Jacqui Knox

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On the way home from Udaipur I decided to take a detour and spend two nights at Camp Zainabad (aka Desert Coursers) on the edge of the Little Rann of Kutch. 'Rann' means desert, 'Kutch' is the area, and at nearly 5000sq km it is 'little' only in comparison to the 'great' rann located further towards Pakistan. The area is the last habitat of the Asiatic Wild Ass, but I was more interested in the landscape. It is dead flat, and turns into a marshland during the monsoon, broken only by a few small islands or 'bhets'. But the rains haven't conformed this year and the desert was still spongey from flooding in early November. About 20,000 families live in the desert during the dry season, barely reaping a living from salt panning. Other families raise ... read more

The Bombay Hash House Harriers don't take their athletics too seriously. At 10am, when the rest of the city's joggers were no doubt finished and showered, the 'hashers' were busy unloading beer and ice from a car. There were sandwiches to eat, greetings to be made and a few brief guidelines given, and then the 20 or so hashers were off through a fishing village at anything from a fast trot to a friendly stroll, shouting 'on! on!'. Well, you probably need to be a little loopy to run in this city. I had always wanted to try hashing. It is a bit like urban orienteering without compasses and without rules. The idea is that the runners follow a course marked with chalk or, in our case, red electrical tape. The course could include false trails, ... read more

Manori beach is separated from the urban sprawl of north Mumbai by about 200m of estuary and by about two decades of development. The beach, reached via narrow village lanes that smelt of drying fish, was empty apart from a group of teenagers playing cricket when we arrived at about 9am. Maybe that's because it's quite difficult to get to - we had to take a train, then an autorickshaw, then a ferry then another rickshaw. As we walked north along the beach a young man started following us, and he continued to do so as we scrambled around a rocky headland. It turned out he was both drunk and lost and had hoped we knew where we were going. Little did he realise we were trying to find a piece of rock on which to ... read more

Kodanad is an elephant rescue centre about an hour from Cochin. If you turn up before 8am you can watch the mahouts scrub their elephants with coconut husks in the Periyar river. The animals are surprisingly dainty, placing their feet carefully as they negotiated the slippery river bank. They are also tremendously charismatic - no wonder so many stories are told about elephants! The largest liked having her feet scrubbed. She was also the most cooperative, as if she realised her two carers had drawn a short straw having to clean her massive body. Another elephant was a 'little bit mad' and rolled about using her trunk as a snorkel. The third and smallest elephant was cheeky, as was her mahout, who made sure she was singled out for photos and therefore tips. ... read more

You only need to leave the monsoon forests of the Western Ghats and emerge into the high-altitude tea plantations of Munnar to realise just how many cups of tea must be drunk around the world each day. The century-old bushes cover about 60,000 acres of the surrounding hills like a bright green patchwork quilt. Every 10 days their fresh leaves are 'plucked' and taken for processing in one of 18 nearby factories that emit tea-flavoured smoke. Ten thousand workers are involved, their blue-washed homes scattered about the valleys. As Tom discovered, they put up with numerous leeches, and work on slopes that look too steep to stand on. Finally their product comes to me in the form of a Tetley tea bag. And I've just destroyed it by adding UHT cream. For the entire three days ... read more