ITALY VOTES AND BANS NUCLEAR POWER ONCE AGAIN

THE ITALIAN PEOPLE VOTED IN A REFERENDUM TO BAN NUCLEAR POWER AND LEAD THE WORLD TOWARDS A NEW FUTURE OF HOPE.

"CHERNOBYL AND FUKUSHIMA WILL NOT HAPPEN HERE, AND WE WILL WORK WITH EVERYONE IN THE WORLD TO STOP THE MONSTER WHEREVER IT LAYS IT'S UGLY HEAD."

VIVA L'ITALIA

Old Goa

I was seriously squashed on the bus from Madgao to Panjim, by a big, fat man whose shoulders pinned half of me to the back of the seat. I was amazed to find that I had not changed shape when we arrived, or indeed suffered any lasting damage.

Augustinian friars arrived in Goa in 1572 and built a small monastery on the Holy Hill, at present day Old Goa. From this small beginning grew an enormous monastery, three stories high, with a tower, two large stone staircases, cloisters, corridors, pillars, galleries, halls with numerous rooms, a refectory, a guest house, an infirmary; vast dormitories and numerous cells. The monastery was built out of the same black larval stone that was used to build the cathedrals. This was then covered with plaster, inside and outside. Vestiges of blue, white and yellow Portuguese tiles remain in places, as do occasional traces of carved stucco floral designs.  This and several large cathedrals marked the centre of the Portuguese capital of Goa, a large, thriving commercial city that rivaled Paris and Rome at the time.

Eventually the Portuguese were forced to move their capital to present day Panaji (Panjim), abandoning the old city, which disintegrated completely, leaving only the ruins of the massive monastery and the old cathedrals. The rest was reclaimed by the jungle, which grew up quickly in the tropical heat.

I had read about the cathedrals in the jungle and was curious to see them. Imagine my surprise (even disappointment) when I got out of the bus to see a big white cathedral on one side of the road, surrounded by a vast expanse of rather dessicated lawns with a fancy white stone perimeter wall. On the other side of the road was a black cathedral - black because it had not yet been plastered and painted white, like its sister opposite. It was similarly surrounded by lawns, trees and pathways lined with neatly clipped box hedges. To add to the well maintained effect, between the white walls and the road there were pavements with neat edges - something you never see in India, not even in Goa - and an avenue of palm trees along the stretch of road between the two cathedrals. There was even a row of neatly parked cars.

I went in search of the ruins of the Augustinian monastery. The Archaeological Survey of India had been at work here, carrying out "scientific clearance' of the ruins since 1998. They had removed all the invading jungle and taken out pieces of carved stone, which lay neatly arranged in rows in a field outside the ruins.

A lot of money has been spent on the cathedrals, which are now a major pilgrimage site. They are large, imposing and to my mind, ugly, built to impress.

I caught a bus back to Panaji (Panjim) and went to eat fish in a riverside restaurant. I walked about a bit in old Panjim, whose small, one story houses are as delightful and the cathedrals are not. Much of Panjim has succumbed to the great God concrete, but there are still little streets with old houses with their ornate balconies and curved windows and doors and tiled roofs. The bus back to Benaulim was more crowded than any I have ever been in. It was a struggle to get through the crowd thonging the corridor of the bus to get to the entrance and I was not sure that I would get there in time to get off. But the bus waited. I arrived, sweat pouring down my face in rivulets.

carnival in Goa

Madgao
I missed the carnival in Panjim,  so I went to the one in Madgao. It was a very tame affair, for although many of the floats pumped out old recorded calypso numbers, there  was no hip movement during the dancing - no unseemly showing of cleavage or thigh. Instead the dancers hopped from side to side, waving  large handkerchiefs in the air, or stepped demurely sideways, one way, then the other.

One in every five floats was advertising something. There was however, a float with a rice plantation being planted, complete with papier mache' buffaloes, a float with a fish market with real fish, a giant swan and a giant preying mantis; wealth out of garbage, producing petrol from garbage and a giant bee made out of coloured rope. Several giant puppets ambled along the road, together with men in drag, and  a lot of people in fluorescent wigs and plastic masks. A large police presence did not, however, prevent the public from invading the road that the floats were travelling down, thus impeding progress.

When people started throwing coloured water about the place I decided it was time to leave, but leaving was not as easy as that, for all the streets where the bus passed through had been blocked off. In the end I shared a taxi with a German couple.

Today the carneval is coming to Benaulim, but I haven't seen any sign of it yet.

Panolem

Yesterday I took a couple of buses from Benaulim, where I am staying, to Panolem, where Selvaggia is staying. The buses drove through steep, hilly, thickly forested countryside. Selvaggia is the director of the Florence River to River film festival - an annual Indian film festival, held in Florence. She was having a break from her busy schedule in Mumbai.

The up market beach huts in Panolem are built on stilts, each with its own open-to-the-sky bathroom. People step out of their beach huts onto the beach, where there is every sort and kind of cafe - a bit like Gokarna really but much easier to reach from the airport and consequently more expensive.

Goa, as everyone will tell you, is not really India. There is no border between Goa and the rest of India, but you notice the difference immediately. Goan women dress like old fashioned Portuguese women, in just below the knee skirts and blouses; there are bars selling alcohol and catholic churches everywhere. The people even look different, which is hardly surprising, since Goa was a Portuguese colony for over three hundred years, during which time the locals and the Portuguese intermarried. Apparently many of the older Goans still speak Portuguese.

Carneval is celebrated here in every town. Tomorrow there will be a huge procession in Panjim and I'm wondering whether to go. Later in the week there will be processions here and I suspect everyone will get drunk. The bicycle hire man has started already. I hired the oldest, rustiest bike from him a couple of days ago. Unfortunatly it doesn't have lights.

Goa

I caught the train from Jodpur to Mumbai - a nice twenty hour journey, this time in three tier AC because there were no seats left in sleeper class when I booked the ticket (over a week ago). There were 64 middle class Indian teenagers from an international school in Mumbai in the carriage. They had been on a school trip and all chatted excitedly in Indian flavoured English.

I arrived in Bandra station in Mumbai, bought a ticket to Victoria terminus and caught the local train, which had a special compartment for senior citizens (not that anyone took any notice of this). Victoria terminus (or CST) is a glorious relic of the British Raj, with ornate pillars and arches, curlicues and statues. I left my luggage in the left luggage, which involved putting it through a scanner and getting a police stamp and locking it, and headed off into the streets of Bombay. I was surprised to find myself in a street full of people and virtually no traffic. I decided to go to Cafe Universal, an art deco cafe, and ended up spending the rest of the day chatting with a German couple who were the most well-travelled people I have ever met.

The cafe was delightful, the beer flowed, the food was delicious and at ten o'clock in the evening I retrieved my luggage and boarded the train to Madgao, this time sharing a compartment with two French sisters, a Czech man, a Norwegian woman and a woman from Kyrgistan. This was a mere twelve hour journey. There were more food vendors on this train than I have ever come across. They were selling samosas, omlettes, sandwiches, masala dosas, upama, chicci (nuts and sugar made into bars), chocolate, biriani, and of course chai wallas and coffee wallas every two minutes. This went on incessantly until at least midnight, when the bunks went up and everyone who had a booked seat lay down. We ended up with three people sleeping on the narrow floor space between the two tiers of bunks and the people sleeping on the lower bunks had several people sitting on the ends of their bunks. The rest of the people with tickets but no booked seats ended up sleeping in the corridor. In the morning the procession of food and chai wallas stepped carefully over the sleeping bodies as they made their way along the corridors from about eight am, when no one was the slightest bit interested in food or drink.

