were lost by the mundanity of the place.
Seemingly from nowhere, the over friendly motorbike taxi driver that had taken me to my hotel the previous day appeared before me as if he had just sloughed off Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. He shook my hand vigorously and attempted to set up a number of tours with me. I picked up the cloak he had just dropped and made myself invisible, walking away as if nobody could see me. He stared after me as if I was crazy, but I wasn't. I was invisible.
I whisked through the shopping centre, buying some swimwear for a trip I intended to take later in the week. The mall I found myself in was clean and modern and comparable to any western mall apart from the unfamiliar brands, which was refreshing.
I ambled around town and found a quirky little cafe that dressed itself down to look like a tribal kitchen. It was called First Corner and had a rather good selection of veggie food. The owner greeted me with a smile and went about the business of delivering my food laconically and without fuss. It was delicious and I returned there several times that week.
I headed down to the docks to see if I could get a boat to Railay, a supposedly beautiful peninsular with great beaches. The boat driver was waiting for eight people to turn up. I was the only one waiting so I decided to go another day.
Later in the evening I visited a bar called the Old West Saloon. It was supposed to be Krabi's hottest bar, but the only heat it was generating was hot air from the mouth of a rather loud American bragging about his travels in Thailand. I settled down for a few beers and pulled out my iPhone to see what was going on back home. After a little while, a young bloke who was one of the only other patrons in the bar that night asked to see what apps I had on my phone. It was an unusual request, but I let him have a peek and he seemed a little disappointed. It turned out that he was an iPhone developer and had a popular app available - an Alan Partridge soundboard.
We got chatting and Tim (as he was called) turned out to be a bright young man and really good company. We were interested in many of the same subjects and talked about technology (especially the iPhone), Ancient Egypt (we were both fans), music (comparing playlists), women (a sometimes endless and bewilderingly complex topic in itself), books, the environment, conspiracy theories and other general bollocks. Beers went down fast and turned into sambuca shots. Before we knew it, we were both battered, it was half five in the morning and we were staring into the faces of some very cheesed off bar staff.

Me and Tim in the Old West. It’s vaguely possible that I may be slightly drunk here.

Promising to meet up again the next day, we said our farewells and I stumbled back to my hotel. As I was entering, the sun was rising and the hotel manager was at the door to greet me.
"What was open at this time in the morning?" he asked, a quizzical smile upon his face.
I stretched my arms wide and slurred, "The whole town was open for me." For some reason I thought this to be an incredibly urbane response, and I hauled my slumped frame up the stairs to my room, giggling all the way.
The next day was a write off. Again i tried to jump on a longtail boat to Railay, but by the time I got down to the docks mid-afternoon, the last boat had sailed.
Instead, I ate in First Corner and met Tim down the Old West where we continued our conversations from the previous evening but in a naturally much more subdued manner, even managing to get an early night.
I had booked a tour the next day marketed rather lazily as the "James Bond Tour," the reasons for which will become apparent. However, the day would be spent around Phang Nga National Park, a truly wondrous place.
A minibus picked me up outside my hotel and took me to a larger bus which then sped around Krabi for an hour until we reached a small dock near the tourist town of Ao Nang.
The longtail sped off with about twenty of us on board, spray curling through the air and cooling our faces as we made our way past Coconut Island and on to Kao Majoo. Here we disembarked and three of us jumped into kayaks with a jovial local man who spoke softly in Thai as he paddled us around. We went through Tam Lod, a limestone cave that led into an isolated cove where a vital stillness silenced the voices of the other tourists around us. It was quite beautiful.

We ploughed on through a shallow sea, under arches and natural tunnels, past drenched limestone crags with greenery clinging to them like drowning men. The scenery was astonishing.

Nice

Next the longtail sped off through Phang Nga Bay to Ko Khao Phingkan. Here, a monolithic limestone crag called Ko Tapu pushes its way up 20 metres from sea level. This site was filmed in 1974 for the Man With the Golden Gun, and so the island is often referred to as James Bond Island. It really was a pretty little place, but unfortunately it's become so commercialised that stalls have been set up selling all kinds of tourist tat and shutterbug idiots like myself stumble around the winding paths of the island trying to make the best of the light, whilst essentially all taking the same photo.

The longtail took off once more, and the view of James Bond Island from the sea was quite spectacular. Being a scene locator for the film industry must be such a difficult job.
Next we headed for Ko Panyee. Sheltered by a huge limestone karst, this floating village was started by three Muslim families 200 years ago who weren't made welcome on the mainland. Now Ko Panyee is a thriving fishing port, and of course, a main stop in the Phang Nga Bay tourist circuit.

The village itself is colourful and well maintained with a mosque, a quaint little school and shops everywhere - mainly aimed at tourists but with some also selling fare for the locals. It's such an impressive place to walk around and soak up the atmosphere, but it looks absolutely amazing from the water.

Next, we headed back to the mainland and jumped on the bus that took us to Wat Suwankuha, or the Monkey Cave Temple.
One of the Buddha statues here had an unsettling stare, a bit like the stranger that your parents warned you about when you were a child. It was as if the real Buddha had been stolen and an Asda replica had been put in its place. I must admit though, I kind of liked this Buddha. He was quirky and different - so unlike all the other Buddhas I was to see on my travels.

The cave itself was large and dank, and filled with hanging bats high on the ceiling. It was quite interesting to explore for about five minutes or so. To the rear of the main cavern was an incline that led out onto a lovely, peaceful view of the rainforest surrounding the cave. None of my fellow travellers found this spot, and I stood there for a while, breathing in the sweet, clean air and marvelling at natures wonders around me.
Back outside the cave, some lazy macaques begged for nuts that lazy vendors were selling to lazy tourists. I ignored this sham even though the monkeys were cute, and jumped straight back on the bus.
We were driven overland to a wooded area where a small, unimpressive waterfall trickled gently through the trees. I explored the rainforest a little, bumping into a Golden Orb Weaver spider, much like those I had seen in the forests of Wayanad in India but much smaller.
Afterwards, we were returned individually to our hotels, and after another meal at the First Corner Cafe, I headed down to see Tim and some other travellers at the Bluejuice Guesthouse where he was staying. We had a few drinks and played a card game called Stupid Bastard which was new to me. Luckily I won. I don't know whether that made me a stupid bastard or not. I think I've just answered my own question.
The next day it was time for another trip. The usual deal - a convoluted bus to the docks, but this time we were in a speedboat headed for Ko Phi Phi. The boat bounced and frolicked among the waves as it sped across the Andaman Sea towards Bamboo Island. We disembarked, and I walked the empty beach while white sand and azure sea caressed my eyes.

I made my way inland and hid from the harsh sun beneath a canopy of trees. What a beautiful island!
We took off at speed again, past mountainous islands to Hin Klang, a coral reef just over a mile off Laem Tong Beach on Phi Phi Island. Here I went snorkelling for the first time in my life, and what an amazing place to snorkel! The water was pure emerald, with the brilliant, multi-hued coral clearly visible.
At first, as I struck out from the boat, I swallowed a couple of big gulps of salty water and gagged. I flapped around like a seal having a stroke for a few seconds, then I reapplied the snorkel and had another go. Once you get used to the mask and breathing through a pipe, snorkelling is great fun. Within five minutes I was gliding serenely above the reef, staring in awe at the hundreds of brilliantly coloured fish. There were angel fish and parrot fish, fast swimming long bodied fish with an electric blue colour zipping around my peripheral vision. I wasn't aware until later that the guys on the boat were feeding them, which accounted for their excitement. I swam with the shoals and they swam with me. I didn't want to leave the beautifully warm water, but eventually I pulled myself out once I was sufficiently prune-like.
Next we headed off to Phi Ley Bay. Phi Phi actually consists of several islands. Of the two largest, the southern one, Phi Phi Ley is considerably smaller than Phi Phi Don but no less beautiful, and the bay we entered had staggering, vertical walls over a hundred metres tall. It was so naturally beautiful, it looked as if it had been concocted as a CGI backdrop for King Kong or Jurassic Park. The only real problem with it was me. Well not just me, but the other tourists with me. And not just them either, but all of the other tourists on all of the other boats that clogged up the bay as the vessels slowly and carefully drifted about trying to avoid each other. It was like an exceedingly dull "dodgems" track.

We left the bay and floated past the Viking Cave. This place is used to "farm" birds’ nests for the famous soup.
We accelerated off to Phi Phi Don for lunch at a Hotel near the main port. The food was average, and I spent more time windmilling at flies as they buzzed around my plate. The beach was pretty though.

Interesting business venture on Phi Phi Don beach

After lunch we headed to Maya Beach which was made famous by the film, "The Beach" starring the cabbage faced Leonardo Di Caprio (long before Martin Scorsese grabbed him and moulded him into a decent actor). There were complaints at the time that filming there had damaged the island's environment. However - I would contend that this has only happened since the beach became famous due to the film, because now it's awash with lobster pink tourists scuttling over the sands.

The boat crew gave us an option to either land on the beach or have more time for snorkelling. We sped away pretty quickly, and headed to Lohsamah Bay where we snorkelled for nearly an hour. There was a lot of brain coral around here and although there wasn't the same kind of diversity in the coral, the fish were in even more abundance. I had really found my snorkelling fins by now, and was dodging, weaving and turning with the fish as they swam around me. It was an amazing experience.
Finally, we drifted past Monkey Bay (where there were no visible monkeys – perhaps they had found my Harry Potter cloak) before heading back to the mainland.
Phang Nga Bay and the Phi Phi Islands were quite beautiful and should be on anyone's itinerary if they are in southern Thailand. By the way, Phi Phi is pronounced "pee pee" as in, "Nanny, I just done a pee pee in my pant pants and need a damn good hiding."
That night, Tim and I decided to explore the town a bit and find a different place to drink. We started in Bluejuice and headed past the Old West where the barman was sitting outside playing guitar. I grabbed it off him and began to play it and sing in the street. I hadn't played guitar since I had started travelling five months earlier and I really, really missed the feel and sound of the instrument. After showing off to an empty street for ten minutes, Tim and I headed down Maharaj, the main street in Krabi and found a bar called Crazy bar. Crazy was a place for locals, and we were the only westerners there. A band played covers as diverse as Blondie, Queen and Abba. They were pretty hot, but most of all, the female backing singer was hottest of all. I couldn't take my eyes off her all night!

My favourite has her lips curled around, uh, a microphone here

Tim and I agreed that the Crazy bar was a pretty cool place to hang out (especially when he got chatting to a really hot girl outside).
I slept in a bit the next day, but I was determined to finally make it down to Railay. I headed over to the docks but again I was the only one there and the boat driver was waiting for more people to come. Railay was definitely more of an early morning trip. However I found out that there was another dock a short way away that could definitely get me there. I negotiated with a cab driver who drove me there and bought me the boat ticket too. I waited patiently with five other people but again, the skipper was waiting for two more bodies. After twenty minutes I got annoyed with waiting around and suggested to the other passengers that we all chip in the fare for the two missing people. Everyone agreed and we left immediately.
The boat trip was short but really showed Railay off at its best. It really was an amazing sight from the water. When we got to the beach however, the boat could only go in so far, and dropped us about a hundred metres from firm land. I traipsed across sinking sand, getting stuck almost up to my knees in some spots. After a real slog which involved an exceptional amount of cursing on my part, I eventually made it to land and washed all the slurry off my legs.
I ambled down the beach, then cut across the island to the beach on the other side which was actually a lot nicer. Typically though, I didn't hang around. Fear of sunburn and general tedium usually keep me away from prolonged stays at a beach.

Beautiful Railay

I got the boat back to the dock and was given a lift back to town by a lady on the boat which was kind of her.
That night, Tim and I went back to Crazy where the same band were playing. Then we headed further down Maharaj Street until we came to a club called Room 69. Inside there were about fifty evenly spaced elevated tables with seats around them. There were TVs suspended from walls showing pop videos and a DJ playing standard house music. The place was pretty full. However I noticed that the girls were all sitting at one set of tables and the boys at another. It was like the start of a school disco where everyone stares wistfully at each other until someone has the courage to break the spell and cross the dance floor, only here, there was no dance floor.
One guy came up to us and laughingly pushed a whiskey bottle towards my mouth. I'm no whiskey drinker, but this seemed to be some kind of male bonding ritual so I took a gulp and he drank some of my vodka red bull. There were smiles all round, apart from one of his friends who eyed us suspiciously.
Eventually the club livened up as the boys and girls mixed.
I can't say I enjoyed the club, but then I rarely do enjoy clubs. It's hard to make conversation with loud music blaring, and Tim and I were out of our depth since we didn't know anyone and didn't speak Thai. Plus, it was all a bit sedate and formal. When we'd had enough of this new cultural experience, we headed home.
So there it was. Krabi Town had more than done its job. What started out as ambivalence had turned into a love of sorts. Krabi wasn't charming, but it was was cheap, it was real and it had superb connections for seeing the local sights. Compared to nearby Ao Nang which looked like a tourist trap, Krabi was a relief from hordes of visitors tramping down the beach with hankies on heads and ice creams clamped firmly in hands. Like a favourite, grisly old relative, it was comforting to be around and ultimately quite loveable. I hope to see her again someday.

This blog covers the period 9th-15th January 2010.

Resources:

General Krabi resources:

http://www.krabi.com/

http://www.krabinet.com/

For Krabi nightlife ideas and other good local info, check out this page and site: http://www.1stopkrabi.com/articles/krabi_nightlife/

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"People are drifting like the waves on the sea, without direction like the restless wind, not knowing forward, not knowing back, just existing." Is There A Difference? - Howard Jones.

"It is more important to see the simplicity; to realise one's true nature, to cast off selfishness and temper desire." - Tao Te Ching Chapter 19.

Imagine a town where people get up in the morning, drop their kids off at school, then go to work in local offices, factories and shops. Imagine a town where people come home from work to watch TV with their families, or go down the pub with their friends to chat and listen to a live band. Imagine a town where dull modern buildings predominate, where a large Tescos sits on the edge of town, where cars and lorries trundle the roads all day. Sounds like any suburban town in the UK, right? Now imagine that this town has a magnificent thousand year old Buddhist Temple sitting on the High Street, where insects the size of your fist hum through the air, where brooding mountains with their own weather system perch on the horizon and where hundreds of miles of empty golden beaches are within an hours drive. Welcome to Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand.

I booked the minibus to Nakhon in Koh Samui, and after the uneventful ferry crossing to Don Sak Pier I was faced with a number of unmarked minibuses to choose from. I asked each of the drivers where they were heading until I found the right one. I was the only Westerner on board - a good sign.

I wanted to get off the beaten track, get away from the commercialism of the holiday islands and their hedonistic lifestyle. I wanted to live amongst people just going about their daily lives; to see a bit of the real Thailand.

The minibus tore through the Thai countryside, barely stopping to drop off the other passengers. As the heavily wooded hills flashed by, I kept wondering to myself why Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf was running in the local elections.

Has Chris Barrie moved to Thailand with political ambitions?

The bus dropped me off in the middle of town and at first I was a bit disorientated. My hotel was a couple of miles south of the centre, and I tried to work out how I would get there. Outside of the large cities in Thailand, there are no local taxis or buses. Instead, people are transported around via a Sàwngthàew (pronounced songtao) which is essentially a small truck with two sidelong benches in the back that people use like a bus. Your hotel will give you a guide to which of these to use when heading out, but if you arrive in town without planning, you could end up struggling to get anywhere.

In this case, a Sàwngthàew turned up and I tried to explain to the driver where I wanted to go but he shook his head sadly, the international sign language for, "I don't understand what you want and quite frankly I don't give a shit."

To be honest, he did as much as he could with the help of a passenger who spoke English, but this bus wasn't going near my hotel. However, the one that pulled up behind it offered to take me straight there for 200 baht. I knew it was a con - it should have been 10 baht and it should have gone around the houses picking people up and dropping them off before getting to the stop near my hotel, but I didn't know that at the time and had just been travelling in a cramped minibus for four hours and wanted to flop. On the spur of the moment, I did the deal without even bothering to haggle and was transported to the hotel with the Sàwngthàew to myself.

The Twin Lotus Hotel is a large, multi-storey building at the southern end of Nakhon. It's modern with a large opulent lobby and clean, spacious rooms, although they're starting to look a little weary. Still, at twenty pounds per night I was more than happy to stay there.

Hotel view

I dumped my stuff in my room and went for a walk (by the way, I'm getting sick of writing that line but it's what I nearly always do when I reach a new destination).

I found myself in the local superstore across the road. It was called Tesco Lotus, and was essentially a part of the Tesco group, but obviously adapted for Thailand. The right hand side of the store - like in the UK - sold electronic goods, stationary and clothes. Same brands, same products.

However it's the food section where the real changes are obvious. Noodles abound, the delicious scent of sesame oil and coconut drifts down the aisles, the people working the food stands and deli counter sing and shout for customers to come and view their wares, as if they are working on a Market stall.

Surprisingly in such a large store, I am the only white face visible. I see people staring at me, almost dumbfounded, as I walk around. Children stop whatever they are doing, their eyes bulging and their mouths agape in wonderment. Very small children being carried by their parents start to smile and instinctively reach out to touch my strange looking face.

The adults are no different, smiling at me as I walk past or pointing me out to their friends. I'm rather enjoying both their reactions and the attention.

I purchase my goods and head back to the hotel to devour them.

In the evening, from the 12th floor of the hotel, I watched the night descend quickly over the industrial landscape spread out before me. I ventured out, looking for a scent of the town - that unmistakable feature which makes it resonate to a unique frequency.

I wandered down the street outside the hotel where Google had told me there were a few bars. I walked dark, busy roads with little street lighting and no pavement. The trees, leafy and green even in winter, rustled gently and kept my only company as I walked. Nothing appeared to be open. I walked back to the hotel and further into town. A bar called Casanovas pumped heavy dance music into the night. It looked like a club full of very drunk Thai people. I didn't like the music, so I kept walking. There was nothing else around however, so I returned to the hotel, feeling defeated. Outside the lobby, I heard the loud click of an insect wing case, and turned to see a huge cockroach take to the air majestically like a helicopter to the tune of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.

The next day I took it very easy, trying to sort out some issues I had back home with my tenants (they weren't paying the rent), writing my blog and watching a little TV. In the evening I drifted downstairs to where a woman was murdering some Chinese songs to a piano accompaniment in this hotel's version of karaoke. She sounded like she had a vibrating love egg inside her, turned up to 11.

I headed to the outside bar, bought a drink and listened to the live band play a few competent but bland covers. There were about fifteen other people sitting around. One, a middle aged Thai man was sitting with what was obviously a kathoey, or ladyboy.

It's funny, but I can tell ladyboys quite easily. It's not just from lumpy throats or big hands either - it's mainly from mannerisms. Boys and girls have different patterns of behaviour, some innate, some instilled into them since they were born. It's this core set of behaviours that people who change sex are usually missing. If you're good at reading body language, you can pick it up quite easily, because the exaggeration of natural female mannerisms, or poorly acted - or especially badly timed - mannerisms will give the game away. Of course there's bound to be a few who you'll never spot as they are just naturals, but being a kathoey in Thailand is almost a fashion these days, and sadly, I believe gay men are driven to the op for financial reasons more than out of any real need.

The next day I moved to a hotel in the middle of town so I could be in the thick of the action.

I'd heard there was a little vegetarian cafe in town so I ploughed down the streets looking for it. The main street was packed with cars and motorcycles - people going about their daily business. I walked past a school where suddenly a thousand children emerged on their lunch break, cluttering the pavement. I felt like growling and roaring, legs apart and clawed hands held high in the air like a big, fat Godzilla scaring all the kids off the pavement, but instead I walked in the gutter so they wouldn't be in danger of tangling with the traffic. It seems that this one large school catered for the town and the surrounding villages, and it looked modern and well stocked. I passed by the central Market place where stalls were doing a firm trade with the locals. I walked past an ancient hand bell shaped stupa, blackened and leaning at an angle with age. I noticed a small but elegant temple on the other side of the road, with people coming and going, saying prayers and receiving blessings.

I couldn't for the life of me find my cafe though.

Ratchadamnoen – Main Street, Thailand.

On the road back, I passed by a garage where a bunch of mechanics were eating lunch. One of them shouted out "Hello!" and they all began to laugh. I turned and waited for the next sentence. They continued to laugh so I joined in. The caller jumped up, smiling and shook my hand. It seemed that was the only English he knew. Basically, the cheeky sods were taking the piss out of me, but it was all in good fun.

I passed a modern, clean restaurant with lots of Thai lettering plastered all over the windows, but the menu had one English word that jumped out at me - vegetarian! I ordered the dish - noodle soup with some vegetables in it. Simple but filling.

There was a Carrefour here. I dived in and bought some food for later to the sound of an hilarious tune that seemed to be a cross between 60s bubblegum pop and chanting monks - sung by girls with squeaky voices.

Thai Supermarket Music.m4a Listen on Posterous

I walked further up the High Street and clocked a couple of bars for future reference.

After a rest in the hotel, i went out in search of some nightlife. I passed the bars I had spotted earlier. There were girls sitting outside. They didn't say anything to me but I could tell straight away these were no bars. Clearly, they were bordellos for local men. One girl bowed lightly at me as I walked by and said hello. She seemed genuinely delighted to see a Westerner in her town, but there was no intent to persuade me to come in.

Light rain began to spot the pavement as I walked and I ended up at the Bovorn Bazaar where Market stalls and shops vied for trade during the day and bars waited patiently for custom at night. It was midweek however and nobody was out to play. I dodged a few shining, black carapaces as I trudged back - at least the cockroaches were in good form. A couple of girls dashed by on scooters, waving and shouting "Hello!" as they passed. I smiled and waved back, wondering where the party was.

Back at the room, a large cockroach had decided to keep me company. She spied me as I entered and froze, observing me, assessing the danger. She obviously didn't like what she saw as she scurried into a hole under the wardrobe and I never saw her again.

The next day I decided to venture down to the largest and most important Temple in Southern Thailand, Wat Phra Mahathat. As it was raining heavily, like all great idiot explorers I decided I knew a shortcut. I walked the backstreets right into a dead end on a building site. A wizened old man shooed me away whilst a man on a scooter laughed hysterically at my confused expression. He pointed the way out and I soon found myself back on the high street - Ratchadamnoen - and in a Sàwngthàew to the temple gates.

I spent a peaceful time wandering around the small stupas dotted around the temple. For the first time, I saw two Western girls who were obviously Buddhists as they made offerings and said prayers. Around the edge of the main temple was an array of golden Buddhas in their own enclosure.

Around the outside of the main enclosure, there were more golden Buddhas. Alongside them were a few golden statues of what I assumed were monks. These statues looked so realistic, it was as if their bodies had been covered by gold leaf after their death.

One of the many Buddhas surrounding the main pagoda. 

I sat on the floor with my legs crossed at the main entranceway to the pagoda, just enjoying the quiet ambience. Others would come and kneel or bow, say a silent prayer and then offer money for their prayer to be heard.

I wandered around the inner courtyard some more, noticing the lotus emblem on the pillars, then moved on to the attached museum. The museum curator, on old woman wearing a simple blue dress and wandering around in wrinkled bare feet tried to direct me. "You! Go here!" she shouted, pointing to a doorway behind her. I laughed at what would have been considered rude behaviour in my culture, but her English was poor and she was only trying to help, as determined by the huge grin on her face.

The museum housed a large reclining Buddha, and some great ornamental pottery and furniture. One wooden chest in particular had me captivated with its remarkable patterns interwoven with the likeness of animals. It was beautiful, and somehow reminiscent of the repetitive works of M. C. Escher. The date was marked 19th Century, which seemed unremarkable to me until I realised it was the Buddhist 19th century, making this piece mediaeval.

Face of the huge reclining Buddha

The museum was cluttered with lots of tiny religious pieces; small buddhas, old books used by monks, silver trees, rings and other general brick-a-brack that sat on dusty shelves, waiting to be discovered and loved. I found it all rather charming.

