Spanking the monkey (ahem)

Apologies for blog slackness over the last few days. Been hanging out in Manali - the weather cleared up, so we did plenty of walking in the truly lovely Kullu Valley. By far the most beautiful and peaceful place we've been in India thus far - the fact that it's winter meant that we had the place pretty much to ourselves. The few westerners about - a couple of guys from London, and an endearingly loopy Australian couple - were good company, and we spent the rest of the time wandering down the river and befriending passing dogs and monkeys.

Sadly all good things must come to an end, and so two days ago we embarked upon another god-awful bus journey to our current place of residence, McLeod Ganj (home to none other than the Dalai Lama, along with the Tibetan government in exile). As it's low season, no "deluxe" buses were available, so we braved the local bus. Only in India, I thought as we clattered and bounced up and down mountains, could a bus average 20 km/h and still feel like it's travelling dangerously quickly.

No, seriously - yesterday it took us 6 hours to travel all of 110km. The fact that our bus was a local bus meant that it stopped at every little cow town on the way, along with pretty much anywhere else anybody felt like getting on and off, and anywhere where the driver felt like having a cigarette. These constant stops meant that the driver was constantly trying to make up for lost time, which meant that whenever the bus wasn't stopped, it was careering at breakneck velocity around mountain roads that are best approximated by imagining the Great Ocean Road, replacing the sea with fog-shrouded valleys, and replacing the nice smooth bitumen with a mish-mash of potholes, roadworks, landslides and the occasional goat-herder.

As seems to be the trend of late, though, (and long may it continue) the destination made the journey worthwhile. McLeod Ganj is a very pleasant little enclave, perched on a ridge some 500m above the kinda main town of Dharamsala below (and wasn't that last little leg slogging up the hill an absolute delight). The fact that it's essentially Tibet-in-India means it's somewhat reminiscent of a Tibetan theme park, but it's not nearly as commercialised, overwhelming or full of sandal- and kaftan-clad Westerners as I thought it might be - again, the fact that it's off-season might explain this. We've not explored much yet, but we've happily discovered a French bakery, complete with croissants, real coffee, and Asterix books - a good way to start the day.

The fact that we've been here over a month has got me reminiscing about what we've seen and done so far - the time seems to have flown, and I'm doing my best not to think about what'll happen when it's time to leave, mainly because I have no idea. In the meantime, without further ado, here are the Best of India Thus Far Awards 2006 (cue drum roll):

MOST ASTUTE OBSERVATION
The chap on the bus who told me that "driving in India is easy, because there is only one rule - you must not hit anyone else's car". At the time, I laughed along chummily, thinking it an amusing one-liner, but the more I've watched, the more I've become convinced he was dead serious. In a way, this encapsulates everything that I like about India - most of the time, there are no signs and tedious rules telling you what to do, but if you fuck up, it's your problem, and if you hurt anyone else in the process of fucking up, then you're in all sorts of trouble (I constantly think of the scene in Shantaram where a taxi driver gets beaten black and blue by a crowd for causing an accident). It's certainly not ideal, and it's a harsh old environment, but it does a nice change from the litigation-obsessed and everyone's-fault-but-mine West.

MOST AMUSING INCIDENT
There's a temple to Hanuman (a Hindu god with the face of a monkey) on top of a hill right outside Shimla. It's a nice spot - in the middle of a forest, with pretty spectacular views over the mountains - but it's renowned for being inhabited by monkeys who can turn nasty if you don't feed them. On our way up the hill, we ran into two permanently bewildered Americans - a mother and son travelling together - who we'd first encountered on the train a couple of days before. The lady sported a rather nasty couple of scratches on her cheek. When we asked what she'd done to herself, she explained that she'd been ambushed by a monkey, which had stolen her glasses and shot up a tree with them, refusing to give them back until she bribed it with food.

We did our best to stifle our giggles and our visions of a monkey happily waving a pair of glasses around its head, I stashed *my* glasses in my pocket, and we continued on our way, thinking that with another couple of hundred years of evolution, the monkeys will be demanding rupees for their ransom, rather than just sweets.

