Travel stories

Mark Moxon's Travel Writing

India: The Keralan Backwaters

I first travelled the Keralan backwaters back in 1998, when I took the tourist cruise from Kollam to Alappuzha, and I loved it. The serene waterways that lie just a stone's throw from the sea are relaxing, smothered in coconut palms and perfect for unwinding. Given my complete lack of ability to acclimatise to India's heat and noise without throwing a tantrum, the backwaters seemed like the perfect place to relax for a few days.

We hadn't meant to jump straight onto a boat, but India being India, things just fell into place (well, apart from some hiccups with my credit card, but let's leave that for another time). We took the train from Varkala to Kollam, fell into a rickshaw to the DTPCtourist information centre and started talking to a man about houseboats. He didn't have anything available until Saturday, which was far too far off, but he sent us round the corner to the office of the Visit Kerala representative, who produced photographs of a houseboat and a book full of glowing handwritten reviews from travellers dating from 2005 ('The current book is on the boat,' claimed the agent), and said the boat was available now to hire for as long as we wanted. We said we'd like three days, and he suggested an all-inclusive itinerary, costing Rs16,000 for three nights and four days, going from Kollam to a quiet halfway point on the first day, then to Alappuzha on the second day, and then around Alappuzha for the third day and night, ending in Alappuzha at the end of the trip. It sounded good, we checked out the boat and liked the look of it, and then I tried to bargain, which completely failed to work as he had 'already given you my very best price.' Too tired to argue, we paid up and headed for the boat.

The Valiyavila Family Estate, not far outside Kollam

Ah, the Keralan backwaters. They live in a time zone of their own, and although our trip from Kollam to Alappuzha followed the same route as the ferry I took back in 1998, there's something wonderfully relaxing and, dare I say it, decadent about doing it in your own boat, with the smells of cooking wafting up from the back of the boat while you sit in the shade of the veranda like kings and queens of the river. It's delightful, and even though it took a while to seep into my pores, it eventually took my black mood, tied it up in a bag, dropped in a big, heavy rock, and threw it mewling and whingeing into the luscious green waters of the backwater canals.

I should point out that, given the price difference – Rs300 for the tourist cruise, compared to a houseboat being of the most expensive attractions in India – the tourist ferry comes out of it very well. For the first two days of our trip, I saw nothing that I didn't see back in 1998, if you ignore the new developments that have sprung up in the meantime (such as the construction work surrounding a couple of huge bridges that will one day join the outer land spit to the mainland). But I remember the tourist cruise being, well, rather touristy and a bit too busy, and if you're a couple looking for a romantic interlude, or you're a large party who would rather hang out with each other in privacy, then a houseboat is absolutely the way to go.

Great Expectations

A boat moored in the backwaters

Our boat, the Thamanna (or Expectation), was run by a three-man crew of smiling but relatively silent chaps, who ran the boat with the kind of relaxed efficiency that comes from working as a team for a long time. Anil, the chef, would prove to be a magician with food; Shaji, the engineer, charmed us with his smile; and Retheesh, who steered the boat, was quiet and slightly more aloof, perhaps because he was the new boy, having worked on the boat for just one year (the others were old hands, judging by the comments in the onboard visitors' books). They kept themselves to themselves, hovering around enough to make sure we were perfectly happy and to have little chats now and then, but without ever feeling clingy or invasive. Indeed, I wouldn't have minded if they had been more chatty, but perhaps on the backwaters, leaving the tourists to mind their own business is a sensible move.

Peta aboard the houseboat

For the backwaters are a drifter's delight, and it started from the very first day, when we set off from Kollam in the hot, early afternoon sun. As soon as we left the mooring, just round the corner from Kollam's somewhat fragrant abattoir, the breeze through the front deck blew away all memories of crowded trains and hot, sticky city centres, and just like that we reached the second largest lake in the backwaters, Lake Ashtamudi, whose waters stretch out into the distance, deep and green all the way to its palm-strewn fringes.

Soon after crossing the lake, we tied up to a pole in the middle of the channel, and out came lunch, the first of many spreads that we would both marvel over (I'm not ashamed to say that we took photos of our meals before ploughing into them – they really were that well presented, and they tasted as good as they looked). Our first lunch consisted of fat-grained south Indian rice, dhal, diced green banana, green beans, cabbage, soya beans and two whole fishes, which Anil said had come from the lake we'd just crossed. Whatever their origin, they tasted delightful, and each of the dishes was presented in its own red terracotta bowl, with its own unique recipe and mixture of herbs and spices. Indian cooking has a reputation for being fiery and spicy, but when it's done well – as it was on our houseboat – you can taste the individual spices, and the sum of the parts adds up to an inspiring taste of its own. Each of Anil's terracotta bowls was worthy of an ovation, and we did them justice as best we could (though each meal was so large, even two hungry mouths could only dent the mounds of food we were presented with, though I'm sure nothing went to waste).

A public ferry on the backwaters

After a short siesta to see out the hottest part of the day, we resumed our drift northwards, passing houses that lined the canal on both sides. One of the strongest memories of my previous visit to the backwaters was the insanity of the children, who would run along the banks, shouting, 'One pen! One Pen! Give me one pen, please!' in the hope that we would copy the hordes of tourists who throw pens at the locals, thus making things worse (the official advice is not to hand out pens to children, but to given them to a local school instead; throwing pens off your boat only encourages the children to yell, 'One pen! One pen!' every time they see a white person, which doesn't achieve anything). One child was so enthralled by his mantra that he kept running along the side of the bank, leaping along the tops of the concrete stumps until they ran out and so did he, his legs wildly pumping the air as he fell, still screaming, into the river; he kept shouting as he surfaced, determined to get his reward, though I think on this occasion his efforts were in vain.

A boatyard where houseboats are made

The 'one pen' brigade are still in evidence some nine years later, but it feels to me as if they have calmed down in the intervening years (though perhaps this is because they save their biggest efforts for the tourist cruise, as the odds are better, and don't pester houseboats quite as much). Instead, the happy smiling of the locals is the most common sight, and people waved gleefully as we chugged past, happily waving back. All this waving and the smiling appears to be completely genuine on their part (it definitely was on our part), and the women and children reacted brilliantly when Peta said hello, something they were less keen to do with a solitary male all those years ago.

As the afternoon wore on, we sailed past a mineral factory and fishing boats moored on the shores, and the cantilevered Chinese fishing nets for which the area is famous. We finally arrived in the small village of Alumkadavu at about 5.30pm, where we pulled up by the Green Channel hotel – all but empty in this, the shoulder season – and Shaji said we were more than welcome to explore the village, if we wanted. And, of course, we jumped at the chance.

The houseboat Thamanna moored in the village of Alumkadavu

Again, this is something that you don't get from the tourist cruise, and it turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. We wandered randomly through the village, along its main road with all manner of shops crowding the sides, from the ironmongers, the saree shop and the men's tailors, to the rope shop, the chemists, various food shops and, oddly enough, a shop selling western-style toilets. A lone television sat in a shop window showing Tom and Jerry battling it out in space, and children and old men sat around on the dusty ground, engrossed. Further on a line of auto-rickshaws gleamed in the afternoon light, their owners waiting for a fare, and all around people stared at us, some returning our smiles, and some just staring.

We took a right turn at a T-junction for no particular reason, and were soon overtaken by a small boy of about ten on a rather impressive bicycle. It had tinsel around the wheel hubs and the shiniest seat you've ever seen, and he slowed down as he went past.

Local transport on the backwaters

'Hello,' he said.

'Hello,' we chimed. 'How are you?'

'I am well,' he replied. 'What are you doing?'

'We are just walking,' we said. 'What are you doing?'

'I am just riding my bicycle,' he said, and waved as he rode off. And that, we thought, was that.

A little further down the road the same boy popped out from nowhere and said, 'Hello.'

'Hello', we said.

'This is where I live,' he said, pointing to a small house just off the road. 'Would you like to come in?'

An early morning river taxi

How could we refuse? So we wandered in and perched on the edge of the front porch, while our newfound friend said his name was Renju Bhavan, and introduced us to his mother, father and grandmother. We made brief and rather stilted conversation while slowly other boys wandered in, all giggling and hiding behind their hands. They let us take their pictures, insisting I appear in at least one of them, and while Renju went inside to write down his address so we could send him the prints, Peta went to talk to a group of girls who had gathered next door, and got taken off to see their home while I sat there, smiling and bobbling my head as if to say, 'I'm happy to be in your home, even if I can't speak a word of your language and you can't speak a word of mine.'

Sand is collected from the bottom of the backwaters and punted to the shore

Before long Renju emerged with a pen and his school book, and decided that it might be quicker if he dictated his address to me to write down, so I jotted it down as best I could, and he then asked me for my autograph, which Peta and I both gave him. This opened the floodgates – everyone produced their own school books, which we dutifully filled with our signatures and, in Peta's case, a smiley face that went down particularly well, and after a few more photos and promises that we would send them copies as soon as we got home, we floated back to our boat, the smiles and happy waves of the locals of Alumkadavu a reminder of how genuinely friendly and open the locals of rural Kerala are.

And that evening we ploughed into a feast of masala chicken, rice and spiced aubergine, reflecting how it's always the unscripted parts of the trip that produce the best memories.

To Alappuzha

There are lots of brightly coloured boats along the backwaters

Unfortunately, our first night on the houseboat proved to be rather less tranquil than we'd hoped it would be. The noise of a small engine (or possibly a large transformer) throbbed throughout the night just beyond our bedroom wall, and although we started the night lying in our cabin with the mosquito net coiled up above our heads, I woke up in the wee hours with itches that turned to scratches, and we had to spend the rest of the night huddled in the still air under the net. After finally dropping into a troubled sleep around three o'clock, we both woke to the shock of the muezzin's call at 5.30am, after which the local Hindu temple decided to play catch-up with a woofer-blasting rendition of its own that went on all the way to breakfast, accompanied by loud, sharp bangs that we would later discover were firecrackers. Apparently our first full day on the backwaters happened to be a Hindu festival, and nobody sleeps when there are colourful gods to be celebrated.

Lunch, from front to back: masala prawns, beetroot yoghurt, spinach, okra, sambal, beans, rice and pappadams

So day two started in a haze of exhaustion, brought on by yet another difficult night adjusting to the heat and the noise of India. It can take the body up to two weeks to acclimatise to this kind of heat, and six nights in, neither of us had managed anything approaching a proper night's sleep. Thank goodness we were on a houseboat, then, because there is absolutely nothing to do except kick back and relax.

Giving up on our sweat-drenched bed, we spent the early hours of the morning watching the village wake up. Just in front of us the river taxi man punted his canoe back and forth between the banks, ferrying people and bicycles between the main village and the houses on the opposite bank. Back and forth he went, sometimes carrying sedate clutches of colourfully clad women, and other times carrying groups of men who seemed to be able to talk without drawing breath. Meanwhile, we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast on the front deck, consisting of masala eggs, nests of rice noodles, baked plantain and sweet tea. At dawn the air had been completely still, made hazy by the smoke from the morning fires, but over breakfast the air slowly cleared, the humidity of the early morning replaced by a feeling of impending high temperatures as the sun felt its way towards our houseboat. Setting off for the day's cruise not only brought something else to look at, but a welcome breeze that made life bearable once more.

A power station on the backwaters

After an hour on the backwaters, heading north along a wide canal surrounded by thick coconut forests, we stopped briefly at the Matha Amrithanandamayi Mission, where about 2000 people live and follow the teachings of one of India's few female gurus. Known as Amma ('mother'), she is best known for her darshan (or her 'blessing'), when she hugs thousands of people, one after the other, in long sessions that can go on all night. We wandered round, feeling slightly self-conscious, as this is one of the more popular ashrams for westerners, and there were plenty of white faces, decked out in the simple clothes of ashram devotees. They looked happy enough, though looking at the tall, pink tower blocks which house the throng, I knew that this wasn't for me. I like the bad things in life too much to become an ashram devotee, though if I ever feel tempted, a hugging guru is probably the way I'd go.

A glut of houseboats near Alappuzha

A little further on along the backwaters, we pulled up to wooden pile in the middle of the canal, surrounded on both sides by thick jungle and the sound of Hindu celebrations. Firecrackers cracked, drums drummed, and it felt for all the world like the build-up a cannibal scene out of an H Rider Haggard novel. We idly fantasised that we were being fattened up for the exotic celebrations, because lunch was truly something. Little bowls held masala prawns, beetroot with yoghurt, a lovely spinach dish, sambar, ladyfinger, beans, rice and crunchy poppadoms, and we polished off as much as we could to the tune of a cold beer while the drums thumped out a tune to aid the digestion.