I left the temple feeling calm and very satisfied. Although it was the first Buddhist temple I had visited on my travels, I knew it would be one of the best.

I wandered back down the main street and began to sing a song in my head called "Is There a Difference," by Howard Jones. It was one of the few songs I knew with words directly influenced by Buddhist teachings, so it's no wonder my subconscious dredged it up.

As I walked, oblivious to the world as i sang the song in my head, I realised I was in the way of a girl on a motor cycle who had mounted the pavement and was waiting patiently for me to pass. I stopped at an intersection and took out my map to find my bearings. I felt something soft and wet on my foot (I was wearing sandals). I looked down, and the girl from the motorcycle was standing lightly on my foot and smiling mischievously. The people of this town certainly had a cheeky sense of humour!

I walked further up the road, exploring another small temple before finding a peaceful little river meandering through the edge of town.

That night I was determined to find a good place to have a beer. I asked at the hotel and they directed me to a bar on the highway called Bar 60. I walked down the highway through open air restaurants where people would cook up amazingly spicy fare at the side of the road and sell it to locals spread out on wooden chairs. Three stray ponies began following me down the road in the hope of a sugar lump. I found the bar - it was packed - and ordered a beer. I was sat near the entrance on an elevated floor, and people would say hello to me as they entered. A band was playing - very entertaining and constantly getting the crowd involved. I chatted to one of the female singers who did a cover of Linger by the Cranberries. She had an excellent voice.

As the evening wore on I enjoyed myself more and more, and although the language barrier prohibited any long conversations, little waves and smiles that I received all night made me feel at home. In fact, Nakhon reminded me of my home town, Stevenage, with its ordinary houses and dull work buildings, its cheeky people and lively nightlife. Earlier in the week, I had tried to find the essence of the town, and then I remembered the Stevenage motto: "The heart of a town lies in its people." If that is so then this town had a big, healthy, beating heart, pulsing with warmth and laughter.

Nakhon Si Thammarat. Say it once. Say it again. Feels good doesn't it?

This blog covers the period 5th-9th January 2010.

Resources:

http://www.everythingnakhon.info/

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Warning: My matrix filters let through sweary words.

"I was trying so hard to please myself I was turning into somebody else." Out of the Blue (Into the Fire) - The The.

The minibus driver threw his vehicle around the roads as if it were an unbreakable child's toy with plastic figures inside it. He obviously wanted to get back home in time for lunch, but at this rate we would be the ones who would end up as lunch - for worms. I can't say I was too worried though, I'd seen far more frenetic driving in India. The gasps and the screams of the other passengers were entertaining in their own right.

We were travelling from Surat Thani Airport to Don Sak Peer where the ferry to Koh Samui departed from the mainland. I had booked the flight from Bangkok as it was the only route available at the last minute.

As we neared the peer, a number of angular limestone mountains poked their ragged faces from beneath the earth like trolls; their hair, dense foliage which clung on at every precipice; their features, sun-bleached rock and shadow.

On the ferry to Koh Samui, I watched billowing cumulous clouds skate across the pearl flecked sky. An old lady approached me angling to find passengers to cart around in a minibus to hotels on the island. It could all have been a scam but it wasn't.

Approaching the island

The roads around the island weren't in the best of repair, but it's amazing to think that there were no roads here at all 25 years ago, the island being uninhabited at that time. Now there was infrastructure, but it was all a bit weary.

I fell asleep on the bus and as it came to a juddering halt, I jumped out still half asleep. Unfortunately it was the wrong stop. I was a mile from my hotel and had to march over a large, wooded hill, dodging bikes of all descriptions as they hurtled around the winding bends of the road.

I dropped off my backpack at the hotel and went for a walk. I was in the Lamai Beach area and it was mid afternoon. There seemed like a lot of bars around but not too many punters - probably still recovering from the night before based on the reputation this place had.

I found something to eat, a Tofu curry from a place advertising Vegetarian specials. The curry had a long thin spiral of hard aluminium in it - as if cut from a tin can. When I showed it to the waiter he just smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "Nothing I can do about it."

I made my way to the Shamrock, an Irish bar in the centre of town. There I got chatting to a madman who I shall call Luke.

Luke was in his mid-thirties and ran his own business which was very hands off, so he spent much of his time travelling the world living like a playboy. We had a good conversation about our travels, and he also revealed he had a few problems with people not liking him as he felt was far too practical and not very empathetic.

We downed more beers, chatted about football and music, and then started getting really drunk. He began talking about all of the many prostitutes he'd had and how it had clouded his judgement of women.

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"You can get anything you want here from P4P to GFE."

"Eh?"

"Pay for play and the girl friend experience. I do it so often now that I can't be bothered with women back home. Come, I'll show you."

We started walking around town and found some "bar beers". These are open air bars grouped in little clusters worked by bar girls who either sit around playing games like Connect 4 or dancing on the tables.

We drank more beers and chatted with the girls, then he pulled me away down the end of the High Street. Here was a massage shop with a collection of girls waiting for punters outside. He grabbed a girl and pulled her inside motioning me to do the same. The other girls tried to pull me in but I sat that one out at a bar across the street. He came out ten minutes later with a big grin on his face.

"Let's go clubbing."

We headed down to the Subterranean Club but it was mostly empty and not too entertaining. Next we headed to more bar beers. By this stage I was completely rat arsed, and must be honest that I found the whole thing to be a bit dangerous and quite exciting. Here I was, living it up in a town full of gorgeous and available women who all seemed keen on me. But as Marty Pellow once sang, I was living in a world of make believe.

We went to the Fusion Club but as we arrived Luke decided to call it a night - he had an early flight to catch the next morning. We said our farewells and I started to walk back to my hotel. Just as I reached it, a girl was emerging from the hotel reception and we exchanged glances. She was one of those girls I find immediately attractive for some reason (although the reason on this occasion could well have been twelve pints of lager). I started chatting to her and asked if she fancied a drink. We headed back to the club and got some more drinks in. Her name was Lek, she was 34 and Koh Samui was her home. We chatted some more and started to get on really well, and as the neon turned to fuzzy velvet and people started to duplicate before my eyes, I thought we had pulled each other. However, as the evening unravelled and my drinking spun out of control, I found out to my cost that I hadn't pulled Lek at all.

After a long, long lie in the next day, I got a phone call from my mate JJ. He and his better half Debbie were in town and we were going to investigate a few watering holes together. You may remember I met these two rapscallions back in Paris. Personally I think they are stalking me around the world and I shall do as much as I can to encourage this further. The first night was an easy stroll down to the Shamrock with JJ and I knocking a few back to the sound of a Filipino cover band thrashing out sometimes tuneful, sometimes painful songs, whilst Debbie had an early night as she is a girl.

JJ and Debbie

When JJ hit the skids too, I went back to Fusion bar. Again I have to admit that the whole thing was tantalising even though it was like looking at an alien landscape. I could see how people could get lost in this lifestyle. The Thai attitude to sex is liberal and natural, unhindered by the thousands of years of repression built into Christianity by St. Augustine in the fourth century.

There was a tap on my shoulder and there was Lek. She seemed a different person from the carefree girl I met the night before. She was clingy and manipulative, claiming a stake on me and directing my every move - especially who I kept company with. In fact, the only person she "allowed" me to speak with was her friend - a Kathoey (ladyboy) with flapping great hands.

Quite a few of the girls working the bars up and down Thailand like to keep a few foreign boyfriends on the boil, as they can be a good source of income even when they are back home. Lek was older than most bar girls, and although she was pretty and engaging, she probably wanted to retire soon. She was looking for a foreign sponsor and it seemed I fitted the bill. Although I was drunk, I hate being cosseted and so started to make my way back to the hotel. Lek followed me and I explained several times that, like Greta Garbo, I wanted to be alone. Finally, at my hotel door she got the hint and left. That was the last I saw her, but she would continue to phone and text me until I left Thailand and ditched my Thai sim.

I woke late the next day and idled, reading on the bed until my friends were ready to go out. Again we had an easy stroll down to the Shamrock with Debbie and I knocking a few back to the sound of the same Filipino cover band, whilst JJ had an early night as he is a girl. We walked down to a beach bar and chatted idly to the relaxing sound of the surf.

Lamai Beach, Koh Samui

And so it was New Year's Eve. Not the New Year celebrated in most Buddhist countries (it was actually the year 2553 in Thailand), but the Gregorian New Year of 2010. JJ, Debbie and I convened at lunch time and had a nice meal in one of the beach side restaurants. The beer was flowing freely, the talk was easy and hours disappeared in the haze of good times. We wandered into town late afternoon for more food and as night descended we found ourselves back on the beach, lounging on comfortable chairs. As midnight approached, Chinese Lanterns rose into the sky in steady streams from various points on the beach. More and more rose majestically, casting orange glows across the night sky until thousands arced their way over the island, outshining the stars.

Then the fireworks began. Rockets sped into the sky and burst a hundred glowing embers of all colours, aerial shells exploded furiously as if emulating the lifetime of the universe in the blink of an eye, pin wheeling detonations illuminated smiles and gasps while runaway Catherine wheels somersaulted along the beach. Cracks, pops and fizzles burst here and there to the smell of gunpowder and sea. It was violent and it was beautiful.

We drank some more and partied through the night. I was so pleased and comforted to be able to spend New Year with good friends. We walked back to town, but after JJ and Debbie retired I found myself back in the Fusion Club, attracted by the danger, by the unknown, by the sheer audacity of it all.

Fade to black...

I awoke in bed the next morning with a stranger lying next to me. She smiled and started chatting to me in Thai. I must have looked very rough, because she gave me a hug. I felt rough. I felt like a Zombie had eaten my brain and replaced it with a stack of nails which were now slowly making their way into the remainder of my skull.

I stared bleary eyed at the girl next to me, then hugged her back. I hugged her hard, spinning from the torment of a brutalised liver. I clung onto her for dear life as if I was about to fall off the edge of the world. We hugged each other and our movements were reassuring and tender, never sexual.

Her name was Lulu, she was 31 and she was from Udon Thani. She loved sad Thai ballads and spoke little English. Apparently, through sign language and a mixture of Thai and English I found out I had picked her up in the club the night before. I remembered none of this. I don't know what I'd promised her, but I paid her later in the day anyway just for clinging onto her like a frightened child for five hours and she looked at me rather strangely, smiling her quirky smile and clucking away to herself in Thai.

I hadn't come to Thailand to be a sex Tourist. I didn't want to end up like Luke; buying love and hating myself for it. My period of alcohol abstinence in India had lowered my tolerance, and the availability of cheap booze was obviously getting me so drunk that my base instincts were taking over. It just goes to show that when alcohol strips away our self image, with all of the associated assumptions and pretentions, there are some very basic driving forces at the core of us all.

I never ate at all that day.

Strange Koh Samui road sign that summed up my New Year’s day

The next day I bade farewell to JJ and Debbie who were off to another local Island. We went for lunch and I butchered some songs at a karaoke bar. It had been great seeing them - they were a link to my past - to what seemed like a different person in a far off age. In their presence they had kept me relatively sane, but I had changed in the last few months and was still changing; some strange metamorphosis brought about by new experiences, ever changing vistas and too much introspection.

Now it was time for me to move on too, find someplace where I was anonymous and free, but also out of temptations way.

For a while in Koh Samui I thought I would enjoy being someone who hasn't a care in the world, where no rules applied and where there was no such thing as responsibility - even to myself. I had been so intent on having a good time that I had lost myself in a place where nobody knew me. In a way, that is what my whole journey is about: to deconstruct all the familiar parts of my identity just to see what surfaces, to test myself, to gain new ground, to find different angles in a complex hall of mirrors. It's not always going to be successful as doing this relaxes your standard levels of self control.

The night before I left town I was sitting in a bar feeling bored and friendless when Lulu spotted me and approached, smiling. We gave each other a hug and sat together holding hands, content in each other's company. It was all rather sweet. Sometimes the loneliness of solo travel, or of a job that brings intimacy without emotion can lead you to miss the essentials of existence. The simple touch of another person, feeling their warmth, finding comfort in their presence without any obligation to be anyone but yourself. These are the things that make life worth living.

And in those warm moments in a ragged roadside bar in Koh Samui, watching the stars wink at each other across a black velvet void and listening to Lulu sigh, I found myself again, if only for a short time.

This blog post was written under the influence of Miles Davis and covers the period 28th December 2009 - 4th January 2010.

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Warning: Contains adult language and scenes of a not very sexual nature.

A vast blue sky cut through with flecks of white paraded itself over my head as I headed towards Bangkok from the airport. A brilliant sun bleached the immaculate pavements, grass verges stretched and yawned, verdant trees leaned lazily toward each other like neighbours chatting over a garden fence.

As my taxi drew in towards downtown Bangkok, I was surprised by the number of gleaming towers perched upon the horizon, bright and proud like statues lining the road to some ancient state capital.

I yawned. I hadn't slept all night on my flight from Mumbai and that electric fuzz that sweeps around your brain when you're convinced it shouldn't still be light was shorting out my neurones.

The car left the motorway and turned onto Sukhumvit Road in the heart of the city. There were few vehicles here and all were driving in an orderly manner. The streets looked deserted; I wondered for a moment if it was some kind of national holiday. The few people that were around seemed to pace purposely, carefully and oh-so-slowly down the street, as if walking the prow of a ship in high seas.

The tall, elegant structures of glass and cement formed a hollow canyon and enveloped me in shadow.

"Where has the world gone?" spluttered my tired brain. It was if the earth's atmosphere had turned to tree sap, and all of us poor fools plodding slowly through it were gradually being entombed in amber, to be poised forever in six billion moments of mundanity.

Perspective is a funny thing.

Many people who have been to Bangkok may be surprised, even dumbfounded by my description of it. Most say it is a bustling, noisy, energetic city with far too much happening all at once. However, besides being over-tired, I had just spent nine weeks in one of the most populous countries in the world, where walking five abreast is the norm, where traffic jiggles and bounces around like a badly animated cartoon, where you are surrounded by the constant noise of car horns tooting and people jabbering. In comparison, Bangkok was not just sedate, it was almost tomb-like.

I had splashed out on a nice hotel in the city centre called the President Palace as I fancied a bit of luxury over the Christmas period. As soon as I had dumped my gear, as usual I was out on the streets having a gander at this strange new world I had found myself in. The hotel was on Soi 11 - a Soi being a lane leading from a main road.

I reached the junction at Sukhumvit Road and as if from nowhere, an Indian man appeared directly in front of me. I thought I was having some kind of flashback.

"Excuse me sir, it's your lucky day!" he chanted excitedly.

"No it isn't" I scowled and slid around him. My spiv dodging skills acquired in India were by now well honed. Even as I left him behind though, I thought I should have said to him in Churchillian fashion, "Sir, it may be my lucky day, but sadly it is not yours."

I found a supermarket - I'd forgotten all about these things - and stocked up on fresh fruit, salad, fresh bread, and wonder of wonders, Marmite! It's funny how you miss the simple things when you've been deprived of them. I also found a pharmacy and bought the secret elixir that seems to cure all my ills - Pepto Bismol. I'd been suffering from diarrhoea for the last eight days and I was starting to feel like a human colander. Within a day, this stuff had fixed up my insides. When I inevitably succumb to some fatal disease I'll just chug some of this stuff to cure it.

After a refreshing sleep, I wandered back onto Sukhumvit and walked around, eyeing the many market stalls crushed onto either side of the pavement. You can buy just about anything here as long as it is fake - watches, handbags, wallets, T-shirts and underpants - all mimicking famous designer names. There was also a vast selection of hooky DVDs ranging from poor cams of the latest movies to top quality copies of TV shows and a range of random porn flicks.

I hopped on the Skytrain -  a modern elevated railway that runs through the heart of Bangkok. It was clean, fast, had a regular service and was beautifully air conditioned. I got off at the MBK Centre a large shopping complex that has many small independent traders. The fourth floor is packed with phone accessories and I picked up some Bluetooth earphones as a Christmas present for myself.

Outside, a boxing ring had been set up for a number of Thai boxing bouts between some local contenders. The fighting didn't look too convincing. It was a free event so the fighters were no doubt saving themselves for a money match.

As I headed back to the hotel, looking around at the sleek new cars and the sweeping overpasses, the people loaded with shopping bags and weighed down with jewellery, I thought how modern this city was and how much it must have changed even in the last ten years. Tourism has brought a boom to Thailand, and with favourable exchange rates and Western Multinationals moving in to take advantage of the new money in the country, Thailand, like the rest of Asia, is on the rise.

That night, I was determined to head out and investigate the red light district around Nana Plaza as I had discovered it wasn't too far away. I've always found run down, seedy places to be far more interesting than the new and opulent. I grew up in a New Town, so I'm used to the safe but mundane.

I threw on my glad rags and found my way to a small bar at the end of Soi 11 called Cheap Charlies. And cheap it was. Effectively a bar leaning onto an open road where you stand and drink, Cheap Charlies isn't going to win any awards for decor. However, the beer is cheap and the place has bags of character.

I started chatting to some British boys in their early twenties who were just finishing up their first tour of Thailand and were full of that all knowing world weariness that only youth can afford.

Inevitably, my bladder filled and I headed for the toilet - a frail wooden outhouse by the side of the road. Inside the stinking shack, I heard some scuffling near my feet. I looked down to see a furry friend had decided to pay me a visit - a rather large rat. Now I like rats, and this beauty looked terrified of me, but when it saw that I wasn't moving (for fear of spraying my feet in the cramped conditions) it just scuttled under some pipes and disappeared through a hole in the wall.

I returned to the lads, got some recommendations for their favourite places to visit in Thailand and disappeared into the night.

It was three days before Christmas and I still wasn't in the mood for festivities. It was 30 degrees at night and sweat was running down my legs. However as I approached Nana Plaza, the local red light district, I heard a ho, ho, ho. Three of them were walking down the street, chatting.

I ducked into a large bar called "Gulliver's Travels" that looked half empty. Various older "farang" (Thai for Westerner) were sitting around with much younger girls glued to their sides. Another bunch of girls were playing pool. They were very good at it too, suggesting they spent a lot of time in bars. I chugged my beer and moved on.

I walked down Soi 4. This was it. The red light district. I braced myself. I found another bar and dived in. It was pretty full with what appeared to be karaoke on the stage. This wasn't so bad, I thought to myself as I tucked into my fourth beer. Not nearly as seedy as I thought.

I looked around. The bar was populated with couples - Western men, Asian girls. I got looks of surprise from the men, as if wondering why I hadn't hooked up with someone yet. It's funny how expectations of behaviour vary according to your geography.

I ordered another beer and noticed that the awful karaoke was actually a band playing mindless pop tunes with vacuous lyrics such as, "I love you and you love me, will you marry me?" Apologies to anyone who used that sentence as a proposal.

I was getting increasingly drunk. A middle aged woman walked into the bar, screwed up her face, turned around and then left. A large glitter ball that had remained static for most of the evening now started to slowly rotate, spilling beams of light over the faces of the disappointed, the lost or the just damn strange. By now I was on my sixth pint and I was convinced this wasn't a red light bar. It was just too much like any European club but with a large proportion of Asian girls.

My tolerance for alcohol was at an all time low. I hadn't drunk this many beers in the last four months and I was starting to feel a little blurred around the edges. Then something happened that made me sit up with a clear head and bright eyes. No, I wasn't being genitally manipulated by some Thai girl; the band had started playing "Killing in the Name", and what a great cover it was too. Clearly, they were talented musicians - they had just been playing too much rubbish all night. I got up and made it to the dance floor, stomping around manically and screaming the chorus when it came along - so much so that the singer beckoned me over for the final chorus and handed me the mike, where I happily screamed the final line over and over, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" Three days later I was surprised and thrilled to find out it had been the Christmas number one in the UK.

I staggered down the road after chucking out time and started chatting to some Brits who were standing by the corner of the main road. A Thai woman was getting drinks from somewhere and bringing them over to us. I was just happy to still be drinking. As we were talking about Bangkok and our first impressions of it, I was approached by a Thai girl in her mid twenties. I was giddy with the cooking lager by this stage and don't remember a lot of what she said, but I do remember she was very restrained and started relaying some kind of sad story to me. I suddenly realised where I was, that I was more drunk than I should be and it was time to go home.

As I was weaving down the road, two more girls approached me and tried to convince me that I should take them both back to my hotel. They were very pushy and aggressive with their proposal, but softened it all with smiles and laughter which deeply confused me.

I made my excuses and left.

The following day I had a nice long break from the world, watching telly and reading. I noticed that the Thais seem to love sad songs. I watched a few music videos - each portraying tragedies more graphic than the last, culminating in a video for a slow, melancholic song drenched with minor chords in which a tearful girl watches over a boy in a coma who then wakes and chases her from the hospital only to see her hit by a car. I was laughing my arse off.

I decided to upgrade my room for Christmas and as I stood at reception paying for the extra amount, one of the young interns stood at the counter, hands clasped together, smiling and bowing every time I spoke. She was so cute that I wanted to put her in a cage and keep her as a pet, although unfortunately there are laws preventing that, even in Thailand.

I went for a walk and up at the intersection, there was my Indian mate again. He was a Sikh and his job obviously wasn't sitting well with him as he almost had sorrow in his eyes as he spoke to me. Sikh's have a fearsome reputation for honesty, so perhaps that's what was making him uneasy.

"Hello sir, today is your lucky day..." I tried to remember the undelivered response from two days ago, but I got confused and just waved him away with a stern, "No."

Christmas Eve, then, and no one to visit. I'd done some internet research and found out that although I had been near the red light district I hadn't actually been in the thick of it. With that in mind, I dressed as a vagabond and melted into the darkening alleys. This time I found Nana Plaza straight away.

A square surrounded by three stories of bars and clubs with names like Fantasia, G-Spot and Hollywood. Random neon flashes across your face in all possible colours. Transient people enter and leave the square constantly. They often come in as a party of one and leave as two or more. But others arrive too; working girls striding in to start their shift or returning from an earlier job;  voyeurs like me just here to observe the human cavalcade of oddities - such as each other.

I sat at the bar in the centre of the square and bought a beer. A couple of girls working the bar eyed me seductively. I ignored them and they left me to it. I watched the streams of people melt and flow through the place, observed their initial hesitance as they stepped across the threshold of the square or the boldness of their movements as their intent became clear. Some had come looking for love and affection, others a quick grope and a cheap fuck. One thing was for sure - if you had money you could easily buy the second and at least the illusion of the first.

The bar girls now started laughing and joking and throwing me glances - trying to draw me in. One came straight up to me and asked where I was from. We started chatting and I bought her a drink. I asked her where she was from. It turns out that she came from a place where most of the professional girls in Bangkok come from, Udon Thani, a relatively poor agricultural area in the North East of Thailand. The girls from this area are slightly darker skinned than their Bangkok counterparts and are looked down upon for being uncultured peasants. Sadly, the TV and billboard adverts for skin whitening cream in Thailand are unremitting.

Bella, as she called herself, was remarkably open about what she did. She told me that a lot of the money she earns goes straight back to her family in Udon Thani. In fact, it is common and accepted there that a girl from a local family might be in the city, "working for a hotel."

As we were chatting, there was an almighty commotion from one of the nearby go-go bars, and a huge crowd formed. I stood up, and since the bar was on a raised platform, I could quite clearly see two of the bar girls going at each other ferociously. Fists were flying, hair was being pulled, red faces and tears were evident. I felt terrible, yet loads of men were standing around laughing. I wanted to jump down and split them up, but there was no way I was getting through that crowd, and to be honest, I would probably have been set upon by the locals for interfering.

After about five minutes or so, the fighting stopped. Only pride had been seriously wounded and the crowd started to disperse. The winner of the fight stomped back into the bar with her nose in the air and the loser stood around crying with nobody to comfort her. I don't know what she had done but I just felt like giving her a hug. However, I was in a red light district and that kind of behaviour could easily be misconstrued. The crying girl wiped away her tears and slunk back into the bar.