I'm now in Benelin in south Goa, staying in a little house next to a bar in a palm tree forest. I walked through the forest today and came to a beautiful lush green swamp, surrounded by tall coconut palms. Eventually I came to the beach and a nice beach cafe that was full of huge fat Russians. There are so many Russians here that some of the signs are written in Russian.

Sweepers in Jodpur

Sweepers, blacksmiths and leather workers belong to the untouchable or Dalit caste, which officially does not exist, but in reality is as strong as ever. In India everyone throws everything on the ground, in the street, out of the train windows, bus windows, car windows, wherever they are. It is the job of the sweepers to clear up this rubbish in the city streets, early in the morning.

Old Jodpur has narrow streets with old houses, whose stone balconies, carved like lace, jut out over the floors below, almost obliterating the sky. On either side of the streets run the open sewers. During the day the rubbish accumulates in the streets until some of it falls into the open sewers, blocking them, so that by night time there are floods of foul water in the street. First thing in the morning it is the sweepers' job not only to sweep up the rubbish, but also to unblock the sewers, which they do vigorously with their brushes, heaping the resulting slimy black detritus onto the general pile of rubbish, which they build in the middle of the street for the rubbish cart to come and collect. Cows munch on paper, cardboard, vegetable peelings and the odd bit of plastic as the pile grows before it is taken away. I guess the sweepers in every town with open sewers have the same job. In the big cities the sewers have mostly been covered.

The Jodpur Fort

The Jodpur Fort is quite different from the Jaisalmer fort. The Jaisalmer fort is a fairytale golden sandcastle, perched precariously on a pile of sand, gradually sinking as a tide of sewage seeps down from the hundreds of dwellings and hotels in the fort, eroding the sandy foundations. The Jodpur fort, on the other hand, is a serious affair. Built on top of a steep solid rock, out of dark, forbidding, red sandstone, its walls tower threateningly above the town, tiny slits for windows and rows of cannons on the ramparts. Inside, the Rajputs built themselves a beautiful palace, with ornate, gold encrusted rooms, series of courtyards and a whole area for their women - a Zenanna, where the women could look out through stone screens but no one could look in on them.

I spent a delightful afternoon with my two German friends, then they caught a train to Agra, leaving me to be entertained by the cook in our hotel, who wanted to introduce me to the joys of 'good Indian whisky'.

Yesterday I discovered the Jodpur parcel making mafia. One man who doesn't have a licence to make parcels, nevertheless pays off the police to let him drag unsuspecting tourists off the road to his parcel making shop, where he packs and sews their parcels ready for the post office and overcharges them. He pays the police to harass the real parcel makers, so that they can't set up shop outside the post office, as they should. I only found all this out after I had let this man make my parcel - not very well. I hope it will arrive OK. Yes more saris. There should be a warning in Lonely planet.

Jodpur

I caught the night train from Jaisalmer to Jodpur with the same two German girls who travelled with me from Delhi to Jaisalmer. When we reached Jodpur at 5.15 in the morning (or should I say night) we decided to walk from the station into town. We were followed by a posse of rikshaws, who simply refused to believe that we actually wanted to walk. A hotel owner grabbed the girls and persuaded them to come to his hotel, only to find, when we got there that the room he wanted to let to us was currently occupied, until 10am. So we went up onto the roof to watch the sun rise and admire the fort, a formidable looking structure that dominates the town below. 

Jaisalmer

Four intensely social days in Delhi, including a trip to a market to buy old saris with Bunty. Bunty is the proprietor of Madan cafe in Pahar Ganj, a little cafe where you can eat a thali for forty rupees and live to tell the tale. It is a popular meeting place/hangout/gossip shop for a whole variety of people who spend part of the year in Delhi. Three dogs, a few saffron robed sadhus and a variety of lame, blind and deaf people also frequent the place for the scraps of food (in the case of the dogs) and the free cups of chai (in the case of all the others) that are liberally handed out.

Bunty is the most helpful person I have ever met. He always inspects everyone's train ticket, to make sure that they go to the right train station (Delhi has eight main train stations), that they catch their train at the right time (I almost missed mine yesterday because I thought it went at 11.30 but actually it left at 5.30). He has all the train time tables in his head. He knows how much the rikshaws should charge. He knows where everything is in Delhi, where to get permits to visit Nagaland and Manipur, where to find a good doctor, an eye specialist, a dentist. . .the list goes on and on.

A couple of days ago we had a thunderstorm and torrential rain, which filled up the drains in a few minutes, after which they burst out of their drain covers and squirted like fountains into the middle of the street, so that in places the water was soon ankle deep. Most Delhiites  hid indoors, or in doorways until it was over. I imagine that the station was packed, though I didn't go and see.

I caught the 5.30 afternoon train from Delhi to Jaisalmer, sharing a compartment with three German women, an Indian man who had been to a wedding and a Korean man who hardly spoke a word. The train stopped at every station on the way out of Delhi and since it was rush hour, commuters piled in to the sleeper carriage and stood in the corridoor. A few attempted to sit on our seats but were forcefully evicted by the very fierce German women. The ticket collector kept away until the commuters had all finished commuting, then appeared to check our tickets.

I woke from time to time during the night and listened to the magnificent chorus of snores from a hundred people, then went back to sleep again. Early in the morning the soundscape changed as the snorers became chatterers, card players and telephoners.
I came down from my bunk to look out of the window at a flat, desert landscape, speckled with small trees and thorn bushes. Fine sand blew in through the windows. Most of the passengers kept their windows open, so the seats were soon covered with sand, as were we - sandy hair, sandy clothes, sandy lungs.

I am staying in the Artist's Hotel, a little hotel run by an Austrian, who encourages musicians to come and play in his rooftop restaurant in the evening. Several musicians are staying in the hotel. The rooftop restaurant has views of the fort - a great sandcastle fort on a hill in the middle of Jaisalmer. It was too hot to go anywhere this afternoon, so we cowered in a small bit of shade on the rooftop, admiring the fort, drinking tea and chatting.

The Fort

The fort rises up out of the town of Jaisalmer, hewn out of golden sandstone, with palaces, intricately carved Jain temples and narrow, winding lanes where shop keepers have hung their brightly coloured embroideries, patchworks and carpets.

Jaisalmer has a medieaval feel to it. When you look down you see open drains and cow dung mixed with of rubbish piled in the malodorous streets. Every cow I see appears to be enormously pregnant. They are doing a good job of covering the streets with manure. When you look up you see exquisitely carved golden sandstone haveli - large houses, hotels and palaces, with balconies and roof top restaurants.

Back to Delhi

My train arrived at 5.15am. I don't know why, but in India the passengers in the sleeper class compartments wake up and get up an hour before the arrival time of the train, even when they are going to get off at the train's final destination. I see no point in this so lie doggo until the train finally stops, while the other passengers step on me climbing out of their bunks, switch on the lights, move their luggage around, talk loudly and sit on my feet.

The train arrived at a station I have never heard of. I thought it was old Delhi so kept asking everyone where the metro was. People sent me up and down the stairways, dragging my luggage behind me until finally I met a lovely Sikh, who told me there was no metro here, but I could catch a local train to New Delhi station for 2 rupees. He took me to the ticket office and bought me a ticket, then sent me off to catch the train. I finally arrived at Sky View Hotel at 7.15, where everyone in reception was asleep on the floor, blocking the entrance. A bleary eyed receptionist took a little while to register that I had a room booked but eventually checked me in to the room where I stayed last time, opposite to my friend's room.

I have come here to meet up with my Tibetan student but so far we have not met. I've also come to see some other friends and perhaps to buy some more saris. This is the best season in Delhi, not too hot and not too cold, but the air is still polluted.