A paddling of ducks on the backwaters

After a siesta we struck north, and soon sunk back into a set of smaller waterways with picturesque houses dotted along the banks. People waved and smiled, with only a minority of the children shouting, 'Please give me one pen,' and after a short chug we pulled in to the banks and were whisked off to see the locals making rope from coconut fibres. This rope is made from coconuts that are submerged in water for three months, which makes it easier to separate the nut from the fibrous shell. The fibres (known as 'coir') are separated out into huge piles of thick, hair-like strands, each only a few inches long, and the ladies who make the rope weave the coir using a simple contraption that spins four large needle-like hooks along their axes (these days these machines are electric, though they used to be hand-cranked before the arrival of electricity). They attach a few strands to each needle and twist it to form a short rope, and then two of them take two ropes each, one in each hand, and walk backwards, away from the machine, feeding more strands into the twisted fibres and creating a thin string as they go. After 10m or so, they stop and join the ropes they're holding in each hand together, thus creating two loops, and they attach these to a similar machine at that end that twists each pair of strands into two lengths of twisted-pair rope. Considering that these ropes are made by simply twisting short strands of coconut fibre together, they are incredibly strong, and the ladies reckoned they could produce 25 to 35kg of rope a day, no mean feat in this weather.

The backwaters are home to lots of boats, some on land, some on water

It's a skilled job, too, as became quite clear when we tried our hand at making a short length of rope. It isn't easy to feed small strands into a twisting rope without losing the momentum, but the ladies of Kerala make it look like a breeze. Hats off to them, I must say.

As you approach the Alappuzha end of the backwaters, there's a sense that the waterside developments are, well, slightly more developed than their equivalents down towards Kollam. Although most of the houses are still small and modest, the number of larger houses increases, and you get the feeling that there's a bit more prosperity at this end of the waters. The landscape changes too, moving from the coconut forests of Kollam to a more open, agricultural layout, with large, flat paddy fields stretching out beyond the banks of the backwater. The paddy field are separated from the canal by long, thin strips of land, with the occasional irrigation gate providing a means of flooding the paddy fields at the start of the growing cycle, when rice needs to grow in shallow water. Water pumps and large plastic pipes allow the farmers to pump the paddy fields dry, so that by the time the rice is ready to harvest, the fields are no longer waterlogged.

The Keralan backwaters

Rice growing is much in evidence in the northern backwaters, with canoes plying the water, bursting with huge piles of harvested rice, ready to head over to the threshing site where the rice grains are separated from the grassy stems. But there's an awful lot more going on than just rice growing, for this is still a bustling place where people live. Boys dive into the water as your houseboat floats past, racing to see if they can reach the boat before it passes (it's futile with petrol-driven boats like this, but it's the taking part that counts); women bathe by the banks, coyly clad in their sarees, while men bathe further downstream in just their lungis; further along, a group of boat builders is working on the skeleton of a new boat, its curves reminiscent of a ripe banana or a sultan's moustache; boys play cricket under the palm trees, yelling 'how is that' amid a torrent of Malayalam; men squat on their haunches in circles under the shady trees, embroiled in heated discussion while women walk past in pairs, their bright clothes looking immaculate in the bright sunshine; the thwack-thwack of wet cloth on stone fills the air as the women of the house stand knee-deep in the water, doing the washing in the time-honoured way of smashing wet clothes on flat washing stones; lone canoes paddled by wiry old men pass larger boats weighted down to the waterline with piles of sand, collected in the morning by men with baskets, diving down to the bed of the canal; a solitary tantrum rings out, the intonation of both mother and child instantly familiar to anyone who has children of a certain age; river taxis punt from bank to bank, some carrying bicycles, and some carrying women hiding from the sun under their umbrellas; the shrill sound of a saw rings out from a riverside saw mill, where logs are bundled onto the back of a waiting truck; women bend over in rice paddies, scything ripe rice into bundles that the men carry away on their heads; and a man in a small canoe makes 'oo-ee' and 'kak-kak' sounds as he herds a large flock of ducks from one side of the canal to another. Life on a houseboat might be lazy, but all around you can see the quiet pace of life unfolding before your very eyes.

And that night, as we dropped anchor in a quiet stretch of the river just south of Alappuzha, we finally managed to get a good night's sleep, after a week of trying. At last, we felt human...

Romantic Cruising

Peta aboard the houseboat

Life on a houseboat soon becomes quite mantra-like. Breakfast starts the day, lunch punctuates it, and dinner rounds it off, and in the middle there are more drifting sights and chances to doze off as the sun climbs through the sky. The scenery around Alappuzha is almost entirely flat and made up of paddy fields, and as such is lacks some of the charm of the winding coconut forests of the south, but by this stage it doesn't really matter, as everything plods along in the manner to which it has become accustomed. People are just as friendly and are always happy to smile and wave, and although the evidence of labour is right there in front of you, rather than tucked away behind the palm trees, the atmosphere is still just as relaxed. The sun is hot, the breeze is welcome, and the pace of life is delightful. 'A perfect spot for a bit of romance,' you might think, as you flick through the visitors' book and read the comments of couple after couple after couple.

Chinese fishing nets on the way to Ashtamudi Lake

Well... yes and no. There's no denying that life on a houseboat is romantic, in a kind of 'just the two of us on a boat in the middle of a palm-encrusted tropical paradise' kind of way... except that reality isn't quite that simple. It's so hot and so humid that you break a sweat just by standing up, let alone standing to attention; meanwhile there are three burly men manning the boat, and although Anil, Shaji and Retheesh were terribly respectful of our privacy, these boats aren't exactly huge and the walls aren't exactly thick; or if you think a quick spot of fun in the middle of the night is a good idea, then beware the silent canoes that paddle past, just feet from your open bedroom windows, their candles and torches lighting up the inside of your room in glorious, high-definition night vision for everyone to enjoy, while the stench of ingrained fish wafts in on the still night air; and even if you close the curtains or decide the fishermen can get stuffed, you try getting romantic under a mosquito net without catching it with your feet and ending up like two dolphins in a tuna net. Luckily, what you do get are bottled memories that you can take away with you, ready to be cracked open on cold evenings at home and savoured in front of the log fire, far away from the crowded melee of modern India. Or that's my plan, anyway...

The surprisingly loud Kalloorkad St Mary's Forane Church in Champakulam

The only stop we made on day three was the village of Champakulam, 18km from Alappuzha and home to the Kalloorkad St Mary's Forane Church, which was founded in the fifth century AD, but now uses modern technology to get its own back on the local mosques and Hindu temples. When we visited, the loudest sound system this side of Mecca was blasting out a Christian service, and the church was jammed with a congregation that spilt out into the church grounds, men standing on the left of the church and women on the right. The service was clearly Christian, but the words were in the local language and the pace of the service was definitely Indian, bearing about as much relation to staid English church services as do the happy-clappy churches of Ghana. And although I'm used to mosques ruining the peace of the wee hours and Hindu temples being as noisy as the country of their origin, it's a shock to hear Christians before you see them. But who can blame them in a country where even the religions have to shout to be heard?

Our final evening passed like the others before – quietly and pleasantly – and all too soon morning had broken and, like the first morning, we arrived back into the chaos of India in the form of Alappuzha. After tipping the crew and saying goodbye, we hopped into a rickshaw to the bus station, caught the bus to Ernakulam, jumped on the ferry to Fort Cochin, found a room in a very pleasant homestay, and lay down for a bit of peace... though, truth be told, there are few places in India as peaceful as the backwaters, and that's all part of their charm. What a place.]

India: Kochi

Now that I come to think of it, the last time I was in KochiI spent a day wandering around the sights of Fort Cochin on the northern end of Kochi island, and another day killing time in Ernakulam, eating in the Indian Coffee House and enjoying a James Bond movie in the company of the locals. I didn't hang around, and two days was probably one too many. I'm glad to say that, nine years later, Kochi is still the kind of place that forces you to kick back and relax.

I say 'glad' because India is currently suffering from a heatwave, and when India suffers, I suffer along with it. According to the very friendly man in the Dal Roti restaurant in Lilly Street, Kerala is currently five degrees hotter than it should be, and even the locals are finding it a bit much. 'It is like April temperatures in March,' he said, and boy, I can believe it. As I write this, sheltering from the midday heat in the covered veranda of our homestay, I'm literally dripping with sweat, and all I'm doing is moving my fingers.

It's doubly hard, because for both of us, Kochi rocks. Unfortunately it also rolls, pitches, lurks and yaws, because even though it's 48 hours since we hopped off thehouseboat, the whole planet feels completely unsteady under our feet. I really thought that the backwaters would have left us by now, but the humidity seems to be perpetuating our sense of giddiness, and the thwack-thwack of fans everywhere adds to the constant feeling of movement. Perhaps we will get back home to find that southern India has officially turned to jelly in the heat; it certainly feels like it has, anyway.

So we've been hiding from the heat, and I've been desperately trying to stem my natural impulse, which is to don my bush hat, pop open the umbrella, and go walking in the midday sun. The dogs aren't bothering, so perhaps, just this once, Englishmen shouldn't either.

The Beach Front

Fort Cochin Beach

Instead of trying to brave the daytime, we decided to wait until the sun had dipped before venturing out into Fort Cochin. It appeared that we weren't alone, for Sunday night is clearly promenade night in Kochi.

The island of Fort Cochin is the quiet, touristy cousin to Ernakulam's crazy city vibe, and it's where everyone goes for a romantic seaside stroll before the evening meal. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone, because the beach promenade is absolutely teeming with visitors, almost all of them Indian. As a result, it's a great place to explore, though perhaps not from a romantic perspective.

Let's not beat around the bush; the seaside in Fort Cochin is pretty squalid. The sea is grey, but not in the way that it's grey in England; in Fort Cochin the sea is grey in the same way that the water in the open sewers around town is grey. The foam is grey where the waves break against the rocks; the sand is grey on the two small beaches that litter the promenade; and the slime that clings to the rocks is the kind of radioactive green-grey that makes your immune system wince. On top of that, the grassy patches behind the promenade are completely smothered in litter, from plastic bottles to wrappers from the ice cream stalls that do a roaring trade in the tropical heat, and the nearby beaches are a disaster zone, smothered with bits of polystyrene, old flip-flops and the garbage equivalent of the hair from the bathroom plug-hole. It's not exactly paradise, though I guess that's all part of being at the entrance to a busy port.

Happily the locals crowding the shore are way more colourful than the seas of grey water and sun-bleached rubbish, and elbowing your way through the crowds is a fun way to reach the main drag in Fort Cochin itself, where fishermen demonstrate their Chinese fishing nets and sell fresh fish that you can eat in the restaurants set up right next to the seafront. It's atmospheric and fun, though I am assured that this is one place where being a white woman attracts the kind of opportunistic cop-a-feel local that us men simply don't come across. Perhaps romance is possible on the seafront after all...

Top-end Kochi

Fort Cochin Beach

For our first evening meal in Kochi, we decided that eating fish plucked from a quagmire was perhaps a treat best saved for another night, and decided instead to follow a recommendation we'd been given to try an evening meal at the Brunton Boatyard, the poshest hotel in Fort Cochin. We've thus far been happily staying in mid-range homestays and guest houses – a serious step up from my budget level travelling of nine years ago, but still a long way off the standard of international western hotel chains – and I've been delighted at what you get for your money. From something in the region of Rs1000 to Rs1500, you get lovely double rooms in period houses, with en suite bathrooms, comfortable beds and a complete lack of cockroaches. However, you also bump into the lower end of the travelling class that gives us all a bad name. I'm talking about those who still seem to think there's a British Empire, and treat the natives like subjects.

I witnessed a typical example in the bar at the Brunton Boatyard, where a pasty-faced Englishman with a pinched nose was arguing with the barman over the price of a drink. Clearly the man had ordered one drink and had got another, and he was refusing to pay the higher cost of the drink he'd had, and insisted on paying for what he had ordered. 'Nothing wrong with that,' you think, and you're right, but it wasn't the fact that the man was complaining that shocked me, but the completely rude way in which he was doing it. He refused to make eye contact with the barman, and just talked at him, rather than engaging in any kind of two-way conversation. 'That is what I ordered, so that is what I am paying for, and that is that,' he said, pomposity visibly ballooning in his upper chest like an elephant seal fighting for territory in the mating season. The barman looked furious, but he simply accepted with good grace, walking over to serve me, where I waited to pay my drinks bill. I tipped him heavily, by way of apology for my fellow countryman's utter lack of breeding.

This wasn't the first contretemps we saw in Kochi. A couple of days later our hotel manager could be seen effing and blinding at a rickshaw as it pulled away from the front door, the white arm of one of our fellow guests protruding from the back. The hotel owner was threatening to call the police, and although I have no idea what the problem was, the man in the rickshaw had been treating the hotel staff with an all-too-familiar disdain that I found as disconcerting as that in the Brunton bar. It seems incomprehensible to me that a hotel owner in a predominantly white tourist area would kick off such a public display of hatred without some kind of justification, and although I'm clearly guilty of jumping to conclusions here, there's a pattern of behaviour in mid- and top-end range accommodation that you very rarely see when you're travelling at the budget end (perhaps because budget travellers' expectations are lower, or perhaps because those who hate the locals don't want to live with them, and that's all part of the charm of living in a Rs50-a-night fleapit).