Now my curiosity was really piqued. I left Bella and walked down to the go-go bar which the girls had been fighting in front of. It was called Rainbow. I breathed deeply and walked in.

A long bar stretched from where I sat to the wall, mirrors on the floor, mirrors on the ceiling. Older women walked the space in between, making sure I had a full drink. Girls strutted on top of the mirrors. Music played. They shuffled tiredly. It was like watching performing animals in a circus.

I yawned. One of the girls yawned. I yawned again. Three girls yawned. At this rate we would all be asleep in ten minutes.

As they continued to shuffle tiredly across the stage looking as bored as I was, I looked around at the clientele. Nothing unusual; a few Japanese salarymen, older western guys and a few young bloods  looking goggle eyed. A mamasan approached and asked me what number I would like. I didn't understand until I looked up at the girls and realised they all had a number pinned to their skimpy costumes. I politely declined.

The music stopped, the girls got down from the stage. Some of them sat with men who had expressed an interest, the rest disappeared into a room in the back where another set of girls emerged, climbed the stage and set off on the one step shuffle all over again.

It was a machine churning out flesh for consumption and short term relationships as inconsequential as the whisper of a lover in a half remembered dream. There was more life to be found in a body bag, more excitement to be had at a Royal Variety Performance and more sexuality to be gained from a mouldy pork pie.

I left the square thinking it was all a bit dull.

The next day was Christmas. I'd spent just about every year with my Mum at Christmas, and as the day dawned, miles from the people I loved, I knew that this day would never be special. Instead of pretending to enjoy it, I did little. I walked the streets of Bangkok, harrying with the local vendors. I stood at the street corner where the Sikh salesman usually accosted me in the vain hope I could use my killer line. I found a local vegetarian cafe that made me an amazing Thai curry for Christmas dinner. Sated, I paced back to the hotel and watched episodes of 24 on some hooky DVDs I had bought.

I could feel a strange sense of ambivalence in me. On one hand, I was in a nice, easy place to live with all the amenities a modern city provides. On the other hand I was bored. My time in India had changed me, and I was in a transitional state.

My friend Anil Nadig had once warned me: once you leave India you will miss it - the vibrancy, the crowds; the sense of being alive. I laughed it off thinking it would never happen, but he was right. Here I was, looking for some kind of thrill and excitement in any way I could find it.

Perspective is a funny thing.

This blog covers the period 20-27th December 2009.

Useful links.

Bangkok Hotels.

Bangkok Nightlife.

Things to do in Bangkok.

Travelfish Guide to Bangkok.

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Tips for Surviving the Subcontinent

India is a place of extremes, from lavish wealth to abysmal poverty; from beautiful natural landscapes to brutal urban slums; from blissfully peaceful settings to areas where you'll receive constant harassment; this country is guaranteed to induce emotional highs and lows in any traveller. It is certainly not for everybody, but if you have a keen sense of adventure or require an experience that will give you a jolt, India will thoroughly reward you. Extreme poverty, hideous pollution, an endless tide of touts and scammers and very poor infrastructure is offset by a diverse and warm people, amazing scenery and fantastic monuments, temples and history.

Culture shock is something you will definitely experience no matter what part of the world you are from. India is highly populated and the sheer number of people around you can be overwhelming at first. However, it's also important to remember that violent crime is low - generally the worst thing you'll experience is being ripped off by commission touts or a crushing bout of diarrhoea.

Single female travellers may find it harder than others; Indians interpret Westerners from our own media - especially advertising - which has a habit of depicting scantily clad "available" women. Thus many Indian men think all western women are of loose moral virtue and may try to get away with the odd sleazy approach or even grope. If possible, hook up with other female travellers, or if you find yourself in an intolerable situation, loudly draw attention to it - Indian men are easily shamed in public.

Travel

Be aware that many travel agencies in India are merely commission men who book through more reputable agencies and pocket the extra money you give them. Nearly all hotels and hostels can arrange flights, taxis etc. and usually only charge 5-10% commission which saves you the hassle of standing in the queue at the railway station. Always ask for a quote first and if you feel you aren't getting value for money, phone around or search the internet for comparable deals.

Railways

Travelling by train is a rewarding experience in most cases. However it can be confusing if you do not know how things work.

When you buy a ticket, you will either be assigned a seat number immediately or put on a "wait list" shown as W/L on your ticket. The wait list will consist of two numbers. The first number is the position you start the wait list on. Thus if you are waiting at 19th in the queue, 19 will be the first number. The second number is your current position, so in our example, initially that will be 19 too. However, if two people above you in the queue cancel, the second number will drop to seventeen - you will be W/L 19/17. Two hours before leaving the station, all the seats that have been set aside for dignitaries and railway employees etc. will be freed up and there's a good chance you will suddenly find yourself with a seat. I've started a wait list well into the 30s and still been assigned a seat two hours before departure, but it all depends on the train and the type of seat booked.

The railway carriage you are assigned to will often have a list stuck next to the door with all of the people booked and their seat numbers, so if you cannot check whether you have been assigned a seat via phone or the internet, turn up and check the carriage door. If you can't see your name, you can then decide if you want to take a chance and bluff your way on. You will usually be able to pay for either an upgrade or downgrade (be warned that a downgrade could mean travelling in a filthy carriage jam packed with people in very hot weather with no air conditioning).

For bookings, use the Indian Rail Website. You can use international credit cards to book, but the site is a little flaky (it has many, many users) and it may take a few attempts to actually book anything.

For more information, check out Seat61 which contains lots of useful information about riding the trains in India.

Taxis

Taxis and are cheap in India. Fares vary between states, but sometimes a pre-booked cab is the only way to travel, as you can go from A to B whilst visiting C and D on the way. Cabs can be booked via hotels, local travel agents, or take your pick from the local yellow pages. Drivers are generally reliable, honest and can occasionally act as a guide or even as a minder to keep away those pesky hawkers. Cabbies are normally paid a reasonable wage, so it is in their interest to keep you happy so that they keep their jobs. However, watch out for the fly-by-nights who offer you great deals on the streets. Their vehicles are usually on the verge of extinction and you may have to sit in sweltering heat while the driver tries to fix it every five miles you travel.

Vehicle Hire

Obviously you can hire a car in India, but almost invariably you have to return it to its point of origin. It's the same deal with bikes. Make sure you are a confident driver, as you'll need nerves of steel to confront the Indian road system.

Auto-rickshaws

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was by cloning himself all over the world and going into the auto-rickshaw business. Treat every auto-rickshaw driver as a cheat and a liar (because they are). Do not let them take you anywhere other than your actual destination. Aim to pay 10 rupees per kilometre (it's actually less but that is a fair price) and make sure you agree the price up front (metered auto rickshaw drivers will drive you around for ten kilometres before dropping you off at your destination which was three kilometres away). Okay, so not all auto-rickshaw drivers are the devil, but in most big cities they will rob you blind or cart you around to every handicraft shop in town where they earn a commission before leaving you bruised and battered at your destination. Always refuse to be taken anywhere other than your destination and be firm about it, or you will be ripped off or exposed to high pressure sales techniques that can easily turn ugly.

Nearly all major railway stations have prepay auto-rickshaw stands outside them. Take your time and find these, or ask for directions at the information desk in the station. When you find them, you usually pay a nominal fee of 1 or 2 rupees to the stand and are given a ticket with a fair price to your destination. You will generally get no hassles from these drivers as they only get paid to take you where you want to go, but do not give the ticket to the driver until you reach your destination - he will not be paid without it.

Most importantly, do not encourage touts by going with the first idiot that latches onto you when you leave the station - you will pay between 3-5 times the regular price and encourage "good" drivers to the dark side when they see others making silly money by being aggressive at the station entrance.

You have been warned.

Buses

State buses have regular services - often hourly - to long distance destinations and can be jumped on at most central bus stands. You pay the conductor once you have climbed aboard in cash only. They are cheap and can get very packed at certain times of the day, but are definitely worth a go. Most state bus drivers are clinically insane and blind to any other traffic on the road. They also have a phobia about taking their foot off the accelerator.

More comfortable buses can be booked, but for me they weren't comfortable enough to justify the extra cost and the driving was almost as bad. At least you get the ultimate hair-raising thrill of nearly dying on a state bus. Don't sit at the back though - the buses thunder over bumps and pot holes in the road like they don't exist and you get the full spine rattling effect in the back seat.

Planes

I must admit, I only used Kingfisher Airlines as they had extensive internal routes, were cheap and were excellent in terms of service. However, there are other airlines you can use such as Jet and Air India.

I did have problems using my credit card on the Kingfisher Airlines website, in which case I used Ebookers for the same price plus a 5-10% commission.

Skyscanner is a good resource for finding cheap flights.

Rules of the Road

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

No seriously.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Haaa!

Okay, from meticulous study, the only rule I've worked out is that there is a hierarchy of objects on the road. Let's start from the lowest to the highest in order of importance (and therefore right of way).

Women. Sorry girls, but if anything is going to be run over it is you.

Children.

Men.

Bicycles.

Motorbikes.

Bicycle rickshaws.

Auto rickshaws.

Cars.

Vans and trucks.

Buses.

Finally the thing that gets complete right of way, the humble cow.

Travel Essentials

Immunisation. See your doctor at least six weeks before you travel to find out what you need to be immunised against.

A visa. Make sure you have one - nearly everybody requires one to enter the country.

Travel Insurance valid for what you intend to do (action sports etc.)

A medical kit including sterilised needles.

A mobile phone. Essential for emergencies and useful at all other times.

Conservative clothing - you need to cover up not just in Temples but on the streets. Local people can become indignant at the sight of foreigners wandering around in beach wear - even on the beach!

A torch and spare batteries (or even better, a wind up torch). Power cuts are rife all over India.

Toilet paper. Some hotels don't stock it, so always carry a roll just in case.

Mosquito repellent. Those pesky flies are everywhere - especially near areas of stagnant water where they breed. Deet based repellents are most effective, but be aware that deet is toxic and can cause allergic reactions.

A mosquito net.

Anti-malarials if you are going to a high risk zone.

A rain jacket. Even outside of the monsoon period, Indian skies can deliver lots of water very rapidly. Monsoon periods also vary between geographical regions, and some places have more than one monsoon.

A universal adapter for plugging in any electronic items you may have such as a mobile phone.

A pen knife or multitool.

Gaffer tape. Great for temporarily mending bags, mosquito nets, even clothes at a pinch.

Needle and thread.

A travel pouch. Something discreet that you can wear under your clothes to keep passports, credit cards and money safely hidden from the clutches of pick pockets.

Passport sized photographs. Always useful in case you lose your passport, need a phone sim or decide on the spur of the moment to get a visa for Nepal or something further afield.

Earplugs. India can be a noisy place especially in the cities.

A padlock and chain for securing your bags on trains, buses and even your hotel room. The padlock can come in handy to lock doors in some hostels/hotels where the lock is broken.

Two photocopies of your passport, kept in separate places in case you lose the original.

Phone numbers - emergency numbers, credit card and bank numbers etc. Keep a printed copy in case you lose your phone.

Loperamide (Imodium) tablets to stave off diarrhoea temporarily on those long journeys. 

Accommodation

The variety of hotels all over India is vast, from renting a room in a converted palace (seriously) to a grubby, rat-infested toilet (seriously).

If you are just turning up in the hope of finding cheap, quality accommodation, then good luck! Always ask to see a room, check the toilet to make sure it has working facilities, lift a pillow and have a look for bed bugs (also on the floor next to the bed) and have a quick look behind furniture or in dark spaces for cockroaches. Smell is also a fairly good indicator! Make sure windows shut properly or you could end up being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

In my opinion, the best way to find decent accommodation is to discover what other people think of a place. This is where the internet excels. My favourite sites for checking the quality of a place are Tripadviser which has hundreds of user reviews of different hotels and B&Bs (some of them very amusing) and Hostelworld which has cheap but usually good quality accommodation listed (again with user reviews). Remember that you don't have to chose a place in the top five listings; many decent places can still be found half way down the list.

I also found Booking.com quite useful in reserving the actual rooms as they don't have an obvious surcharge (I've used most of the big booking sites and they are only good value if you can get a deal when staying more than one day). Hotels.com is a useful alternative, but you will pay a surcharge at the end of the booking process.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that Guest Houses are a poor option. There are some fantastic, clean and inexpensive options all over India. Just do your homework first on the above listed comparison websites.

Homestays are a great way of meeting Indian families and having a great adventure too. I stayed with my friend Anil at the Buena Vista Hut in Wayanad. Check out the site - it lists other homestays around the country too.

Health and Safety

Get comprehensive insurance before you go. I hate insurance. As an insider in the insurance industry for several years I know what a con it can be. However, comprehensive travel insurance is a must. When it comes to your own personal health, you do not want to be stuck in some backwater medical facility suffering from an infected wound just because you can't afford proper treatment.

The biggest threat by far to your health in India is on the roads. According to statistics, India has the most dangerous roads in the world and once you see how Indians drive you'll understand why. Learn how to cross the road properly - always keep your wits about you, keep a steady pace and always stare at the oncoming traffic, gesturing for them to slow down with an upraised palm. Keep looking both ways especially as you near the far side of the road as some people travel the wrong way on bikes near the kerb. Most tourist accidents involve scooters or motorbikes. Only hire one of these if you are confident handling them and you think you understand how the road system works (which I doubt because not even Indians know that). Never drink and drive - the roads are crazy enough when you're sober, and always wear a helmet on a bike.

Malaria is something you should not ignore and dengue fever even more so. Visiting most areas of India does not require you to take anti-malarials (see this map for details of malaria hotspots) but you should always use a deet based mosquito repellent spray or cream (Odomos is a cream you can buy in India which is actually very good). Cover your feet, legs, arms and head (either with clothes or repellent) and wear bright clothing (mosquitoes love emos). The truth is, some people attract mozzies more than others (I'm lucky - I rarely get bitten) and infection rates are quite low but prevention is better than cure - malaria and dengue are rotten illnesses, sometimes fatal. The bites themselves can become very itchy, irritating and occasionally infected.

Diarrhoea is a very common traveller's complaint in India. If you get it, drink lots of fluids with rehydration salts when necessary. If it persists for more than two or three days, seek medical help. Dehydration will weaken you severely and if left untreated can damage your internal organs or kill you.

Always drink bottled water and make sure the bottle is properly sealed as there is a scam where old bottles are filled from the tap and resold. Crush all bottles after you use them to avoid this. You can obtain water purification tablets from any good travel shop for emergencies. Tap water in India is often unchecked and unreliable in terms of cleanliness, and most Indian people have built a natural immunity to many of the bugs that would wipe a foreigner out. Because of this, also avoid ice in drinks.

Similarly, be wary of street food or empty restaurants where "static" food is being exposed to flies and other environmental nasties. Peeled or cut fruit is usually a bad idea unless you cut it yourself.

As part of your medical supplies, bring a sterilised needle kit - you can't be certain that in a medical emergency you or your doctor will have access to a clean needle giving rise to the risk of infection from Hepatitis or AIDS.

Many animals carry rabies in India - you can catch it even if a dog licks an exposed cut on your skin. Rabies is fatal, so be wary of any roaming creatures, no matter how cute they look.

Communication

There are many public phone booths/shops available in India. Just look out for the PCO (local calls) STD (inter-state calls) and ISD (international calls) signs - usually around Internet Cafes which are easily found due to the fact that there are so many of them.

Phone sims can be purchased for your mobile if you have a passport sized photo available. I used Airtel which has extensive coverage all over India. You can also enable GPRS for internet requirements. It is extremely cheap compared to using your own sim card, even for international calls. Note that you have to enable roaming if leaving the state you bought the sim card in, and topping up - which can be done at any small mobile phone shop - will cost slightly more if you are roaming. Make sure your phone has an IMEI number or you won't be able to use it - India banned the use of unregistered phones in December 2009 in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.

Scams

Indian people are generally reserved by nature, so anyone who approaches you on the street - especially near transport hubs and tourist attractions - is doing so because you are being singled out as a tourist and therefore a source of income for them. Of course this isn't always the case, but the number of ingenious scams going on in India that will separate you and your cash - sometimes in very large sums - is endless.

Usually, a firm "No!" will do, but India is the land of the persistent scammer and you must be persistent in turn by putting the palm of your hand in their face or telling them to go forth and multiply vociferously - or better still, be prepared to completely ignore those who approach you as if they didn't exist.

The most common offenders are auto-rickshaw drivers who will attempt to charge you as much as possible if you are from out of town, or try to take you to their "brother's" shop or hotel where you will be massively overcharged and the driver will earn a nice commission out of you. Other scammers just stand around in the street waiting for their mark (i.e. you) and will strike up a conversation with the classic "Where are you from?" or by claiming they are just practising their English.

There are many dodgy travel agents in India too - always shop around or ask your hotel what they can offer. "Too good to be true" offers are usually there to entice you into a place where a trap will be sprung and you'll end up literally paying far more than you bargained for.

Never use a credit card for purchases - cash only. The temptation for some unscrupulous shopkeepers to run up a number of transactions on top of the official one is just too great a temptation. Hotels are generally trustworthy in this respect.

Tout's are usually confidence tricksters - that is, they will try to gain your confidence with sweet words concerning great deals (or even a meal with their families), but you will ultimately pay the price when dumped off on a high pressure sales team or are deposited in a quagmire of a hotel which has the best front desk you've ever seen, but the worst rooms. Again, use common sense. Source all of your hotels or guest houses first and only use these touts if you are desperate and willing to pay the price (which should never happen with a little preparation).

Scammers always ask you if this is your first time in India. This is to determine how gullible you are. Always answer "No."

Never accept food or drink from a stranger. It could potentially be drugged (it's a known scam) and you may end up waking up without your possessions in a hospital with sore orifices (okay, so that's a worst case scenario, but you will usually be robbed at the very least).

There are many other scams in India. To give the scammers credit, some are actually beautifully inventive. To keep up to date with them, check out your guidebook or the IndiaMike Scam Forum. Don't get depressed about all of the scams out there - following the above advice and simply knowing they exist will ensure you don't fall prey to them.

A final word of warning - corruption is rife in India, so try to avoid any reasons for having to contact the local police. You may end up having to buy your way out of any situation you find yourself in.

Shopping

India has been trading goods with other nations for thousands of years and haggling runs in the blood of most Indian people. It is in fact a very social practice and somewhat of a battle of wills. Remember, the idea is not to try to grind someone down so they hardly make a profit, but to reach a mutually acceptable price. What you have in your favour is that if one bazaar is selling that carved rock elephant you desperately want, another will also be selling the same a few metres away and a threat to buy from another trader will nearly always get you a price drop.

Major shops and chain stores operate in the same way as the West, and options for bargaining are limited, but many independent shops will nearly always display the maximum price they want for an item (if there is a price at all).

Remember, as a foreigner you stand out, so prices will often be three times as much as an Indian would be quoted. Start by offering a third of the price and start haggling up. If you don't get the price you like, walk away. This act in itself will usually be enough to get you the price you asked for. If not, there will always be an opportunity to get that item somewhere else.

Toilets

Some would say this is not only my favourite subject, but the main inspiration for my sense of humour. Personally I think they're talking out their arses.

Most toilets in Indian hotels and guest houses are western style. Occasionally you will find squat toilets where you straddle a hole in the ground, squat down and drop one into it. Many places have a small "water gun" hanging by the side of the cistern. This is for spraying a jet of water into your arse crack to clean it. Personally, I found these to be very hygienic - especially for the hot climate - keeping your anus clean, fresh and itch free, especially if you have piles.

Public toilets are few and far between and are about as hygienic as a blocked sewer (which is often what they are).

Showers generally come with two buckets - a large one for filling with hot water which you clean yourself with and a smaller one for filling with the water from the big bucket to pour over yourself. You don't have to use these if the shower works however.

Beggars

Do as your conscience dictates. I've seen a beggar pull out a mobile phone to tell another beggar I was travelling in his direction. I've also seen desperate, starving people that have nearly brought me to tears. Whatever you decide, I would advise not to give to children as this only encourages them (and whoever may be coercing them) into a lifetime of begging and poverty. Instead, buy them some food and do as I do - donate money on a regular basis to one of the many charities that support the poor all over the world. Contrary to popular belief, they don't actually spend all their money on advertising - that's just an excuse for the apathetic and tight bastards.

Also, consider getting involved in an aid program.

Resources

IndiaMike is in my opinion the best travel resource for India, with an excellent forum for any questions you may have about your trip.

Virtual Tourist is useful for seeing other traveller recommendations for local places to visit, especially nightlife. Good scam information here too.

I love Wikitravel. I use it all the time to source possible destinations for my travels.

Lonely Planet guides can be both exasperating and a joy, mainly because of their over-exuberant scare mongering and because every hotel they recommend is full of people carrying Lonely Planet guides. Still, they are definitely useful - especially their "walking tours" if you are only in a place for a short time. Their forum is pretty good too.

Travel Junky is a witty and irreverent site that looks behind the scenes of the major travel destinations. Thoroughly entertaining.

British newspaper, The Guardian’s take on India.

British Government Travel Website is useful for seeing if riots/natural disasters/terrorist threats/alien invasions are coming to a town near you.

The Indian Ministry of Tourism website has some useful info to help plan itineraries, and most importantly lists all the Tourist Offices which are actually very helpful in India.

Foreign Embassies in India. Use this resource to note details of your embassy should you lose your passport or be involved in an accident or crime.

The Library of Congress has a list of Indian Internet resources.

Indian Blog Entries

Overwhelmingly, people comment that one of the most entertaining and informative blogs on India is by a dysfunctional miscreant called Rob Jamieson. Actually, only I would say that, because it's me.

All of the information above is distilled from more than two months of travelling around India which I have extensively blogged. The blog is descriptive of all of the sites I have visited with plenty of pictures and sometimes video clips, and is also highly personal and hopefully amusing. But don't trust me until you've checked it out for yourself.

I've listed each place I've visited in chronological order and by place name to make it easy to scan if you are planning an itinerary. Some links go to the same page if I've covered two places in the same blog.

Bangalore

Chennai

Mamallapuram

Pondicherry

Kumbakonam

Thanjavur

Madurai

Bangalore (again)

Mysore

Wayanad

Kozhicode (Calicut)

Ernakulam

Kochi (Cochin)

Allapuzah (Allapey)

Kovalam

Trivandrum

Padmanabhapuram Palace

Kanyakumari

Goa

Delhi

Agra

Taj Mahal

Jaipur

Jodhpur

Udaipur

Mumbai

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Warning: Contains vivid depictions of toilet related escapades and graphic scenes of monkey sex. So what's new?

Mumbai from the air is a bewildering sight. Large areas of high rises and commercial buildings are interspersed with strange patches of undulating grey - like the view through a monochrome kaleidoscope. As the plane nears the ground, these strange blotches coalesce into millions upon millions of small ramshackle buildings with corrugated roofs squashed into a maze of tiny alleyways: the Mumbai Slums.

I had chosen a hotel near the airport for the first night because it was cheap and downtown Mumbai is notoriously expensive. I dumped my stuff and went on my usual reconnaissance of the local area. I was on the busy Mathuradas Vasanji Road, teeming with life, overcrowded with noisy vehicles. I passed a few restaurants noting which I could use later. A foul, heavily polluted river oozed nearby.

I walked around the edge of some slums. I wanted to walk down the darkening alleyways but strangely, it wasn't the threat of any danger that stopped me, but the feeling that I would be intruding. I was tired from the flight - air travel always knocks me out - so I grabbed dinner and went to bed early.

The next morning I did a little research and found that I was near the Nehru Centre, so I opted to stay another night and explore the area more. I wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find something interesting. This may sound like an ineffective way of doing things, but it usually works very well for me as I love walking and nearly always find something unusual or interesting to see that is off the beaten path. Today wasn't to be one of those days. I walked for what seemed like miles past nothing but construction sites and empty buildings. Feeling tired under the onslaught of the midday sun, I hailed an auto-rickshaw. It took five minutes to explain where I wanted to go before I gave up on the driver and continued to walk in the general direction of the Nehru Centre. By now my underpants were filling with sweat and my continuing diarrhoea made every fart potentially fatal.