I have to go back to Italy on the 10th March, three weeks early, because I am going to interpret at a medical conference in Cremona. A friend has bought me a ticket to Milano from Mumbai. So I am cutting short my stay in India. From there we will be going to London a few days later. Being adequately compos mentus after a ten hour flight will be a bit of a challenge!

Pushkar

It is not possible to sleep on a train when you have to get off at 3.30 in the morning and my train arrived at Ajmer at 3.36am. Retiring rooms were not available so I went to the first class ladies waiting room, stashed my luggage in a corner out of sight from the door, climbed into my sleeping bag and lay down on the floor and went instantly to sleep. At 5.30 I was rudely awakened by a railway official who was clearing out the waiting rooms. As I began to emerge from the station I was beseiged by crowds of touts. I ran back into the station and sat down on the floor amongst all the sleeping bodies (who for some reason the railway official was not clearing out). I sat there for a bit then thought this is silly. I'll have to just brave the touts (in the dark). So I marched out, batting them away like mosquitoes, leaving them shrieking with laughter, and made my way to the main road where a crowd of men looked like they were waiting for a bus. They directed me to the other side of the road and I got a rikshaw to the bus station.

It was very cold. In the bus station groups of men were huddled round little fires burning rubbish (including plastic that glowed eerily in the dark), shawls wrapped tightly about them, faces covered with scarves and wooly hats on their heads. I dug out my winter coat and put that on. The bus reached Pushkar before dawn, where I had to contend with another swarm of touts. I managed to shake them off and walked into town.

I have a very small, very cheap room in an old lodging house built round a central courtyard, with twisting staircases leading up to the roof restaurant that overlooks the lake, where women are washing clothes, throwing flower petals into the water and washing themselves in the holy water.

The lake in Pushkar is small, with wide steps leading down to the water. Behind the steps there are several temples, their white domes rising up in the sky. Palm trees and broad leaved trees surround the temples. Pushkar is in a small valley, surrounded by steep, soft brown, dry hills, speckled with scrubby bushes and small trees. It is a pilgrimage town, visited by a constant stream of Indian pilgrims, who visit the temples, walking round them and performing ceremonies, then dipping their hands in the lake while they say prayers to their favourite god. I got caught by a Brahmin priest, who wanted me to shower him with twenty pound notes. "You don't have to give me rupees" he said "foreign money will do". Needless to say I was not a willing customer.

For some reason Pushkar attracts a huge crowd of hippies, with baggy trowsers and dreadlocks. Maybe it's the cheap accommodation.

Udaipur - beyond the lake

Talking to an Indian miniature painting shopkeeper, it occurred to me that Udaipur might be the place to find watercolour paper, so I asked him. 'Yes madam' he said 'you can get it from Kapoor's stationary shop in Bapu Bazaar.' So I set off on a long trek through what seemed like an endless succession of bazaars, starting with the gold and silver bazaar. Square door openings led into shops only as wide as the door, where shop keeper and customer sat cross legged on white cushions on the floor either side of low glass cabinets. These narrow jewellery shops opened into the walls of the street, like holes in the wall, one after another, occasionally interspersed by equally tiny shops selling jewelled wedding turbans or brightly coloured fabrics. The gold and silver traders were buying and selling, weighing objects brought to them on old scales, using little brass weights. Further on the shopkeepers were trading in old jewellery: intricate gold plated necklaces, exquisite strings of old seed pearls, semiprecious stones and dusty old silver ornaments.

At some point the next bazaar began, a bazaar selling wedding saris and veils. Various other bazaars followed and then I came to a vegetable market, where women sat on the ground, wicker baskets of brightly coloured vegetables in front of them. More bazaas followed, selling everything from plastic buckets and cooking pots to batteries and spare parts. After a long time the tiny streets of the bazaar opened out into a main street, Bapu Bazaar, where I did, indeed find water colour paper.

On the way back I somehow found myself in different streets from the ones I had taken to reach Bapu Bazaar. I ended up near a clock tower where groups of Muslim men, dressed in white, wearing white skull caps, were gathered around, as very loud music blared out of some giant loudspeakers. They were celebrating Mohammed's birthday. Out of a narrow side street appeared a line of white horses, brilliantly caparisoned, with men and boys dressed in bright costumes sitting astride, two to each horse. In the middle of the line of horses a camel appeared, wearing a beautiful bright woven camel cloth, studded with jewels, its rider dressed in costume similar to that worn by the horse riders.

Still Udaipur

The palaces and hotels in Udaipur are built right at the water's edge, just like in Venice. At intervals there are stone stairways leading down to the lake. Most of the hotels on the water's edge are expensive, but anyone can go there for a drink or some food, in their rooftop restaurants. I have been climbing up and down stairs, exploring some of these beautiful old hotels and their restaurants, having a drink here, a snack there while I drink in the view of palaces on the other side of the lake and in the middle of the lake. In between times I have been looking at Indian miniatures, painted in the ancient tradition by young artists.

The Mughals created the most exquisite miniature paintings on ivory, using gold leaf and painting with ground up semi precious stones mixed with glue. They used squirrel hair paint brushes, sometimes just one hair thick, to paint in the minutest details. Now it is forbidden to paint on ivory, but the tradition has been kept alive, passed down from old masters to their students, generation after generation. The best paintings still use semi-precious stone pigments: lapis lazuli, turquoise and coral, but today they paint on camel bone, silk and paper. Every other shop in Udaipur is filled with miniatures of varying quality. The prices are high today. In one of these shops the salesman told me that he was part of a cooperative of fifty seven artists, who had learned their craft from an eighty year old miniature painter. Most of them lived and worked in the surrounding villages. He, on the other hand, lived in Sweden, where he said he sold more paintings than here in Udaipur.

In the afternoon I went to the most beautiful restaurant, in a courtyard shaded by trees, right on the edge of the lake. I stayed there all afternoon, watching the palaces on the other side of the lake change as the sun moved across the sky, chatting with an American woman who had come to India for her friend's wedding and had stayed on to see a little of India.

Udaipur

Udaipur - what a fabulous place! Way back in the seventeenth century the ruling Raja of the area decided to create some lakes. For the first time in the world, rivers were diverted to create seven lakes, all connected, so that the water flowed from one to the next, to the next. Then he built palaces by the lakeside and the city of Udaipur. The palaces are big, imposing and look out over the lake graciously. The old city of Udaipur, the part nearest to the lake has steep, narrow tiwisting roads, temples and beautiful old hotels. Wherever you look there are domes, spires and minarets, round, scalloped doorways and windows, rooftop restaurants and mosaics.

I caught the overnight train from Aurangabad to Mumbai. A lot of passengers had tickets but no booked seats. In India if you have a ticket but no booked seat you have two choices: sit on the floor of the corridor or charm some passengers with booked seats to let you sit in their compartment. One of these charmers had hit on the young couple in my compartment and sat with them (thus preventing them from setting up their middle bunk and getting some sleep) and chatted until four in the morning, when he arrived at his stop. This effectively put a stop to me sleeping too. Then at six am the rest of the people in the compartment woke up and started chatting and laughing at the tops of their voices.

In Mumbai I discovered that my train to Jodpur would not stop at Udaipur and I could not get a train from Jodpur to Udaipur. But I could get out at Ahmedabad, spend the night there and get a train to Udaipur from there. So that is what I decided to do. But. . .on the way to Ahmedabad, in an incredibly full train, with several charmers in our compartment, my boots disappeared. All the passengers in my compartment searched under the seats, up and down the corridor but to no avail. I complained bitterly. They told me that I should not leave my boots on the floor. People steal things of value, they said. But my boots are twenty years old, I said. They can still sell them, they said. And you should lock your luggage to the bottom seat, they said. Then they gave me food to eat and offered me water.