I don't know if there's any connection, but only the other month a British tourist was found murdered in Mumbai, purportedly because he had asked a woman where he could find somewhere to sleep, and the locals had interpreted this as a come on and had sorted him out (though the man had time to leave a message on his parents' answer-phone saying that he feared for his life, so the argument obviously simmered for some time). One can't help feeling that there is more to this story than meets the eye, and Kochi provided us with lots of fuel to add to the speculative fire.

Fort Cochin Beach is not the tidiest beach in the world

But I digress, as we had yet to enjoy our meal at the Brunton Boatyard, and after drinks in the outside bar – a set of tables by the waterfront that was caged in on all sides, presumably to stop birds from swooping in and stealing the expensive hors d'oeuvres off the menu – we were shown to our table on the Seafood Terrace, a pleasant balcony overlooking the ferry terminal. The service was very attentive and the fish chowder made a pleasant starter, but as we waited for our main course, first one, then two, and then three or four large raindrops landed on the stone floor, each of them evaporating within two seconds of landing.

The diners all looked up at the same time, wondering what was going to happen if it rained; the only shelter was provided by a set of washing-line wires strung above our heads – again, to stop birds from swooping down and making off with the seafood platter – and as more drops started to fall, the lady on the next table asked the waiter, 'It's raining – what do we do?'

'It is not raining,' said the waiter, as droplets fell with increasing attitude onto his head.

'Yes, it is,' she said.

'It will be fine,' said the waiter, but clearly even his optimism couldn't save the day, for suddenly the taps turned on and a serious tropical downpour hit the Seafood Terrace, throwing everyone into a state of amused panic. The waiters seemed caught completely off-guard and initially huddled together under the awning near the door to the terrace, before realising that perhaps they should be doing something, namely rescuing people's meals and moving them inside.

Unfortunately the inside of the restaurant was full, and as the terrace diners filed inside, the maître d' looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights, as all his careful table planning went up in smoke. Luckily he managed to save his reservations system by channelling us all down into the bar, where we sat out the rest of our meal to the tune of air-conditioning and irritatingly piped chill-out music in the form of Enigma, Germany's contribution to the art of lift music.

The main course – the seafood platter – turned out to be very disappointing. Compared to the amazing fish in Varkala and the wonderfully homey cooking of the houseboat, this was bland, anonymous and utterly forgettable. The fact that it cost four times as much as a meal overlooking the sunset of Varkala only added to the irritation, but this is where I have to grab myself and remember that I'm not in the target market for posh hotel restaurants, so perhaps I just shouldn't frequent them. I like earthy eating holes and I don't aspire to haute cuisine, which is possibly why I spent most of my previous Indian trip rushing to the toilet and drinking oral rehydration salts. I can imagine that if I wasn't much of a traveller and I'd arrived at the Brunton Boatyard straight from an air-conditioned coach, then the strange sounds of the world outside would freak me out, and the thought of going down the waterfront to buy a fish from a fisherman and have it barbecued in front of me... well, it would scare me in a way that a fairly amorphous hotel restaurant experience wouldn't. Luckily I know enough about India to know that the world outside the hotel window is far from scary, but then again I don't believe there's still a British Empire, and I spend most of my time in India smiling, rather than sour-faced.

So we tipped the waiters handsomely, wobbled our heads to them as we left, and ducked out into the now-clear night air once again to soak up the post-thunderstorm atmosphere of the world outside the hotel.

Exploring Kochi

Dal Roti restaurant in Fort Cochin

The following day we visited the same tourist attractions that I'd seen nine years before, braving the heat to visit Jewtown and Mattancherry Palace, as well as the area round Princess Street, which has blossomed into a completely backpacker-oriented part of town. There are loads of tourists in Kochi, and they continue to pile in in their air-conditioned coaches, looking slightly worn out and rather oppressed by it all; one wonders if Coachy would be a better name for this part of town, as yet another dark-windowed coach empties its pale occupants into the sun, blinking and looking rather dazed. Luckily the backpacker scene has its advantages, and one of them is that there in the middle of Burgher Street is a little piece of Hampstead, perfectly preserved in every detail. I'm talking about the Kashi Art Café, which the Lonely Planetcalls 'something of an institution.'

It's an oasis, is the Kashi, and if you ignore the hot weather, it's easy to transport yourself home, because it's a classic bohemian coffee bar from head to toe. The chill-out music is direct from Europe; the customers dress in what the locals consider underwear, but we consider to be shorts and tight T-shirts that leave little to the imagination; laptop computers are much in evidence, as is the hallowed Lonely Planet; the menu serves lattes and filter coffee served in a cafetière; and people chat away on their mobile phones, sipping pineapple juice and swapping travellers' tales.

And that sums up Fort Cochin, really. It doesn't feel like India, it feels almost continental, and as a result it's not quite as exciting as other more Indian destinations in Kerala. Happily there are pockets of excellence, and we fell in love with the aforementioned Dal Roti restaurant, which served excellent north Indian food in a quiet backstreet some distance from the main drag. Then again, the proprietor speaks perfect English, lived in London for six years, used to own a house in Epping, and returns there twice a year, so even here, you get the feeling that Fort Cochin is a world away from the hustle and bustle of India.

Still, that's half the appeal, I suppose, and as a place to wilt from the heatwave, it hit the spot. We sat around soaking up lime sodas by the dozen, we went to a kathakaliperformance – an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours – and we recharged our batteries, ready for the next journey. Mission accomplished, then...

India: Kovalam

Kovalam has something of an image problem, at least among backpackers, who think it's far too touristy and is probably best left to people who like egg and chips for dinner and their culture packaged up and delivered along with a rep. This is rather unfair, because although Kovalam does have a slight air of package holiday about it, it's still a charming little place with much to recommend, particularly if you're looking for a restful and stress-free spot for a few days before moving on elsewhere.

It was good timing for us, too, because Peta announced as we left Munnar that the Coffee Inn would be the last budget place we were going to stay in, and that was that. Apparently she took exception to the carpet being sticky enough for her to lift it up off the floor along with her foot, and the large spider we discovered in the bed on arrival didn't earn me too many brownie points either, so I hung up my travelling boots and decided we should take a look round a number of places in Kovalam before picking the one that Peta was happiest with. After wandering along the sea front and checking out four hotels with swimming pools, we plumped for the Hotel Sea Face at the southern end of Hawah Beach. It was easily the most expensive hotel we looked at, but the extra money was worth it, as the decidedly non-sticky air-conditioned room had a balcony that looked directly over the hotel pool, which itself looked directly over the beach and into the sunset. Boxes ticked, we settled in for some relaxation before our flight a couple of days later.

Kovalam consists of two beaches, the aforementioned Hawah Beach at the northern end, and Lighthouse Beach to the south. The two beaches join up seamlessly – although there's a rocky promontory between the two, the seafront promenade doesn't even stop to check its footing as you walk from one beach to the other – but there's a distinct difference between the southern end of Lighthouse Beach and the developments where the two beaches join. If I had to guess, I'd say that development in Kovalam started at the southern end of Lighthouse Beach, because this is where things look most faded. As you move north, things get bigger, cleaner and rather classier.

Fishermen readying their boats on Hawah Beach

Don't get the impression that Kovalam is a huge beach development, though, because it isn't. There aren't any high-rise hotels and the two beaches are pretty small, and although things are obviously developing, it isn't the rampant builders' yard you might be expecting if you read the guidebooks. Instead, it's a bit like Varkala, but with more comfortable accommodation and without a cliff separating you from the beach. The biggest difference, though, is in the clientele, because where Varkala is full of twenty-somethings and hippies, Kovalam appeals to the kind of traveller for whom Speedos weren't a good idea when they first wore them in the 1970s, and most definitely still aren't. It's a resort for empty-nesters, and perhaps the most noticeable thing is that a large proportion of the tourists are fat. Varkala, in contrast, was full of bright young things, sporting the latest size zero hippy fashions, but Kovalam doesn't win any prizes for good looks; beer bellies are de rigeur, debatable sartorial taste is par for the course, and proof that gravity always wins is all around... but on the upside, you also don't get to overhear conversations between gap-year travellers who think they know everything there is to know about the world without having actually experienced it.

This more mature atmosphere also means the toilets are cleaner, the food is slightly more expensive, and the touts are just that little bit more insistent. Oh, and when we'd checked into our hotel, we discovered that it was home to Thomas Cook's very own Kovalam rep, a cheery girl called Lorraine who popped round every morning to check that her guests were having a good time, and to ask whether they wanted to go on the elephant ride this Tuesday, or to pop down to the southern tip of India this Friday. Perhaps that's why the toilets are so clean; if so, then thank you Thomas Cook, because you've helped make Kovalam a great place to get away from the reality of India, and after a couple of weeks in the heat of Kerala, that's something I really appreciate. And no, I'm not being sarcastic.

Beach Fishing

Hawah Beach, where all the fishing action takes place

One of the unexpected benefits of staying at the Hotel Sea Face was that the pool overlooked the beach, which meant we were treated each morning to the sight of the fishermen dragging in their catch. As entertainment goes, it was even good enough to clear the grumpy cobwebs from my morning mind, which is really saying something.

The fishermen practise beach fishing, a method that is used the world over; they even do it in parts of northeast Scotland still, though in the West it's long since been replaced by more efficient mechanised fishing. The concept is the same wherever you are, though. The first stage is to load up a boat with a large, mouth-shaped fishing net, with two long ropes attached to the sides of the mouth. Once the net is coiled up neatly, it's time to launch the boat from the beach by pushing it into the sea as the waves break on the shore. The boats at Kovalam are paddle-powered, the oars ending in circles rather than the long, tapered faces of a canoeing oar, and presumably this gives them quite a bit of leverage, as once the boats catch the tide, they're off with a cry and a yelp and an impressive kick of speed.

Once afloat, the fishermen throw the ends of the two ropes to those waiting on shore, and the boat heads straight out to sea, laying one rope to port and one to starboard, and dropping the net in once the rope has run out. As the ropes have white polystyrene floats attached every 10m or so, this creates a large arc of rope into the sea, with the two ends held in the safe hands of the fishermen on the beach, and a mouth-shaped net at the furthest tip of the arc, all reaching a good couple of hundred metres out into the bay.

Launching the boat

This is where the long haul starts, with 15 men on each rope, standing some 20m apart. They slowly haul the rope up the beach by walking backwards, one step with every beat of the chant they sing. The man at the end of the rope lays down his part of the rope in a neat coil and walks down the beach to the head of the line, picking up the rope and starting all over again. It's like a very slow millipede, gently clawing the two ropes towards the beach to the sound of a fishing song whose words may be in Malayalam, but whose meaning is universal. It's the sound of men working together, and it doesn't take long before the arc shrinks and the net starts to take hold.

When the arc is close to the beach, four men leap into the water in a line across the mouth of the net, jumping around and slapping the waves with their forearms, driving the fish deep into the net. Slowly the tempo of the fishing song rises, until you can see the light brown of the net itself rising from the waves like a cloud from the deep. The last few hauls are careful – the whole process takes a good hour, so it's important not to let the fish get away – and eventually the net reaches the sand, where the men wash the sand away with the lapping waves and crowd around to examine the catch.

Actually, it's a disappointment. The net is so fine that it catches everything in its path, from miniscule minnows the length of a little finger to larger fish the length of a forearm, but given the amount of time and effort, it seems a paltry catch, and one that surely can't do the marine environment that much good – I may not be a marine biologist, but even I know it's not a good idea to kill off shoals of baby fish in order to catch ten or 20 larger ones.

But this doesn't seem to bother the fishermen, who untie the ropes, shake out the nets and lay them out to dry on the beach, while another boat, net coiled, sets off into the surf to drag the sea a little further along the bay. Later, the fishermen will coil up their nets and ropes and stow them in their fishing boats, pulled up on the beach, and in time-honoured tradition they'll lie down in the shade under the bow to see out the hottest part of the day, dreaming of the ones that got away.

As spectacles in India go, this has to be one of the more relaxing ones on offer, particularly when sampled over tropical breakfast. Long may it continue...

On the Beach

Coiled ropes on Hawah Beach

Kovalam, however, isn't notorious for its fishermen, but for the gangs of young men who stroll along the beach, desperate to catch a glimpse of pale, western flesh. My first exposure to this was in Kochi, when I popped out early one morning to take a picture of the beach, or, to be more accurate, a picture of the amazing amount of rubbish strewn along the sand.

'Hello, morning,' said a voice from behind me as I snapped away. 'Where you from?'