Suddenly, my driver reappeared driving slowly along next to me. Apparently he had become enlightened and knew exactly where I wanted to go. Dubiously I climbed aboard. We trickled down the road in gridlocked traffic for five minutes before pulling in at a petrol station. He left me alone in the rickshaw while he disappeared for a while before jumping back in again. We stop-started down the road for a few more minutes before he turned left at a junction, did a U-turn and joined a queue for another petrol station that looked so long it could probably be seen from the International Space Station. We had travelled a grand total of fifty metres in twenty minutes. Exasperated, I tapped the driver on the shoulder and said, "I've had enough."

Seriously dehydrated from the diarrhoea and the temperature, I jumped out of the auto-rickshaw, bought a huge bottle of water and retired to my room for the rest of the day where I regained my strength gradually. During the evening, I let rip with what should have been a huge pump. Instead of the usual entertaining frapping sound, there was a dull pop. I can only conclude by saying that my fellow Stevenage alumnus Lewis Hamilton may be a better F1 racer than me, but I can leave more impressive skid marks.

The next day, I booked a cab to take me to the Hotel Oasis, a cheap downtown hotel I had booked online the night before. I shared the cab with a girl called Kay from Oxford who, by coincidence, was also going to the same hotel.

We drove in the clamorous Mumbai heat, casually chatting. I warmed immediately to Kay - she was well travelled, good natured and entertaining.

We stowed our bags and took a walk into town. We walked past an elaborate police station which the guards outside wouldn't let us look at for security reasons. Since the Mumbai attacks, there are armed police posted all over town.

We hit the Gate of India down by the docks, a large stone edifice similar to a triumphant arch designed by the British for a visit of King George V. I thought it was tired looking and preferred the view of the misty (polluted) bay.

We walked past the Taj Mahal Hotel which had been a focal point of the Mumbai attacks, with explosions, executions and people escaping from windows by tying bed sheets together. Around the block was the famous Leopald's, a Mumbai Café Bar where we had lunch. The food was average, and later I found out that more people had died in this place during the attacks.

We continued to walk around downtown Mumbai, taking in the University and High Court - all very grand and European in design and architecture.

As the sun was dipping we visited Jehangir Art Gallery. Although it contained some exceptional pieces, I found it pretty uninspiring. However, the good thing about this place is that it has a high reputation in the Indian art world and artists are on a fairly rapid rotation, so give it a go - you might get lucky.

Back at the hotel, I noticed a black spot on my pillow. I shook it and the black spot fell to the floor and slowly started crawling away. Repulsed and without thinking, I stamped on it. A thick sheen of crimson blood spattered across the floor. My blood - it was a bed bug.

The next day, Kay and I went on a long walk. First, we headed to Chatrapati Shivaji (Victoria) Railway Terminus, a grand and eloquently designed building, where thousands of people traversed the platforms.

I found a large colony of cockroaches scurrying around the ticket office in broad daylight. These were obviously the cockroach equivalent of the marines as they showed no fear as I approached and observed them.

We headed to Crawford Market - an amazing place which defines the word "lively". I saw a kitchen sink being sold there, so there's no limit to what else was on offer. I'm also pretty sure I saw a fully working light sabre, the One Ring and the Ark of the Covenant near the pitches of Elvis and Lord Lucan.

Crawford Market – this women is an expert at ignoring hawkers. Kudos!

Crawford Market – a young woman with something on her mind sells vegetables.

We walked further afield towards a mosque which we never found, where the streets took on an almost rustic, Gallic appearance.

Then we found our way into the backstreets and past some makeshift slums. A little boy was joyously playing in the streets and Kay noticed that his mother asked him to beg from me. He didn't - that kid will go far.

Back towards town we ran across more dilapidated dwellings by the side of the road.

One of the major things I noticed about downtown Mumbai is that on the whole, it was sedate and modern, with a few grand historic buildings thrown in too. And the biggest difference of all? No cows. I didn't see a single heifer swaggering around like it owned the place. The thing is, I'm a vegetarian so I have a real fondness for Hindu beliefs. However, letting cows wander wherever they like, although an admirable trait, simply isn't practical. Firstly, the cow needs to eat a lot and consequently, defecate a lot. When you have cow pats all over the road coupled with poor or nonexistent public services, sanitary conditions spiral down. And let's face it, if the mighty cow can shit and piss all over the place, why shouldn't people? I surmise that is why a lot of people follow suit - apart from the fact that there are large numbers of homeless people in the big cities. Not only that, but the cows end up eating rubbish left out in plastic bags. The plastic bags get entangled in the cow's gut, leading to a lingering, painful death. Personally, I think Mumbai is leading the way in not allowing cows into the city centre - intentionally or not. It certainly is one of the most sanitary city centres I have seen in India.

The next day, Kay's friend from England, Davita turned up. She was quick witted and lively and kept the conversations moving along nicely. We headed for Elephanta Island - a popular Mumbai tourist spot. On the island are many cave temples with embedded shrines. Most of the statues have eroded with age (the temples were carved out around 1500 years ago) but the most impressive statue of a three headed Shiva that stands six metres tall is both a captivating and immensely beautiful work of art.

There are several colonies of monkeys on the island and they caused mischief all day, from stealing some of Kay's lunch to a huge monkey war which we were lucky enough to witness. The monkeys were pin wheeling, gesturing and physically battering each other on the nearby hillside while others looked on dumbfounded. There was also some dirty monkey sex if you're into that kind of thing. They were going at it like England footballers at a fashion show, prompting one young lad to embarrass his mother by asking what the stringy, viscous fluid hanging from one young monkey's fingers was.

John Terry, yesterday.

That evening we relaxed by going to the Taj Hotel and sipping cocktails in the bar. We attempted to find the Insomnia nightclub but it had been temporarily closed. Never mind - I don't think any of us could have lasted the night anyway. I said my farewells to the girls - it was to be my last night in Mumbai, and in India.

The next day I packaged some books and clothes up to send back home. In India, you have people who parcel up your package in front of you before you mail it. As I stood opposite the Post Office while a large demonstration was going on outside it, the parcel wallah asked me to step away from underneath the overhead trees. I didn't understand why until a few seconds later a large white streak flashed down on my black shirt. Dirty pigeons!

I dispatched my goods (it cost more for me to post them than to initially buy them) and grabbed a cab for the airport.

It had been nine weeks, twenty three towns and cities, seven states and over three and a half thousand miles of travel. I'd been bitten by insects, stalked by giant arachnids, met some wonderful people, bumped into a few scoundrels, witnessed some heavenly places and been torn up by some terrible sights. India is truly a country of extremes; wonderful, absurd and intangible.

Most importantly, in India you always have a keen sense of the here and now; of being alive. Every sense is active, every heartbeat felt.

There is no other place like it in the world.

This blog covers the period 13-19 December 2009.

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Warning: I like to say rude things and I'm a very naughty boy.

Pale winter sunlight falls gently on the amber earth. Stunted trees rise from the arid soil. Occasionally, a swathe of green cuts through the crenulated hills as irrigation ditches crisscross the landscape to nurture large paddy fields.

A soft wind blows; the rice gently yields.

In the distance, a roaring beast thrashes along a pit filled road, belching smoke and furiously beeping at eternity. Sat inside this monstrosity, I smile at my driver's lack of fear and ignorance of danger. I'm used to it all now. We pass the open countryside, disturbing a few geckos. A distant hawk flaps its wings. Then we are gone in a cloud of dust; thundering through the next valley, careening around every bend in the road.

For a fraction of a second I see a girl carrying a large clay pot on her head. She is making her way to a small well near the side of the road. She is about twenty, though the sun has aged her slightly. However, those harsh rays can do nothing to diminish her beauty. She is adorned in a peacock coloured sari - blue, green, gold - all melting around her slender figure. Lustrous black hair falls loosely around her shoulders; rich brown skin forms tautly around her high, regal cheekbones; wonderful, large brown eyes stare straight into me.

It is a perfect picture-postcard shot that only exists in my mind and she will remain frozen in time, forever within my memory.

We drive on.

The landscape opens out once more. We speed through a wide expanse of almost desert-like terrain. A huge backlog of lorries has blocked the road for about a mile ahead of us, but it's not a problem for the driver, he just jumps into the opposite lane until we reach the blockage: a lorry has skidded across the road. Luckily, it has just been corrected as we reach it and with a tasty bit of driving he nudges the vehicle to the front of the queue and drives off down the open road. First class.

Back up into the hills again and we slow so I can observe a man driving oxen round in circles to mill grain.

We thread through the hills then hit a plain where the small town of Falna is situated. We sweep through the town and just before we hit the railway crossing I see a young girl raking her arms through a big pile of rubbish looking for something that has recycling value. My driver speeds on but the image stays with me, for now the onslaught of the Delhi slums comes flooding back. I was too shocked by the poverty I saw there to even acknowledge it - never mind act on it - but now I know what I have to do.

At that moment, I had enough money on me to pay for my food and lodging for the day. I would give that little girl a day of my travels; just one day to me but possibly a lifesaver for her. She was only a single person, but it is said that a random act of kindness can trigger a chain of events that brightens any number of lives.

I asked the driver to turn around. He looked confused as I asked him to drive slowly so I could find the little girl at the side of the road. We crossed back over the railway. I searched. It was definitely here, near this big pile of rubbish. I got out of the car. I looked up and down the road, searching frantically for her. I was possessed. Nothing could stop me from doing this deed. Nothing except for one thing. She was gone.

I cursed slowly and wretchedly under my breath. I kicked a big clod of dry earth into the air.

I hadn't acted quickly enough.

Dejected, I climbed back into the car, thinking good thoughts about her for the rest of the journey, hoping that my feelings would somehow filter out into the world and evoke the same butterfly effect that the gift of a few rupees might have done.

Half an hour later, I was in a queue, chatting to a middle aged Indian man about my travels. As I told him of all the places I had been and how Kerala and Rajasthan were the two most beautiful places I had seen in India, I could see pride shining in his eyes.

The queue was for Ranakpur Temple. Whenever you visit a place that has been described as stunning, incredible or amazing in tourist literature, then your arrival at such a place is often accompanied by a gnawing disappointment that you try to ignore. Such was my predicament when I laid eyes on Ranakpur temple for the first time. Sure, it was pretty, but incredible? Such superlatives are only truly justifiable for places that are great wonders of the world, for people who have changed many lives for the better and for things such as my penis. (A girlfriend once said, "It's a wonder." Her following words were, "I can feel it." Unfortunately, I fear it was all part of the same sentence).

I stepped inside the temple and was almost immediately accosted by a "monk". I put monk in inverted commas simply because this guy looked more like Sinead O'Connor on a very bad day. Also, he was carrying a dish with a 100 rupee note in it and asking for a donation.

This immediately made me wary. Firstly, hadn't I already paid to get in? Secondly, why was a holy man asking for money – aren’t alms always given freely? And thirdly, why was he using a known psychological con like having a single item of the largest denomination possible in his collection plate (the con is that you don't think about not giving - he's a monk after all - but you don't want to look like a cheapskate so you match what's already there, and he's obviously not rich as he only has one note in his collection). Caught off guard, I did give him a donation, but only for 20 rupees as I thought he was being cheeky. In hindsight, I realise he was a complete fraud as he wasn't wearing a facemask or brushing the ground before him to avoid killing any small creatures as all Jain monks do.

It's a shame that some of the people you meet in holy places are the last people that should be there - I think the Catholic Church can vouch for that at the moment. In fact, things have been getting so bad on the religious front lately that I've been inspired to start my own religion and these are the rules. Firstly, sins of the flesh are no longer sins. Go forth and do what you want in a mutually agreeable manner. Secondly, drinking is not a vice, it's an obligation. Thirdly, all murderers, rapists and paedophiles shall be burnt alive. And with that, I've just realised I'm the devil. Any takers?

I started to wander around the temple. This is when it started to hit me that this place is actually very beautiful. Nearly 1500 white marble colonnades, each of them carved differently, hold aloft domes and carved archways giving a cavernous feel to the temple.

Every column is different.

Extreme wide shot to show the roof and the columns supporting it.

Column detail.

The inside of the temple feels like it is shining even without direct sunlight.

I walked around feeling calm and very comfortable, yet there was a nagging feeling that I was missing something. Then I heard the source of my disquiet: a very distinct noise just like a kettle expelling steam but without a whistle. I turned around and almost jumped out of my skin. A man who looked like a cross between Ron Moody's Fagin and the Child Catcher from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" was beckoning me to follow him. As if this wasn't chilling enough, his smile alone looked like it could cut paper. Due to his surreptitious behaviour, the fact that I had been conned in a temple before (see blog here) and his Texas Chainsaw Massacre looks, I ignored him. Still he persisted, blowing and making as many different quiet sounds as is humanly possible, but if there's one thing my mum taught me, it's not to talk to strange men - especially if they look like they want to rob you, bugger you and cut off your head (and not necessarily in that order).

I continued to look around, unimpeded this time and examined a number of statues and carvings. Not for the first time in India, I marvelled at the intricate craftsmanship and the many hours of labour that individual people had put into this masterpiece of a building and I wanted to know who they were; to shake the very hands that had made all of this beauty surrounding me.

I find my car and we steam back off into the mountains. The driver beeps repeatedly on an open road, but I suppose it’s because he’s still cruising down the wrong side of the road for no good reason at all. In the fields, circular hay roofs sit atop bales of hay like badly woven wigs. Broken rocks spill across the road in defiance of man’s intrusion. The wildlife wisely continues to avoid us.

After an hour we start to approach Kumbhalgarh Fort. However, we’re now looking hopelessly lost, stopping to ask the locals directions every five minutes and with my GPS showing no roads at all in our vicinity, we're literally off the maps. I really don't mind though, the countryside around here is rugged and beautiful and the local people colourful and friendly. In fact the drive itself is one of the highlights of travelling between Jodhpur and Udaipur. At one point I jumped out of the car and took a picture of a woman and her children walking down the road in the distance. I waved to them and the kids waved back, but not the woman. It was only when I examined the photograph a few days later that I realised why.

We make it to Kumbhalgarh eventually and I start the long trek up the mountain.

Another fort, another long arduous climb, but if you want to see a fort, you don't generally stroll up a hillock. What with all the walking and diarrhoea it's no wonder I lost twelve pounds in India.

As you ascend the fortress grounds you can see a small run-down village and an extensive temple complex stretching out to the surrounding countryside, but unfortunately I never had the time to explore them.

The fort is out in the middle of nowhere, but it was once in a very strategic position. Built by Rana Kumbha in the 15th Century (he also built over thirty other forts), it was used by Mewar warriors to fall back to in times of attack. The wall surrounding the fort is the second longest in the world and held off all but one occupation - from the great Moghul Emperor Akbar (see my blog on the Red Fort at Agra here) - which only lasted two days before the fort was retaken.

Kumbhalgarh is wonderfully deserted except for the monkeys that scamper and play around the grounds. The only effort that is made to maintain it is to keep it in its current state of disrepair. But that's what I loved about it - its authenticity. No audio commentary here, or even guards strolling the halls. No furniture or paintings either - in fact some parts aren't even lit and a bit of exploring in the dark with a couple of flash photos revealed empty dilapidated rooms inhabited by pigeons and no doubt rats. However what you do get is atmosphere and tons of it.

The main courtyard.

Some of the rooms upstairs from the courtyard are dark and barely decorated, but the wind blows through all of the screened windows, making a sound like a thousand people whispering, as if the previous inhabitants over the past six centuries were trying to tell their story.

The views from the roof of the surrounding countryside for miles around are vivid and immediate for which photographs can do no justice.

There are hardly any other visitors here and you can explore at your leisure. And that's another great thing about the place - there are many nooks and basement rooms that you can wander around if you have the time, a flashlight and a helping of courage - some rooms are pitch black.

I wandered back to the car and my driver tore down the road to Udaipur as if his driving earlier had been a Sunday stroll for him. We made the town as the sun was beginning to dip and I was greeted by a worker from the guesthouse who led me to it and booked me in.

I staggered to the bathroom and let loose an almighty gush of watery excreta. The diarrhoea was getting worse.

I flopped on my bed. It had been an exhausting day full of sights and sounds, ups and downs. I immediately wanted to tell someone all about it and the first person who popped into my head was my mum. And then I got that jolt again. That fiery, blue, electrical arc that twists through your mind every time you are grieving for someone but had temporarily forgotten they were gone. It's one of the worst feelings in the world - like waking to hear the same news day after day that someone you love has just died; a constant realisation that you've lost something very beautiful and precious.

Tears came. They flowed for what seemed like an age. But this time, instead of the usual deep sorrow and an unending pit of loss yawning before me, something different happened. I felt an overwhelming sense of love, warmth and respect for my mum. After all, it was her that nurtured me to become the big, fat idiot I am today. And you know what? It's fun being a big, fat idiot, doing big, fat idiot things. I'm mostly happy with life and that sense of well being was derived from her.

This was an acceptance of sorts and the following days would bring a real acknowledgement of all the things my mum had given me over the years.

I fell asleep feeling like I wasn't alone for the first time in months.

The next day I took some rather unconvincing pictures from the rooftop of the guesthouse, then stalked the streets of Udaipur looking for adventure and whatever came my way. Nothing much did.

A rickshaw driver asked me if I wanted hash, cocaine or a lady. I laughed in his face and strolled on. In smaller towns like this, ignoring hawkers works a treat. They start off with the usual, "Hello, excuse me sir", and when they see I'm not taking any notice, their voice diminishes, their tone drops and their words peter out. Perfect.

I wandered further and a smart, eloquent man of around forty started chatting to me, saying how he was taking his business to an expo in Birmingham (lucky him). He really built this up for about five minutes and then asked if I would be so kind as to check out his exhibition to see if it was worthy of being shown in the UK. When I politely declined he seemed to give up all his pretences and asked if I wanted to buy some drugs. I made my excuses and left.

A man of around twenty body checked a young European girl on the street and stared at her like a piece of meat as she walked away. She looked both embarrassed and intimidated. Suddenly enraged that any man should do that to a woman, I did the same to him, leading with my shoulder and digging my elbow sharply into his ribs, making sure it hurt. His look of surprise and pain showed me he didn't like the taste of his own medicine, but he definitely got the message. I was immediately set upon by another tout trying to sell me drugs which made me wish I had followed through with my fist.

I strolled down to a bakers shop and ate a tasty pastry while I watched cows and dogs shit in the road. Flies swam in shoals around my head.

I sauntered down to Lal Ghat at the side of nearby Lake Pichola where women were washing their clothes and an old man was bathing naked. Here I could see Jagmandir, the island upon which the Lake Palace Hotel is situated. You may recognise it from the movie Octopussy, and if you don't, you can watch one of the endless nightly reruns of the film in some of the local hotel bars.

Walking back through the bustling streets to my guesthouse, a boy of about twelve cycled up to me and beamed a brilliant smile.

"Hello!" he said.

"Hello," I smiled back. And then he was off, clattering down the streets on his tatty old bike. Brilliant.

Nothing seemed to be happening in Udaipur and I didn't really mind. For the first time in a long time I didn't feel any drive to get out and explore everything around. And that was fine. I would just enjoy my stay here as if I lived here rather than rushing around all of the tourist traps. I returned to my room and read a book, listening to children playing cricket opposite in the temple grounds, breathing in amazingly fresh air for an Indian town and relaxing deeply.

In the evening I went for a meal in Maxim's Cafe, one of the local restaurants with great views of Jagdish Temple from the rooftop terrace. While the food was delicious, the rice smelled a bit off. When I told the owner, instead of trying to save face, he immediately apologised and offered to make me more. When I said I was leaving, he offered to make me a complete meal to take with me. I explained that I was leaving because I was full, not because I was upset, but with that level of customer service, that young man and his restaurant should go far.

The next morning I tried to find the City Palace and Museum, a huge imposing edifice in the centre of town. Apparently it’s huge and imposing, because I couldn't find the fucker. My sense of direction was gone, gone, gone, like some confused albatross that had found itself perched upon a Toy'R'Us store in Basingstoke. I pottered around the town for a bit smiling to myself, then packed my things and set off for the airport. From what I could make of it, Udaipur was a gentle, laid back town - quite pretty in its own unique way. I hadn't really made the most of it, but I had enjoyed it nevertheless. Now I started to get excited because I was heading to the airport and the last stop on my mammoth trip around India: Mumbai, the City of Dreams.

This blog covers the period 11-13th December 2009.

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Jodhpur by night. Outside the train station, people sized bundles of rags huddled together on the pavement, fighting off the sting of the night air. A light smog peeled from the walls of buildings and rolled insipidly down the dark streets. Skinny dogs padded around looking for a castaway idli or a warm place to rest.

I looked around for a moment, trying to get my bearings. It was 11:00pm so most of the hawkers were tucked up in bed - if they had one. I was greeted by an auto-rickshaw driver holding the name of the guest house I had booked. I relaxed.

We rattled down the tight, claustrophobic alleys of the Old City before arriving at my new abode. So far, I had been luxuriating in low to mid range hotels, so a guest house was a departure for me. However, I needed to be more frugal if I was to have any chance of seeing out a whole year of travel. Luckily, The Blue House was not only cheap, it was clean and friendly.

Unfortunately on arrival, I was beset by another bout of diarrhoea, but it wasn't incapacitating and seemed reasonably controllable, so I wasn't too dismayed.

The next morning I made my way into town and began the long clamber up the hillside that led to Mehrangarh Fort. This huge and intricately designed fort containing several palaces was first built in 1459 by Rathore ruler Rao Jodha, who buried a man alive in the foundations to ensure its prosperity. However, much of what can be seen today was built by Jaswant Singh in the 17th Century.

An audio guide is part of the entry fee. It was the best audio guide I had heard in India - excellently written and researched with a narrator whose fine resonant tones and witty anecdotes reminded me of my friend Jay Kembhavi, making it all the more entertaining.

The fort has a number of gates, leading to the main entrance and as you look up, you feel the scale and enormity of the structures within the fort.

There are a number of palaces within the walls of the fort and various period rooms are maintained as they would have looked when in use. The walls of these palaces are beautifully rendered.

The Moti Mahal (or the Pearl Palace) is a State Room for the Maharaja to meet his ministers and nobles (these events were known as Durbars). With multicoloured windows and a gold filigree ceiling, it is one of the finest rooms in the fort.

There are also a few rooms dedicated to the museum of Mehrangarh, which has an excellent collection of paintings, costumes, furniture, palanquins - you name it, they have it. Many of the rooms are hosted by Fort employees in period dress.

A man with a grand moustache.

The views from the walls of the fortress over the city are stunning.

Mehrangarh Fort walls with Jodhpur lazing in the background.

Enlarged view of the Blue City.

On leaving the Fort, I noticed a number of handprints - some of them tiny - on the wall by the inner gate. These were the prints of Maharajah Man Singh's widows, all of them taken just before these girls and women climbed upon his funeral pyre and burned to death - probably in an opium induced stupor. This horrific and tragic tale really affected me for some reason, and I couldn't stop feeling both sadness and anger about it for the rest of the day. This ancient rite known as sati has its origins in prehistory, and was often voluntary on the part of the widow, although there is much speculation about whether this was always the case - especially in royal households where traditions had to be maintained. Now outlawed, it still rarely occurs in some parts of rural India.

I descended back down the steep slopes and into Sardar Market. A distinct counterpoint to the sedate Fort, this ancient, bustling marketplace was actually so chaotic that I found it really amusing.

The clock tower that fronts the market place.

Wonderful chaos. There are even people on the roof...

I made my way back to the guesthouse through the labyrinthine, mediaeval streets of the Old City and climbed to the rooftop restaurant. There I watched the sun go down, saw monkeys scampering across the rooftops and hawks alight on nearby mobile phone masts. Across the town, innumerable mosques began their call to prayer, each voice vying and intertwining with the other in a strange, ethereal harmony.