After a few hours someone came into the compartment saying that there were boots in the toilet. They were my boots. They all congratulated me on this lucky turn of events.

In Ahmedabad I rented a room in the station and slept like a log until six am. But when I came down to the station entrance the station police told me that my train had been cancelled. Standing right there, beside the station police was a rikshaw driver, who told me that my only solution was to get a 'luxury' bus to Udaipur. He told me there were no local buses. I didn't believe him but couldn't be bothered to go to the local bus station and find out. So I ended up paying 300 rupees for a bus, and at this point he said OK I didn't have to pay for the ride to the bus booking place. I could just give him my train ticket and he would reclaim some of the money for it. So I reckon this guy got money for my ticket and money from the bus booking place.

However there was a dual carriageway most of the way, so the journey was fast and we were in Udaipur by eleven o'clock. I booked into a little old hotel with a winding stairway, few rooms on each floor but many floors - narrow and tall. Then I went off to explore. After a short while I found myself at the entrance to a palace. So I went in.The palace was huge, many storied and imposing but beautiful. The interior of the palace was surprising, with narrow, winding stairways and passages opening out into little intimate courtyards with trees and fountains, covered walkways, scalloped archways and carved marble pillars. Everywhere I looked there were hand painted blue and white tiles, pictures created out of inset semi precious stones and sparkling glass and mirrorwork mosaics. Later I met some tourists who said this was not their favourite palace. But it was everything I had hoped for.

Ajanta

Ajanta. What a fabulous place. Worth coming all this way to see; worth that sleepless night on the train (because I had to get off at four in the morning) to Aurangabad; worth the smoke, dust and pollution of Aurangabad; worth the three hour ride in a rattley bus along potholed roads; worth the climb up hundreds of steps in the midday heat (because the bus took so long).

As I reached the top of the steps my first sight of the caves at Ajanta took my breath away. Twenty six Buddhist monasteries and temples had been carved into the side of a sheer rockface, over a period of seven hundred years. The rockface is shaped like a giant horseshoe, overlooking a small forest. The temples and monasteries which appear half way up the rockface have beautifully sculpted pillars at their entrances. The position of these caves reminded me of the ancient cave dwellings of New Mexico, and they were made at aproximately the same time. But there the similarity ends. The caves at Ajanta are elegantly sculpted monasteries and temples, with rows of pillars inside and vaulted roofs. The walls, ceilings and pillars were originally covered with paintings in glowing colours. In one of the caves, carved in the fifth century AD, the paintings on the walls and ceilings have miraculously remained, so that you can begin to imagine how all the other caves would have been. For seven hundred years or more, Buddhist monks were inspired to excavate the rock to create these temples, carving and painting them with great skill and devotion. Here in this secluded place they found peace and tranquility. They were surrounded by nature and at night they had a clear view of the starry sky.

In one monastery a group of Buddhist monks from Thailand, sitting in front of a great stone Buddhist statue, were chanting a Buddhist prayer. The sound reverberated around the cave. A guardian sat at the entrance to each cave, making sure that everyone took their shoes off before entering and no one used flash photography. Although hundreds of tourists, mostly Indian, had come to visit Ajanta, it was supremely peaceful. I was deeply moved.

Elora

Next day I went to see the caves at Elora. These did not move me in the same way as those at Ajanta. The Hindu Kailasha temple was hewn out of the rock between 733 and 773 and is a great monolithic structure, caved in one piece, isolated from the surrounding rock, a truly miraculous feat. It is not quite finished and some of the pillars are emerging from the rock, statues of dancing girls just beginning to appear.It's as though the sulptors could see the shape of the temple within the rock and had only to chip away to uncover it. The temples and monasteries at Elora are scattered about the landscape and some are Buddhist, some are Jain and some are Hindu. Many of them are very large, but austere, unlike the intricately carved caves of Ajanta. I spent the morning in the company of an old American hippy who had been travelling around India on the cheap since December, despite two very bad hips. He walked very slowly with the help of two sticks and took rikshaws from one temple to the next. By the end of the morning he was exhausted and went back to his hotel. I on the other hand, caught one of those shared taxis (five people in the front seat - I was sitting on the door knob) to Daulatabad.

Daulatabad

Daulatabad was a hill fort. The evil ruler of Delhi forced the entire city to leave and walk to Daulatabad, where they built a new city for him around the fort, increasing the fortifications with moats, walls, ramparts, secret tunnels and all manner of ingenious measures to prevent attack. Most of the people from Delhi died during the forced march. But those who survived did a marvelous job, creating this enormous fortification. The outer walls stretch for miles and miles.

More Hyderabad

I caught a bus to Charminar, a huge fortress with domes on top, an austere, forbidding landmark in the middle of a Muslim area of a city with a very large Muslim population. At half past nine the Chowmahalla Palace was not yet open and nor were any of the shops. A retired policeman invited me to sit on a plastic chair outside his house, to wait for the palace to open. A couple of cocks were fighting. They had already pecked out all the feathers from each others necks. Flocks of black-robed college girls walked by.

The Chowmanahalla Palace

Right in the middle of this traffic-infested city the Chowmanahalla Palace is an oasis of calm. As you walk through the entrance you find yourself in a large square garden, with a pool of water with fountains in the middle and the palace in front of you. All round the gardens are a kind of Islamic cloisters with mysterious doorways and sculpted archways. The entrance hall of the palace is filled with a sea of crystal chandeliers and white marble pillars.

Archways take you to other rooms full of photos, many of which show the city as it was before the advent of the internal combustion engine: a beautiful city of wide streets and few people.

Hyderabad

On my last evening in Belur I found a drinking den, otherwise known as a large hotel with a restaurant. Two tourist couples had migrated here, drawn by the cold beer. The food was almost as bad as it was in Vishnu Residency. I joined an English couple for a beer. They, like all the other westerners I had so far met in Belur, were travelling by car, with a driver. "Oh our driver doesn't speak English, but he finds wonderful places for us, right off the beaten track" they enthused. Six Indian men were getting drunk at another table, on whiskey, laughing more and more loudly.

Next day I left Belur in a bus full of school children, travelling back to Hassan, where I intended to get the train to Mangalore. But. . be careful who you ask about the destinations of trains. The people I asked nodded. I got in the train. It stopped at Arsikere. No more trains to Mangalore. So I crossed over the bridge, dragging my luggage behind me and got on a train to Bangalore. There were more people on the platform at Bangalore than I have ever seen. It took a long time for them to leave, up a staircase that would only take about five abreast. I went straight to the reservation office, a Darwinian experience - only the fittest actually get a ticekt. But by a miracle, and a lot of pushing and shoving, I got a sleeper reservation for the same day to Hyderabad.

I shared a compartment with five young Indian women, all business management students, returning from a college trip. We shared biscuits and crisps and chatted amiably. I was kept awake a long time by the ticket inspectors, who chose to use our compartment to do their books, with the light on and talking loudly. The train arrived in Secunderabad, from where I caught a local train to Hyderabad, stopping at stations with names like James Street and Necklace Road, past a big lake with gardens.

Looking for a room in Hyderabad proved difficult. All the places I tried were full. Catching a rikshaw in Hyderabad is not a good idea. For one thing you are right in the middle of the traffic and exposed to the fumes of the traffic around you, including the buses, whose exhaust pipes are exactly level with your face. For another thing the rikshaw drivers don't speak a word of English and don't take you where you want to go, even when you give them an address and point to it written down. I eventually gave up on the rikshaw and searched for a room on foot. I found a suitably dingy room for 300 rupees, then set off to the Nizam's museum. Yet again the rikshaw driver took me somewhere else - to the Salar Jung museum this time. Fed up with arguing with rikshaw drivers, I went to see this museum, although I knew it would not really interest me. And I was right. Salar Jung, one of the latterday Nizams (feudal lords who ruled Hyderabad) seemed to have believed in quantity, rather than quality and travelled round the world for many years, buying up everything he could find.