'England,' I said, turning around to find a couple of young men doing star jumps, fully clothed. 'Where are you from?'

'Kochi,' said the shorter of the two. 'What do you do?'

'I'm a journalist,' I said, realising too late that perhaps I shouldn't have said that, seeing as I was taking pictures of how shitty their local beach was. 'I'm not working now, though, this is a holiday. I'm just taking pictures of your lovely beach.'

'It is fantastic,' he said, with absolutely no hint of irony. 'Where have you been in India?'

'Let's see, we started in Varkala,' I started, 'and...'

'Varkala,' he interrupted. 'It is good, Varkala?'

'Yes,' I said. 'It's very nice.'

'Lots of western women there?' he said, a glint in his eye.

'Um, yes, it's pretty crowded,' I said.

'Many women to see?' he said, making the universal sign of the bosom with a sly grin. His companion stood there silently, grinning like a schoolboy.

'Well, yes, I suppose there are lots of women there,' I said, sighing at the direction the conversation was going.

'And they fuck, yes?' he said.

'I don't think so, no,' I said, trying to look as disapproving as I could. 'You're not one of these people who goes round staring at western women on the beach, are you?'

'Oh yes,' he said.

'Well, you do know that staring at western women is no way to pull, don't you?' I said. 'You have to be nice to women, kind and polite, or you've got no chance.'

'Oh, I am kind and polite,' he said, 'but my friend here is an angry man. Last time, in Kovalam, he went up to one woman and said, "Do you want sex?" just like that. He is crazy.'

Judging by his friend's grin, he had a point. 'That's not very nice,' I said.

'So we are going to Varkala this weekend,' he said, repeating his impression of a busty siren. 'To find lovely women.'

'Well, be nice to them,' I said, 'or they'll just think you're idiots.'

'I will be,' he said. 'I am not sure about my friend, though. He is an angry man!'

Fishermen laying out their nets to dry

And with that I bid them goodbye and went back to photographing their 'fantastic' beach, while they did star jumps on the promenade and grinned at each other at the thought of their impending trip to stare at the girls of Varkala. Visiting Kovalam, it's easy to see how men like this get their kicks from the beach, because like all good beach destinations, the bikini is queen. Or it is for western women, who soak up the rays in the skimpiest attire, sometimes without first consulting the Bumper Book of Taste.

Kovalam is also a popular spot for proper Indian tourists, especially on a Sunday when both beaches are heaving with locals, but when Indian women go swimming, they do so in full attire, making sure they don't show off any more parts of their body than they do in the high street. It's bizarre: on one hand you have bikinis that seem to disappear at certain angles, and on the other you have sarees in the surf. If the latter is what Indian men are used to, it's no wonder they come to Kovalam with their tongues hanging out.

But it can get annoying, as can the touts, who waltz along the beach front, trying to persuade you that, yes, your life really isn't complete without a map of India and a packet of counterfeit cigarettes. In most places a quick shake of the head is enough to put the touts off – Varkala was particularly laid-back, I thought – but in Kovalam they are much more insistent, though they still have a long, long way to go before they can appear on the same bill as the touts of Morocco. More irritating are the stares you get when you wander round in a bikini, a problem that I can't confirm first hand, but which was fairly apparent by the way gangs of ten or 15 young Indians would walk in front of a bikini bather on a sun lounger, their heads turning left in a precision movement that would have a Sergeant Major wiping a proud tear from his eye. Let's be honest, every single person on the beach enjoys looking at the beautiful people – both male and female – who grace the sand, but there's a difference between peeking from behind one's sunglasses, and standing there as a group, gawping like 14-year-olds. There used to be a sign on the beach at Goa that said, 'Easing oneself in public is strictly forbidden,' and one wonders whether such a sign will one day be necessary in Kovalam, as the number of lechers increases.

Even escaping to your hotel pool is no guarantee of privacy. On our second day in Kovalam we decided to relax by the pool, with me typing up a few notes in the shade of a cocktail umbrella while Peta lay on a sun lounger, catching the rays. While I was lost in my own little world, hammering away on my fold-out keyboard, Peta was getting increasingly frustrated with an Indian guest at the hotel, whom we'd seen for the last couple of days sitting on his own, ploughing through bottles of Royal Challenge beer and smoking cigarette after cigarette. In order to walk from the bar to the toilet, he had to walk past the pool, and each time he did so, he would stare at Peta's chest like a pubescent schoolboy sneaking a peek at the top shelf in the newsagents. After a few such toilet breaks, Peta decided to confront him.

'Excuse me,' she said, putting on her politest voice. 'Would you please stop staring at my chest every time you walk past? I consider it to be extremely rude.'

'Ah, um,' said the man, looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights. 'I wasn't staring at you, I was staring at your book. It looks really interesting.'

'Yeah, right,' said Peta, switching to a voice with steel barbs. 'Well, just stop it.'

He still kept sneaking glances, until Peta came over to me, and I started staring back at him. And then, incredibly, out came a woman with a young child, who turned out to be his wife, and we wondered how she felt, knowing that her husband had come to Kovalam to drink beer on his own and ogle at the women in the hotel. I wondered idly whether he was the kind of man who would ease himself on the beach, but figured he was just a common-or-garden wanker.

That said, if you develop a reasonably thick skin and practise the art of saying 'No' to the touts, Kovalam is a pleasant spot to soak up the sun, and it's a good place to relax. After all, even the touts in India have a smiley side, something you really can't say about every country.

India: Munnar

Ah, that's better. The oppression of India's mini-heatwavehas been really grinding me down, and like the British before us, we've taken refuge in a hill station. Munnar, which the British Raj made their southern capital in summer, is 1500m above sea level, and like all India's hill stations, it lets you function. The novelty is palpable.

Munnar is clearly taking off as a tourist destination – both Indian and foreign – because the outskirts of town are under construction to a considerable degree. High-rise blocks are propped up by hundreds of straight pieces of scaffolding, while whole gangs of workmen drill, mix, bang and blast, slowly filling the concrete skeletons with red brick walls and grey concrete plaster. Unfortunately, we followed the advice in the Lonely Planet and started looking for a homestay to the south of the main town centre, only to end up in a hotel that was perfectly pleasant, but which turned out to be stuck in the middle of nowhere and a long walk from town. 'Never mind,' we thought, and fired up with the energy of those who have just escaped the heat of the plains, we strolled into town, ate in the bazaar, walked back to the hotel and decided we'd celebrate the ambient temperatures with a beer. And that's when things started to go a bit wrong.

Tea pickers near Munnar

When we tried to find the hotel bar, we discovered they didn't have one, and so we took the concierge's advice and hopped into an auto-rickshaw for the Hotel Isaac's Residency, home to the only bar in town. I'd forgotten how amazing the bars are in southern India; indeed, I'd forgotten just how frowned upon alcohol consumption is in general, and the bar at the Residency is a good example of why south Indian bars don't win any prizes for hospitality and ambience. Worst of all, I'd had the nerve to bring along a woman, and as we slunk into the dimly lit room and sat down, a palpable wave of bemusement ran through the all-male crowd.

Keralans go to bars to get drunk; they go there to consume a drug, and any pretensions to socialising over a beer after work would go straight out of the window, if the bars had any. I thought at first that the drinkers propping up the bar were diluting their large measures of whisky with a surprisingly large amount of water, but they were actually mixing it with a clear liquid that calls itself brandy, but is clearly a local interpretation of the genre that has nothing to do with its European origins. People were clearly getting drunk, and quickly, and in this atmosphere we tried to order a Kingfisher and a Kingfisher Strong from the waiter, so we could compare the two different varieties of India's premium lager.

Tea plantations on the way to Top Station

The waiter looked pretty confused, and he brought over the Kingfisher Strong first, and I tried it; it wasn't bad. Peta waited patiently for her beer, but it didn't materialise, while the frenetic buying at the bar – which reminded me of the London Stock Exchange on a busy day – continued on apace. Eventually we realised that he wasn't going to bring a beer, so I called him over and asked him for another Kingfisher, pointing to Peta. He looked horrified, but went to get the beer anyway, clearly unused to serving women in any shape or form.

The striking thing was just how naughty everyone looked. I say 'naughty' because that's exactly what it was; they were like schoolboys breaking the rules, hoping that nobody would see them. Huddles of conspirators hid in the dim light, while a handful of solitary drinkers downed glass after glass of whisky, slowly sinking into their chairs in defeat. One young man at the table opposite us tried to pull his collar up when an older man came in and stared at him in total disapproval; the young man eventually went over to the older man and tried to undo whatever offence he had caused by being there, but the man wasn't having any of it, and however much the boy nudged him as if to say it was all right, the old man kept a straight face, utterly offended.

Funnily enough, we didn't savour our beers. Instead we drank them down fairly sharply, and figured that this was probably why I hadn't drunk much beer on my last visit. Somehow, making alcohol a thing of shame makes it taste rather bitter. It's perhaps no wonder that the locals drink to get drunk, because goodness knows there's no other reason to go out for a beer here.

Around Munnar

Tea plantations near Munnar

I forgot to mention that we hired a car and driver in Kochi to get us around for the next five days. After all, this is supposed to be a holiday, and spending hours and hours on bumpy Indian buses is a luxury only those with time on their hands can afford, so we've spent Rs6500 on a gleaming white Ambassador Classic, a very friendly driver called Sajeeve, and an itinerary from Kochi to Munnar, then on to Periyar and Kovalam. It's a great way to get around, even if it does reek slightly of decadence.

The best thing about having your own car is being able to decide exactly where you want to go, and when. On our only full day in Munnar, we decided to head over to Top Station, a point on the border between Tamil Nadu and Kerala that offers spectacular views over the Western Ghats, the mountains that separate Kerala from its western neighbour. This sounded exciting enough, but we hadn't realised that the journey there would be so beautiful.

Tea plantations near Munnar

The area round Munnar is absolutely stunning. This area is famous for having some of the highest altitude tea plantations in the world, and once you leave the overactive and slightly dingy town centre, the hills open up and the beauty of the High Ranges becomes apparent. And what a delight it is...

Most of the reason is tea. Tea was introduced to India from China in 1780, and large-scale planting had taken off by the mid-1830s, after the discovery of the Assam tea plant in 1823. Cultivation in central Travancore (as Munnar used to be known) started in 1875, and the High Ranges were cultivated in 1878, leading to the tea estates we see today. Because tea leaves are picked from the tops of tea bushes, the bushes quickly assume a squat stature and a flat top, giving the fields the appearance of a perfectly assembled jigsaw. Tea bushes are a beautifully deep green, and there are paths between the bushes where the tea pickers ply their trade, so it's as if the hills have turned into huge, complex tennis balls, albeit tennis balls smothered with meticulously manicured topiaries. Or, to cut the description to a minimum, the hills around Munnar are simply gorgeous.

Madupatty Lake

The beauty is enhanced by a collection of reservoirs, which the road to Top Station winds past in an increasing state of disrepair. These reservoirs form part of a hydro-electric system that provides tourists the opportunity to take pedalos out onto the water, and afterwards to shout at the tops of their voices at a place called Echo Point, so called because – you guessed it – the reservoir shore echoes back whatever you care to yell at it. This being India, you don't have to try it out yourself, as there are plenty of noisy tourists about who can shout louder and longer than you'll ever manage. Yes, this is the land of the Indian tourist, and it's all the more fun because of it.

Kundala Dam

Indeed, the only problem with getting to Top Station is the road, which clearly gets a pounding in the monsoon. They're currently resurfacing parts of it, which means you get to drive right through the middle of the whole process, dodging workmen and veering round turning trucks. In the West we can only glance at roadworks from the other side of an invasion of orange cones, but in India you get to participate. At one point, a JCB digger politely stopped dropping rocks onto the road ahead of us, just in time to stop the stones bouncing off the bonnet; at a contra-flow, manned by men with red and green flags, buses and four-wheel-drives with attitude overtook us by driving on the part-surfaced road, only pulling in when faced with stationary road-laying equipment in their path; and all along the sides men and women toiled in the hot sun, smashing rocks with hammers, sending sharp shards into the side of the car and doubtless into their companion's shins. It's a hard life, out there on the highways of India.

But the effort is worth it, as Top Station does indeed provide wonderful views of the Western Ghats, even if they're a little hazy at this time of the year. And best of all, you get to repeat the journey on the way back; the tea plantations, reservoirs and roadworks are just as wonderful second time round.

Top Station, on the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu

We ended our tour of Munnar with a visit to the Tata Tea Museum, a slightly uninspiring introduction to the tea-making process that takes you through the various stages in an accent so heavy that most of it gets lost in translation. Happily the process turns out to be the same in Munnar as it is in Darjeeling, with the raw tea leaves being dried by having air blown through them, before being rolled and chopped by what's called a CTC(Crushing, Tearing and Curling) machine. The goo is then oxidised – or fermented, to use a more common term – where the tea turns brown (green tea is not fermented, so it stays green). It then passes through a machine called a Ball Breaker, whose function I couldn't quite understand, and finally the tea is dried in a hot air stove before being sifted into a range of sizes, from powder to leafy (the powder making stronger tea than leafy tea). It takes 4kg of leaves to make 1kg of tea, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is that.