BEST EXAMPLE OF INDIAN BUSINESS INGENUITY
The guy at the top of the aforementioned hill in Shimla, who'd perched himself outside the temple and was hiring monkey-hitting sticks at 5 rupees a go. Hiring out sticks. In the middle of a forest. And doing a roaring trade. Excellent.

FAVOURITE WORDS
"Sabzi" (mixed vegetables) and "wallah" (seller). They just roll off the tongue. I try to drop them into as many conversations as possible, whether they're relevant or not.

BEST PLACE
Manali. The Himalayas in general.

WORST PLACE
On the bus. Any of them.

Happy New Year to all.

White Christmas

And now, from the prize clown who brought you the Moroccan epic "Going to the Sahara in the Middle of Summer" comes its sequel: "Visiting the Himalayas in Deepest Winter". We are in Manali, it's Boxing Day, and it is *freezing*. The title of this entry is something of a white lie (ha) - we didn't actually get a white Christmas, but Boxing Day has done its level best to compensate. It started snowing at about 10am and hasn't let up since - our frantic dash into town for a lunch saw us wrapped in virtually every item of clothing we own. Leila set what must surely be some sort of record with seven layers, and only the fact that I don't actually own seven layers kept me from doing the same.

If this all sounds somewhat negative, it's probably only my native pessimism coming to the fore, because despite the weather (or perhaps because of it), it's absolutely beautiful here. We're staying in old Manali, which unlike the main part of town pretty much closes up for the winter. Both old and new must be pretty dreadful in summer - they're awash with signs in Hebrew advertising hairdressers specialisng in dreadlocks and places with names like the "World Peace Cafe" - but at this time of the year, it's peaceful and almost impossibly pretty. When the snow doesn't obscure our view, we look straight across the river to yer genuine snow-capped Himalayan peaks. With the sky equally white, and only the trees to indicate where the mountains stop and the sky begins, there's a curious and disconcerting sense that you're looking through the peaks at the sky itself.

There's plenty of walking around here, although today's snowfalls might put the kibosh on attempting any of the tracks for now. It occurred to me as we skidded down the hillside in a worryingly skittish rickshaw that the snow might also make an awful mess of the roads, so we might end up stuck here for a while. But then, with homecooked fresh trout and endless chai at our beck and call (not to mention ESPN showing the Ashes in the morning and the Premier League in the evening), there are certainly worse places to get holed up over Christmas.

Apologies to all who I didn't email to wish a merry Christmas (ie. pretty much everyone) - internet access here is just as questionable as it is in the rest of India, and twice as expensive to boot. So, merry Christmas to all who value such things, commiserations to those who the festive season shits to tears... and vale James Brown.

Viviaaaaaaaan...

If Slartibartfast won an award for the fjords, as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy suggested, then whoever came up with the Himalaya surely deserved an honourable mention. We're currently in Shimla, once the summer capital of the Raj and now a pleasantly quiet and pretty mountain town nestled happily in the foothills of the Himalayas.

When I say "foothills", I mean things that look suspiciously like mountains to the untrained eye, and would probably be called mountains just about anywhere else (if they didn't have the likes of Everest and K2 to compete with). The scenery is just absolutely stunning - we're at about 2000m about sea level, and just about everywhere you look there are sweeping panoramas out over the great folded fractals of stone that define the ranges and valleys. Leila's been taking lots of photos, and if I can ever find an internet cafe that's competent enough, I'll upload some here. In the meantime, words will have to suffice, although it's difficult to find the right ones.

Suffice it to say that there's something really quite wonderful about being able to see for miles and miles, everything from the tiny white spires of temples perched precariously on hilltops down to the stepped crop-growing vistas carved out of the hillsides right down to the green valleys way down below, all the land stretched out before you until it vanishes into the haze where there's no horizon, just the distant shadow of mountains and the sun floating in the fog and cloud. I keep thinking of Jack Kerouac perched on his mountaintop writing Desolation Angels - I could happily spend a long, long time up here. As it is, a couple of days will have to do.

The fact that I can actually see for miles is due to the fact that I've finally bitten a long-overdue bullet and invested in a set of glasses. They only cost me $140, which is some consolation, but they've bought on one hell of a "Aaaargh fuck I'm getting old" crisis. Aaaaaaargh fuck I'm gettin old! Matters are made worse by my recent adoption of the Indian habit of wandering round in a blanket to keep warm - there's something very pleasing about being able to do the next best thing to staying in bed all day, but with blanket and specs I now look like some unholy amalgam of Daniel Vettori and Neil from the Young Ones. Whoop-de-fucken-do.