One very disappointing room in the museum was full of Indian miniatures, half of which were at waist level, so forcing you to bend down and so poorly lit that it was difficult to see anything. Even so I do not think many of the miniatures were very good. But I did see one beautiful thing in this museum: a Japanese ivory statue of an old man wearing a piece of cloth, with a woven design that covered his head and body. His soft long beard disappeared into his robe. He was smiling serenely. The statue was small, smoothly polished and perfect. I wanted to take it home with me in my pocket. No photos were allowed in the museum.

After I left the museum I walked along the road to the bridge over the dribble that remains of the river, where I took photos of the high court, a wonderful building with many domes. Then I asked someone the way to Nampali and they pointed to a bus. No more rikshaws for me. Buses from now on.

Shravanabelgola

I caught two buses to Shravanabelgola, passing through dry, scrubby, uninspiring countryside. During the last part of the journey a young man from Chennai sat with me and lectured me on the chakras. He also told me the story behind the statue that we were going to see. It involved a lot of fighting between two brothers, both of whom now have temples dedicated to them on the tops of two hills facing each other. The statue we went to see is enormous, a naked standing man, seventeen and a half metres high, carved out of a single piece of rock at the top of a huge round rocky hill. Vines grow up the legs and arms of the statue, to show how long he has been standing, meditating, for he was a Jain, and Jains always meditated naked and standing. There are small jain statues all round the cloister that encircles the central courtyard, where the big statue is. Many of these small statues have very narrow waists, broad hips and thighs and broad shoulders, suggestive of hermaphroditism.

To reach the statue you must climb six hundred and fourteen steps up a steep hill, with bare feet. Porters carry the unfit and the fat in sedan chairs up to the top. Hundreds of Indian pilgrims climb the steps, a few sit and meditate around the enclosure at the top. Others make offerings. Priests ring bells and perform ceremonies continuously. I guess they are paid to do this. This statue is sacred to Hindus although it is a Jain statue.

As I came down the steps the sun was heating up the stone and I was glad to put my sandals back on. I enjoyed a nice thali in a pure vegetarian hotel (as they call restaurants in India), then walked along the road watching the pilgrims climb the steep slope, like a line of ants crawling over a boulder. I was happy that I had made the climb in the morning.

Halebeedu

The Hoysaleswara Temple

The bus from Belur to Halebeedu goes along a quiet country road with the minimum of potholes, shaded by avenues of trees. Halebeedu, or Halebid, once the capital of the Hoysala empire, is bucolic in the extreme: a small country town by a lake, which provides water for fields of maise, potatoes, cabbages, forests of coconut palms, date palms and all kinds of other trees. Buffalo laze in the fields, children play by their mud brick houses and all around there are these wonderful temples. The main temple, created by Ketamalla, commander of King Vishnuvardhana in 1121AD, is a great, grey stone structure, intricately carved. On the outside of the temple there are carvings of every kind of sexual practice, dancing girls, musicians, horsemen, hippos, mythical beasts, elephants, warriors with round, ear-expanding earrings, some finely carved, some unfinished. The other side of the temple is decorated with very fine carvings of Hindu gods. The roof of the temple is crenelated, which might have looked different when the towers were still on the temple, but now this gives the temple a spiky, defensive look. Every inch of the temple walls is intricately carved. Behind this temple there is another unfinished temple. Lawns and trees surround the whole complex, which overlooks a lake. Someone in their infinite wisdom has seen fit to burn a pile of rubbish today, so smoke drifts across the lawns.

Parshvanatha and Shantimatha Basadis

I walked from the main temple down the road to these other temples. Parshvanatha basadi (temple) was built by Boppadeva, son of Gangaraja, a Hoysala minister, in 1133 AD. Shantinatha basadi was built in 1196. Both of these temples are unfinished but set in a walled enclosure with lawns and palm trees. Shantinatha basadi has a magnificent Jain statue of a naked standing man, whose extremely slender waist suggests that he might be of indeterminate sex.

Kahareshwara

I walked on another kilometre through lush farmland to this temple, similarly carved and sculpted, surrounded by lawns and palm trees, with the mountains in the distance.

Hulikere Tank

I had a ride in a very full rikshaw, perched on the side of the driver's seat, hanging on for dear life, to Hulikere, where a gang of children asked for pens, but settled for having their photo taken instead. They begged me to photograph the fish in the tank, but the photo didn't come out, as I had expected.

I am planning a return trip by train via Mangalore. I don't think I can face that bus trip over that terrible road again.

Journey to Belur

The night watchman woke me at 5.15. He carried my bag up the steep path on his head, from Namaste to the rikshaw stand, where my rikshaw driver was waiting to take me to the bus station in Gokarna. I caught the bus to Mangalore, which, I discovered, went all the way to Hassan, the nearest town to Belur. So I got a ticket to Hassan. We travelled through thick forest, interspersed by the odd village and small town, from Gokarna to Mangalore. The road used to be shaded by beautiful old baobab trees, but all along the way the trees had been cut down and uprooted, to make way for road widening.

From Mangalore the road twisted and turned up the mountains. Thick forested hills rose up on all sides and from time to time I glimpsed mountain peaks. The road deteriorated into a dirt track with deep craters, which the poor bus drivers had to navigate, their buses creaking and groaning alarmingly. They had also to contend with lorries carrying gas and flammable liqids, slower buses, rikshaws, cars and motor bikes. Somehow our valient driver managed to pass everything going slower, take the poor bus rattling and clanking down the steep sides of the craters and up the other sides, using his claxson the minimum amount any decent bus driver can possibly get away with. We arrived in Hassan in the evening. I took one look at the place and decided to catch a bus to Belur.

We arrived in Belur in a huge cloud of dust. It was just another little scruffy town, and I wondered why I had come all this way and hadn't stayed on the beautiful beach at Gokarna. But hauling my luggage after me, I went off in seach of lodgings and found the cheapest and cleanest room of all the rooms I have stayed in, in India. Then I headed for the Vishnu Regency Hotel for a bite to eat and ended up drinking gin and lemon juice with two very well informed French tourists. They told me about the twelve temples in the area, a few of which they had seen, and took me to see photos of these temples on the walls of the hotel lobby. The hotel will provide a taxi to take people round all the temples for a fee of 2,500 rupees (nearly forty pounds), way beyond my budget.

A third French tourist had booked a car and a driver to take him round India for three months. He booked from France through a tourist agency and paid five thousand dollars in advance. When he arrived in Calcutta he discovered that his driver did not speak a word of English, had never been out of Bengal and could not read a map. After a month and a half he was stopped in Mumbai by a policeman who asked his driver for his tourist permit. He didn't have one. The policeman said that both driver and tourist would have to go to jail. The driver bribed the policeman and he let them go. The Frenchman says he will never go back to India again! I'm glad I am travelling by public transport.

This morning I woke early. The town was smokey in the dawn light, as people burned rubbish. The sweepers were already stirring up te dust. At the end of the road, rising out of the smoke and dust, the temple appeared. As the sun rose, the temple glowed in golden light. The part of the temple that I was looking at was the pyramidal structure over the entrance, carved with figures, many of whom are naked, in various different forms of sexual congress. From the entrance a great wall extends on both sides, forming a large square. Inside the temple walls there are several small temples, built at different times. Most have finely carved black pillars inside and carvings of Hindu gods round the outside.

Behind the temple and on one side are rows of single story old houses, many of which are derelict. Those which are still in use are charming. The rest of the town has fallen victim to the great god concrete.