Jodhpur Call to Prayer.m4a Listen on Posterous

I looked at the fort on the hill and thought about the Maharajah's wives who had immolated themselves on his funeral pyre. I stared at it as if it were some ancient, venerable figure that had been involved in every aspect of life in this small town. It surely had answers - and I wanted it to speak, to tell me what had really happened to those poor women; that it had not all been a tragic waste of life. The fort stood resolutely, imperiously as it always had, cradling the town below as the dying sun made it glow.

This blog covers the period 9th December 2009 - 10th December 2009.

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Warning: I believe swearing is both big and clever.

“Life’s what you make it, celebrate it.” – Talk Talk.

Agra train station was like a city within a city. Hundreds of people traversed the platforms as twilight descended over us. Passengers carried huge suit cases on their heads as they hurried to find a space to stand under the darkening sky. The sounds of men singing out their wares and the bashing of ladles on pots as they cooked food on makeshift stoves on the platform defined the evening tumult.

The poor, who lived on the railway line around the station wandered around looking for useful rubbish. Families sat around on their suitcases watching the smaller children run around in circles. A swarm of flies, up well past their bedtime, buzzed manically around a small spot of shit on the ground.

I hate flies. For me, the fly goes a long way to disprove reincarnation. How can you possibly do anything virtuous as a fly to justify being reborn as a higher life form? All you can wish for is to be reborn as something more infamous; something which has caused many needless deaths such as the mosquito, the flu virus or Tony Blair.

I asked a porter if I was on the right platform for the Jaipur train. He officiously demanded to see my ticket, stared at it for an age as if he had never seen one before (I believe he was trying to look very important indeed) and then nodded quietly before walking off.

A lad of about eleven asked me to buy him a banana just as a fruit seller carted his produce by. With my backpack restricting my movements, I didn't get my money out in time, so I gave the kid enough money to buy a bunch. It's not as if he needed them - it looked like his main source of vitamin C was pie.

For the next two minutes, he stood in front of me begging for more money. When I'd had enough, I said, "If you're not careful I'm going to take that money back." We looked sternly at each other for a second, then both burst into giggles when he realised the game was up.

As the train pulled into the station, I had trouble finding my carriage - the platform signs didn't match and Indian trains are very long. I made my way near to where it should be and jumped in the train so I wouldn't miss it. Almost immediately, a guy in a smart but stained black jacket jumped in front of me and asked where I was going. I told him I could find my own way.

Then he demanded to see my ticket.

"Why? You don't work for the railway," I stated.

"I do, now show me your ticket."

"No - you show me your ID."

"What?"

"Show me your railway employee ID." All railway workers carry an ID to prove they work for the department of railways.

He smiled - that same shallow smile I'd seen before in India when I had caught someone lying to me. However, at that moment, an older man sitting in the carriage said, "He does work for the railway."

I decided to defer to the old gentleman - he looked respectable enough. I let the young guy lead me to my carriage. There were two young Canadian girls already seated when I arrived and we briefly exchanged pleasantries. When I turned around, the young guy was still in the doorway of the carriage.

"Everything alright?" he asked pleasantly.

"Yes thank you," I replied.

Then, with a theatrical flourish that would have made Stephen Fry cringe with embarrassment, he raised his closed fist to his mouth, coughed lightly into it, then flattened his palm and held it out for a tip.

Red mist descended. Tautly, I said, "Absolutely no way. I told you I didn't need your help. Not everything in this world should be done for monetary gain." I indicated for him to leave which he did.

I was sick and tired of scam artists and fools trying to extract every rupee out of me at every available opportunity. I didn’t care that they're not the richest people in the world. I didn’t care that they're only trying to make a living. In that mood I felt that they were all just greedy scavengers who didn't give a damn about anything except getting one over on their “stupid” mark; an attitude that stinks in any language, in any country.

I apologised to the girls for my behaviour which they were fine about, having been subjected to the similar experiences since they arrived in Delhi a week earlier. Kelly and Marie were Canadian girls who had been working in South Korea for a year teaching. Now they were on a whistle stop tour of the world on their way back to Canada for Christmas. We talked about our travels, their strange experiences of Korean culture and how they found some men there arrogant and bigoted towards women. We swapped ghost stories and basically had a laugh which helped to pass the time.

Leaving Jaipur station, an auto driver tried to accost me on the platform. I was later to learn he was called Jabad. I ignored him, but he continued to say, "You come with me, yes?" - despite the fact I repeatedly said no. He walked a few paces in front of me and changed direction whenever I did which made me increasingly angry. Being followed from behind is one thing, but someone obviously following you from the front is a challenge to your freedom of movement. He had a face ripe for punching.

"Let me take you to your hotel," Jabad said outside the station.

"No I'm going to the prepay stand."

"Give me a hundred rupees, I'll take you there," he insisted.

Again, I noticed that he had one of those faces that would only ever look good on the end of my fist.

"Get fucked," I replied, but I don't think he understood that beautiful little aphorism.

I walked to the prepay stand and got my ticket for thirty rupees, but astonishingly, the prepay stand assigned Jabad to be my driver. 

Normally touts aren't allowed to drive from the prepay. Jaipur was obviously different.

As we journeyed to the hotel, I diverted myself in thinking of the number of different ways I could stove the cunt's head in. Meanwhile, he rapturously talked of how most of his work was follow up business from delighted customers giving them tours around the city and of how honest he was.

"If you're so honest, why did you try to charge me a hundred rupees for a thirty rupee journey? Honesty is more than just words."

He completely ignored me and continued to exalt himself and his services.

At the hotel he gave me his business card. I still have it - I'm saving it for when I'm caught short without toilet paper.

I woke the next morning another year older. It was my birthday, and to celebrate I was going to do absolutely nothing. I lay in bed for a while reading, then watched a couple of films. Then I slept a bit more. I rang around my friends and family. I was really missing home. Here I was, a million miles from anywhere, on my own, seemingly surrounded by a bunch of morons whose only interest in me was how much they could extort from me. It was one of the lowest points of my travels.

You may be wondering why I moan so much about touts and scammers in this blog. Well apart from the fact that they are endemic in tourist areas in India (I've only talked about a fraction of the touts I've met), the simple fact is that I am a mug. I suffer from some kind of strange reverse autism where I can sometimes relate to people too much. I usually take people at face value without cynicism, so I'm easily misled. India is therefore a real struggle for me as I have to force myself to keep my guard up - not a natural state of affairs for me and something I find very tiring.

Just as I was pondering this, there was a knock at the door. It was the hotel manager. My guard was still up from my encounter with Jabad and I cynically started thinking that perhaps the manager had just invented a new "Backpack Wanker" tax that I had to pay for staying in his hotel.

"Hello sir, we've been trying to phone you all day." I had accidently knocked my phone off the hook.

"Everything ok?" I asked, wondering what could be so urgent.

"Certainly sir." He smiled. Behind him was a waiter carrying a big silver tray and on it, a Birthday Cake!

It was such a nice moment that all my cynicism disappeared and I was back to being myself again. I thanked them profusely and for the rest of the evening I was walking around on tiptoes. Sometimes the simplest gestures can make the most profound difference.

The next day I decided to face Jaipur. I was accosted by a number of rickshaw drivers straight outside the hotel. One bicycle rickshaw driver said he could get me to Nahagarh Fort for 50 rupees so I jumped in. 

Off he cycled and ten minutes later stopped at a crossroads in the middle of town, waiting for me to get out. I tried to explain we weren't near the Fort but he suddenly couldn't speak English. He started speaking to a cop on the street who was directing traffic. The cop explained to him I wanted to go to the Fort and then he demanded his money. I got off the rickshaw. I was annoyed now. I was tempted to walk off as the guy had either played me or hadn't understood a word I'd said and just got me onto his rickshaw to beat the other drivers to some cash. While I was thinking about this, he got really agitated and started screaming at me for his money. I gave him an icy stare and he continued raging. Now I'm not a violent person, but I can honestly say I was on the verge tickling his tonsils with my fist when the policemen came over to see what the fuss was about. I gave the guy his money, knowing that I would lose a lot more if I had to bribe the cop.

I found an auto rickshaw driver who was being pimped out by a very unpleasant old freak who was as high as a kite on weed. They stung me for 400 rupees but by this stage I was tired of battling scammers and just wanted to get to the fort.

They dropped me in a backstreet full of pigs and young naked children running around shacks with corrugated roofs. Here I walked up a steep incline for about half an hour before getting to the top.

The long and winding road.

I couldn't find the entrance to the fort, but it was in a ruinous state anyway. There was what appeared to be an amphitheatre filled with dirty water and rubbish.

Teenage boys wandered around lackadaisically in large groups, trying to outstare the few tourists bungling around.

One came over to me and said, "Are you alone?"

"What's it to you?" I replied. He turned around and sauntered off.

I really thought this place was not worth visiting. It wasn't kept well, it was shoddy, dirty and falling to pieces whilst trying to convince it was a premier league attraction. It reminded me of Burnley Football Club.

I had come up to see the sunset and in the words of the great English poet Lord Byron, “It were a bag of wank.” (I’m sure he must have said that at some point in his life).

On the way back down the hill, I passed a woman with three children all carrying firewood on their heads. Her face was tired and lined, though I knew she must have been in her early thirties. At times she would call out to her herd of goats further down the path. The goats responded by stopping, calling back and waiting for her to catch up.

Halfway down the hill there was an angry cow that I passed very carefully. I knew it was angry because of the evil way it eyed me as I approached and the way it mooed abusively as I passed. It also had a very cross face.

Very angry cow - possibly suicidal.

At the bottom of the hill was a pig feeding her young while she ate from a pile of garbage at the side of the road.

As I walked back through the slums at the bottom of the hill, a naked boy of about three with a big toothy grin on his face ran past me waving his hands in the air shouting, "Hello! Hello! Hello!" After all of the irritations and annoyances of the day, this really cheered me up and made me laugh aloud.

That night I decided Jaipur was the worst city in India, full of scam artists and terrible attractions. The next day I didn’t go out – just stayed in my hotel and scowled into the mirror - but on my last full day I forced myself to go out and see some of the sights. I grabbed an auto driver and asked him how much to take me into town. When he quoted me a fair price I hired him on the spot for the day.

The central walled streets of the original Jaipur are lined by buildings of faded terracotta, which is why it is known as the Pink City. The streets are packed with bazaars and markets, cows and people, rickshaws and bikes, all hemmed in by piles of rubbish and glorious pandemonium. So far, the Pink City had been more like the “Red Mist” city to me, but all of a sudden, I started to enjoy it.

First I visited the Jantar Mantar, a large collection of huge astrological instruments used to follow the constellations about the sky.

Built by the city’s founder, Jai Singh II from 1727 onwards, these innovative devices not only predicted seasons for crop planting, but eclipses and planetary positions. I had a guide show me around, and would not have worked out what all of the instruments were for without him.

The Samrat Yantra – the largest sundial in the world – is accurate to two seconds and its shadow can be seen physically moving at about a millimetre a second.

For me, the Jantar Mantar is Jaipur’s most prized possession. I loved it.

Next I went to the city palace.

Unfortunately, apart from nearly being run over by a speeding black limousine carrying one of the royals around, I found it all a bit boring. There is a museum which houses a large collection of weapons (with little context to their display), a host of royal garments (yawn), and a couple of very large silver vases (snore). The Hall of Public Attendance was pretty and had some interesting photographs, but there was no real atmosphere to the place and the exhibitions were lacking in co-ordination, although the audio guide was fairly informative, if a little dry.

Pretty door decoration at the City Palace.

After the City Palace, I travelled out to the Man Sagar Lake to see the Jal Mahal, a five storey structure that is now mostly submerged and off limits to visitors. Auto drivers constantly come up to you in Jaipur and show you a picture of the Palace, then charge you an extortionate fee to visit it. It’s nice, but it’s not worth being scammed over.

On the way back into town, many decorated elephants and camels were being ridden in, though I’m not sure what for. I would like to say they caused chaos on the roads, but Jaipur is so congested and chaotic that it made little difference.

I also witnessed a small oven on the street which used cow dung to power it - a genuinely good use of an old idea, and hilariously, a street barber, where men sat on a chair and had their hair cut in the public theatre of the city streets.

Finally, on my last day I visited the Amber Fort. Constructed in 1597 on the site of an earlier fort, its high imposing walls belie the sophisticated architecture of the palace within.

Here there are shaded courtyards with elaborately carved gates, a hall of mirrors reputedly lit at night by a single candle, some amazing mosaics, a royal temple with silver doors closed to public access, extensive underground passageways with resident bats, geometric gardens in bloom and ornately decorated residences. The fort is certainly impressive and I spent a very pleasant morning exploring it all.

Geometric Garden.

Hall of Mirrors.

Residential rooms.

Finally I visited the Hawa Mahal, or the Palace of the Winds, which is part of the City Palace where the ladies of the court could go to watch the city privately through an elaborate stone screen stretching five stories high.

It is impressive from the outside, but I didn't spend long inside as there is little to see. Even the view of the city from the top is fairly dull, even though some commentators have called it astounding. Worth a short visit though.

After the Hawa Mahal, I went directly to the train station to travel to Jodhpur. As I travelled through the city streets watching the crowds jostle between the pink buildings, I realised that although I had first hated Jaipur, I had grown to enjoy its sights and history. After feeling hemmed in by scam artists and pedlars and a lonely birthday so far away from everyone I love, I had forced myself onto the city streets to face whatever awaited me. This was to change my impression of the place so much, that as I left I wished I had spent more time exploring and less time procrastinating. But sometimes life is like that – sometimes your mood is going to affect how you feel about the world around you. Sometimes, you can change all that just by forcing yourself to grab the world by the throat and shaking it a little. Most times,  life is what you make it.

This blog covers the period 05/12/2009-09/12/2009.

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Warning: For me, swearing is like exposing yourself - it always livens up a good debate.

 

Once upon a time there was a great King who ruled the land. He built many great fortresses to protect his people and led with a strong but fair hand. One day, his wife died whilst giving birth.

The King was inconsolable.

Grief stricken, he ordered his finest builders and artists to design a memorial in her name. However, the King lost sight of his rule and seeing his chance, his son had him arrested and placed in one of the forts that the King himself had built. The King's son was not unnecessarily cruel however, and he made sure the King lived in luxury, with a view of the memorial he had built for his wife.

Here is that view.

I was travelling from Delhi on the morning Shatabdi Express to Agra solely to see the Taj Mahal. I'm not a morning person and Delhi station at six in the morning is not a good time to hassle me. But hey - this is India!

Someone came up behind me and said, "Excuse me sir, are you going to Agra?"

"Fuck off," I replied in a matter of fact way, as if I had just said Good Morning to a vicar. I didn't even turn around to look at him.

"Agra is a very beautiful city," he continued with his spiel, then trailed off as he realised what I had just said.

I climbed aboard the train and enjoyed an uneventful ride with a nice spicy breakfast thrown in.

I disembarked the train, bracing myself for the inevitable assault of the auto rickshaw drivers at the exit to the station. When I got there however, I saw perhaps the most beautiful sight I had ever seen in India. It wasn't the Taj Mahal. It wasn't Megan Fox in a thong. It wasn't even a magical self-filling beer glass. It was a bunch of auto-rickshaw drivers fighting each other - over me! They were so intent on getting to me first that they had started to brawl in the street. I stood in awe, chuckling contentedly, pleased with the mayhem I had created.

To be fair, the one who started the fight - the smallest of them all - was one of the honest drivers from the prepay stand fighting off the sharks who stand at the entrance and try to con tourists for three or four times the fare you would normally pay. When he saw me going to the prepay stand he stopped the skirmish, satisfied he had won the battle.

Good for him I say.

I had lunch at my hotel. I was the only person in the small restaurant and now I know why - the food was awful and the waiters (of which there were half a dozen bumbling about a small empty restaurant) were constantly trying to get me to buy extra dishes that even I couldn't possibly put away. I had enough money to pay for the food alone, but I put down a large bill so I could use some of the change as a tip.

After ten minutes, I still had not received my change. I asked where it was. They didn't have it; they had sent a boy out to get it.

After twenty minutes, still no change. I asked for it again, after which the waiters started talking furtively and occasionally giggling. After another ten minutes, the waiter came over and gave me my change. I counted it. Half of it was missing.

Now there are three sides to this story. Firstly there are the Indian waiters who are under pressure to get me my change but at the same time don't want to lose face, so they cobble together what change they have on them and give it to me in the hope I won't count it or I'll write off the missing amount as a tip.

Secondly there is me, who has learned all about saving face and understands that the waiters aren't up to anything malicious.

Thirdly there is the uninitiated foreign traveller who thinks these waiters are trying to steal from them. You see, the waiters had gone to such ridiculous lengths to save face, they hadn't even considered the fact that they could be accused of something much worse than wasting a customer's time - theft.

I asked for my original money back and gave them the exact change.

Then, for the first and only time in India, I complained to the manager of the hotel. This was more for their sake - if they had done this to someone who didn't understand what was going on, the police could have been involved (not that they would have done much except try to extort the tourist) and it could have gotten pretty messy.

Agra has a Red Fort as well as Delhi, but this one, though smaller in acreage, has more existing buildings and is considerably more beautiful.

The hall of public audience (Diwan I Am).

Built by Akbar and extensively added to by his grandson Shah Jahan, the differences between building styles is huge. Akbar used red sandstone and Hindu workmen, Jahan used white marble and Persian craftsmanship. However, both sit together beautifully.

Fort wall.

Inside the Musamman Burj where Shah Jahan was incarcerated.

Small, beautiful mosque called the Moti Masjid.

Part of the Jahangiri Mahal, built by Akbar for his son.

A cheeky monkey watches the sunset from the Jahingiri Mahal.

Afterwards, I got the auto driver to take me down to Mehtab Bagh which is on the opposite bank of the Yamuna River on which the Taj Mahal is located.

Here, you get a nice view of the rear of the building without hordes of tourists everywhere. There were about ten of us waiting expectantly for sunset and even from a distance, the Taj Mahal looked beautiful.

My simple fairy tale at the beginning of the chapter hides a darker truth to the lives of the Mogul Emperors. Shah Jahan who built the Taj (and many other exquisite buildings - see my Delhi blog for details) came to power by murdering his two older brothers and all of their families. Ruthless yet tolerant, he was to rule for nearly 50 years, building Delhi as his new capital. When Mumtaz Mahal, his second wife, best friend and favoured counsel died giving birth to their fourteenth child, he went into mourning for two years, during which time all his hair turned grey. As per her dying wish, he was determined to build the most beautiful and lasting memorial to her.

Building began in 1641 and it took over twenty thousand labourers and artisans drawn from Persia and Europe to complete over a 22 year period. Headed by the architect Ustad Ahmad Lahwari, it is rumoured that Shah Jahan had his hands cut off after completion so he could never produce a better work. This story is probably untrue as is the notion that Jahan intended to build a mirror image of the Taj on the opposite bank of the Yamuna River.

Jahan's third son, Aurangzeb, was furiously jealous of his brother, Jahan's favourite son who was to succeed him. In a military coup, Aurangzeb imprisoned his father at the Red Fort in Agra, then beheaded his brother and sent Shah Jahan the head as a gift. Emperors and their jolly japes, eh?

Jahan died at the Red Fort in 1666 probably from complications arising from an opium overdose and was buried next to Mumtaz in the Taj Mahal.

I awoke early next morning to be one of the first in line at the East Gate - a lesser used entrance but one that was on the same side as my hotel.

I walked down the darkened road, following a trail of camels that would later be used to parade a bunch of hapless tourists around. When I reached the gate, I was the first in line. A guard toting a semi automatic rifle asked me if I had a ticket.

"Can I get one here?" I asked hopefully.

"No - down the road." He pointed where I had come from.

Luckily, a bicycle rickshaw was passing by so I jumped on. Lala, my driver, was a bloody nice bloke and took me straight to the ticket office and waited for half an hour while I got my ticket. Then, pedalling manically, he took me back to the queue, chatting all the way.

I was about twentieth in line when I got back. Good enough.

After forty minutes or so the sun rose and they opened the gate. No one charged, no one ran. We all walked calmly, expectantly to the main entrance. There was a counter in the entrance hall and the people behind it were calling us over, but by now, I could see part of the Taj and carried on straight through excitedly. As I emerged from the main gateway, I could see it in all its glory. It was amazing.

Now I'm not going to launch into a barrage of superlatives that border on cliché. Instead I'll try to describe my experience.

On first seeing the Taj Mahal, it was like meeting a favourite film star - something that had always been remote and flat was suddenly bright and real before my eyes. I'd loved the building since I was a kid. I used to have something called a talking viewmaster - a children's toy used for viewing stereoscopic (3d) images that also had mini vinyl recordings attached to it. The picture of the Taj Mahal was my favourite and I would stare at it for hours, imagining myself there.

I walked up to the first viewing point. There were only five of us. I stared. It stared back serenely, the white marble glistening in the early morning light, the pools of water smooth like stainless steel blades cutting through the gardens.

What an utterly awe inspiring vision. The building in the background ain’t too bad either.

Three Japanese men started racing down the footpath so they could be first to the next viewing point, in the process ruining any more chances of a pristine shot for the people behind. I suppose it had to happen at some point.

I followed two German girls down the path who were braying with excitement at being so early. I took some more pictures for good measure, then I just enjoyed the walk up to the mausoleum, taking my shoes off as I stepped up onto the marble platform.

The German girls race off to get their towels down in the mausoleum.

As you get closer, you can see intricate patterns carved into the walls; colourful floral designs made from a number of precious and semi-precious materials that represent paradise on earth and black calligraphy that extends the borders of the archways over the doors.

I looked around. It looked strange seeing such a familiar building from an oblique angle.

The marble was cold and smooth beneath my feet as I made my way straight to the mausoleum entrance. I was the first inside. It was cool and dark, and a tout tried to show me around but I shooed him away. The bodies are actually entombed below the main mausoleum - just a representation of their coffins exist here. The room inside is octagonal and only about twenty metres across. It is dark, and lit by a single dim lamp. Although there was no wind outside, a ghostly murmuring sound echoed from around the walls. At first I thought it was the sound of people talking outside, but there was no one there.

To me, it was the sound of universal static, the whisper of a trillion suns in radioactive harmony. Barely perceptible above this was what seemed like moaning, contorted voices attempting to reveal their mystery. In reality, even the slightest brush of air moving through the ventilated dome above creates a sound that reverberates to the building's core, echoing and amplifying. It is very eerie indeed! I was really lucky to hear this because it was impossible to detect when more people entered a few minutes later.

I got the moon on a stick!

Outside I slowly walked around the main structure, taking in all the details. My feet were getting cold slapping listlessly on the marble so I got down from the platform and put my shoes back on. I went around to the east side where the morning sun was starting to sprinkle vibrant colours on the building's surface. I sat down and stared, losing myself in the immortal architecture of death before me. It was beauty engendered for beauty entombed.

Every few seconds, my brain would get that same moment of excitement and realisation of amazement when you realise you are actually alive right here and now. I was completely living in the present.

Feeling very satisfied, I slowly made my way back to the entrance, stopping a couple of times just to savour the experience. The sun had risen further and the colour of the marble had adopted a different hue. The shrine shone and shimmered in the distance like some amazing underwater treasure, forever out of reach. The crowds were really starting to flood in and I knew it was the right time to leave while I was still excited about being here.

The perfect Taj Mahal visit.

Outside, I saw Lala the superhuman bicycle rickshaw driver and asked him to cycle me back to the hotel. I told him how fantastic it had all been, but he'd heard it all before. It's strange, but even though the Taj Mahal is legendary, it is one of the few places I have ever been that actually surpasses all of the hype surrounding it.

Finally, I'd like to try to sum up the Taj Mahal. Rudyard Kipling called it, "the embodiment of all things pure," while Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore said it was, "like a solitary tear suspended on the cheek of time."