Next stop: Manali, home of the world's finest hashish. Which, given the tales I've heard of Indian police and kickbacks, I'll be avoiding like the plague. You can buy it in Amsterdam anyway. And whit goes on in Amsterdam, *stays* in Amsterdam.

The Toorak airforce base

Had a rather bizarre experience this morning - a brief and accidental journey to the inner sanctum of the Indian upper class.

Having visited both the Nepalese and British embassies in search of visas - the Nepalese very pleasant and helpful, the Brits predictably quite the opposite - we wandered off down the wide boulevards of the Diplomatic Enclave in search of an autorickshaw. After brief encounters with Nehru Park - a startling little Fitzroy Gardens-esque oasis of serenity - and a man with a monkey on the back of his bicycle, we found ourselves outside some sort of airforce base.

We were about to resign ourselves to turning back and trying somewhere else when we saw a semi-obscured sign proclaiming the base to be the home of some sort of shopping centre. This seemed so improbable that we decided to have a look. It turns out that the shopping centre was Delhi's equivalent of Toorak village - a wonderfully snobby enclave full of rich women who are so incredibly important that they simply couldn't possibly shop in the city with everyone else. Why this was stationed on the grounds of an airforce base is one of the many imponderables of India, but it was an interesting insight into the lives of women who are so rich and civilised that they can't quite bring themselves to admit that they're Indian, the sort of people who (to paraphrase Spike Milligan) speak six languages and have nothing of interest to say in any of them.

We sat and had vastly overpriced cups of tea, enduring the glares of waiters who clearly weren't happy that the accident of an inflated exchange rate enabled two shawl-clad Lonely Planet-clutching itinerates to step into their world, and watched the chattering classes clucking over exclusive beauty products and clothes that'd cost yer average Indian's yearly wage. The novelty lasted about half an hour, and then the snotty waiters and Christmas muzak became too much to endure, but still, it was an interesting reminder that even in a country containing 35% of the world's poor, society wimmin remain as self-obsessed and tedious as ever.

The treadmill

After a coupla days in the rather disappointing Jaipur, we find ourselves in Delhi. It's a strange old place - the backpacker ghetto we're staying in is reminiscent of the scungier parts of Amsterdam or Kowloon, but the rest of Delhi (or New Delhi, at least) is unlike anywhere else we've been in India, in that it's a) spacious b) orderly and c) reasonably affluent. It's full of wide boulevards (with real lanes for traffic!) and open spaces, and the upmarket shopping strips look more like Regent Street or Collins Street than anything else. There are no homeless people, or at least none that we've seen - I'm sure they're around somewhere, but they're nowhere near as prominent as they are in Bombay.

For all that, Delhi doesn't have anything like the spirit that Bombay does - it's a curiously soulless sort of place, and not one that I'm keen to spend a lot of time in. Depending on the degree of arsing about required to secure tourist visas for Nepal and L's ancestral visa for London, this might be a forlorn hope, but we'll see. In the meantime, Delhi does have its charms, namely a fine selection of restaurants (had some very acceptable Thai food today, which makes a nice change from our usual diet of Western breakfasts and Indian lunches and dinners), along with a couple of fantastic bookshops.

As for Jaipur, well, it was essentially a tourist trap. One of the sadder aspects of our travels thus far has been seeing perfectly pleasant places ruined entirely by tourism. Of course, even thinking this probably makes me the worst sort of hypocrite, but the fact remains. Jaipur was obviously once a beautiful place, and there are still many beautiful things to see there, but where's the incentive to maintain anything when you can just charge 200 rupees for entry to anything, watch people happily take a couple of snaps for the holiday album, then sit happily on the profits?