I'm going to catch a bus to Halebid now, to see another one of the Hoysala temples.

Last Day in Hampi

On the last night of the festival there were elephant parades with dancing girls, fireworks, music and massive crowds, all of which I missed because I was stuck o the other side of the river. Lying on my swinging bed outside my new found friend's room, I could hear the music and the shouts of thousands of people. I drifted in and out of sleep for some time, eventually waking up with a start as the fireworks began with a series of explosions like machine gun fire. As soon as they stopped I was asleep.

I woke the next morning before dawn, cold. When I went down to the river there were still crowds on the other side waiting to go across to get back to their villages on the other side.They must have spent the night in the open, probably sleeping o the ground. By midday Hampi was back to its quiet, sleepy self. I spent a frustating hour trying to contact someone on couch surfing.org and gave up in the end.

At Mango Tree restaurant I met two Canadians and we went in a rikwhaw together round the area, admiring the big granite boulders, stopping at temples from time to time. There are over four thousand temples, mostly unfinished, around Hampi. Many of the boulders have been cut or bear marks where they have started to split them. It would appear that they were stll building teples when the empire fell. Hampi was the capital of the Vijaayanagar Kingdom, which rose to power in 1336 and fell in 1565. They seem to have believed in quantity, not quality, for very few of these temples were ever finished and even in those the quality of the workmanship is poor. The carvings are rough, maybe partly because they were carving in granite, but they were using local stone and the boulders around the area are granite.

I left Hampi and caught a train to Hubli, then an overnight train from Hubli to Madgao, this time with a booked ticket in three tier airconditioned carriage. They heated the carriage all night and it was really a bit too hot. Then I got another train to Kumta and from there a rattly old bus to Gokarna.

I went back to Om beach, Gokarna because I had left my watercolours there by mistake. They had kept my watercolours but thrown away the watercolour paper!!! Maybe for them all paper is the same - watercolour paper, newspaper, toilet paper . . .

Hampi Festival last day

My mobile was stolen today. On the quaiside, waiting for a boat to go across the river to meet my friends on the other side.

The decca Herald reported today that the Belary ministers who are organising the festival decided to solve the problem of poor attendance by busing in large numbers of people from the surrounding towns, offering them a free lunch and busing them back in the evening. All the buses had large posters with photos of the BJP ministers who had ordered the free buses pasted on them. So first they make a mess of the publicity and then they make political capital out of creating a crowd.

My two friends decided that they did not want to move, so we spent the day sitting in cafes, watching the rice grow, while Lupus played and sung Leonard Cohen songs. At six I decided to go back, but the crowd at the river bank was enormous and I retreated. An hour later the crowd was even worse and no boats seemed to be going. Then I met a couple of women who offered me a bed with a mosquito net outside their chalet, so I am going to sleep there.

Yesterday evening I went into the temple, where I saw local musicians playing traditional music. Galloping horse tabla rythms, delicious harmonies and melifluous interweaving flute and singer held me entranced. I had hoped to hear some more music today but it seems like it's impossible to get back across the river.

Festival in Hampi

This has to be the worst organised festival I have ever experienced. Those respnsible for organising it didn't advertise it at all, or invite any dignitaries or famous people. There are no programmes and no one knows what is going on.

But the trees lining the wide avenue leading out of Hampi have been festooned with coloured lights. Millions of rupees have been spent on creating a son e lumiere show with  laser beams, in a town near to Hampi, but no transport has been organised to take people there from Hampi or to bring them back after the show. Apparently there are several gigantic stages outside Hampi.. So far I have found one.

Last night I went to see some traditional dancing and music. Some bright spark had put some banana trees in the middle of the front row of seating, so that half the audience couldn't see the stage. So everyone had to sit down the sides in order to see. Most of the seats were empty. The music was ramped up to full volume, so if you wanted to see the dancers you were deafened. I watched, fingers in my ears, for an hour or so, then I went to bed, where the music wafted over me until late into the night.

Hampi

Hampi is a beautiful village by a river, with an enormous temple, with high pyramidal towers, intricately carved in sandstone. In the temple carved, pillared collonades overlook wide coutyards. Low granite inner temples are carved with kings or gods in high headdresses, dancing girls, palm trees and elephants. Monkeys climb all over the buildings, jumping from rooftop to rooftop. One building has a ceiling covered with pictures from ancient Hindu texts. The part of the temple furthest from the entrane is carved into the rock, a labyrynth of dark rooms with pillars, connected by stairs and passageways. There are little temples within the temple, devoted to various gods. places where people light candels, put red dye on their foreheads, make obeissance to multiheaded snake gods, turtles, the elephant god and many others.

Looking down on Hampi from one of the nearby temples, behind the village is a band of lush palm tree forest and behind that heaps of huge boulders piled onto a long ridge. A long line of stone pillars lead out of Hampi towards ruined temples amoungst the palm trees and boulders. The crowds are beginning to gather for the festival.

When I arrived yesterday, all the cheap rooms were full. I ended up sleeping on the roof of a guest house.
The cafe in the building next door was playing a CD by Prem Joshua, a flute player - sweet, gentle music with a hypnotic tabla beat. Someone was playing a Spanish guitar in the cafe, along with the music, blending in perfectly. I lay under my mosquito net lulled by the music, drifting in and out of sleep until finally sleep took over. I was woken this morning by the bleating of flocks of goats. When I looked over the edge of the roof, I saw a field full of goats, waiting to be milked.

Now I have a room with a bed and a mosquito net. All the guest houses in Hampi have hiked their prices because of the festival. I got the cheapest room I could get for 300 rupees.

Walking along pathways beside the river with the palm forest on the other side of the river and piles of round boulders behind the trees, eventually you reach more temples. At intervals there are beautiful riverside cafes under the trees, sometimes set out on stone terraces.

I met two young men, a lawyer and a musician, who invited me to come across the river with them to a bar where we could get a beer - the only one in Hampi. The bar was surrounded by brilliant green rice fields. We sat on mats and cushions at low tables and watched the sun go down. Then I had to catch the last boat back.

Indian Trains

There are five classes on Indian trains: First class (two people to a compartment), air conditioned two tier (four people to a compartment) air conditioned three tier (six people to a compartment), sleeper (six people to a compartment without air conditioning) and Second class. In order to get a seat in any of the first four classes, you have to book well ahead. If you want to buy a ticket on the day you travel you can only travel second class. This means, of course, that the second class compartments are hopelessly overcrowded a lot of the time. There are other, local trains, where everyone travels second class, but these are frustratingly slow for long journeys.

I took a local train to Margao, where I was obliged to buy a second class ticket, since I didn't want to hang about there any longer than I had to. At the entrance to the second class carriage people told me that there was nowhere to sit, but I squeezed in. Six people were sitting on a seat designed for three, on both sides of the compartment. Piles of luggage and people occupied ever inch of the floor in the corridor. One man managed to lie across the doorway to the toilet and go to sleep. I found a sack with some hard, lumpy things in it to sit on. A young man reading the Bible gave me a cotton cloth to cover my legs. He thought my skirt was too short.

We chugged through thickly forested hills.

After three hours I got a luggage rack shared with an old man to sit on. He got off at the next station, leaving me in full possession. Covering my legs, I lay down with my face to the wall. Soon I heard loud shouting. I heard the words baggage rack several times and decided to lie low. Eventually the shouting died down. When I turned over I saw that the Bible-reading youn man was sleeping in the luggage rack opposite mine, snoring loudly. Eventually we ended up with two people on each luggage rack. I had a young man sitting on the end of mine, being careful not to touch me. I clung to my rack all the way to Hubli. When you manage to acquire a luggage rack you resist the disire to go to the toilet or get down for any other reason. The minute you move you've lost it.