Hill Spices

Tourists phoptographing the tea pickers near Munnar

We'd been so uninspired by the location of our first hotel, that we tracked down a second one for our second night. Perched on top of a hill next to the Mount Carmel Church, bang in the centre of town, the Kaippallil Homestay was much more our kind of thing. Our room had a balcony overlooking Munnar, the homestay served ice-cold beer with no guilt attached, and the rooms were cheaper – you can't say fairer than that.

It was also a very short walk from the homestay to the centre of town, which meant Peta could buy a large bag of he spices for which the area is famous. As she picked out bags of cardamon, vanilla, white and black pepper, mace, mustard seeds and cinnamon, the young man behind the bar looked up and his eyes widened.

Kundala Dam

'Last night,' he said, pointing his thumb at his mouth, looking slightly guilty. 'Last night, you were in the bar.'

'That's right,' said Peta. It was the youngster who'd had the run in with the older man. 'I remember you.'

'Ah yes,' he said, 'I was getting in trouble.'

'Who was that man?' asked Peta. 'Was it your dad?'

'Father, no,' he said. 'Uncle. Not pleased to see me there.'

'Ha,' I said. 'But he was in there too, so he couldn't really have a go, could he?'

'I'm not supposed to,' said our young friend, grinning conspiratorially as he handed us our bag of spices. And with that, we headed off to the Rapsy Restaurant, which proudly proclaimed on the sign outside:

India: Periyar

Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary is a funny old place. Yes, it might be one of the few places on earth where you can theoretically see tigers – though with only about 35 tigers in a 777km² park, your chances are slimmer than slim – but it's also faintly depressing, particularly at the moment, because the veneer of tourism is so thick you have to dig quite deep to get away from it all. Luckily, when you do, Periyar is a delight.

First impressions are pretty awful, because most of the accommodation and restaurant action happens in the nearby village of Kumily, which is a forgettable slew of Kashmiri trinket shops, expensive resort hotels and unloved traveller hotels. The atmosphere, while still reasonably friendly and easy-going, is a world away from somewhere like Munnar, which is clearly a working town that happens to be popular with tourists; Kumily exists purely to service the nearby wildlife sanctuary and the tourists that flock here, and it feels like it. Walking the streets is an exercise in being as polite as possible to the incessant chants of, 'Hello, where you from, come into my shop, just looking, good price, you come back later maybe, yes see you, thank you,' all choreographed to head wobbling and 'No thanks' from the passing tourists. At this time of year, as the shoulder season slides into the off-season, the hassle is fairly mild and the shopkeepers are happy to take 'no' for an answer, but after an entire street has tried to entice you into their shop to check out their Kashmiri emporium of amazing pashminas and multi-armed statues of the Hindu pantheon, it makes you wonder what it's like in the high season, when tourists pile into the park in their air-conditioned coaches.

Exploring the rainforest of Periyar

After a long, four-and-a-half hour journey from Munnar, we were fairly exhausted from bumping around in the back of the Ambassador, so we headed for the Coffee Inn, which the Lonely Planet gives a gushing review, managing to squeeze the words 'lovely', 'friendly', 'comfortable', 'laid-back', 'peaceful', 'great' and 'delicious' into just one paragraph of description. Unfortunately the Coffee Inn turned out to be a faded, faintly tacky place with a building site above it, where the owner has obviously decided to build the Coffee Inn Hotel, thus missing the point of the original inn's appeal by a country mile. Having met the owner, this doesn't surprise me, as he was a pretty grumpy bugger when we arrived, showing us to a hut down the road with all the shoe-dragging enthusiasm of a bored nine-year-old. Tired, we checked in anyway, happy just to have somewhere to dump our bags.

A fig slowly strangling a tree in Periyar

Kumily has a lot more to offer than backpacker haunts that have lost their sparkle, though. As we had an afternoon to kill, we thought we'd wander round the posh hotels in town to see if any of them were worth eating in (we'd grabbed a snack in the Coffee Inn, and it had turned out to have mediocre food and incredibly slow service, the latter not remotely mitigated by the sign saying, 'Please do not shout at the chef; good food takes time to make,' particularly as there was only a handful of other people in the place when we ate). We started with the Spice Village, which feels for all the world like a package holiday venue, with an uninspiring buffet restaurant, polite but slightly bewildered staff, an air of concrete hidden beneath the palm-tree exterior, and an astonishing price tag of US$210 per night for a double room (at least the Coffee Inn is honestly priced, at Rs400 for a double, or around US$9 per night). Our next stop was the Taj Garden, a really lovely wooden hotel set in delightful gardens, with a price tag of US$169 a night for a room and a restaurant that looks utterly wonderful; and our final visit was to the Tree Top Hotel, which has pleasant doubles at Rs2500 a night and a great little restaurant selling the usual Indian favourites, like Butter Chicken, Chicken 65, Chilly Chicken and all the other stalwarts of hearty restaurants throughout the land. It seems that in Kumily, it pays to shop around, as accommodation can be extortionate while being far less interesting than the competition.

So that night we ate in the Taj Garden, which proved to be a wonderful place for a romantic tropical dinner, and slunk back to our crusty little hut, safe in the knowledge that if it turned out to be a mosquito-infested noise-fest, we could always up-sticks and move across the road to the comparatively luxurious Tree Top.

The Wildlife Sanctuary

A tree with ancient tiger scratches (top) and more recent elephant foot scrapes (bottom)

Kumily is one thing, but the wildlife sanctuary at Periyar is another thing altogether. Kumily has the feeling of a place that is feeding off the tourist dollar, and you can see the effects in the more impressive hotel developments and some of the shops; one shop, Red Frog, is so beautifully presented that it looks as if it's been beamed straight in from the King's Road, with its large plate-glass windows, arty displays and modern lighting. It looks rather out of place in an Indian street, surrounded by rickshaws and stray dogs, but it would look even stranger if it moved 3km south into the wildlife reserve, because if there's one thing Periyar is, it's faded.

This is so often the case with government-run institutions, and Periyar is a great example. The buildings were no doubt impressive when they were first built, but now they're covered in the black mould that afflicts so many of India's concrete blocks, and it's lucky that the complex that makes up the park headquarters is relatively small. The nearby hotel, the Aranya Nivas, fares slightly better than the rather limp information office and bedraggled restaurant, but apart from a stand of rabid rickshaw drivers, a small office for the park rangers, and a concrete jetty just down the hill on the lake, that's the entire complex. This wouldn't be a problem, except you're not allowed beyond the edges of the park HQ and precious little happens in the headquarters itself. It's a bit of a disappointment when you first arrive, really.

A fresh elephant tusk hole in a Periyar tree

But dig a little deeper, and all is not lost. For those with only a day or so to spare, there are two options: you can hop on one of the many ferries that ply the lake at 9.30am, 11.30am, 2pm and 4pm; or you can take a three-hour nature walk in the company of one of the park's rangers, who are from the indigenous tribe. We arrived a little later than we'd originally planned, as the 6am alarm we'd set made no friends at all and quickly got slapped into silence, a few extra hours' sleep easily winning out against the recommendation that wildlife is more active in the morning (homo sapiens excluded, presumably). We'd thought that this would scupper our chances of joining a nature walk, as it was a Saturday and we assumed the hordes would have snapped up the available places, but as we sauntered into the park at 10am, idly wondering what we could do, a ranger called Shajimon popped up and asked us if we were interested in a nature walk.

'Yes, that sounds great,' we said.

'There is one leaving at 11 o'clock,' said Shaji. 'Would you like to join it?'

'Excellent,' we said, and gladly filled in the form in which we absolved the park of any liability should we be ripped to pieces by tigers or stomped on by elephants. 'So, are you busy at the moment?' we asked.

The rainforest in Periyar

'You are the first walkers today,' said Shaji, looking a bit crestfallen. 'It is the quiet season, and very hot.'

'Ah,' we said. 'Well, we're certainly up for it,' and with that Shaji started talking about the park, and how the hot weather had driven the animals deeper into the jungle than normal, in order to seek shelter, and how the level of the lake was really low, because the amount of water flowing down the river was less than in the past. The lake certainly seemed parched, looking like an ancient bath with dried-on stains up the sides and a sad-looking pool of water in the middle, an ambience which wasn't helped much by the unloved boats pulled up the banks, listing on their sides as nature took her toll.

To kill time before our walk, we took a short walk about the headquarters, enjoying the sign that declared the park rules to anyone bored enough to read them (i.e. us). It told us in no uncertain terms that:

Tourists to a national park/sanctuary 'should not':

• Take any pete inside the park/sanctuary
• Honk unnessarily
• Should or bease or chase wild animals
• Organic merry making like camp-fires within the park/sanctuary

Just to make sure we got the message, it listed a whole set of rules, including the ominous Rule 7:

Leaving litters; smoking; consumption of ALCOHOL; illegal entry of vehicles; blowing horns; playing music systems; parking outside the parking zone; feeding, teasing, disturbing wild animals; bringing pet animals; unauthorized trekking and picnicking; firearms, wildlife traps, poisons substances; breaching in the lawful directions of the park, staff in the protected area are prohibited under section 33 of Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 and the violation is punishable with a fine of not less than Rs1000.

Or, to put it another way, Periyar is not supposed to be like the rest of India, though that doesn't seem to stop it from trying. There's a laudable 'no plastics' policy in place in the park, and it's noticeably tidier than most Indian settlements, but lurking beneath the surface, it's still India. The sign saying 'No plastics as they are non-biodegradable' is right next to the park shop, which happily sells plastic bottles of water, and there are still one or two plastic bottles floating in the lake, ready to cause a painful death to the wildlife, so I guess the plastic ban isn't perfect. But it's good to see them trying; this is a wildlife reserve, after all.

The Nature Walk

A monkey hiding in the Periyar canopy

Our walk turned out the be an excellent way to experience the park. The three of us set off into the forest, crunching the dried leaves underfoot and weaving our way along thin paths until the noise of the small number of local but vocal tourists back at park headquarters had disappeared into the distance. Every few minutes Shaji stopped and motioned us to be quiet, and he'd stand still, looking into the trees, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that had alerted him. Even though it was the middle of the day, when most of the animals are sensibly hiding from the heat of the sun, he managed to spot a fair amount of wildlife, and each time he was full of information.

The first bit of wildlife we spotted was the blur of a mouse deer's arse as it shot off into the bush, alerted to our approach by the crackle of the leafy undergrowth beneath our boots. A little later Peta spotted movement in the tree-tops, which turned out to be a macaque monkey, dropping through the canopy. A distinctive rustling in the distance turned out to be a large monitor lizard, which we stalked for a few minutes before it ran off into the distance, crashing through the brittle undergrowth in an attempt to escape the clutch of tourism. We also scared off a larger deer, which we saw running up the opposite side of a valley, and on a couple of occasions we came across jungle fowl rooting amongst the leaves, quite oblivious to us handing the binoculars to each other and marvelling over the colours of their bright head ruffles.

Walking through the Periyar rainforest

We also bumped into skinks hiding among the detritus; termites devouring an entire tree, hidden beneath the bark which, when pulled off, revealed thousands of tiny ant-like creatures, chomping on the wood; a tiny lizard, the length of my thumbnail and as thin as a thread, living among the termites and enjoying their company for breakfast, lunch and dinner; wild boar, bathing in a mud pool at the end of a long opening in the trees; giant squirrels lazing in the tree-tops, their big, black, bushy tails hanging down into the still air; and we saw huge bee and wasp nests way up in the highest trees, with pegs going all the way up the trunks so the locals could raid the bee's honey store using smoke and long poles. And every few yards butterflies flitted past us in the heat haze, and birds flew past in the canopy above, the woodpeckers knocking out their distinctive calls on nearby tree trunks while white-bellied blue flycatchers, endemic to the area, sat in the branches, minding their own business while we watched from afar.

Scenery on the nature walk

Of course, one lives in hope of seeing a big animal, like a tiger or elephant, but even though this is the part of the world that inspired Kipling's characters in The Jungle Book, the chances of you bumping into such rare animals is practically zero (though Shaji insisted that it does happen, and that last Christmas Eve a party on the nature walk did see a tiger, which only helped to increase the sense of anticipation). The closest we got was a tree with an old set of scratches at head height, and one large, fresh gash at the bottom, with two smaller but equally fresh gashes at the top,

'These are tiger claws,' said Shaji indicating the scratches. 'This is very old now, but these new ones are elephant. The bottom one is the foot, and the top one is the tusk.'