In fairness, elements in the Indian government and the various state governments do seem to be making some sort of effort to ensure the preservation of their heritage, as opposed to just cashing in on it. Also helpful are the various private trusts, often set up by ex-Maharajahs and the like for the maintenance of their ancestral homes, monuments etc, but all too often the "sights" are disappointing - you feel like you're being shunted along something that's simultaneously akin to a treadmill and a conveyor belt, where the only thing that really matters is the money in your pocket. I dunno, call me an unrepentant leftie, but rampant commercialism leaves me cold, and being confronted with a swarm people (often government-sanctioned) trying to sell you souvenirs and other uselss consumer items before you've even managed to leave the palace / temple / whatever basically shits me to tears.

The one pleasant experience we did have in Jaipur was a trip to India Textiles, a small clothing co-operative set up by an Australian ex-pat along with a couple of Brits and various others. We bought a heap of clothing - the prices were probably a bit over the odds, but the clothes are all hand-made, the company apparently provides employment for a heap of widows and other social personae non grata, and the chai was good. And they didn't once say "Hello my friend", which is good enough for me.

Anyway, enough bitching. More positive comments next time.

Wedding season

Another day, another balls-achingly slow computer - a shame, as there's a lot to write this time. I'll see how it goes.

Still in Jodhpur, which has grown on me a great deal since we arrived. It's known as the Blue City, which makes perfect sense when you look down on it from above, as the majority of the buildings (in the old city at least) are painted a vivid sky-blue. Apparently the reason for this is two-fold: the indigo in the paint pigment is an insect repellent, and it used to signify that the house was owned by a Brahmin (the highest Hindu caste). These days, non-Brahmins also paint their houses, and the result is one crazy-looking city. Lonely Planet, in a nice rhetorical flourish, described it as "a cubist mass of sky-blue angles", which is exactly right - it does look like a Cubist painting, and it's a quite a sight, especially as it's set against the backdrop of a desert.

It's also home to the Mehenrangarh fort, which is far and away the most imposing and fascinating "historical" site we've been to on this trip so far. It's a giant, majestic 15th century fort set on top of a steep rockface overlooking hte city - vaguely reminiscent of Granada's Alhambra, which is high praise indeed. The location is quite stunning, and the buildings inside are beautiful - all ornate stonework, lavish interiors and airy courtyards. This does sound horribly like a tourist brochure, but it's a pretty amazing place.

Apart from aesthetic considerations, Jodhpur is just a pleasant place to spend time - the legion of "Hello my friend" types is far smaller here than it was in Udaipur, and people are generally friendly and open. We've made friends with the local chai-wallah (who sells us excellent chai for all of 3 rupees a glass), and managed to get ourselves caught up in what appeared to be a wedding procession last night, which was all good fun until some vile little tyke copped me in the face with a bloody carnation (flower throwing seems to be quite the thing to do at celebrations). How'd you get that black eye, Tom? Er...

This brings me to the title of this installment, as it does appear to be wedding season at the moment. We're staying just off one of the main streets in the old town, and at least three or four times a day, a wedding procession will wind its way down the middle of the street. Now when I say "main street", I mean just that it's a little wider than every other street - at its biggest, it's probably just wide enough to get one car down. Consider that the average wedding procession involves a marching band, horses, a couple of hundred people, and that the street also holds an open sewer, two "lanes" of traffic, pedestrians, shops, and the usual assortment of cows, dogs, goats and anything else that fancies wandering down the road, and you'll get an idea of the sort of traffic chaos this causes.

Despite it all, no-one seems overly bothered by, well, any of it. There's a bit of honking, and a bit of pushing, but mostly everyone just hangs about and waits for everything to clear. Which it does... until the next procession comes along. Ah, God bless India.

For everyone's who's asked, there'll be some photos soon.

Ods jodhpurs!

This will be a brief entry as the computer on which it is being written is truly dreadful - I suppose this is all you can expect when paying 15 rupees (50c) an hour for internet access. We've escaped the tourist treadmill ghetto of Udaipur and headed north-west for Jodhpur, home of lots of blue buildings and one incredibly large antique fort.

It's perhaps not quite as aesthetically appealing a town as Udaipur, but egad is it a much nicer place. It seems that here, when people say "Hello!" it means "Hello!", not "Come into my shop and sit your little white ass quietly down on this seat while I siphon the cash from your wallet and smile winningly whilst doing so". Bitter? No, not really - I'm well aware of the realities of the tourist economy, but it does give me the shits to the extent that I try to avoid it as far is practicably possible.