When we reached Hubli at half past ten, the crowd of desparate travellers started to board the train before it stopped. When it did stop the hord pushed us back and scrambled in. We couldn't get out. Eventually a big man in front of me pushed the next man trying the climb up back and climbed down. Using him as a shield I climbed down too but my luggage was trapped by immovable people. I pulled, tugged, shouted and rammed it against their legs. They seemed impervious to pain. Eventually I managed to extricate it.

Not wanting to leave the station at that late hour, I took a room in the station, a huge, palatial room with an enormous bathroom and two beds. The floors were marble and the bathroom walls were tiled. The cheap price - two hundred and fifty rupees - was reflected in the dirty state of the room.

I was woken several times during the night by trains coming through the station, blarring their claxons at top volume. At five thirty I gave up trying to sleep. The whole town already seemed to be in full swing, taxis and rikshaws adding to the loud hum of people shouting. At six the muezzin began his chant. At seven I got up and went in search of breakfast. The trains that continued to shunt through the station were goods trains, carrying minerals, including coal.

I managed to book a ticket from Hospet to Hubli and one from Hubli to Madgao for the 31 Jan in AC 3tier. The only trouble was that the only train from Hospet to Hubli left at six thirty in the morning, arriving at ten thirty am and the only train from Hubli to Madgao left at eleven at night, leaving a very big gap in between, to be spent in a very boring town.

Then I bought another second class ticket to Hospet for the same day and got into another sardine squash carriage. This time I had a window seat. The countryside from Hubli to Hospet is flat with miserable looking crops, fields of maize with most of the plants missing, stunted crops of beans and sunflowers and a few little trees. Two young men were playing music on their mobile phones. I played them a few tracks on my mobile phone that they liked. But they wanted to watch a video and I didn't have any videos on my phone. Then they gave up their seats for a couple of old ladies. Later, when a few people left the train I got into a luggage rack and slept soundly the rest of the way. The other passengers woke me at Hospet, where I had the usual struggle to get out of the train.

A rikshaw driver met me on the station platform and persuaded me to let him take me all the way to Hampi.  I was going to get the bus, but he took me right into the town and traipsed round all the low cost hotels looking for a room for me so I was glad I was persuaded.

I have ended up sleeping on the roof. But tomorrow I get a room.

Holy Cows

Everyone knows about the Holy cows of India, cows that wander the length and breadth of the subcontinent, feeding mainly on vegetable waste from the markets, along with paper and cardboard and the occasional piece of plastic. Even in the countryside the cows gather at places where rubbish is dumped. Cows stop the traffic, crossing the road, even lying in the middle of the road, so that the traffic has to go round them.

I began to realise that the cows were a nuisance when I saw a cow approach a table at a cafe in Gokarna where tourists sat. A cow leaned over and tried to take food off a tourist's plate. She swiftly removed the plate. They tried to shoo the cow away but it wouldn't move. One of the tourists took a spoonful of yogurt and tried to tempt the cow away from the table. The cow was not fooled. I didn't stay to see how this ended. But the restaurant owner probably came out with a big stick and chased the cow away.

Next day on the beach two beautiful Norwegian women lay stretched out on their towels, reading their books. A cow approached, leaned down, tore a page out of one the the books and ate it. Outraged, she snatched up the book and beat the cow off. It wandeered over to another group of tourists, knocked over their drinks and thrust its nose into someone's bag, looking for food. A man waved a stick at the cow, which put its head down threateningly.

The two Nowegian women went for a swim, leaving their books on their towels. The cow walked over, tore a mouthful of pages out of the same book, then wandered on munching happily. "I hadn't read those pages yet" complained the woman when she came back to her mutilated book.

Gokarna town

I'm still in Gokarna. My excuse is a severely bruised toe. I bashed my little toe a couple of days ago on a stone, walking over the hill to a nearby beach. It hurt too much to go walking in shoes or sandals. But it's fine walking on the beach with bare feet.

Gokarna is a small town with lots of little temples and lots of lovely bookshops. I have found a second hand copy of Shantaram, so I could just stay here until I have read it, then trade it in for another book.

The walk over the hill from Om beach to Gokarna is beautiful. Wooded hills roll softly all around with the sea in the distance. Maximum temperatures are thirty one degrees at the moment, with cool breezes from the sea. There are westerners here who have been living in bamboo huts for months and months.

Gokarna

Gokarna is in Karnataka, beyond Goa. It is quieter than Goa, with fewer tourists. It is, they say, how Goa used to be forty years ago. There are little places to stay on the edges of the beaches.

Namaste is a wide, spacious cafe surrounded by trees. Sun shines through the leaves illuminating them. Behind the cafe are rows of single story rooms, scattered about, with cobblestone pathways linking them and tropical vegetation in the spaces between. A room here costs 250 rupees a night, sharing the toilets and showers. At night the pathways are illuminated by low level lights so there's no problem finding your way to the toilet.

Customers sit in the cafe for hours on end, waiting for the heat to abate.
Yesterday we were invaded by hordes of Russians. They don't mix with the other foreigners.
And this weekend is some kind of religious festival, so it's an Indian holiday. They have come from the big city to have a look at the seaside. A few of them splash about in the sea in their vests and pants. The rest wander about dipping their toes in the water. Then they sit under the trees, together with the cows, chewing slowly in the shade.

Madgoan

There was a train at 11pm from Madgoan to Gokarna. But it arrives at 2am. Not a good time to arrive. On the other hand, there was a train to Kumta at 7am. Kumta is 26 km from Gokarna. I took a motorbike taxi to a fairly dirty hotel, the taxi driver holding my luggage on his handlebars. There were centipedes in the bathroom of the hotel. Upstairs was a restaurant/drinking den, where I tried to order fish, but it was all finished. They brought me some miniature crabs instead. The men at the next table were drinking whiskey with their meal. They had bought a whole bottle of it and one of them stuffed the remains of the bottle in his pocket when they left.

Next day I caught the train to Kumta, travelling with a young Norwegian man who had spent the night in the station. He had been accompanying his mother to Delhi for an operation which you cannot get in Norway, to alleviate the symptoms of her MS. It helped a little bit but not much.

At Kumta we saw a train headed to Gokarna road, so we jumped on it, squeezing in beside women and children sitting on the floor of the corridoor and hung on for dear life, as the train hurtled through tunnels. We had no tickets for this train, but nor had most of the other passengers, I suspect.

At Gokarna Road the usual touts tried to get us into rickshaws and taxis but we all headed for the mini bus, which somehow managed to squash us all in. I had half one buttock on the seat. We then took a rikshaw to Om beach, dragged my luggage down a steep path to the beach and checked into a cheap beach hotel called Namaste.

A wild goose chase continued

I lay on another bench and slept some more. It was hot. When I woke up a series of buses arrived and departed, with a few passengers, a gaggle of school girls stared at me, the sugar cane machine went round and round with it's jingling bells but I never saw anyone drink the juice. Crows cawed. The sun set.


At last my bus arrived. The driver got down and dissappeared.

Jaitapur

The road to Jaitapur deteriorated. There were whole stretches without tarmac, bumpy earth. Dust billowed up as we drove and everything that overtook us enveloped us in a huge cloud of dust. As we progressed, the bus gradually emptied. The bus stopped. Smiling, the conductor told me to get out. Jaitapur. It was completely dark. Jaitaupur? I asked. The waved their hands in a general direction, also dark, and so I walked. I came to a house with a light on. No one spoke English. I gestured sleep. A girl cme out and told me kuchni - nothing. They took me a little further on to a rickshaw, who took me up the coast to a bar. They seemed reluctant to give me a room, but they did. Just that. A room with a bed. The toilet was outside, down two flights of stairs, in the dark.

