Travel Blog Posts
February 8th 2011
Jaisalmer at dawn. The fortress has disappeared in a chilly cloud of mist. Trucks grind along the road, their airhorns carolling to each other. A compound door opens in the lane below and a group of women come spilling out into the road, all laughing and teasing each other, excitable as schoolgirls escaping a classroom. They crouch down on their haunches round a small fire on the roadside, stretching out their braceleted arms to its warmth, and draw their shawls around themselves. Sitting in the restaurant at breakfast I felt a nudge on my leg beneath the table. Expecting a dog or similar I looked down to see a boy sweeping the floor with a wet rag. My presence was no obstacle to him - he carefully wiped the rag around my feet and then scuttled ... read more
February 8th 2011
We left Bikaner at 9am for the long drive to Jaisalmer. It was absolutely freezing. The heater in the Tata turns out not to be working - the dial only turns as far as the blue then sticks fast. Mr Mukesh tried putting on the fan, which came on with a wobbly screech and wafted a fishy, glue-like smell around the cabin, so I turned it off. After an hour my feet had gone numb and I was shivering, so he dug two blankets out of the boot. We draped these over our heads in the local manner and wrapped them around ourselves, hunched over like two old ladies in shawls. Through a grey haze a tiny, pale sun rose into the sky, giving no heat. Then, abruptly at 11am the mistyness began to disperse and ... read more
February 5th 2011
"Many Indians unHonesty. But my India great." - Mr Mukesh, 2nd January 2011 Winter in a desert town. When the sun disappears around 6pm the chill gets into your bones. Bikaner is a baked mud-brick town with hotels that look like fortresses, decorated with red ochre battlements and crenellations. Wide open streets and a sense that on the outskirts of town lies a great nothingness - we are on the edge of the Thar Desert. I appear to be the only guest at the Palace View Hotel, which one might reasonably assume to have a view of the palace, although one would be wrong in that regard. A tour of the fort, which was imposing, if rather battered. Dusty mementoes and faded photos of fresh-faced Sahibs out from England posing with freshly slaughtered tigers. They peer ... read more
February 4th 2011
New Year's Eve found me sitting on the rooftop of the hotel Arya Niwas in Jaipur, smoking a large cigar and watching as boys on adjacent rooftops flew small diamond-shaped kites. They fought pitched battles, trying to bring down each others' kites by glueing ground glass to the string and attempting to saw through the others. The kites wheeled and bobbed, making a high snapping flutter upon the breeze. Towards midnight other guests drifted up to the rooftop to watch fireworks spread out across the city, distant flares of light in green and gold that burst into cascading showers of colour that glittered in the darkness as they fell. Two Germans who had been standing nearby turned to me on the stroke of midnight and we all solemnly shook hands and wished each other happy new ... read more
February 3rd 2011
The bus to Rajasthan left Bikaner House at 10am, and was a comfortable air-conditioned Volvo. Tilting the seat back and unscrewing the cap of my complementary drinking water (having checked the seal), I settled in for the trip, anticipating a series of naps interspersed with a bit of scenery out of the window. The brief reverie lasted exactly 30 seconds until the first emergency braking manoeuvre and blare on what sounded like the foghorn of an oil tanker. This continued more or less constantly every 30 seconds for the next five hours. The driver used traffic jams to berate other motorists out of his open window and on one occasion actually got out of the cab to remonstrate with an auto-rickshaw driver at some length. It put me in mind of the article in the Hindustan ... read more
February 3rd 2011
Christmas Day, 2010. Mid-morning in the Delhi suburb of Alaknanda, and the air is full of dry, powdery dust, carried into the city by westerly winds from the deserts of Rajasthan, or from the numerous construction sites. Pigeons land on the maidan (field), throwing up small puffs of red ochre dust as they touch down. Tropical trees shade the yard, and little yellow-striped squirrels scamper along the branches. The earth is dry, warm and vaguely spicy, smelling of dust and the faint tang of drains. It feels like a long time since it last rained. The water comes on twice a day, announced at 5.30am by a man on a bicycle who cycles around the complex hooting a klaxon horn. Later the vegetable cart comes round, the vendor crying out a two-toned, rising call, in which ... read more
January 15th 2006
I lost a few days in Bangkok, like a lot of people do. After 4 days in the city it was time to escape, so I headed north to Chiang Mai. The new group met for the first time last night at the restaurant where I had that searingly hot green curry. “Ask for not spicy,” I cautioned, but some of them went for it anyway and it all ended in tears. We took a klong cruise the next day aboard a narrow longtail boat like the ones they used in ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’. It was not quite as exciting as the film, and in fact I fell asleep, but some of the scenery was nice. A child in a rubber ring floated in front of the porch of a house on ... read more
January 12th 2006
From the hotel balcony a forest of masts march on across the city, each topped with a winking red light. You look down from the rooftops into people’s lives: a woman in a sarong empties ladlefuls of water over herself, her jet black hair cascading down her back, then suddenly a man’s arm reaches out to her and the scene shifts; the mood alters. The New World Lodge is Muslim-owned. There is no hotel bar, and the minibars in the rooms contain only fruit juice, which suits me fine. Everyone expresses astonishment that I can be English and teetotal. As a race they are notorious alcoholics, apparently. Well, I knew that anyway. At breakfast large blonde girls in shorts queued next to veiled Thai women to receive their ration of toast. It was a popular ... read more
January 11th 2006
It was a rough journey to get here - Bangkok, Thailand. Five hours in the back of a pick-up truck on the abysmal National Route 6 across Cambodia. Potholes large enough to swallow a truck, bridges that were often just two planks lashed together, and everything covered in a thick, choking dust. We left Siem Reap at 6am and the road got worse and worse. Usually we’d get a warning - the truck would slow down, we’d all brace and then suddenly we’d be thrown into the air, coming down with a crash on top of the rucksacks. I expected to arrive with a bag full of broken Vietnamese crockery, but amazingly most of it survived. As a protection against the dust I wore a bush hat, shades and the checkered Cambodian scarf called a krama ... read more
January 10th 2006
The Bun Nath Guesthouse is set back a short distance from National Route 6, the main highway between Phnom Penh and Bangkok. It growls with traffic at any time of day, and at night a few hookers wander up and down the sandy pavement under the bored gaze of white-helmeted motorcycle cops. There’s a 24 hour Caltex garage on the corner with crips, sweets and stuff like that, the most ‘westernized’ shop I’ve seen since coming to Asia. I buy rice cakes and seaweed flavour crisps, and a big bottle of water called Steve. That’s what it says - “Steve water, for all your drinking requirements”. “Made with technology of United States.” And on the back, in big swirling purple letters, “Steve - the quality drops.” In the morning I sit on the balcony with ... read more
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