Anyway, we're here for a couple of days - we're yet to explore the aforementioned fort, but we've had a nice old wander about town and eaten a lot, both of which are great pleasures in India. Sadly, using the internet doesn't always fall into this category, so I'm going to sign off for now before I throw this keyboard at the wall.

Dhoom machale!

Apologies to anyone following this (on the assumption that anyone is actually following this, of course) - we've been in transit a fair bit over the last couple of days, so chances to sit down and write something have been pretty limited.

Writing this in Udaipur, a town that seems to be India's answer to Venice, in that it's very pretty, set on the water, and so infested by tourists that any vestige of real life is hard to find. It's not fun to walk down the street feeling like a huge dollar sign. But, more of this later. First I want to jot down some thoughts onthe stuff we've done over the last couple of days.

After leaving Diu on the back of a supreme seafood feast provided by our friend Oscar de Souza (a massive platter of king prawns for the princely sum of $10 each), we returned to Ahmedabad for a night. There we experienced two quite different but equally fascinating insights into Indian culture - a trip to the ashram where the Mahatma lived from 1920 until he set out on the march against the salt tax in 1935, and a trip to the movies to see the bona fide Bollywood blockbuster "Dhoom 2".

First, then, the ashram. It was a fascinatingly serene, beautiful place, which Gandhi founded shortly after his return from South Africa - it's now been converted into a museum-type arrangement, with an assortment of exhibits including a library, art gallery, and kinda walkthrough history of Gandhi's life. Amongst the more interesting things to see was his original manifesto for the ashram, which consisted of a series of 10 'vows', ranging from philosophical ideas of celibacy and non-caste discrimination to more practical ideas like use of local materials - I can't say I agreed with all of them (he can keep celibacy, for a start), but it was an interesting insight into the way the man's mind worked.

Even more interesting was the fact that his house has been preserved - his room is sealed off, but if you can slide your way through the queue of tourists lining up to take a photo, you can look inside to see the spartan interior - bed, spinning wheel and, er, that's it. And what was once the kitchen, stored unceremoniously in a simple copper pot in a small glass case, are his ashes.

I found it quite poignant that what remains of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century - unless, of course, you ask John Howard, who nominates Reagan and Thatcher - has come to such a simple, incongruous rest. Of course, it's probably the way he would have wanted it, but still - through Gujarat and London and South Africa and years in jail to being hailed as the father of a new-born independent India, to assasination and... this. Stuck in a little copper pot in a cabinet, to be looked at by me and thousands of others. Ashes to ashes, indeed. Quite a strange experience.

It's hard to think of something that could have formed more of a contrast to this than the wonderfully ludicrous 3-hour epic of Dhoom II (nothing to do with the computer game, by the way). After arguing with the congenitally irate ticket guy, we bought a couple of tickets and parked ourselves of the balcony of the Ahmedabad cinema to see our first Hindi movie. It proved quite a good choice, having little in the way of a coherent plot - instead, it's one of Bollywood's first full-on action movies.

God only knows how much it must have cost to make - filmed on location in Brazil, Namibia, Mumbai, Fiji and various other places, chock-full of epic songs and dances, along with copious explosions, motorcycle chases and anything else you can think of. The plot makes absolutely no sense - nominally, it's the tale of a couple of cops chasing a master thief, who relies on all sorts of hi-tech gadgets to steal various priceless valuables from museums etc - but really, who cares? The point is that it was an absolute blast from start to finish, and cracking value for 50 rupees (about $1.50) a ticket. Viva Bollywood!

Going to the movies was pretty much our last action in Gujarat - this morning, we jumped on a bus into Rajasthan. I've been told by various people how beautiful Rajasthan is, but still, I was pretty awestruck looking out the window as we wound through some of the prettiest countryside I've ever seen. The thing that really struck me was the colours: hills the colour of sunset, all soft pinks and ochres, offset by star-white outcroppings of rock and dotted with elegant trees, all deep olive greens and browns; low fields of some crop that looked like lawn, lush and green; occasional explosions of flowers, the deepest carmines and violets and yellows you've ever seen; women in the fields, all clad in saris dyed the same deep shades as the flowers. It's at once barren and verdant - the hills are bare, but the trees are delicate and slender, not sparse and sinewy like the trees in Australia. There's none of the numbing flatness and long emptiness of Australia, either - instead it's all hills, some small enough to climb and some so majestic that they could almost be called mountains. It's just beautiful.