Next day I tried to wash my hair with soap and a bucket of water, because I had forgotten to bring shampoo. The soap seemed to act like glue. In the bar they shook my hand, attempted conversation and told me when the next bus was going to Rajapur. The night before a couple of businessmen told me that Ritwik's telephone number was not local to there. There was no public telephone in this place and no one wanted to let me use their mobile. Anyway it seems that I had come all this way to meet someone who doesn't live here and nobody in this place spoke English. They barely spoke Hindi. So I decided to beat a retreat.

It turns out that the bar was a drinking den, where men come to drink whiskey, from seven o'clock in the morning. Rows of bottles of Indian whiskey on glass shelves. That might explain their reluctance to let me stay the night before.

I made the mistake of catching a bus to Rajapur, thinking that I could get a train from there. But the train station was 26km from the bus station and there was no transport to get there. The birds nest was still scattered all over the floor of the bus station. The jingling sugar cane juice machine was still turning. The crows still cawed. I got on the next bus to Ratnagiri (I could have got a bus direct to Ratnagiri from where I was.) The Ratnagiri bus went back to Rajapur town, got stuck in a traffic jam, then came back to Rajapur bus station. Then on to Ratnagiri, grinding up and down the wooded hills for three and a half hours.

In Ratnagiri I got on a local train to Goa , in the ladies carriage again, until it emptied. Then I went into the general carriage, where two delightful Saddhus invited me to sit with them. They wore orange robes and orange turbans, and had long locks and long, soft, white beards. They perused my map with the aid of a pair of broken glasses and a torch and advised me to go all the way to Madgoan, the last stop, not to try to get across country to a beach in the night because I wouldn't find any buses. They gave me a beautiful wool shawl to wrap round my shoulders to keep me warm. When we arrived they wanted to give it to me as a present, but I refused. How could I take something from a pair of wandering Saddhus. They had nothing but the clothes on their backs and relied on the generosity of the public to survive.

A Wild Goose chase

I ran away from the cold in Mumbai on the Rajdhani Express train to Mumbai.
I had a comfortable bunk ina carriage with a clean floor, central heating, a bottle of water and food.
sharing the compartment were two Afghans, a Nigerian woman and a couple from beijing -he American and she Chinese. The older of the Afghans was going to India to visit a hospital for a checkup. There are no hospitals in Afghanistan, they told me. not even any doctors. The Nigerian woman was married to an Indian, who lived and worked in Delhi, while she lived in Nigeria with their two children. The couple from Beijing lived and worked there. They had been trekking in Nepal in December, a brave thing to do, but they'd been lucky and there hadn't been any snow. Maybe we got all their snow in England!

About half an hour into the journey they brought us trays with half a cheese sandwick, a tiny square of halva, three miniature dried samosas and a packet of apple juice. "strange supper," I thought, giving away my sandwich. Then they came round with hot water in small thermos flasks for tea and coffee. We had a convivial supper and half an hour later I retired to my bunk.

Just as I was dozing off, the food walla thumped my bunk and shouted "soup", passing me a tray with a paper cup of soup and a packet of bread sticks. I climbed down and joined my fellow passengers for soup. Half an hour later they brought us a meal - rice and chicken for the meat eaters and rice and cheese in a strange sauce for the veggies. They also brought some dahl, yogurt, chapattis and pickles. We finished eating at ten pm. I retired once more to my bunk. The food walla thumped my bunk again and shouted "ice cream".

They woke us up with a news bulletin about an airoplane somewhere that had crashed and shattered into pieces. Then the food walla came round, thumped my bunk and shouted "veg breakfast".

We arrived around midday in Mumbai. I want to buy a ticket to Rajapur. I was told to go to a different station - CTS. So i tried to catch a local train. i was told to go to the end of the line, then catch a taxi, which I did. I had to crouch down in the taxi to see out, since the window was sl low and we were going past historic colonial buildings. At CTS station I bought a tkcket to Rajapur. when I went to look for the platform I was told I had to go to Dadar station on another local train. I could have gone straight to Dadar station from Delhi central!

At Dadar station I was told the train was eleven hours late. It would leave at four pm.
The train to Rajapur was called the Ratnagiri Express. it took nine hours to reach Ratnagiri, which is not even as far as Rajapur. I got into the ladies compartment, with a gang of young women, who chatted and laughted in high pitched voices. One young school girl decided to take me under her wing. she told me that the train was so slow that if I went all the way to Rajapur I would not find anywhere to sleep. There are no hotels there, she said. At about ten oclock the ladies carriage started to empty. The three young women engineers, who were also university lecturers, dressed in jeans and t-shirts, left. My young friend took me to the family carriage, where she introduced me to a family man, who, she said would look after me.
When we arrived in Ratnagiri at one a.m. he took me to a hotel with expensive rooms. I threw up my hands in horror. Then the hotel offered me a place in a dormitory for three hundred and fifty rupees. The dormitory was a huge room with a marble floor and a pile of mattresses in one corner. They laid out a matress for me with a not too clean sheet and a pillow and switched on a fan. I slept like a log, dreaming of teaching herbs, double booking myself, letting my students down and getting late for my other students. i was glad to wake up and see the sunshine and the blue sky. The dust hasn't risen yet.

The family man who said he would come at ten and put me on the right bus hadn't turned up at twenty past, so I left. The bus stand is in front of the station. This is also a taxi and rickshaw stand so, as expected, they tried to get me into a taxi to Rajapur for seven hundred rupees. As usual I threw up my hands in horror and said i wanted a bus. Then an Indian couple called me over. "We're waiting for the bus too." So we went in a rickety bus to the bus station, where I caught the bus to Rajapur for fifty seven rupees. It took three hours, grinding up and down thickly wooded hills, stopping to pick up passengers every few minutes and stopping to deposit passengers with equal frequency. Many of the passengers were reluctant to sit too near me, whether out of respect or whether they didn't want to be contaminated by my foreigness, i don't know.

Rajapur bus station is tiny, in the middle of a forest, with very few buses. The next bus to jaitapur, they told me, goes at six. Formica topped tables in the canteen. I went to eat the usual rice and dahl. then I lay down on the long stone bench and went to sleep. I was woken an hour later by a cleaning lady who came with a filthy mop and a bucket of black, evil smelling water, which she proceeded to spread around wetly. When she had finished, a bird scrathed a nest out of the rafters, which fell, scattering all over the floor and one of the seats.

I have to go now and catch a train. Will continue at the next opportunity!

Delhi

The air is thick like soup, the sky grey and people are burning broken up packing cases in the street to try to keep warm. Madan cafe is still here with a big smiling Bunty, helpful as ever. As soon as I arrived he phoned my friend and sent me to see her in her hotel, where a room was waiting for me. We are down the narrowest alleyway on the second floor. The hotel porter was surprised when I remonstrated with him about the footprint on the sheet, but he changed it for another sheet, marginally cleaner but with a hole in it. Oh well, we are only paying 350 rupees a night.


Last night we went to dinner with a very generous man who paid for the whole table. He is running a free hospital in Bihar for lepers and he told me that he had been involved with this hospital for forty years. Today he is helping a man from the carribean who's grandfather was stolen out of India as a slave. There are many of these x-slaves, who want to claim their Indian citizenship, but it is proving very difficult. It seems they need DNA tests.

I am going to try to go to Jaitapur by train. A lot of the trains are held up by strikes and protests.

A lot of friends in Delhi, some leaving tomorrow, some arriving today. A pity the air is so unbreathable.

Preparations

Not off for a couple of days. Hoping that the metro has got as far as the airport by now, which would make life a lot easier.