I thought long and hard about how I could describe it. My first effort, though succinct, wasn't quite up to scratch: "It's white. A bit like a toilet. Don't try and shit in it though."

My second effort was much better: "A pearl necklace on the face of eternity," but that didn't sound very original for some reason.

I gave up after that.

This picture took me longer to compose than any other, and I’m justly proud of it. It’s difficult taking really bad pictures intentionally! This adds to my substantial collection of joke pictures in front of world famous monuments.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Warning: I swear, therefore I am.

Out of the gentle night, lights twinkling peacefully below over a vast terrain of carefully tended land, a monster arose; all shuddering in brightness and wreathed in foul breath. Delhi lay sprawled before me like a murder victim, covered in a filthy miasma of fumes that hung about it like a swarm of flies. As the plane approached the ground I could see the lights growing brighter, the streets more defined. I could see the rickshaws moving between drunken, leaning buildings, the smog swirling around the streetlamps, hordes of people tramping down the night. It was bizarre, but I felt like I was flying into Victorian London.

I was excited and filled with dread at the same time as I left the airport and headed for the taxi stand. I'd heard a lot about Delhi; not much of it good, mostly because of the amount you get hassled and the number of scams going on here.

There was a small man standing on a box at the taxi queue, directing people to their designated cabs as if he were sending troops to war.

When I reached my cab, there were two young guys standing around laughing with each other who obviously didn't want to take me anywhere. I asked them if this car was number four. The driver said, "No - four over there," and pointed vaguely down the queue.

"So what's that big '4' on the sign behind your car?"

He smiled a shallow smile. I put my gear in the back and climbed in.

"Which hotel?" he asked. I told him. Both he and his friend chimed in at once, "That hotel is closed."

This is an old scam in which the cab drivers tell you that your hotel is inaccessible due to closure/full booking/street riots and then take you to a hotel where they get 40% commission which you pay for in addition to the standard hotel fee.

"It's not closed. Now take me there."

"It is closed," he insisted.

"It's not fucking closed, I just phoned them, now move."

Disappointedly he started the cab and left his friend standing in the street. I was annoyed he tried to dupe me, so I said, "You must think people are really stupid to fall for your idiotic scams."

"Sorry, I not speak English," he replied rather conveniently. In English.

When we reached the hotel, I grabbed my bags from the back of the cab and walked towards the door. The driver appeared in front of me with his hand out.

"Just a little sir?" he asked.

"Sorry," I replied, "I not speak English."

Later that evening, I thought I would go for a walk. I'd heard that Delhi had a small bar scene, so I decided to walk into town and check out three bars recommended on the Internet.

Outside my hotel in Chuna Mandi, throngs of people crowded the road; men rushed around hauling carts full of ladders, tubing and other building materials, women walked with wicker baskets perched upon their heads filled with market produce and kids rapidly darted between the people, either playing or begging.

I walked further afield down to Connaught Place - the heart of New Delhi. The walk there brought me past many large building works, including a new flyover and several huge, gleaming, glass towers.

Connaught Place itself is a big roundabout with a number of roads built in concentric circles around it with a number of arterial roads leading to and away from the centre. Around these roads are shops, restaurants, cafés, and bars. I must have spent about an hour trying to find the first bar, only to find out it had been closed down. The same with the second bar. I later learned that the government had recently cracked down on the number of places selling alcohol in the city centre. The third bar - the Q Bar - was nicely designed and very modern, but virtually empty. I had a swift beer and walked back, feeling slightly disappointed.

The next day I got an auto down to the Red Fort from a very pleasant driver who idly chatted with me about the city without trying to get me into any dodgy shops and who asked for a fair price.

The Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan (who also built the Taj Mahal) constructed the Red Fort in 1638. It took ten years to complete and he triumphantly rode through the tangled streets of Old Delhi on the back of an elephant in celebration. The walls extend over two kilometres and look imposing from the outside.

I had to queue for tickets to the Red Fort. In India, queuing is an art form. There are generally three different queues outside major attractions. One for men, one for women and one for foreigners. The separate queues for men and women I believe exist because there is no sex education in India, and young men often get excitable and very childish around women. It doesn't usually get out of hand, but it can lead to groping which in any Western country is tantamount to sexual assault.

The reason there is a separate queue for foreigners is that quite simply, we pay about ten times the entry fee of an Indian citizen at most tourist attractions. This is an easy way for these venues to make extra money, as the fee for nationals is commensurate with their average salary. Some would say this is a racist policy, but it's not. It is discriminatory however, and I personally think that it's wrong, but at the same time I can see why it is done. I still have the choice to decide not to enter.

Inside, the entrance gate leads past an arcade of bazaars that the emperor's entourage would have used to buy everyday items. Once past the inner gate, meeting rooms, a throne room, a mosque, a water tank and a number of stately buildings still display some of the fine architecture and intricate decoration that would have been outstanding in their day. Now, they are husks, ghostly shells that whisper of their early provenance.

Detailed artistry.

The modest gardens surrounding these buildings are well tended, and there is a serenity here that somehow defies all the noise and madness of the city streets outside the walls. Birds flock in large numbers around the buildings, and the sweep of their wings can be both heard and felt as they fly over you. I felt very relaxed strolling around the grounds and really enjoyed my visit to the Red Fort.

Birds wheel around the buildings.

Back outside, I barged past the touts and auto drivers as they crowded around me, and found an underpass to get me across to the other side of the road. The underpass reminded me of the one from Tottenham Court Road to Centrepoint in London, as it was filthy and stank of piss. I managed to step into a big puddle of gunk that covered my feet and sandals, but by now I was hardened to this kind of thing and laughed it off.

I made my way through the backstreets where a kind-faced old bicycle-rickshaw driver tried to gently cajole me into his rickshaw. We just ended up in a standoff, laughing at each other. Further along the road however, a young bicycle-rickshaw driver started following me around, trying to convince me it was dangerous to walk in these parts. In all my time wandering the streets of Delhi, I never felt in any real danger. In fact, with my explosive temper still chasing me around after my Mum's death, I often thought I was the most dangerous thing on the streets. It's merely because this city is the usual first port of call for most travellers to India. It's here that they first experience culture shock and that is reflected in the number of stories about how wild the place is.

My anger took hold with the young rickshaw driver after numerous efforts to get rid of him. Calmly, I looked him in the eye and said slowly, "Do you want to know what I am going to do to you if you don't fuck off right now?"

He didn't hang around to find out.

Past some waste ground where a makeshift fair had been set up and a Ferris wheel rotated faster than an astronaut's centrifuge chamber, I found my way to the Jama Masjid - the largest mosque in India. This amazing building, again constructed in 1644 by the genius Shah Jahan is made of white marble and red sandstone and can hold twenty five thousand people - more than most football stadiums.

I left the Mosque and decided to walk back towards my hotel to see what I met on the way, and that was such a great decision. Without knowing it, I began to wander through Chandni Chowk, Delhi's most famous market place which has a convoluted network of streets winding through it, each filled with a different element of pandemonium. I think people read too many guidebooks, because for the next delightful hour, I stomped down streets that other tourists had been scared away from by Lonely Planet's dreadful scaremongering.

I walked down narrow alleyways with shops facing each other three feet apart, where two people had to negotiate their way past each other.

The main streets were crowded with people. Everyone coughs, hawks, spits as the diesel fumes attack the sinuses.

Sagging buildings inclined to the ground, their patchy walls and dirt-streaked facades making them look frozen in time at the moment they should have been demolished - as if a ghostly static wrecking ball hovered mere feet from their brickwork.

Huge wooden poles lining the gutter held aloft a wild array of electrical cabling spilling everywhere like a smashed spider web.

Bazaars! Bazaars! Bazaars!

All of them screamed, "Buy me! Buy Me!" with their gaudy colours and neatly presented wares. Here there were stationary shops, there bridal wear shops, everywhere shops of a distinctly uncertain nature. The tainted smell of sulphur and melted fuse wire leaked from ironmongers and mixed with the smell of pungent spices being sold in the open air.

People everywhere. People moving, talking, looking for a bargain. The teeming streets sparked with human electricity; a living, sentient energy.

Not once was I stopped or hassled. Not once did someone look at me oddly for being the only foreigner around. I was nobody, invisible, just part of the human cloud.

And I loved it!

Notice at the end, the man on the left takes a piss against the wall in a crowded street.

At the Chowri Bazaar Metro, I took a train ostensibly to have a gander at the rail network. The Delhi metro is new, clean and works well - it's just very busy. You have to choose a train door (they are marked on the platform at the bigger stations) and queue outside it. Trains pass through, people shuffle on and off at their chosen door and the lines go down. I was impressed with how well it functioned.

Chowri Bazaar Metro – Delhi’s Piccadilly Circus.

For my final day in Delhi, I decided to visit Humayun's tomb complex. Nasiruddin Humayun was a 16th century Mogul Emperor who saw some extraordinary twists of fate in his lifetime. He inherited a large kingdom covering parts of Northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan from his father, Babur, the first Mogul Emperor. This land was hotly contested by other rulers from the surrounding kingdoms - most notably Sher Shah Suri who attacked him relentlessly. Due to the fact that Humayun was more of a playboy than a tactician, and due to multiple betrayals by his three brothers who were after his title, Humayun lost virtually everything and at his lowest point, found himself in the desert eating the horses he and his remaining loyal men rode on. However, after travelling in Persia, he was befriended and hugely influenced by the nobleman Shah Tahmasp, who gave Humayun the impetus to build a new army and recapture his old lands - this time leaving the battles in the hands of the tacticians. The Persian influences that Humayun adopted not only changed Mogul rule, but art and architecture throughout Northern India, resulting in his amazing tomb.

But first, while Sher Shah Suri was in control of Delhi and Humayun was in exile, one of Suri’s noblemen, Isa Khan Niyazi had his tomb built (Humayun's tomb would be built nearby at a later time). It is this that I visited first, as the gatekeeper said it was the main tomb for some reason.

What I liked about this was not just the octagonal symmetry, but the fact you could go inside and climb upstairs, looking down through the stone passages. Even the mosque which is part of the burial complex allows you up on the roof to gaze at the tomb opposite.

Next, Humayun's grand tomb itself. Designed by Persian architects, the tomb is an early model for what would later be built in Agra - the Taj Mahal.

I was in awe of Humayun's tomb. The grounds and buildings have been extensively restored to their original glory over the past twenty years. Just sixty years ago, it was almost in ruins, with refugees from partition living there and slum markets developing afterwards which saw the monument heavily defaced. The restoration has been a great success in my eyes - this small slice of architectural perfection is something every visitor to Delhi should see for themselves.

Inside the tomb.

On the way back, I asked the auto driver to drop me off early so I could walk the backstreets to my hotel from a direction I had never been. I decided to visit Parhaganj, a road famous in Delhi amongst travellers as it is the main backpacker street. It is also an appalling mess. Mud and shit coagulate all over this excuse for a road, the buildings would have been condemned years ago in any other city. Generators sit outside hostels and cheap hotels waiting for that next power cut. Cows plod up and down the road pulling carts filled with junk. It smelled so bad that I had to turn off down another backstreet. But then it all became much, much worse.

Here, makeshift homes made from rotten wood and rags gave shelter to the city's poorest. Lean limbed women struggled to make chai from scraps they had found in the road, men lay in the street, too weak to move. I was sure some of them had already breathed their last. Street children with hollow eyes and gaping mouths begged for spare change.

This was the first time poverty in India had shocked me. And it was shock - I felt nothing as I absorbed all of this - nothing at all. It was only later when I started to process what I had seen that it nearly brought me to tears. What a terrible, despicable way to live. In other places I had seen poverty, there was still community, family. There was love and happiness and laughter in the absence of possessions. Here there was only misery and a daily fight for life. And the worst of it is that you feel absolutely powerless to do anything about it. It would be a few more days and another town before the repercussions of this event would really hit me. But apart from the terrible poverty that I witnessed, I actually enjoyed Delhi. It's tough, it's smart, it’s insane; it's a no-holds barred assault on every sense you have and on some you didn't know existed. Its beautiful heritage sights, bustling markets and teeming streets make you feel so alive, that to leave it not only brings about a feeling of relief, but a strange sense of boredom.

Delhi: city of contrasts. Amazing, appalling, palatial, bit of a shithole.

This blog documents the period 30/11/09-04/12/09.

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Warning: My name is Rob and I am a swearer.

"Be careful what you wish for." - Old adage.

I wanted to party. I'd been travelling incessantly seeing new sights, briefly meeting strangers and forever moving on. I wanted to have some fun, talk to other travellers, swap stories and have a laugh. I decided based on what I had read that Goa would be the place to visit.

Goa became famous in the sixties as part of the hippie trail that stretched from Europe down to India and into South East Asia. Before then it had been a sleepy port that the Portuguese had once claimed and settled. Now it was supposed to be Party Central, India.

My initial impression of Goa was that it was India light. The state capital, Panaji (Panajim) is a sprawling metropolis with many high rises and new builds. It all looked a bit sanitary. By the time I reached Baga Beach where I was to stay for six days doing virtually nothing, there was little more of a sense of being in an Indian town. Although there were the usual cows, goats and dogs wandering around and bustling bazaars with dirt roads hedged in by ramshackle buildings, everyone here was, well... foreign. Mostly British, but a few Germans, Dutch and Italians thrown in for good measure. And it was oh so quiet...

I had booked a room at a beach resort and luckily, it had a veranda with a sea view.

First day, I relaxed out on the porch and read.

Second day, I did the same but with a walk through the dull, dull town geared entirely for tourists. All along the road, taxi drivers constantly and annoyingly pitched themselves every five metres. “Taxi sir? Taxi?” I also walked along the pleasant but largely unimpressive beach. Some say the beaches around here are beautiful and perhaps they are, but having pasty skin that catches fire under the light of a pen torch, I don't really appreciate beaches too much.

At night, I went looking for nightlife. Everywhere was dead apart from a bar called Tito’s where two bulimic looking European girls danced half-heartedly to a trance beat. It was like a party in a graveyard - there were flashing lights, pumping music and a couple of dancing skeletons, but that was it.

The food at the hotel was generally fine, but on this evening I was delivered a plate of gelatinous goo with bits of hard potato in it. I was led to believe by the menu that this was mashed potato. I was straight on the phone, Basil Fawlty style.

“Hello, is your chef busy tonight?”

A mumbled reply. It was Sanjiv on reception – a really nice bloke who I had chatted to every day who normally spoke excellent English. I think he just didn’t know how to handle the question.

“Hello? I said is your chef busy tonight?”

Another garbled reply.

“I'm sorry I don't understand a word you're saying, but listen. Either your chef is very busy tonight or he’s drunk. Either way, this plate of mashed potato that he’s sent me is the most bland and offensive thing I’ve ever seen. It’s like vomit on a plate.”

I’ve never heard shock on the other end of the phone before, yet there it was.

After a pause, he replied, “I’m very sorry sir. Would you like us to provide you with something else?”

Immediately, I felt regretful that I’d been so blunt. “No – that’s fine. I’m just letting you know so you can hopefully improve the dish.”

“Yes sir, sorry again sir.”

In hindsight, I was being a bit of an arsehole, but I stand by my description of the food.

On the third day I took a cab to the Anjuna Beach Market. This is a large, famous flea market that the original hippies made popular in the ’60s. Now it sells T-Shirts and beach wear alongside handicrafts and bongs. Rows of tarpaulin covered frames vie with each other to stand out by splashing wildly coloured posters, balloons, vivid draperies and garish masks all over their shop fronts.

Personally, although I was glad to see the market, I found its reputation of being culturally rich and bizarre to be undeserved, instead finding it pretentious, artificial and dull.  Eighteen year old girls with beaded hair and naive attitudes to world politics would love it here. I know this because the place was full of them.

A headless cow on Anjuna Beach.

I headed for the beach as the sun died and watched the fishermen come in with their daily catch.

After I walked to the famous Shore Bar to watch the sun go down. Here a few lazy travellers lounged on beds or around tables drinking beer and perhaps breathing. The sunset was pretty, and I sat around for a couple of hours lazily watching the lights of the ever present freight ships and oil tankers on the horizon travelling up to the Middle Eastern gulf states. Bored and with nobody to talk to, I returned to my hotel and went to bed.

Fourth day, guess what? I read out on the veranda and strolled along the beach. Blimey - that's pushing things. Again at night I went for a solitary beer at the bars only to be disappointed by their continued obsolescence.

The next morning I awoke at five, feeling strange. I said aloud, "What the hell am I doing?" I was referring to my round the world trip. Sometimes we are plagued with doubts, and for some reason I was so doubtful that I had to wake myself up to tell myself so. As the day wore on the doubt diminished. By the end of the day I was back on track. I feel it's good to question everything as long as it doesn't hinder your decision making.

During the week, I found time to watch a bit of TV. You haven't seen overacting until you've seen an Indian soap opera. Lingering shots of rictus jawed actors holding dramatic poses for fifteen minutes as the camera pans around them. Every time someone speaks, there are another fifteen different reaction shots for each character in the room, whilst the music attempts to become more and more dramatic until it is frenetic.

A lot of comedy shows rely on the same formula: two men acting the fool - one slightly more sensible than the other, with a woman as the harridan with a heart of gold. It's like Laurel and Hardy meets the Chuckle Brothers.

Then there are the religious programs which usually involve some old, bearded man in robes doing little talking but giving lots of meaningful stares.

The news channels are diverse, and some go for titillating celebrity stories while the more political channels are actually very good. One story that was repeated endlessly was how a Keralan politician was found in a whorehouse in Bangalore. They had busted in and filmed him inside, looping the footage nonstop for 24 hours. Lurid? Perhaps, but after I left Goa, it was reported in the news that a young Russian woman had been allegedly raped by a local politician. After a week, the police still had not apprehended him. They said he couldn't be found. The next day, the politician turned up on a local news channel saying he had been contactable at home all this time. Suspicious? Well, considering that the Goan Police Chief has to pay for his commission, you would speculate that the only reason for this is that the post is extremely lucrative. 

Indeed, with all the kickbacks from local businesses and the baksheesh (bribes) extorted from foreign tourists on trumped up drugs charges, the police in Goa are perhaps one of the most corrupt forces in India.  So why don't the politicians do something about it? Mainly because the kickbacks go all the way to the top. Political corruption is so accepted in India, it is often laughed away. Buildings are erected quickly without preparing amenities such as sewers and pavements. Rules are flouted to save money and backhanders are pocketed. It's such a shame that a nation that earned free rule through one of the most scrupulous and fair public figures in political history - Gandhi - now seems to be drowning in a sea of corruption.

However, the Indian media seems to be going through a major revolution. There are numerous newspapers and news channels of varying quality to be enjoyed, and it seems all of them are gunning for corrupt politicians. In fact, the quality of investigative reporting is in many cases better than that of the West where reporters are muzzled by the few corporate owners of news outlets to protect their interests and those of their cronies. This freedom that India is currently enjoying in terms of exposing those who use their own privilege to flout the law is so refreshing that I hope it will eventually bring about political change in the country so that public figures are held accountable for their corruption, and checks on their behaviour are put in place.

Saturday night. Party night. My last night in Goa. Surely something would be going on in the main beach bars? I walked down to a place called Mambos which is supposed to be the hottest club in Baga. Near the entrance, a man standing surreptitiously by the side of the road whispered to me, "Ecstasy? Hash? Coke?" I asked him if he had a Pepsi. He didn't look too amused.

It costs 800 rupees to get into this club which is a lot of money in India - a price clearly designed to keep out locals. The place is laid out so that the main bar is open to the air, but there's a glass walled dance floor so you can watch the dancers sweat from the safety of the bar. I ordered a drink and listened while three British men argued vociferously about whose round it was. The beer was so cheap I wanted to go over and buy their round just to shut the fuckers up.

Shitty dance music pounded through the bar to make it impossible to have a conversation. A few drunk, spaced out partygoers bounced around the dance floor to a desperate beat. Others sat at tables staring at their drinks, an alcohol induced sadness drawing down their faces in the way only cheap whiskey can do. The words of my teenage anthem, “How Soon is Now?” by The Smiths rattled through my brain as I became increasingly annoyed by this pathetic attempt at cookie-cutter entertainment. It wasn’t that it was a pale imitation of European nightlife that had me boiling, it was because it was exactly the same!

I have always despised these bog standard nightclubs that use the same old formula to bring in the punters. Most of the music is monotonous, endlessly repeating, clichéd bilge written by computers, for computers. The clubs themselves are often filled with people who, pleasant and interesting by day, have by this time consumed so much alcohol that they either want to fight or fuck. Or both. Drinks are thrown back, lascivious looks exchanged and crass one liners spew from tired minds. A thousand school discos could not hope to recreate the embarrassment of one night in Mambos.

Walt Disney, all is forgiven.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not criticising anyone for going to these places – I’ve been there many times myself (though mainly through lack of choice). It’s just that on this occasion, I was all too aware of how mind numbingly facile it was. Perhaps my bitterness was a product of my sobriety and friendlessness.

After my second beer, I left the club, smiled with relief, and almost skipped home to bed.

The next morning I checked out of my hotel and spotted the taxi drivers at the gate who would torment me daily with their calls to use them. I screamed at them at the top of my lungs, “Taxi!” Their shocked faces made me giggle and I felt we were now even.

Although I had so far loved seeing the sights of India, I had found it very difficult to meet and talk with people. Unless you already know them, Indian people can be very reserved. I was fortunate to have some great friends in Bangalore, but since leaving Jain and Anil in Wayanad I had hardly spoken to a soul. 

I enjoy my own company, but I am also a social animal and I was really starting to miss even the company of strangers. I thought Goa would remedy that but it failed. The only people I saw travelling here were older couples who I found to be quite insular, only chatting to other older couples. As a result I felt increasingly isolated and eventually couldn't wait to leave the place.

Goa turned out to be my own personal hell and I thought it would be the worst place I visited in India from a personal perspective, but as it turned out, things would get much, much worse before they would get any better.

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Warning: now contains new and improved sweary words.

I set out from Trivandrum early to visit the southernmost tip of India; Kanyakumari. I had originally intended to visit here whilst travelling through Tamil Nadu, but I ran out of time and had to return to Bangalore for Samba’s wedding. Now I had booked a taxi through the hotel to take me there and back, and although the driver didn't speak a great deal of English, I could tell he was a stoic, dependable person. Given that, on the road he was a fucking manic.

The first stop on the way was Padmanabhapuram Palace just south of the Kerala state border in Tamil Nadu.

Built for the Travancore kings more than five hundred years ago, this is the largest surviving wooden palace in India. At first glance, it looks a bit rubbish, but go inside and the hundreds of rooms all leading off from tight, maze-like corridors with polished floors and immaculately carved and decorated wooden struts and beams and this place springs to life with intrigue.

Designed successfully to keep out the oppressive heat of the sun, it would also have potential attackers lost within seconds, giving the royals and their entourage who knew it an immense advantage as there are many trap doors leading off to secret passageways and underground chambers.

The detailed carving on the ceilings, walls and windows is a highlight.

Ornately carved ceiling beam.

The throne room alone has 90 flowers carved into the ceiling - every one different. There is also a lamp that hangs from a chain here that has a no longer used mechanism that always keeps it pointing in the same direction. The fastidiousness of past kings all over the world has surely brought about some wonderful, if obsolete inventions. Such as peasant scissors – used to cut peasants in half if they got out of hand. Actually, that would have been my contribution to civilisation had I been a mediaeval king.

Outside, numerous courtyards contain meticulously tended plants and trees and a stone carved Royal Temple.

I wasn't in the mood for traipsing around Padmanabhapuram Palace at the time and found it all a bit dull. I was getting sick of walking around in bare feet and the day was overcast with drizzle. In other words, I was in a right old mood. Only in hindsight, remembering the detail in the place and looking at the numerous pictures I took do I realise how great a site this was. It wasn't swarming with tourists and was set in beautiful surroundings at the foot of a mountain. Definitely worth a visit.