So it's a shame that Udaipur, the first town we've been to here, is such a tourist trap. Hopefully this isn't a sign of things to come. But anyway, such considerations will have to wait, because it's time for me to have a cup of tea and go to bed.

Oh, and it's good to hear that Beazley got the arse. A cheese sandwich could do a better job than him - now let's see if Rudd can do a better job than a cheese sandwich. Here's hoping. Till next time...

Navel-gazing on the beach

Still in Diu, although we're braving the bus again tomorrow to head back to Ahmedabad and thence to Rajasthan. It's been a pleasant couple of days here - we've befriended the lovely Mr Oscar de Souza, the chef at one of the local restaurants, who's been plying us with excellent seafood and delicious curries. The beach didn't quite live up to the visions I had of the sparkling, crystal-clear waters of the Arabian Sea - 'twas more like Port Phillip Bay on a bad day - but still, it was good to have a dip and lay back in the sun for a bit. All in all, life could be worse.

Laying back on the beach, though, I got to thinking about... well, layers of reality is the best way I can describe it. Such considerations are a major theme of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I'm still reading (and enjoying immensely). This is an idea that I quite like anyway, but spending time here has got me thinking about how the reality of the West - the way we live our lives in Australia and its economic contemporaries - is founded on and dependent on the way the rest of the world lives. In other words, the way the West lives is not sustainable - it relies on an uneven balance whereby the rest of the world essentially funds our lifestyle.

This is hardly a revelation, but still, visiting a country like India has kinda made such considerations more... more real, I suppose. There's a general assumption in the West that we have a god-given right to have as much of anything as we want. The whole model is founded on limitless growth, whereby population and standard of living can keep growing indefinitely. This is our reality: we can have meat for dinner every night, we can use as much petrol as we want, we can use as much water as we want, etc etc. But this reality is unsustainable: the only reason we can live like this is that the rest of the world doesn't, because there isn't enough to go around. There's no way the planet can support enough cows to feed 6 billion people, nor that it can support our paying $1 a litre for petrol and driving down to the corner shop every time we can't be arsed to walk.

It's kinda like a pyramid scheme - those at the top survive by standing on those below. Again, this isn't an earth-shattering revelation, but I suspect that things will be rather different by the time our generation dies off. The way we use the car will change fundamentally as oil prices rise. The way we use water will change if our population and consumption continue to increase. The way we eat will change (or at least, it should do).

Anyway, enough musings for today. I sound like George Monbiot. Aiii!

Diu?

Anyone who's heard my stories of the 24-hour trip from Berlin to London probably doesn't need to hear any more about my absolute loathing of night buses. But please, indulge me, because last night's 10-hour nightmare of a trip down here to the pretty little seaside town of Diu takes the proverbial biscuit. Imagine: unsealed roads, Bollywood music blasting at high volume the whole way, uncomfortable seats, and to top it all off, a quite horrendous torture scene from the book I'm reading (Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which despite said scene, is highly recommended) playing itself out in my mind every time I closed my eyes.

So, not a wink of sleep all night, and the same trip to look forward to on the way back. Joy. Perhaps not quite in the league of Rod and Kate's 60-hour odyssey on night buses in China, but surely in the top 10 Shit Bus Journeys Of Our Time.

Still, despite all this, I'm glad we came here. Diu is a lovely little town - as quiet and peaceful as anywhere we've been thus far, more like an island town in Greece than anything, although the cavalcade of cows, goats, boars, and grinning children provide a constant reminder that we're still in India. The beach is apparently beautiful - didn't get there today, as I spent most of the day sleeping, but we'll hit it tomorrow.

In the meantime, we got the full rock-star treatment at a local restaurant, with a constant stream of children coming up wanting photos with us. I feel like quite the celeb. Fun in small doses, although I'm starting to understand why being constantly stared at and photographed might well have limited appeal. Quite why we were the ones that everyone wanted photos with was unclear - perhaps we smell better than the dreadlocked Byron Bay "Oh man I went to India and the trance scene was, like, so great" hippie types who seem to make up most of Diu's expat population.