And just around the corner was a tree with a set of claw scratches leading up the tree.

'And these are leopard marks,' said Shaji. 'Climbing the tree.'

So although we didn't see them, we did manage to see where Shere Khan had sharpened his claws, where Colonel Hathi had cleaned his tusks, and where Bagheera had climbed a tree and sat there, wondering what to do with Mowgli. With a little imagination, Periyar stopped being a dilapidated tourist attraction and came alive, if only for three hours.

The Head of the Family

Pretty Periyar Lake

As we'd decided to devote an entire day to exploring Periyar, we thought we'd go with the flow and book a seat on the last ferry of the day, the 4pm departure, when we would have the best chance of seeing any wildlife peeking out of the forest as the sun headed for home. After a quick snack in the snack bar – where the only food available was dosa, so we opted for... well, dosa, then – and swatting off a clearly idiotic rickshaw man who asked me whether I wanted a rickshaw just as I was about to sit down to eat lunch, we wandered over to the ticket office and asked the man for a ticket on the top deck of the KTDC boat.

'It is full,' he said. 'But I can open it for you,' he smiled, removing the 'Full' sign from above the hole in the ticket booth. 'You have come a long way, after all.'

I thanked him profusely and handed over the money, surprised that this ghost town of a park should have a fully booked ferry on its hands, and we headed down to the park office to wait. I thought I'd kill time by buying a photography permit for the boat, and in the process I discovered that there are in fact two different places selling boat tickets, the KTDC (or Kerala Tourism Development Corporation) and the park authority, who run totally separate boats, all at the same time.

It can get crowded on Periyar Lake

As 3.30pm approached, tourists started coming out of the woodwork like termites from a tree, as coach-load after coach-load stopped at the car park a few hundred yards back towards Kumily, spilling their noisy occupants into the park. Periyar shocked itself from comatose into life in the space of a few minutes, and slowly the crowds milled down to the waterfront, some of us having the luck to be going from the nearby jetty, and others having to walk a good few hundred yards along the lake shore to their waiting boats.

In the end, five different ferries set off at 4pm from five different jetties, though not after a fair amount of jostling and queue chaos. India is no fan of the orderly queue, and for those of us who have queueing ingrained into our genes, it's always a difficult concept to get our heads round. As if the barging approach to getting on a boat wasn't challenging enough, our ferry – clearly the most touristy of the five – was host to one of my favourite Indian eccentricities, that of the Family Patriarch.

Distant elephants by Periyar Lake

Middle-class Indian families on tour are fascinating, particularly if they contain a grandad. Men are the undisputed champions of Indian family life – as far as they're concerned, anyway – and the chance to lead your family from the front is too much to resist for some Indian grandads. Ignoring the long queue of western and local tourists winding up the jetty, a grey-haired man walked down to the end of the jetty, holding his hand up and saying, 'This way, come down this way all of you,' beckoning to his family as if they wereVIPs on a state visit. The family followed him down, and started positioning themselves in various tactical locations, so that when the ferry docked, they could leap on board, rush upstairs and reserve the front two rows of the upstairs deck for their entourage, simply by the Indian expedient of throwing a handbag or a piece of clothing on the seats they wanted. This, apparently, is viewed as a much fairer system than, say, letting those who've waited longest take first pick.

Look closely and you might see elephants...

Of course, this kind of behaviour is like a red rag to a bull for those of us who worship at the altar of queueing etiquette, and as we'd actually been at the front of the queue – through sheer boredom at waiting so long, rather than by design – we decided to take on the patriarch's family at their own game, and lined ourselves up for the kill. As the ferry docked, it became apparent that the aft door was going to be for those with upstairs tickets, and the patriarch broke ranks and ran to the back of the boat, yelling, 'We are in the wrong place, it is over here!'

Peta and I spotted it and ran, years of London tube commuting paying dividends as the patriarch's family scrambled for the aft gate, elbowing their way past any unfortunate souls caught in the way. 'Come on, over here!' screamed the patriarch, punching his way towards the front while trying to make sure his family were in the best possible position to get on the boat first.

Amusingly, Peta was there first, and as the gate opened, she shot up the stairs and I handed her the ticket, jammed as I was behind a particularly feisty couple of women from the patriarchal entourage whose elbows were a little too sharp for me to take on unprotected. And so, with a little bit of territorial jostling at the top caused by one of the girls plonking her handbag on the seat next to Peta and refusing to let me sit there – a situation resolved by me picking up the handbag and sitting down anyway, with Peta staring at the clearly furious girl and saying, 'Absolutely no way!' in a tone that broke through all international barriers – we managed to hold our own while the chaos of the patriarch's family settled down around us to enjoy a gentle cruise round Periyar Lake.

Wildlife Spotting

Periyar Lake is full of amazing trees

When the British created the Periyar game reserve, they wanted to create a lake that would attract big game whose brains they could then blow out before retiring for tea and tiffin. They achieved this in 1895 by building the Mullaperiyar Dam, blocking up the Periyar River and flooding the valleys to create the 26km² lake we still see today. An interesting side effect of this is that the trees that were already there are, well, still there, sticking up from the lake bed, as dead as doornails but still resolutely clinging on to the lake bed. This makes Periyar Lake feel both beautiful and slightly eerie, as the ferry winds its way between these long-dead trees. Birds nest in the stark branches, a beautiful and tranquil sight as you sit there on the top deck, looking out for wildlife on the shores.

Well, it would be tranquil if this wasn't India, for the tourist ferry round Periyar is one of the noisiest events this side of the muezzin's call. We were particularly lucky to have the patriarch screaming out at every opportunity, pointing out wildlife he could see.

'Look over, there, a bison!' he yelled, and his whole family stood up, straining to see what was in fact a wild boar.

'Wow, amazing, it is a hippopotamus!' he screamed, and his family lurched to the side of the boat, only to find a distant deer.

Park headquarters in Periyar

'Look, there, there, elephant!' he cried, pointing to a big, grey blob that, with the advantage of youthful eyesight, I could clearly see was a rock.

His family seemed not to notice that the head of their family was a blind idiot, and busied themselves by talking loudly to each other about how amazing their new digital cameras were, taking shot after shot of themselves while wildlife hid on the shores, scared by the cacophony on board. When the elephants finally slid into view, catching the patriarch by surprise as he fiddled with his zoom lens, he yelled to his son, 'Quick, quick, take their photograph,' and jumped right in front of his son's camera, grinning like a cat while trying not to get in the way of the distant beasts. Presumably a shot of a grinning fool with an out-of-focus blur in the distance is the correct way to record big game for posterity, as they all followed suit, more interested in snapping themselves than anything else.

Threading the boats through the dead trees on Periyar Lake is an art

This rigmarole continued as we spotted extremely distant elephant, bison, deer and boar, but after 40 minutes of floating through the previously serene landscape of Periyar, the family behind us started to tire of photographing themselves and decided that fidgeting would be much more fun. The woman behind Peta started rustling her unopened crisp packet, the man behind me started tapping an irritating rhythm on his camera box, and they all started gossiping about everything from the weather to what the people on the other boats were wearing. They were still talking incessantly as we docked, after an hour and a half of cruising round the lake shore.

Thank goodness we'd gone on the nature walk, or we'd have left thinking that Periyar was a complete waste of time. Happily it wasn't, and we came away having enjoyed plenty of Indian wildlife, some of it even from the animal kingdom.

India: Varkala

If you're looking for a peaceful beach experience that has yet to be completely spoiled by mass tourism, then Varkala is a little piece of heaven. I loved it; sure, it's a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of the real India, but this means it's a great place to relax, get away from it all and recover from a long flight. Evidently I'm not the only person who thinks so, because Varkala is, basically, white (or, to be more accurate, salmon pink), and the only cultural experience you're likely to get is from bumping into fellow Europeans. Still, it's a great place to do it, and the locals are completely charming, and not just because that's the best way to relax their customers into spending a few more days chilling out in the restaurants, shops and guest houses that make up Varkala.

Varkala consists of a crescent-shaped beach, backed by a steep cliff, and it's along the top of this cliff that most of the action happens. There's a promenade along the precipice edge – though as you get the odd taxi or rickshaw bombing along the path, horns blaring, I suppose it doubles as a road – and behind the promenade is Varkala village (though as Varkala town is actually 2km away to the southwest, perhaps 'Varkala tourist village' is a better name). Most of the accommodation is tucked away in the backstreets behind the promenade, as the sea views have mostly been pinched by the bars and restaurants that line the cliff edge, looking over the beach below and staring west into the sunset.

The beach at Varkala

For me, sitting in a cliff-top bar and sipping cold lemon sodas is one of life's great pleasures, but I'm more than happy to leave the surf to those who enjoy it. It's not a crowded beach – at least, not in the shoulder season of mid-March – but because the sea off Varkala has an evil rip-tide that can (and does) carry people off to a watery grave, you are only supposed to swim between the red flags on the beach. This concentrates the action into the centre of the beach, and has the added attraction of turning the officials who man the red flags into an entertainment all of their own. Give a man a whistle, and just like a five-year old, he can't help blowing it, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the beach is home to a mad crowd of ravers, as the constant peeping of whistles travels up the cliff on the sea breeze.

Perhaps this is because, in India, rules don't really seem to be rules, they're more like guidelines (at least, this is how it appears to those of us who are passengers in the rickshaw of Indian life, where driving on the left seems to be more of an option than an obligation). The more the officials peep their warnings, the more the people ignore them, until the level of whistling reaches such a fever pitch and the dancing of the officials gets so animated that eventually the wayward swimmers notice that yes, they mean me, and they move back inside the red flags, accompanied by a gentle but temporary lull in the whistling. And so the cycle begins again, like the bizarre ritual it is.

Decisions, Decisions

Looking south along the beach at Varkala

The most challenging part of waking up in Varkala is trying to decide what to do with the day. Perhaps an afternoon at the beach? Or maybe a morning spent wandering around the tie-dyed boutiques, looking for bargains on kaftans and slippers? Or even a day guzzling seafood in front of the dazzling Arabian Sea? Ah, the decision is difficult, but Varkala is the kind of place where time stretches out and you end up spending days doing what feels like almost nothing.

But what a pleasant place in which to do almost nothing. Whiling away the hours with a fresh mango juice in one hand and a book in the other is one of life's little luxuries, particularly as hints of India still manage to creep into the otherwise rather global atmosphere of Varkala's travelling scene. For example, it's hard not to smile at old favourites, like the wonderful use of English on restaurant menus. The best menu we found was at the Sun Rise Restaurant – a misnomer in itself, as the restaurant, like all those in Varkala, faces west and therefore can never see the sun rise – which proudly serves Chicken Merry Land, the popular pasta dish Spagathy, that favourite of the beach the Sandwitch, a choice of Fired or Plane rice, and a dish for which people will presumably be back, Lobster Termindor. And as if this isn't enticing enough, you can round off your evening meal with a cocktail or two, though I have to wonder how many people order the Salty Dog, the Bledy Merry, the Agg Nog, or the particularly fetching Gin Jizz. Happily the Sun Rise, which looks over North End Cliff and has a fine view of the beach, is actually a great spot for a feed, and the uppumavu and banana we had for breakfast – uppumavu being a kind of spicy semolina – was great. Add in the fact that you can see schools of dolphins jumping out of the distant waves while brightly painted fishing boats head south in search of the day's catch, not to mention the sight of sperm whales migrating north, their dark shadows slowly moving from left to right in the near distance, and you have a seaside spot that's hard to resist.

The northern end of the beach at Varkala

The day's catch is an important part of evening life in Varkala, as the sun set brings to life one of Varkala's charms – the seafood. Walking along the cliff top in the early evening is an adventure in visual fishing, as the restaurants lay out the catch of the day in an attempt to lure you in. Huge marlin and swordfish lie alongside red snapper, tuna, butterfish, pomfret and barracuda, all surrounded by king prawns – large and small – and squid. Most of the fish really is as fresh as they say, with the bright eyes and clean skin of recently netted fish, rather than the milky, sunken eyes and slimy, ammonia-tinged skin of the fish that has seen better days. You pick your fish and decide how you would like it cooked – in the tandoor with fine Keralan spices, or simply cooked in butter and garlic – and take a seat overlooking the waves, with the sun setting in the distance.

It's delightful, sipping a beer while waiting for your fish, and when it comes, it's utterly divine; the calamari we had at the Sun Rise was absolutely the best calamari I've ever tasted, cooked as it was in wonderfully light, tempura-style batter that brought out the flavour of the meat. It melted in the mouth, which is something you can't often say aboutcalamari in England.

Looking north along the beach at Varkala

The freshness of the catch is plain to see as the sun goes down, as the horizon darkens to reveal strings of distant lights, flickering in and out as the fishing boats they're swinging from rise and fall with the swell. If you're lucky enough to experience a power cut while you're eating – something that is relatively common, judging by the slick way in which candles appear out of nowhere within seconds of the lights dimming and giving out – then it looks for all the world as is the stars have fallen from the sky and landed on the sea, lighting up the waves like distant, floating lanterns.