Outside, I waited while the driver went to bring his car to me as it had started raining. A fruit seller started screaming at me from across the road, "Sir, sir, come here, please! Please! PLEASE!"

He started shouting the last in a high pitched voice over and over, and then started chuckling, knowing how annoying he was being. Sure, I don't mind juggling five melons, ten pineapples and innumerable jackfruit for the rest of the day. In fact I would gladly have bought a pineapple off him just to shove it up his arse the wrong way.

We drove through the end of the Western Ghats (a sprawling series of hills and mountains that stretches down from Mumbai) to reach Kanyakumari. It was a lovely drive, though some of the scenery was spoilt by various ugly hotels perched along low lying cliffs that looked like they had been designed and built by Lego.

The Western Ghats.

Kanyakamri itself is an unremarkable town awash with pilgrims and a few tourists. The pilgrims come to visit the temple and to bathe in the sacred waters. I headed straight for the harbour, as the southernmost point of India is actually on one of two islands just off the coast.

Now this may sound odd, but I’ve always been fascinated by capes. Not the kind you wear, but the termination points of land masses. Ever since I was a child, I’ve always wanted to visit these points in Africa, India and South America because to me they feel like “the ends of the earth” that inspired awe and wonder in so many adventurers of the past. So Visiting Kanyakumari was like an adventure for me. When I got there I immediately made for the ferry, not so much to reach the islands, but so I could look back on the tip of India.

On one island is a huge statue of Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar erected in 2000. It reminded me of the statue of Talos from the classic movie Jason and the Argonauts which scared me to death as a child. I had to keep looking over at it to make sure it wasn’t moving.

On the main island is a memorial to one of India’s most important religious philosophers of the 19^th Century, Vivekananda.

This island also harbours the southernmost point of India. Standing here looking back at the land I had travelled for more than six weeks, I felt calm and at peace. The quality of the light here is amazing. Everything shines. To the far right, a huge swarm of distant wind turbines produce free electricity for the Indian grid. In my opinion, it looks both elegant and technically amazing.

As your eyes sweep along the coast you can see the distant mountains, the bright white church near the waterfront, hotels and businesses of the town, the ferry port and a small rocky islet. The Arabian Sea is to the left, the Bay of Bengal to the right and the Indian Ocean is behind you. It’s the end of the world!

Before leaving town I went for a thali at a well known hotel restaurant in town. When it was delivered to me, the whole thing was stone cold, completely uncooked. I motioned for the waiter to come over and I said to him that the food was cold. He shook his head negatively, but I repeated that it hadn’t been cooked. He looked confused for a second, touched the bowls to feel if there was any heat, and then with the funniest face-saving comment I’ve ever heard, said, “Oh, so do you want it hot then sir?” as if thalis were meant to be served cold and I was the one who was mistaken. Brilliant!

At the end of the meal, I requested the bill in international sign language. When the waiter collected my payment, he looked eager for a tip, so I gave him one. In international sign language.

On the way out of town we stopped at the Suchindram Temple . I didn’t go inside because we didn’t have much time and also men have to take off their shirts. Frankly, if I had done that, they would have thought I was an incarnation of Hanuman, the Hindu Monkey God. Or perhaps just a stray monkey.

Men contemplating outside the temple.

The drive back to Trivandrum was a scream, and I was doing all the screaming. The driver was desperate to get back before sunset, and people, cows and other vehicles were not going to get in his way. Luckily, I managed to capture some of the more sedate moments. I’ve given the driver the voice of a London cabbie just for a laugh.

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I arrived in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram) after a four hour bus ride from Allapuzah. It was early afternoon and I was tired. I decided I needed to go somewhere and relax for a few days, and nearby Kovalam seemed just the ticket.

On leaving the bus an auto rickshaw driver tried to sell me a ride at an extortionate price. I completely ignored him but still he followed me as I made my way to the pre-pay auto stand. He jabbered in my ear constantly. "What country are you from? Where you want to go? I take you." I let him continue his conversation with himself until he had followed me out of the bus station, all the while shaking my head. He still wouldn't give up so I said, "No!" quite firmly twice. He continued to press the matter, but it was when he grabbed my arm that I swung round to him and said viciously, "I will not say no a third time, now fuck off." Finally he decided to acquiesce. Persistence is a wonderful thing, but harassment is not - and I mean that for both of us.

I walked across the road and grabbed my phone to see where I needed to go. As I stood there, out of the corner of my eye I saw a well dressed man stop, pause and turn back to me as if considering something. Then he walked up to me and put out his hand. Well, this was the smartest looking beggar I have ever seen; crisp shirt, immaculately clean, he looked better than most IT professionals I've seen. He had obviously just thought about it on the spot and was trying it on. I laughed and told him to get lost and he did, rather shame faced.

I didn't like Trivandrum from what I had seen so far, so I decided to leave straight away and I eventually found the pre-pay stand outside the nearby train station and journeyed five kilometres to the coast.

Kovalam is a small beach town with a relaxed atmosphere - except of course for the omnipresent hawkers. The main beach (there are others) is actually split into two parts; one sandy stretch encroached by a number of hotels and a smaller stretch of beach aligned by shops and bars. Each beach is separated by a rocky abutment.

 

 

I spent the early evening by doing something extremely important: cleaning out my backpack. I was becoming slightly obsessive with its weight - something everyone does when they're hauling it around for a year or so. I had loads of receipts on me which I promptly defaced and binned. Paper is heavy. I also got rid of some liquid goods such as body gel - vegetable soap is much lighter and liquids are surprisingly heavy. Satisfied, I washed all my clothes in the sink and crawled into bed to read and wind down. Such is the life of a world traveller - it ain't all glorious sights and meeting new people.

The next day I wandered into Kovalam town about a kilometre inland to size it out. It was pretty dull and sleepy. I bought some plasters from a chemist and he asked me if I also wanted to buy Viagra which made me laugh at his cheek.

I walked back to the beach and strolled along the promenade whilst the hawkers and store owners incessantly tried to grab my attention. I didn't mind it so much here as I was expecting it, and they were actually quite polite about it. When one restaurant hawker tried to get me to eat at his place, I said quite firmly, "No!" and he actually apologised to me. Most of the time I didn't even acknowledge the existence of the hawkers. By this stage I was getting pretty good at pretending to be deaf and dumb and avoiding all eye contact, though it's been said that's the way I am most of the time anyway.

 

 

In the evening I thought it would be a good idea to have a beer or two down by the beach, but all the bars and restaurants were sparsely populated with isolated couples. Instead, I plonked myself down in an empty hotel bar that faced the ocean and started drinking.

 

About an hour in, I had a crazy but exciting idea and began recording loads of notes about it. The idea itself isn't so important - I was just trying to imagine how sentient artificial intelligences would try to understand the universe around them based on the way they are designed (yeah, welcome to my exciting world).

I drank some more beer. It was good. I made more notes. New ideas spun off from others. I thought my best idea was to start ordering vodka and coke with my beer.

I'm a social drinker in that I never drink alone and here's why. When I was twenty or so, I had a Saturday night in, so I decided to get a six pack and a few videos. I drank the beer and watched the films. 

Lovely. A couple of weeks later I decided to do the same again. Right at the end of one of the films, I realised what was going to happen next. It wasn't a guess; I knew it all scene by scene. That's because I had watched it two weeks previously, and had forgotten the whole film except for the ending. I never drank alone at home again until twenty years later when I broke my leg and was incarcerated in my flat in Jersey for eight weeks - even then it took six weeks for me to relent.

When you're a single traveller, one of the easiest ways to meet others is to go to bars on your own and hope you'll bump into some like minded people, whether they are travellers or indigenous. India doesn't really have a bar scene (except for Bangalore and Mumbai) so not only was I drinking alone in Kovalam, but I hadn't had this much to drink in five or six weeks.

After six bottles of beer and a vodka or three I stumbled back to my hotel room and decided it would be a great idea to phone my friends and family and tell them all about my wonderful new ideas. Of course, they were absolutely thrilled to have me call them, as drunk as Oliver Reed bathing in a vat of port, whilst I waffled on about the perception of robots, obscure experiments in quantum theory and the reality of free choice.

Before I went to bed, I was convinced some strange creature was running around the walls of the room, and I had a crazy dream that something was jumping around inside the fridge.

The next day I awoke with a cat clawing at my brain whilst a dog chased its tail in my thoughts and a woodpecker tried to make a nest out of my skull. I had forgotten all about hangovers. They're not very nice really.

I went to the fridge to get some water and there staring up at me with cold accusatory eyes was a small salamander. It had been running around the room the previous evening and must have run into the fridge when I pulled out some water before going to sleep. Being cold blooded, it had died in the low temperature. I reverently lifted it onto a piece of paper and headed out to the balcony to throw it into the bushes below. However in my badly hungover state, I somehow managed to flick it onto one of the balconies below me. The horrible slapping sound it made as it hit the cement will stay with me for a long time. It also made me giggle at my own ineptitude.

I couldn't do much that day as not only was my brain slopping around in my skull cavity like an oiled up Susan Boyle on a waterbed, but I developed diarrhoea. Now the drinking wouldn't have helped but I'm convinced that the hotel restaurant was to blame. They were a great bunch in there, very chatty and friendly, but someone somewhere wasn't washing their hands properly before handling food. Needless to say, after slopping out the poop deck my toilet contained nothing but a few fibrous lumps swirling in a moonshine sea of brown.

Effectively I lost a day. I'd rather lose a million pounds - you can live a lifetime in a day. If this was your last day, would you rather have a million pounds or another day? I try to ask myself that every day as if it's my last. On this occasion however, I opted for the million pounds. It was a particularly bad day.

Next afternoon, after a long lie in, I made sure I still had a pulse and then spent time strolling on the beach and going to a really out of the way vegetarian restaurant called Lonely Planet. This was well worth it as the food was great (their ginger and lime soda was amazing) and it was situated in the jungle well back from the shore. However, the walk back around the rear of the shops and hotels lining the beach showed me exactly what was happening to all the rubbish in the town. Quite shameful really.

At the beach I clambered onto the rocks with many other people to watch the sun set. It's almost obligatory to do this when visiting Kovalam. Running around the rocks below us was this little fellow.

 

 

Back at the hotel, I sat on the balcony watching the stars growing warm in the firmament above me. There was a blinding flash. I closed my eyes reactively. I could feel the hairs on my arms standing on end. 

A sudden crashing sound like rocks tumbling battered my ears. It felt like an explosion - my whole body was reverberating. I was on my feet preparing to react. I looked around. All was still. People rushed into the hotel courtyard below me looking around scratching their heads. 

Then another flash of light and roar of thunder - a bit further away this time. Lightening had struck mere feet away from me. It was quite an experience. This was about as exciting as Kovalam could get and I knew it was time to move on.

 

 

Trivandrum hadn't been kind to me when I first arrived but nevertheless I decided to head back there and explore. I checked in at a reasonably priced hotel and was upgraded to their executive room which was huge and extremely comfortable.

I walked the roads around the town. The shops and bazaars were excellent - good value and most importantly they weren't trying to coerce me into buying anything.

 

 

As I walked, I noticed that although this was Kerala's state capital and main business hub, life here wasn't fast. People walked slowly from place to place, chatting idly with each other, or best of all, singing aloud for their own pleasure. People smiled a lot in Trivandrum. After a shaky start, I was really beginning to like the place.

I walked down the MG Road, finding some great bookshops and a couple of good tech stores. I actually bought a few things - I had only really spent money on essentials until now but the lack of any kind of pressure selling made it more conducive for me to look around. The only thing I hated were the pavements; when they existed they were in a terrible state of repair, and then they usually had bikes or cars parked all over them.

 

 

At the end of MG Road was an amazing market. Everything from watches to wallets to fruit and veg were being traded in the simmering heat.

Even the flies were lackadaisical. The market was in a square surrounded by the wrecks of abandoned buildings and it was shaded by innumerable blue plastic canopies. Women sat by their fruit and veg laid out across the floor or on wooden stalls. Men sat idly around makeshift bazaars, casually eyeing me, wondering if I was going to make a purchase. The occasional light-hearted, "Hello!" rang out from a stallholder as I walked past. The dim murmur of easy going chatter rolled around the aisles between the stalls. The smell of fish, fresh fruit and the pungent aroma of spices intermixed with leather and plastic and the ever present diesel fumes. This to me was a taste of the real India. I was in a non-tourist town and nobody gave a damn that I was a foreigner. It was great!

 

 

I looped around the back of the market and saw a Catholic Church, a Hindu Temple and a Mosque all within sight of each other. This spoke volumes to me about Trivandrum. Here were a gentle race of people living in a comfortable town all acknowledging each other’s faiths. I don't remember seeing police or any kind of trouble in the four days I was here. Although it had the usual problems that Indian cities have - overcrowding, lack of maintenance of public amenities etc. it had something that few places in the world have - soul. There was a real sense of community here, of acceptance and belonging. Everyone I spoke to was unassuming and chirpy, as if they knew they had a good thing going in this town. I would go as far to say that aside from Bangalore, Trivandrum is the only Indian city where I really felt at home.

 

 

I took a day trip to the southernmost point of India before I left Trivandrum (which will be the subject of my next blog), but when finally I did leave town I felt genuinely sad to be going. Trivandrum turned out to be a great place to visit in order to get a real appreciation of an Indian city. Unpretentious and unmotivated by tourism, Trivandrum reverberates with the sights, sounds and smells of everyday life. Populated by polite and unassuming people, it has a warmth and charm that makes it feel like a living, breathing entity with a personality and character all of its own.

I truly loved it.

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Warning: there might be some swearing in this blog – I can’t bloody remember.

“There is enough on earth for everybody's need, but not for everyone's greed." - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

He was a raving, homicidal maniac and he had my life in his hands. I was travelling between Kalpetta and Calicut on a state bus. The journey had started regularly with the bus screaming down bumpy, unkempt rural roads, but suddenly the road began to descend steeply out of the mountains. When I wasn't gasping at the raw natural beauty of the astounding vista spread before me, I was gasping at the reckless abandon of the bus driver as he roared around hairpin bends with hundred foot drops on one side whilst attempting to overtake anything in his path. In India, they don't lock their maniacs away, oh no. They give them jobs as state bus drivers.

The scenery was as breathtaking as the driver's cornering.

Subsequently, I didn't know what was causing my heart to palpitate. I tried to video this headlong rush down the mountainside, but most of the footage was far too jerky to be broadcastable, and frankly, I was more terrified of losing my beloved iPhone out of the window than I was of dying horribly in the wrecked inferno of the bus. However, I have managed to cobble together some short scenes to give a rough idea of what the journey was like.

Too shocked by the drive to think of anything but a cliché, I remember whispering to myself that this fantastic paradise was like the Garden of Eden, and I crawled into foetal position and wept silently as fires raged above the driver’s horned skull and his hovering imps cackled with furious glee at the mayhem unfolding before the smoking wheels of the bus.

Eventually, under a fiery sun, we reached Calicut (or Kozhikode as it used to be called). It was a bright, reasonably clean workaday town with - astonished gasp - honest auto-rickshaw drivers, all with working meters. Calicut was a real pleasure, but there was little to do or see here so the next morning I caught a train to Ernakulam. On the way, I completely missed out on Ponnani. In fact, I didn't even get a sniff of Ponnani, it passed me by so fast. Ponnani is a small town on the coast of Kerala and could be comedy gold in the hands of the right person. Did I tell you that I didn't see any Ponnani in India? Bah I give up!

Close to my hotel in Ernakulam was a Pizza Hut, so I feasted on pizza after a month of gorging on spicy Indian food, and maintained my water content by sipping on this (the brand name of which you really don't want to see on a bottle of water in India).

The next day, I hopped on the ferry to Kochi, which is on a peninsula adjacent to Ernakulam.

Kochi (formerly Cochin) is an ancient spice trading port that was the first European colony in India (the Portuguese arrived in 1503).

I started by strolling through the old city streets, past ramshackle hotels, the usual open sewers and hopping over the great clods of cow shit that I had become so used to in the larger Indian towns. To give Kochi credit (and most of Kerala I might add) it was cleaner and better maintained than most of the places I had visited. Down by Fort Kochi, the buildings opened out and the whole place had a remarkably European flavour. Along the shore are the famous Chinese Fishing Nets, large cantilevered structures believed to be introduced in the 14th Century by traders from the court of Kublai Khan.

Down the coast past a number of remarkably friendly hawkers I happened upon a tatty beach which I neatly avoided by sneaking down a nearby back street. Here was a small, run down graveyard, obviously European in origin. I later learned this is the Dutch Cemetery, a relic from the time when the Dutch had colonised the town in the 18th Century.

Walking around the backstreets, I bumped into a bunch of lads who had been on the same ferry as me. We got chatting - they said I looked unhappy and I laughed. If Morrissey and Amy Winehouse were to have a baby, it would look less miserable than my face in repose. These fellows were on a training course for a foreign exchange company in Madurai where I had been three weeks earlier. They were a fun bunch of characters, and we chatted about where we were from, our jobs, our marital status (these are the first three questions Indian people ask you), where I had been and my favourite places in India so far (Madurai was a popular answer).

We went our separate ways, and I emerged onto what looked like a typical village green surrounded by European cottages and an old church. A group of Indian kids were happily playing cricket and football on the grass. The church, St. Francis, was the oldest Catholic church in India. I had a quick look inside but it was glum and unimpressive, only the age of some of the gravestones on the wall actually sparking any interest.

I caught an auto over to an area unceremoniously called Jew Town, so called because it was populated by Jewish people 450 years previously. 

The auto driver was friendly and he showed me a few of the backstreets and a small canal that ran to the river where he lived. I tipped him well as I stepped off the auto and strode off into the alleyways around the central marketplace. The nearby synagogue was closed and the streets were full of predatory handicraft emporium shopkeepers. I ignored all of their persistent calls as I walked past. You would think that each one would learn from the previous that I was completely ignoring them, but no, they were intent on trying to send me into a murderous frenzy by whistling, shouting, even grabbing me as I walked along.

Again, I have to say it, this is one aspect of Indian culture that really irks me. It's such an obvious ploy to get you into a shop where you are going to be hijacked simply because you are a foreigner. After all, none of the Indian tourists get any of this harassment. The truth of the matter is that a small sample of the population are openly exploiting foreign tourists. They could easily sell these items at regular prices and have people attracted to their shops because of this, but no: fuelled by greed they hike their prices up and employ every devious trick in the book to get you inside and rip you off.

Fraudsters can come in the guise of touts, hawkers, auto-rickshaw drivers, handicraft shopkeepers, people milling around train stations; they are everywhere tourists go. This year is especially bad with tourism down 20% in India after the global recession and Mumbai attacks. There are less tourists and more fraudsters desperate to steal a buck. As I've said before, the great pity is that many short stay tourists leave India never to return because the only people they’ve had dealings with are these arseholes. Their robbery is short term because word spreads and fewer tourists bother coming to the country, which is a great shame. They are letting their whole nation down. However, the reason this exploitation is allowed to exist in the first place is down to one thing: political corruption, but I'll cover this in another blog.

I skipped around the back of the thief laden streets to Mattancherry Palace. Now a museum with a rather lacklustre facade on the outside, this place only comes alive when you step inside and stare at the walls. There are many items on display, such as swords and Raja costumes, but it is the exquisite mythological murals that make this place such a great attraction. Here, you can see Krishna cavort with milkmaids, Garuda playfully gesturing with his enormous tongue and other gods sleeping or staring back at you serenely. All of this is painted in such a delicate and stylised manner, It almost leaps from the surface of the wall and pulls you in to dance and laugh with the characters depicted. I loved it, especially considering that many of these murals are over five hundred years old.

I left the palace and started back to the ferry. As I was walking an auto driver tried to coax me into his rickshaw. I ignored him and grabbed my phone to see if I was heading in the right direction. The auto driver got out of his rickshaw and started shouting down the street at me. Again I ignored him, but noticed that I was over a mile away from the ferry and I was tired from walking all day. By now, the auto driver had followed me down the street and was at my shoulder jabbering away. There was no other means of transport available so against my better judgement I jumped into his auto.

"Take me to the Ferry for 50 rupees," I said.

"I take you for free if you go to my friend's shop."

"NO! Just take me to the ferry."

"Please, let me take you to shop. Great bargains."

"No."

He stopped at a shop. I stared at him like he had just tried to murder my non-existent girlfriend.

"Keep moving." I stared at him hard. He kept moving.

Just as we were reaching the ferry terminal, he tried one last time.

"Please, there is good shop here. Please go in."

Because we were outside the ferry terminal anyway, I just laughed. I gave him the money and said, "No tip for you." Then I walked towards the shop he had pointed out but feinted at the last minute and started walking back towards the terminal. I turned to look at him and started laughing. He looked annoyed which made me laugh even more. At least my childish game was entertaining me.

It was around this time that my love affair with Mirinda began. Mirinda (which means "amazing" in Esperanto, fact fans) is a fizzy fruit based drink (usually orange) which has the amazing claim "No artificial additives!" on the front of the bottle whilst also adding incidentally on the back, "Contains no fruit." Now that's magic!

I had booked a boat trip into Kerala's backwaters so I left Kochi early next morning and travelled by taxi to Allapuzah. On arrival at the landing where the boats departed, my car was surrounded by people desperate to haul me out and stick me on their boat. I made the most insistent person prove to me that it he was the right man by having him phone the hotel in Kochi that had booked the trip for me. Once this was sorted out I ignored the others and followed him down to his boat.

The house boat was crewed by three people, the captain, the pilot and a chef. I had the boat to myself so it seemed a little overmanned. I chatted to the captain as only he could speak English. He gave me the usual stick about my being single and not having children and I laughed at his mixture of surprise and mock outrage. He would chastise me a number of times about this, always smiling. I was later to learn that he was single too which is why he joked about it so much.

We pulled out of the landing and started to drift down the river. We were in a populated area of the river, with small houses lining the river banks. Here, women scrubbed clothes meticulously while old men washed themselves down in the waters. Whole families rowed in small wooden boats to destinations without a name. Strikingly coloured kingfishers perched on overhanging tree branches, eagerly searching for their next meal.

The river opened out into a delta that stretched as far as the eye could see. Glassy waters lapped lazily at small shards of land that harboured bushes and palm trees. The air smelled heavy but clean. A surreal glow infused the waters, a fantastic light spinning off of each tiny wave making everything look clean and bright and new, as if this was the first day of the world. They call Kerala, “God’s Own Country,” and now I could see why. My eyelids grew heavy and I fell into a contented sleep that lasted only five minutes. When I awoke, I felt as if I were still dreaming.

We had now moved to a narrow tributary and were gently floating past grassy tree lined banks. The captain of the ship asked if I would like some Keralan beer. "Yes please."

We stopped by a ragged, wooden shack and the captain ushered me into it. Inside this dark, squalid den, lots of old men sat around drinking idly. Pots and kegs were scattered everywhere. One man was ladling a muddy brew from a barrel into a cup. It was only then that I realised that they were actually brewing the stuff here. Kerala is a dry state and this was an illegal brewery. I like the idea of being able to see, so I declined the beer and returned to the boat. The captain stayed and had his fill.

As we pulled away from the banks, the serene beauty of the river was punctured by a raucous and strangely familiar noise. And then I heard these words, "She is ooooh-ooooh-oooooh. D-I-S-C-O!" someone was blaring the seventies disco classic from another boat. Five minutes later I stopped giggling at the randomness of it all.

We continued to meander lazily and the boat's chef knocked me up a huge meal. The chef was in his late forties and was a really lovely bloke, soft spoken and eager to please. Unfortunately, I hated his food; the smell actually made me feel slightly sick. I ate little of it, and later when he made dinner, I could sense him behind me, watching to see how much I ate, disappointed that his food didn't please me. Fortunately dinner was better than lunch.

In the evening, the captain let me pilot the boat and when we reached a few small houses by the side of the river, I carefully pulled in.

Here, the crew and their families lived. The pilot's wife and children came out to greet me and showed me their paddy fields behind the house.