The other notable event of the day was watching a bunch of locals at work on a boat. Not a little fishing bathtub - a proper, 12-foot, boat. It was fascinating to watch - they were building it in the same way that you see people building boats in old photos and books, carefully hammering in every timber, sanding down, etc etc. We watched for a while, and as we walked back, a couple of cows locked horns, a peacock wandered past, four wild boar foraged in a heap of rubbish, and no-one took any notice at all. And it struck me - this is what I like about India. Things just happen. It's a place where things haven't yet been corporatised and rationalised and automated and sanitised to the extent that all the life is sucked from them.

This is undoubtedly hopelessly romantic, and you take the good with the bad (such as the bloody night bus)... but I really, really like it here. So far, anyway. Now hopefully the beach has some decent waves...

Ahmediminagaybar

Writing this at the tail end of a brief stay in Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat and a city characterised mainly by a) having even crazier traffic that Bombay and b) having a name that reminds me of one of the faux-Indian names that Richie got the commentary team to practice on the 12th Man tapes.

It's not a bad town, though - the food here is good, the hotel was lovely (Hotel Volga is the place to be, should you ever find yourself in this part of the world), and the weather's not as muggy as it is further south. Tonight brings the unalloyed joys of a 10-hour bus trip - we're heading to a place called Diu, a town by the beach that was a Portuguese enclave until the late 60s. According to Lonely Planet, the beer there is "blissfully cheap", although that's not much use to me as I've been on the dry since my arrival here - I've spent most of my time sipping tonic water like some dissipated Raj-era expatriate.

The train trip here was the first sight we've had of the Indian countryside. It takes a good hour to clear Bombay's outskirts - it's kinda like Melbourne in that it keeps going and going. We were amused to see Aussie dream style housing developments on the fringes, including something called the Vijay Palace, which seemed to be Bombay's equivalent of Craigieburn. We also got our first proper glimpse of some of the shanty towns, which are astounding both in their extent and in their ingenuity - people seem to crib housing together out of anything and everything. Wobbling past in the train, we were also rather taken aback by the slum toilets - a huge barren expanse of land stippled with little turds, baking in the sun like some weird crop. Along with people, the slums house goats, dogs, cats, cattle and god knows what else. It's a way of life so alien and so confronting to the western eye as to be almost incomprehensible. And yet at least half the world lives like this.

Once clear of the cities, the countryside is rather pretty - both Maharashtra and Gujarat appear quite dry, but the expanses of brown grass are broken up by crops of corn, rice and what appeared to be tobacco, along with other crops I couldn't identify. As we moved north, there was also scrub - not quite forest, but certainly more than grassland. It's all quite idyllic. In an inscrutably Indian way, there are also various structures out in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason - I'm sure there is a reason for everything to be where it is, but I can't begin to guess at them.

This is a recurring theme here - I find myself looking at things and trying to work out why they're the way they are. Why is there a shrine right in the middle of this field? Why is there a brightly coloured flag flying from that house? Why is everyone clustering around that particular place? In Australia, you generally have a good idea what's going on, and if you don't, it's rare that you can't make an educated guess. Here, I find myself staring at things and having no idea what's going on. It's the first place I've ever really felt like this. It's both exciting and curiously disconcerting.

What else? Indian cable TV remains a blast - most hotels seem to have it, and there's a wide selection of stuff to see, from the familiarly Western (I've been able to watch the Ashes live, and we watched The Goonies last night) to the whacked-out and truly strange. We watched the enduringly bizarre Japanese game show Takeshi's Castle last night on a channel called Pogo TV, which seems to be cable's equivalent of the Lilypad Stage. It's certainly not something I'd have expected to find here.

Anyway, better dash - they're burning some sort of incense in here, and it's giving me headspins. Will sign off with an addition to the pantheon of Amusing Signs Seen In Places Where English Isn't Spoken Perfectly: a sign on the outside of the ladies' toilets on the platform of one of the stations we passed through, which read "Please Pay For And Use The Ladies Once Only". Well, quite.