And before you know it, that's another day gone in paradise, and the next day it's another difficult choice between swimming in the warm sea, soaking up the sun on the beach, drinking lemon sodas in the cliff-top breeze, and watching dolphins and sperm whales swim through the ocean from which tonight's meal has only just been plucked. As a way to kick off a holiday in a totally relaxing and unchallenging way, Varkala hits the spot perfectly.

India: Agra

I prepared for Agra by clamming up and refusing to budge when the touts descended. In the event it was fine: the city's legendary hassle factor was obviously too exhausted to brave the scorching temperatures.

Sure, the rickshaw man tried to charge me Rs30 to the hotel area when the price was fixed at Rs15 for all rickshaws (so I won that one), and I made sure he dropped me off at a different hotel to the one I'd actually chosen to avoid the commission scam, but that was it. There was no trouble. The shopkeepers all pleaded with me to visit their shops, and I flatly refused, but it wasn't that bad. Travelling in the off-season has its advantages, though I didn't realise they were lying in wait, waiting for me to drop my defences...

The Taj Mahal, viewed from a nearby building

You'd never have believed it was the off-season, judging by the masses sprawling round the Taj Mahal. I arrived on a Saturday, so it was bound to be full, but even so it surprised me to see so many Indian tourists posing for photographs and wanting to include me too. I popped into the Taj for a quick look soon after I arrived, and only saw four other westerners, two of whom were friendly hippies and two of whom were so miserable and ugly that for a moment I couldn't believe that I had more in common with them than the Crazy Gang milling round us. But it takes more than Indian tourism and miserable palefaces to spoil something like this.

The Taj Mahal. It's up there with the Pyramids, the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House and the Houses of Parliament, but in one aspect it's so much more emotive than any of the others, because it was built for love. The Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built it in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631 during childbirth; heartbroken, the Emperor commissioned the construction of a huge monument which took from 1631 to 1653 to build, requiring 20,000 workers to create. The Emperor, who was later deposed by his son Aurangzeb and spent the rest of his life locked up in Agra Fort staring out at the Taj, is buried under the Taj, next to his beloved wife.

The view from the Taj back towards the main entrance gate

Even without such a tragi-romantic story behind it, the Taj would be perfect. Its symmetry is legendary, its white marble is brilliantly reflective and the intricacy of the work on the walls is incredible: everywhere you look the marble is inlaid with semi-precious stones, forming patterns of flowers and curlicues that offset the Arabic script arching over the entrances. Inside it is cool but surprisingly light, and the acoustics are not dissimilar to those of the Golcumbaz in Bijapur, though with the maelstrom of the crowds you're lucky to leave the mausoleum with your hearing intact, let alone able to detect echoes.

The Taj doesn't stand alone, either. The tourist mobs rush in at the southern end of the park, snap themselves posing with the Taj in the background, walk up the garden paths to the Taj itself, snap themselves looking serious in the throng gathered round the doorway, enter, clap, scream and yell, and then bugger off. Nobody bothers with the flanking buildings, which makes them rather pleasant.

The Taj is covered with intricate carvings

On each side of the searing white Taj is a red sandstone mosque; these two are mirror images of each other, although only the left one is actually used as a mosque (the other faces the wrong way). Opposite the Taj's main entrance, at the other end of the long ornamental garden that features in everyone's photos, is the original entrance (through which you now exit), and lining the path between the two is a beautiful waterway in which you can see the Taj reflected, if it's not the dry season. All I got was brown leaves, but that was only to be expected at a time of year when droughts and heat waves are normal.

But when all is said and done, the Taj is the Taj and that's it. It's one of the most stunning buildings in the world, but I found myself more moved by the lonely tombs of Bijapur, or the far pavilions of Mandu, each of which sums up the stark beauty of the Mughal Empire better than the honeymoon sweetness of the Taj. Perhaps a lifetime's exposure to the image of the Taj Mahal manages to remove any surprise. Uluru turned out to be completely unlike its public image, but the Taj was exactly what I expected, to be honest; I expected it to be stunning, and stunning it was, but somehow that wasn't enough. The Taj had no mystery, and I vowed to go back again at dawn to see if a sunrise silence could recreate the atmosphere I'd found so powerful in the less well-known Islamic monuments.

Early Morning Taj Mahal

Posing in front of the Taj

Well, it wasn't quite a silence, and the gates don't open until 6am, well after sunrise, but the difference was staggering. Almost exclusively peopled by white tourists, the noise level inside and around the marble walls was negligible: in fact, the noisiest people were the Indian guides, who seem to have mastered the nasal whines of the railway chai men in order to cut through the background noise of modern India. The westerners milling around were, in general, quiet and courteous, even if some of them did look like they had forgotten to put their clothes on when they got up, and if only more of them had smiled I might even have liked them. Instead I wanted to shout, 'You're on holiday! Enjoy yourselves, you miserable buggers! Smile!'

The intricate details of the entrance to the Taj

But I kept quiet, and this enabled me to test out the acoustics inside the mausoleum. They are truly wonderful; whereas the Golcumbaz echoes your noises back to you ten times, the Taj just perpetuates the sound, not so much an echo as a reverberation. It goes on for seconds, turning a talking voice into a drone of feedback and the muezzin's call into a marvel of tonal purity. I found myself remembering an album that I had discovered in Chris's record collection back in Melbourne many moons ago; it was a recording made by a flute player who had managed, sometime in the late sixties, to get admitted into the Taj at night to make the album (obviously with judicious use of baksheesh, I see now). At the time the concept had sounded gloriously exotic and a wonderfully archetypal story from the flower-power era, but that morning it seemed much more real, if only because I could picture the sound of the flute echoing, now that there was peace under the domed ceiling.

The reason for the lack of early morning Indians and the resulting lack of noise is the entry-price policy. During the day the entry price is Rs15, an astounding deal to see one of the world's greatest monuments; but for an hour-and-a-half at dawn and a couple of hours at sunset the entry price soars to Rs105, a still not unreasonable amount but high enough to dissuade the masses (as was obvious when the price went down at 7.30am and crowds piled in, shattering the peace). The ethics of such a policy are debatable, but there's no doubt it was very pleasant to be able to enjoy somewhat more of the atmosphere of the Taj than I'd been able to do on the previous day's Saturday scramble.

One of the four towers surrounding the Taj

Indeed, I saw the policy of dissuasion in action. When I finally tracked down the ticket office through my insomniac muddle, there was a young Indian couple ahead of me, the man speaking loudly in a complaining voice. He obviously hadn't known there was a price difference, and was mouthing off to the ticket man in English about how you fuckers aren't getting my money that easily and it's disgusting what you fuckers have done – his English was pretty strong, especially in the vernacular. He refused to pay, and as he turned around to go he looked at me and said, 'Don't fall for this scam, it's disgusting, they want 105 rupees before 7.30, then it's 15, the fuckers.' Grabbing behind him, he took a long swig from a half-empty 650ml beer bottle, breathed the fumes into my face and strolled off, dragging his empathetically complaining girlfriend with him.

I didn't tell him that not only was I going to pay, I was glad to do so if it meant not having to share the Taj with him and his bottle: he was moaning about the cost of maybe two beers, and it was obvious that he wasn't exactly poor. Sometimes the middle class in developing countries gives me the shits: places like China, Sri Lanka and Nepal charge you hundreds of rupees for every monument, whatever the time of day, and sometimes I wonder if rich Indians realise how lucky they are.

The Taj, close up

But how was the Taj, after all that? Infinitely better with fewer tourists (of course), but still not the earth-shattering experience that I had hoped; as with Uluru I had purposely kept my expectations low, but unlike Uluru the Taj was everything I had presumed it would be and no more. It is stunningly beautiful, ravaged by tourists, eminently photogenic and worth visiting at different times of the day; much like Uluru, it changes colour as the sun washes over the sky, and despite Agra's appalling pollution, it is still radiant (though possibly not for much longer if the air quality doesn't improve drastically). As a monument to love it is unique, though its use as a photographic background for newlyweds is somewhat clichéd.

It's just missing that little something... perhaps a sense of mystery, or the joy associated with discovering something that few others know about. I suppose that's the price you pay for having your photograph splashed across the front of fifty per cent of books about India.

Exploring the Rest of Agra

Just one of the Taj's inlaid decorations

I had planned to spend a total of three days in Agra, but after a hot second day avoiding the touts and visiting the other main attraction apart from the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort (a 'must' according to my guidebook), I decided that Agra was no longer worthy of my patronage. The hassle from the local businessmen was driving me nuts, and India is full of places that are infinitely more interesting and infinitely more friendly.

Agra Fort is fairly disappointing in that it's more of a palace with fortress walls than a kosher fort, and that it's not high up but on the banks of the River Yamuna; my ideal fortress has great views and a barren beauty, but Agra Fort has neither. To be fair the most beautiful part of the fort, the Moti Masjid, isn't open to the public, but neither are the underground dungeons, fortress walls, northern buildings or any of the roofs. Add in crowds of jostling Indian tourists and it's only just worth the effort: I've seen much more impressive fortresses and much more beautiful palaces, and those without tourists too.

Arabic script around the entrance to the Taj; in translation it means 'In the name of Allah the most merciful and beneficial'

I will remember Agra Fort for one thing, though, and that's the gang of touts who hang around at the bridge to the entrance. Agra's hassle factor is definitely higher than normal, which isn't a surprise when you consider how much of a tourist attraction it is, but the difference isn't so much in the amount of attention, which is fairly universal, but in the way the touts operate. They're pathetic, truly pathetic, and they don't give up, even if it's blindingly obvious that you don't want that leather whip or wooden travel backgammon set. And in the off-season, when I visited, they're desperate, and it's almost embarrassing the way they beg you to buy from them.

In fact, when I capitulated and bought a bottle of water from one of the stalls, I handed over ten rupees – it was only eight rupees per bottle near my hotel – but the man wanted 12 rupees, which is actually the standard price for water. I'd been fired up by the touts though, and decided that I'd make him suffer instead, refusing to budge from ten rupees. My stubbornness earned me what the Indian thought was the ultimate insult, 'Are you Israeli?' referring to the Israelis' legendary bargaining aggression and stubbornness; realising he wasn't going to give in I immediately coughed up two more rupees and moved on to the next fool, aware that I was getting sucked in and warped by the touts' attitude.

One of the many lattice windows in Agra Fort

On my way out of Agra Fort things got much worse. One particular tout simply wouldn't let go.

'Hey friend, you want marble box?'

'No.'

'Just twenty-five rupees.'

'No.'

'Beautiful inlay stones, lovely box, look.'

'No.'

'Okay, twenty rupees.'

'No.'

'Marble box, like Taj Mahal, see.'

'No.'

'It opens, look. Fifteen rupees.'

'No.'

A corridor of symmetrical arches in Agra Fort

'Just looking, friend.'

'No.'

'Fifteen rupees, very good price, how many you take?'

'No.'

'I have others too, but this one very cheap price. Ten rupees.'

'No.'

'Ten rupees, my final offer.'

'No.'

'Ten rupees, please sir, please buy one box ten rupees only, please.'

'No.'

'Is very cheap, only ten rupees. Yes?'

'No.'

'Please baba...'

Like the Taj, Agra Fort has some impressive inlaid decorations

He only let me go because he was crushed out of the way by the woman selling leather whips ('Leather? But you're a Hindu!' I said; 'Very cheap,' she said, 'very good quality') and the man with his bloody wooden travel backgammon set ('I also have chess set, baba'). Then the rickshaw drivers closed in, and I managed to duck out of one corner and make off down the road, while a collection of drooling and rabid touts continued to hassle what was by now an empty space.

That afternoon I made plans to get out. I'd seen the Taj, done the fort and realised that if India has an ugly side, it's Agra.

Leaving Agra

Agra Fort is full of amazing stone carvings

I escaped Agra on Monday 25th May, but only after another typical tout extravaganza. The standard rickshaw price from my hotel to the bus terminal should have been Rs15 but the rickshaw-wallahswere insisting on Rs30, and although the price difference was pathetic in real terms, I felt aggrieved enough by the whole Agra scene to stand my ground. I haggled mercilessly, and eventually got it down to Rs25, hardly a victory, but something at least.

But then I discovered I could get the standard rate of Rs15 if I stopped at a shop on the way where the rickshaw driver would get a commission. 'I'm not buying anything, though,' I said, 'so you won't get any money.'

'Yes I will,' said the rickshaw man. 'I get 25 rupees for every tourist I bring, even if they buy nothing.'

'OK then,' I said, deciding to try to get one back on the touts. 'We go to a shop and split the commission: ten rupees for me, 15 for you, so I get to go to the station for five rupees, don't have to buy anything, and the only person who loses is the stupid shop who pays commission to rickshaw-wallahs. Deal?'