I sat outside the pilot's house drinking chai - a sweet and tasty brew made with tea, cardamom and other spices - as the skies rapidly grew heavy with night and insects chirruped noisily around us. Huge clouds had been gathering on the horizon all day. Now, sweeping arcs of light punctured the skies as I anticipated the distant roar of thunder. I watched the children play and giggle together, the oldest girl looking after the younger children almost like a mother. I sat and listened to the adults chatting and laughing, moving and talking in ways which were familiar to them. As I silently watched them all, their love, veneration and contentment in each other's presence so obvious, for the first time in my life I wondered why I didn't have a family of my own to nurture and care for. It felt like a profound sense of loss, but lasted only briefly. Perhaps my biological clock has finally awoken like some bad-headed golem after a forty year sleep. Only time will tell.

I retired to my bedroom and went to the toilet. Here I encountered quite possibly the largest cockroach ever to exist. I froze and started to think of ways of getting rid of it. I automatically reached for my mosquito repellent and gave it a blast. I didn't want to kill it, I just wanted it to hate itself for a while so I could think of a way to get it off the boat. It scurried over to a bucket, it's wing casing opening and closing while it's wings buzzed horribly.

I could sense a definite intelligence in this creature. It was not just reacting to events, but planning it's next moves. I was the idiot reacting. In fact, it was thinking so far ahead of me it would probably beat me at chess.

After a huge battle involving wrestling, bare knuckle fighting and a spot of fencing, I managed to get it in a small bucket full of water. 

It flapped around for a bit and by the time I got it to the edge of the boat it had stopped moving. I threw it into the trees and I hope it is still merrily scampering around in the woods, because honestly it was a strangely elegant and beautiful creature.

I awoke during the night as it turned out that the air conditioning on the boat only had one setting: fucking freezing. I turned it off and managed to thaw out in about five seconds as the muggy night air immediately took hold.

The next morning we returned to the landing. In all we had only travelled about fifteen kilometres, yet the landscape had been constantly changing. As I left Allapuzha, I knew that I would remember my day of idyll on the river for the rest of my life. However, I wasn't to know that my next stop would eventually turn out to be my favourite place in all of India.

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At the Mysore State Bus Stand, the station director stood at his table like a general, writing notes against all of the arrivals and departures. People walked up to him to ask questions and he swished them away like a bad smell. On occasion, if he was feeling generous, he would redirect them to another employee.

India is full of taciturn government employees who want to tie everyone's feet in red tape in order that they move at the same speed as their own incompetence. Having said that, they are often in thankless jobs, but the void of their public admiration is equally compensated by the size of their egos.

I stood at his table and waited for him to look up from his note taking. Briefly, I wondered if he would dismiss me as quickly as he had the others. I decided to be patient.

He was a dark skinned man in his late forties with a large moustache tapering at the ends. He wore a crisp green shirt with shoulder straps and a black cap - although I may have imagined the last as virtually no one wears a hat in India.

The director flipped through his pages officiously, cross checking, making notes and occasionally grunting. He knew I was standing before him, but said nothing. Finally, after perusing his beloved notebook for about five minutes, he looked up.

"Excuse me, could you tell me which bus I need to take to Kalpetta?"

He looked me up and down as if from a distance, then said, "Yes, come."

He walked me over to the bus and motioned for me to get on. I thanked him. It seems that giving him that little bit of patience and respect to finish his work was all it needed for him to be helpful.

I asked the bus conductor if the bus was going to Kalpetta. He smiled shyly and said no. I had seen that smile before. One of my Indian colleagues had once told me the biggest fib going and had smiled in exactly the same way. It's a smile of slight embarrassment at having to lie, though why the conductor didn't want me on the bus I can only surmise.

I double checked with the driver. It was the right bus.

Half smiling myself, I jumped on the bus and said, "It is going to Kalpetta you liar."

It was a five hour journey, so not learning from the previous lesson that my bum cheeks still bore the marks of, I jumped into the back seat, mainly because there was room for my backpack.

It was a bumpy ride.

The bus thundered through lazy villages where people sat and watched the day go by. It roared through farmland that stretched off to the horizon. Gradually, open fields gave way to woodland. It tore through foliage that was constantly increasing in density as we made our way slowly up the hills.

 

 

In some of the larger towns I noticed some posters that looked like bad adverts for the latest Bollywood movie. I had first noticed them when leaving Pondicherry and had realised that they were in fact adverts for local politicians. Beaming visages surrounded by halos of light looked beneficently down upon their flock as if they were incarnations of Hindu gods. The adverts were stomach churning and reeked of corruption. At the same time, I couldn't help but chuckle at their gall.

In Pondicherry, ex-Bollywood actors had actually turned their hand to politics, so it was unsurprising that these posters appeared film-like. However in Wayanad it was a different story.

 

If you invited this chap around for dinner he looks like he would eat your children.

 

Finally, we neared Kalpetta and a group of monkeys greeted us at a bus stand.

 

A state bus and three of its drivers.

 

I noticed how tidy some of the little towns out in the hills were. 

Rubbish disposal seems almost nonexistent in India. It is piled high in the streets of the bigger cities where cows, dogs and the poorest of people pick through it for scraps. But here, there seemed to be more of a civic duty. There was rubbish in the streets, yes, but it was not nearly as apparent. It is a real conundrum to me that Indian people who are fastidiously clean when it comes to personal hygiene step outside their doors after washing to be confronted by piles of rotting garbage. I think after a while, you just stop seeing it – like a stain on a fridge door that you only notice when you have guests, only in this case, it’s more like the fridge is covered by rubbish and there is shit and fucking great potholes all over the kitchen floor.

In Kalpetta I met Jain and his brother Anil just as rain began to pour in sheets from the skies. Kerala has another period of rain after the monsoon which isn't torrential but is still very wet.

We drove through the hills to Anil's home which he built in a truly remarkable location in the rainforests of Wayanad. He had also built a souped up replica of a tribal hut on his property made from natural resources. This is where I was to stay for the next three days.

 

 

It had been a long day, so after meeting Anil's family and having dinner, I headed off to my hut for a long sleep.

By sunrise, the rain had dissipated and I walked out of the hut to be greeted by a fine, fresh morning. I breathed the air in deeply and sighed contentedly. I looked up and froze. My bollocks hitched up so far into my body that I had to swallow them back down again. Strung beneath the forest canopy were a number of webs with huge black and yellow spiders waiting patiently at their centres. These spiders were bigger than my hand (ok - bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hand) at around six inches in diameter.

 

 

I was later to learn that these bad boys (or girls in fact - the males are tiny) are Golden Orb Weaver spiders, and by coincidence I had read an article about them in the paper just before coming to India on how they are being farmed for their silk, which is one of the most tensile materials known to man. In fact, their webs are so strong that they don't bother re-spinning them each day, they just patch them up. A single web has been known to last as long as six months. Apparently, the spiders grow to a greater size in the rainforest as the largest I saw had a body of two and a half inches and a leg span of seven - a third larger than average size. They have on occasion been known to eat small birds.

After breakfast we drove into the Bandipur National Park. The road winds up around the mountains, through forests and past lakes, reminding me of the highlands of Scotland. Clumps of bamboo arranged like inverted tepees grow so quickly here you can hear it crack and stretch. Bats hang from trees wrapped in their leathery wings, waiting for the hunter's night. Monkeys gather in groups to eat fruit and chastise passing humans.

 

Bats too lazy to find a cave.

 

As I waved goodbye to this troop of monkeys, one of them flashed its eyebrows at me and squealed in either surprise or delight. We all laughed cruelly at it!

 

Tribal people still live here, hunting and fishing in the woods and lakes. They craft simple structures for their hunting and farming grounds but live in more elaborate homes in small communities.

 

 

Deep in the forest you can find elephants, tigers and other endangered species. They are understandably very shy and rarely venture out especially at this time of the year when the watering holes are full and there's no need to risk going anywhere near the most dangerous predator of all - us.

We stopped for some rich, sweet Indian coffee in a dark shack in the middle of the forest, and sampled the specialty - a deep fried sweet containing coconut, banana and spices.

Feeling refreshed, we headed for the fourteenth century Gopal Swamy Temple. Perched on a mountain, the misty old temple is associated with a nearby stream where people's ashes are poured into the sacred waters. It was a very beautiful spot.

 

 

Finally, we meandered home through the park over terribly worn and bumpy roads.

That night, I went for dinner at Jain's parents home a little further into the jungle. It was great to sit down with the family and eat a home cooked meal.

Back at my hut, I heard a strange padding sound. I thought there must have been a bird on the roof, but I caught sight of movement above me. 

I froze. A different type of giant spider was crawling around the roof. It looked like an Indian Tarantula (they have striped legs).

 

 

Jain heard me swearing and popped down to help get it out, but it disappeared behind the walls somewhere. After he had left, I quickly prepared the mosquito net so that not even Michael Jackson's ghost could get into bed with me. Outside, above the noise of the crickets, there was a really loud chirruping sound. I opened the door to investigate and found this giant cricket with a body around six inches long. I didn't even know these things existed. I fell asleep to the sound of it rasping its wings together (not its legs as is commonly thought).

 

 

The next day we travelled towards Meppadi. We passed through huge tea plantations where countless rows of bushes are cultivated for our drinking pleasure. Many tribal female workers with brightly coloured saris and sun worn features roam the hills tending the tea bushes.

 

 

Near Meppadi we left the car and made our way through the jungle to Soochipara Falls. You can hear the water thundering in the distance all the way down the two kilometre trek to the falls. A thick mist permeates the atmosphere as you near the water and it clings to your skin. At the bottom of the falls, groups of young lads dive in to the pool as a dare and have their photos taken, but when we first arrived there was nobody else there. The force of the water as it flows over the edge of the cliff is surprisingly violent for a waterfall of its size.

 

 

We wound our way back through the mountains past some stunning vistas around Chembra Peak, the highest point in Wayanad.

 

 

As we drove home, Jain sang some of his favourite songs. In fact, Jain sang a lot on the whole journey and it's no wonder - he's got a great voice. However I was to learn later that it is typical of Keralans to sing a lot, even just walking down the street. Fortunately most, like Jain, are blessed with a good voice, but some are so bad they sound like Paris Hilton with a tracheotomy.

In the afternoon, Jain had to head back to Bangalore, so we said our farewells and Anil and I went to the cinema to see Pazhassi Raja - a rollicking true story of a tribal king who fought against the British East India Company in the 18th Century. The story was fairly faithful to the truth, and even though I couldn't understand a lot of the dialog for the three and a half hours running time, it still had me shouting my support for the tribals as they cut down the annoying British actors hamming it up as the villains.

Back at the hut, an old friend came to visit. Yes - the spider from last night had come to pay his respects, and perhaps taste my flesh. I asked Anil if he could somehow remove it from the hut and to my horror, he whacked it with a massive brush. I must admit, I couldn't help but laugh at the matter of fact way he dealt with it, and I asked to borrow the brush for the night - just in case. Before I went to bed, I went to the toilet and saw a third spider - even bigger than the last, but brown and hairy. However, this fucker was so quick that as soon as it saw me, it almost popped out of existence as it sped over the wall and through a crack in the roof. Being a semi-reformed arachnophobe (I can handle smaller spiders) I should have deposited various excreta in my undercrackers at that point, but instead I just laughed. It had been terrified by the sight of me and I felt we were kindred spirits in our mutual fear of each other's species.

In bed I noticed that something had bitten me in the cinema, as there was a hole in my foot with a river of crusted blood flowing from it. I still don't know what it was - and still have the bite mark!

In the morning, I was awoken by a neighbour playing Hindi music really loudly, accompanied by dogs howling and a distant mosque’s calls to prayer. It was a strange cacophony of noise, almost haunting in my dreamy state, but as I’ve already said - those Keralans love their music and play it loud day or night.

It was time to leave. I had fallen in love with Wayanad, its majestic, sweeping landscapes, its mountains, forests and lakes, its huge variety of wildlife and its gentle, musical people. Most of all, I was thankful to Jain for bringing me here to meet his fols, and Anil's gracious and welcoming hospitality. He had made me feel part of the family at his homestay and provided me with an experience I'll never forget.

 

Jain, Myself and Anil.

 

If anybody fancies a stay in the Wayanad rainforest, I can’t recommend Anil’s homestay enough. He can be contacted via email here.

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I was late for a wedding.
My friends Samba and Reena were due to be married this morning. I had ordered a taxi for seven thirty but the guy at the hotel reception warned me it may be half an hour late. Fine-I had time for breakfast. I had built an hour's redundancy into the plan anyway, knowing that Bangalore's snarling traffic would be an obstacle.
At eight I returned to reception. Still no car. I asked how long it would be.
"Just five minutes sir," he reassured me. He knew I was going to a wedding, I had told him the importance of this cab the moment I had entered the hotel the previous evening and he had told me earnestly that he would arrange everything.
Fifteen minutes came and went.
I asked him again when the car would be here.
"It's on the way. Should be five minutes sir."
"That's what you said fifteen minutes ago," I replied.
"No-it will be five minutes sir. Please sit and I'll call them."
Fifteen minutes passed. My extra hour was all used up.
I was officially annoyed.
"Where's the car?"
"Just another f..."
"Don't tell me another five minutes. Your five minutes last an hour." This kind of time keeping is jokingly referred to by Indians themselves as Indian Standard Time.
"I'm sorry sir, but the taxi was ordered from the centre of town and was caught in the traffic. We've ordered a local taxi who will be here in five minutes."
"But we're five miles from town-why didn't you order a local taxi in the first place?"
"It's not the usual company we use. Please sit and wait for five minutes."
Fifteen minutes came and went.
I was officially angry.
"Listen, I'm going outside to get an auto-rickshaw. At least I'll be on my way and not sat here waiting on a dream."
"No, you can't do that sir, the taxi is ordered."
"I don't care about that, I've got a wedding to get to."
"But sir, the rickshaw will cost more and the taxi will be here in five minutes."
Two lies in one sentence. I was officially fucking livid!
"Bullshit - I'm leaving."
"Please sir, it's arriving shortly. I'll phone the driver. You can talk to him."
I felt like I was in a daytime soap opera; all logic seemed to have vanished in a puff of weasels. I knew what was happening as I had encountered it before. The receptionist was enjoying a very common past time in India known as The Art of Saving Face. People will go to great lengths to avoid embarrassing situations that may tarnish their good name – any kind of shame or dishonour being severely frowned upon in Indian society. It's just that this ancient warrior code that used to apply to bloody, medieval battlefields has been displaced in the modern world. Now it apparently applies to such trivial issues as ordering taxis.
You see, the receptionist had told me the previous evening that he would take care of my trip to the wedding. His honour was now under question as his promises were falling flat. In order that his honour be maintained, he had to provide me with the taxi-whether it arrived now or in three weeks time. Of course I wasn’t even questioning his honour, I just didn’t want to be late, but his dilemma was doubly complicated: he had also arranged a deal with the taxi driver and could not lose face to him either. Never mind the fact that I could miss the wedding; I would lose face for that, not him.
Saving face in modern Indian society can be extremely frustrating for the average foreign traveller, especially when the result often means that the person practising this fine art makes themselves look even more foolish than they originally did. In this case, the receptionist appeared to be wilfully ignorant of my dilemma in order to look competent when in fact he was looking more and more incompetent with the passing of every "five" minutes. It seemingly makes no sense until you realise that a hang over from the caste system is regulating his behaviour - but more of that in a later blog.
Eventually the car arrived two hours late. Thankfully, by now the traffic had eased and we were able to cut through the cross town traffic.
We had some trouble finding the place, but when I caught sight of a white horse bedecked in mogul finery with a strangely familiar mogul warrior atop it, I knew I had made it in time. I should have realised that the wedding would be on Indian Standard Time too.
Samba knew I had raced back from Tamil Nadu to get here and greeted me warmly when he caught sight of me. Then he made sure I was nearby throughout the ceremony so I could get a good look at the different blessings. Samba was marrying Rena who I had also worked with in Jersey, and they both made a fine couple. Like Vivek's wedding nearly two weeks before, it was a spectacular occasion, but significantly different in places as Hindu weddings have different customs in different regions. One notable point about both weddings is that neither was an arranged marriage - a sign of the times in modern Bangalore.
Samba's friends kept dragging me round by the hand which is customary in India as a sign of friendship, and treated me like I was part of their gang.
At the end of the ceremony, I filled my guts with all sorts of delicious curries spread on the customary banana leaf, and waddled back to the group to chat and take photos.
I was becoming a veteran of Indian weddings. They're great!

 

I assure the happy newlyweds that my shirt is both ultra-fashionable and highlights my admirable physique.

I took an auto-rickshaw back to the hotel which took more than an hour, but amazingly, the driver had the meter on and actually took me the right way. I tipped him handsomely and when he looked at me oddly for such a big tip, I told him it was for being fair and honest with me. He shook his head like I was some crazy fool, but smiled as he did so.
My room in the hotel was large and plush, so I kicked back for the next couple of days and recuperated from the mad dash across Tamil Nadu. Sometimes you need a break from all the sightseeing, especially when you've plunged headlong into a new culture. You need to step back and consider what you've been through, otherwise it all just builds into a mess of images and sensations.

Although most of the time during this period I managed to relax a good deal, one thing really annoyed me. I was in the room underneath the restaurant and the constant sound of scraping chairs and tables reverberated through the roof at all hours of the day-but especially when the restaurant was closed, or in the early hours of the morning. I couldn't explain it. It was either a mischievous ghost or some obsolete employee trying to justify his pay cheque because the furniture wasn't being moved a few inches, it was being dragged several feet across the floor.
One night, Vivek-who had just returned from his honeymoon in Singapore-popped around and we went to a couple of bars in the Whitefield district.
The first, rather fancifully called "Ivy-The Unwind Island" was a rather pleasant after-work hang out for Bangalore professionals. Here I was to have my first alcoholic beverage since arriving in India nearly four weeks previously. It was Kingfisher. It was good.
Vivek told me this bar had once been very busy, but like all new bars had fallen out of fashion after the initial enthusiasm. Still, it was doing reasonable trade for a Thursday night, and India were playing a test match against Australia on the big screen. Like most sports, I really enjoyed playing cricket as a boy, but as a spectator sport I find it as boring as watching a snail slithering across drying paint in the reflection of a kettle that has yet to boil. Or watching the sad bits in Comic Relief. However, this match was - dare I say it - actually quite exciting. India needed thirty runs from two overs, and were smacking the ball left right and centre. People were on their feet in the bar, cheering on their national team. It was a valiant effort, but they lost by three runs. It's funny to think that Britain gave India cricket and bureaucracy and now India is better at both.

 

Bangalore nights...

We went to another bar called Purple Haze where rock music was played loud. It was pretty cool, apart from the fact that I failed to drink a jug of beer to myself. I was seriously out of practice! Meanwhile Vivek and I chatted about my time in India and his travels for his Honeymoon and his Bachelor Party in Vegas. Obviously I can't divulge any of those stories as I swore not to, but needless to say, the incident with the cocktail waitress and the salamander will never be made public.

The next day I returned to Avenue Road which had so fascinated and enthralled me the first time I had visited Bangalore. It was raining, but it didn't dampen anybody's mood to shop. They say England is a nation of shopkeepers, but that title really belongs to India. Here, young men walk with their arms over each other’s shoulders, girls collect outside stationary shops looking almost lasciviously at pens and notepads, boys and old men haul carts full of goods about with gritted teeth and the traffic continuously attempts to mow them all down. The audience for this human theatre, the shopkeepers, stand watching stoically as they wait for the next inevitable purchase.

For my final night in Bangalore, I met Vivek and his friend Thaswin in town. We went to another bar also called Purple Haze which was bigger and the music even louder than its little brother in Whitefield. I thoroughly enjoyed it there. It's now my favourite bar in India.

Myself, Vivek and Thaswin.

 

Outside the next bar, “Le Rock,” we came across a drunk Indian guy trying to start a fight with the bouncers. It was quite amusing and quite unlike any fight I've seen outside a pub: lots of pushing and shouting followed by the guy charging the bouncers and literally bouncing off them. He then wandered off in a daze. Had it been Stevenage, there would at least have been blood and teeth on the ground afterwards.

Inside, we asked for shots and the waiter said they didn't have what we wanted but he could do us a special shooter. When the drinks came back, the "shooter" involved three tall glasses with multiple drinks in each. It was a scam and Vivek and Thaswin were having none of it. I was impressed with the way they went to town on the guy, calling over his manager and making him return the drinks to the bar.

When I got back to the hotel, I found a night club in full swing - in the restaurant above my room. The noise was deafening and there were people camping in the corridors. There was no way I was going to sleep, and I couldn't be bothered to move rooms so I decided to join the party. When I got upstairs, there must have been about twenty men all showing off their dancing skills to a single foxy lady. The men danced in a jittery fashion, half Michael Jackson and half Michael J. Fox. It was pretty funny. I chatted to a few of the people there about their jobs and what kind of music they liked. It was all very friendly and enjoyable.

The music finished at around two, and I had to get up early the next day to catch a train. I headed to my room, climbed into bed and started to fall to sleep.

Scraaaaaaape. Scraaaaaaaape. Scrrrraaaaaaape!

The fucking restaurant loon was at it again rearranging all the furniture upstairs. I phoned reception and he promised it would stop.

I closed my eyes again. I almost fell asleep.

Scraaaaaaaaape!

I was straight on the phone. "Stop that fucking noise-the club's already kept me up half the fucking night!" I was shouting. I'm very grumpy when I'm jarred awake. I fell asleep wondering why the loon above couldn't just lift the chairs instead of scraping them across the room, thinking in my tired, semi-drunken state that perhaps he didn’t have any arms, in which case he was probably in the wrong job.

The next day I jumped on a train to Mysore. The Shatabdi Express is fast and the train is very clean, bright and new. It was a stress free journey. I had booked a Ginger Hotel again, and unknown to me, they charged me both for the booking and at the check in. This still hasn't been resolved-their customer service is appalling and I haven't used them since.

On Sundays and public holidays, the Mysore Palace grounds are spectacularly illuminated so I took a stroll down there. I thought it may look a bit like a Santa's Grotto at Asda, but it actually looked very pretty. The lights were everywhere, on the palace itself, on the temples in the grounds, all along the watchtower and around the gates. There were lots of people here and, rather bizarrely, a full brass band playing Abba hits and other 80s pop cheese.

The Palace by night.

 

The Palace by day.

 

The following day, I took the full tour.

The first grand hall for wedding receptions is truly grand. Huge chandeliers hang from the ceiling, oil paintings of Royalty look down at you imperiously and solid cast iron pillars from Glasgow hold up the domed roof consisting of stained glass windows with peacock designs. Upstairs another huge hall with one side open to the world holds delicate portraitures, gilded colonnades and superb religious ceiling paintings. A final room full of mirrors looks best, a technical marvel of gold and silver columns with a stained glass ceiling and lavish furnishings. However for all this finery I found the palace to be coldly magnificent.

Although its opulence was apparent and it was technically superb, there was no passion or soul about the place. It did not feel lived in. There was no idiosyncrasy or whimsy. It was all for show and lacked any atmosphere. There was no left brain / right brain symmetry; pleasing geometric lines and exceptional craftwork were all around, but there was no passion or warmth here.

In my opinion, truly great works of art require both good craftwork and imagination. The greatest of guitarists can knock out a riff that uses all the strings across fifteen frets, but if there is no imagination behind it, it is dull and lifeless. Most practiced artists are technically capable of producing The Scream by Edvard Munch, but that painting required a piece of his soul to be smeared across the canvass in order for it to be so profound. All the logic in the world can make something technically brilliant, but without passion there is no fire, no life.

Mysore Palace was a trinket, a bauble; cared for but unloved. It was like eating a gourmet meal that has no flavour, or screwing a supermodel after you've given her rohypnol.

I left Mysore Palace satisfied by its grandiosity but unimpressed by its pompousness. It was time to move on. Next stop, Wayanad, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.

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