He was cagey, but he would have agreed if I'd pushed him; I however had only been winding him up and had no intention of hanging round in a shop pretending to be interested in cheap marble carvings and tacky carpets, so I ended up paying the Rs25 fee for an uninterrupted journey to the bus. It made me understand a bit more about why Agra is such a pit, though: it's full of people who simply want your money.

One of the buildings inside Agra Fort

I mentioned this to the rickshaw-wallah's boss, who had joined me in the rickshaw. He'd asked me whether I liked Agra, and I told him precisely what I thought, and he sadly agreed. 'We are not all bad,' he said, and I said that, to be honest, the people I'd met away from the Taj and fort had been fine. But that wasn't the point: the touts in those areas more than made up for the smiles of the rest of the population.

'You will find the same in Jaipur,' he said, referring to the capital of Rajasthan, where I would be heading in a few days. 'They are very bad there too. Better you go to Gujarat, where the people are very friendly.'

I thanked him, got on the bus and whistled off to Fatehpur Sikri, an hour's jostling bus ride away, where I was praying the touts would give it a rest. Some chance...

India: Ajanta

I made a beeline north from Aurangabad as soon as I could, and stepped from the world of 1950s Christian values into what can only be described as the Twilight Zone. A three-hour journey north saw Ian, a fellow inmate at the Youth Hostel, and I booking into a hotel in the little town of Fardapur, a speck on the landscape that had all the atmosphere of a motorway service station.

Fardapur's claim to fame is its proximity to the cave temples of Ajanta, but as with Aurangabad, something wasn't right. Menus in restaurants were produced claiming to sell almost anything you might desire, but all they could actually manage was fried rice and soft drinks; the northbound bus out of town left at either 8am, 8.15am or 8.30am depending on who you asked, and the journey time was either four hours, eight hours, ten hours or 12 hours, depending on the phases of the moon (for the record, the bus left at 8.45am and the journey lasted 12.5 hours); and as we sat in our room, strange Indians would walk past our window, staring in and mumbling weird sounds that would be more at home in a David Attenborough documentary.

Add in the birds nesting in our bathroom and flying in and out of the windows to collect food, the fan that changed its speed more often than an Indian bus driver, and the fact that we kept getting told the hotel was full as we tried to pay for another night, when it quite blatantly wasn't, and I think you can safely say that Fardapur could be wiped out by a freak earthquake and nobody would even notice. If oblivion needs to be personified, you couldn't do better than Fardapur; where else can you see signs like the following in our hotel lobby?

ROOM CHARGE Rs150

EXTRA PARSON Rs50

Even an extra Man of God couldn't bring sense to the desperate situation in crumbling Fardapur...

One of the cave paintings in Ajanta

Still, the Ajanta caves were worth a visit, even if they weren't as spectacular as those at Ellora; Ajanta's main appeal is the collection of paintings inside the caves (which are all Buddhist, predating the Ellora caves, having been built between 250 BC and 650 AD). Although the paintings are faded they are quite spectacular, and the cool shade offered by the caves creates a beautiful and atmospheric viewing chamber.

The caves are in a pretty little setting on a bend in a river (which was, unfortunately, almost totally dried up), and we spent a couple of very pleasant hours wandering around randomly, avoiding the touts and soaking up the heat, desperately trying to put off the return to Fardapur for as long as possible. Needless to say, we didn't stay any longer than necessary.

India: Alang

Wrecker's yards, where cars go to die, are sad places. With twin headlights, a grinning radiator grille and a smiling curve to the bumper, your average car looks human, whether it's the frog-eyed bewilderment of theVW Beetle, the blockheaded bouncer look of the Volvo, the cute innocence of the Mini or the slit-eyed sophistication of the Ferrari. Stacks of rusting and half-dismantled cars look depressing because we personify them, subconsciously succumbing to images of retirement homes, mass graves and the inevitability of death. I should know: I spent plenty of time in Australia searching for bits to make my car, Oz, king of the road.

What about ships, though? With their proud bows and blunt sterns they're hard to associate with living creatures, let alone humans. Ships are sleek and ships are always female, but despite man's long history of glorifying and waxing lyrical about boats and the sea, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to The Old Man and the Sea, they're less human than vessel. The only personality I associated with Zeke – the yacht in which I sailed to French Polynesia – was that of gaoler, and despite the curves of the QE II and the gushing success of Titanic, ships aren't people, they're machines: that's why Herbie and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang were cars, not boats.

There is greenery in Alang, just not much

But try telling that to someone who visits Alang. Stretching along the west coast of the Gulf of Camray some 50km southeast of Bhavnagar, Alang is the biggest ship-breaking yard in the world, and it has to be seen to be believed. Official statistics are hard to come by where Alang is concerned, not just because of the tendency of the locals to make things up, but because Alang has been the centre of human rights issues for some time and the government is more than a little sensitive about the whole thing.

However, gleaning what information I could from the local chaishop owners, I discovered the following: Alang consists of 400 breaker's yards (known as platforms) where somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 workers dismantle ships by hand. An average ship has 300 people working on it at any one time, who take two months to break the ship down completely. The whole complex breaks about 1500 ships per year, and when I say 'ships' I mean everything from supertankers and war ships to car ferries and container ships. The statistics are impressive.

Getting to Alang

Nothing is wasted in Alang; absolutely everything is salvaged and sold off

Because the working conditions are appalling and safety levels are laughably non-existent, Alang is a major draw for the poor of India who are desperate for a job, any job. People from Orissa and Bihar, two of the poorest states, make up a large percentage of the workers, but there are people from everywhere from Tamil Nadu to Nepal. I was waiting for the bus in Bhavnagar on the morning of Sunday 7th June – I took the phrase 'it's difficult to reach by bus, so take a taxi for the day' in my guidebook as a personal challenge, especially as there were four or five buses each way per day – and while I was trying to work out the bus timetable a sadhuwandered up to me, saffron clad and clutching a bag and a plastic container half full of what looked like month-old yoghurt. 'Where are you going?' he asked.

'Alang,' I replied. 'To see the ships.'

Ships queuing up to be broken down

'So am I,' he said. 'I'm going to start work there.'

We chatted for a bit – his English was pretty good – and eventually the right bus pulled in and we hopped on. An hour and a half later we were sipping chai¹ in Alang, looking out over the platforms where the ships lay in various stages of disarray.

The word 'platform' when applied to Alang is a euphemism: the platforms are simply beach. When a new ship is about to be broken up, the beach in the relevant yard is totally cleaned, even down to the last nut and bolt (nothing is wasted in this recycling operation), and then the ship is driven straight at the beach at breakneck speed so that it quite literally beaches itself. This part is finely tuned and has been done so many times that the ships are rarely more than a few metres off the desired position, which is a relief when you think of what would happen if they applied Indian bus logic to beaching a supertanker.

Mighty supertankers are rammed into the beach and ripped apart bit by bit

Alang is a suitable place for such crazy antics because it has a pretty eccentric tidal system. The tide is high only twice a month, which is when the sea covers the yards and new ships are beached; then for two weeks at a time the tide recedes, leaving the ships out of the water and easy to work on. And what work it is: everything that is detachable that can be sold is removed from the inside, all the engines are gutted and removed and then the ship's body itself is dismantled, chunk by chunk. The road into town is lined with large warehouses stacked high with doors, lathes, engine parts, beds, entire kitchen ranges, life jackets and plenty of other salvaged jetsam: you name it, if you can find it on a ship then you can buy it cheap in Alang. Most of the bits are trucked straight out to customers, but there's plenty left over for the high street stores.

The ships are stripped by working from one end to the other

The sight of a beached ship with half its front removed is both awesome and gruesome, because despite the lack of humanity in a fully intact ship, when it's sitting there with its guts hanging out it's hard not to pity the poor thing. It might be pity in the sense that we pity moth-eaten teddy bears or unlucky cartoon characters, but the sheer immensity of the beasts makes such pity harrowing.

I saw destroyers losing their final battle against the blow torch and hacksaw, I saw container ships sagging into the sand as the P&O signs were pulled down, I saw roll-on roll-off ferries rolling over and dying: even without an obvious face to each ship, it was slightly funereal.

The workers' houses are extremely close to the shipyards

But the appeal of Alang is also scientific. The whole place is like a huge, lifelike book of cross-section drawings, a real-life lesson in how the engines fit into a supertanker, how those millions of air vents and electricity conduits mesh together inside the hull of a navy ship, and how much of a ship is crammed with gear and how much is just empty space. In the West we are familiar with yards that make ships but not those that break them, and you don't make a ship from bow to stern, you make it in parts: the hull is built first, then the structural innards, and then the pleasantries of furnishing. In Alang it's a horizontal destruction irrespective of what order the insides were put in, and as such it's a unique sight.

Visit to the Ashram

The head of the Gopnath ashram (left) posing with his right-hand man

I was impressed by the view from the chai shop, but what I really wanted to do was to get inside a yard and nose around: I wasn't stupid enough to want to climb around on a half-deconstructed ship, but some close-up views would have been great. My new-found friend said there would be plenty of time to worry about getting permission from the Port Officer later: first, it was time to visit his ashram.

This was an opportunity too good to miss. I've managed to avoid India's ashrams totally so far, and the thought of seeing one in such a godforsaken place as Alang was intriguing. We tootled along the road, past yard after yard and ship after ship, and soon ended up at the Siva ashram of the Gopnath Temple, a ramshackle but friendly complex surrounding yet another Hindu temple tucked away from the main coast road. Inside were other sadhus sitting cross-legged on some mats, and so we joined them.

I've often wondered what makes sadhus tick, and my visit to Gopnath confirmed my suspicions: they're a bunch of stoners. The man who was introduced to me as the big cheese at Gopnath ashram was puffing away on a chillum packed with charas (that's a pipe packed with marijuana), and as we rolled up he offered it to me.

A doorman guarding his platform

I declined because it was obvious that Alang was going to be fascinating enough without chemical aid and I didn't want to get memory loss, but he packed another one and passed it round the circle, everybody inhaling right down to their toes except for me and a couple of guys who were having their palms read.

Five minutes later they were buggered but very hospitable, inviting me to dinner that night (which I also declined because I'd be back in Bhavnagar) and letting me take their pictures, as long as I promised to send them copies (which I did). But I wanted to see the ships, so I said goodbye to my now inert friend, who had decided to put off his job-hunting until four o'clock (though, come to think of it, he didn't say which day), and strolled back to the surf.

The Yards of Alang

The yards are strewn with bits of ship as far as the eye can see

I had previously met a few westerners who had visited Alang, and their advice had been not only to avoid taking pictures, but to leave my camera at home: unauthorised photography was not tolerated and would result in the removal of your film and undoubtedly a big baksheeshbill. I'd brought my camera anyway, and was mighty glad that I had: possibly the fact that it was Sunday made a difference, or the fact that it was high tide and the ships were being smacked by waves, but there were no workers to be seen, just a few lazing gate keepers, and quite a few of them let me in to wander among the guts of ships from all over the world. Only one of them asked for anything – two Cokes, which I didn't bother to buy him seeing as lots of other places weren't asking for a thing – and another bloke took a fancy to my biro (which he duly pinched) but there were no officials, no baksheesh issues and no problems with taking photos.

Bit by bit, even the biggest ships disappear

So I took 'em. The hotel man would later say that I had been very lucky being able to take photos – most tourists are apparently stopped and denied permission – and I would later meet a woman who had been accosted by a policeman with no badge, no gun and no proof of status except for his uniform (which looked suspiciously like a bus conductor's) who tried to charge her for her camera. I was lucky indeed: my experience was far from negative.

The yards were surprisingly clean: I had imagined oil slicks three feet deep and piles of rusting metal clogging up the environment. In reality the sea was fairly blue (inevitably it's not going to be mineral water round a ship breaking yard) and the beach was recognisable as sand, though I recalled that most of the objections to Alang from the international community were over working conditions rather than environmental concerns. Whatever the case, it's a good example of western hypocrisy because the ships keep coming, whatever the issues; dozens of ships were floating offshore, waiting their turn, looking well-used and battered in the way that only old ships can. For a fleeting moment I thought of homes for the elderly and waiting for God, but only for a moment. Ships aren't human, OK?

Cricket Among the Ships

Chatting with the wonderfully friendly people of Alang

The inhabitants of Alang are, though, and they're also incredibly friendly. As I wandered past the yards and admired the workers' slums leaning against each other, I smiled and got smiles back, I wobbled my head and got wobbling heads in return, and I waved and got raised palms for my trouble. And halfway back to the bus stand I came across a handful of boys playing cricket across the main road – steadfastly ignoring trucks and cycles as they turfed up the wicket – and they insisted that I join in.

I must have played for a good hour, batting and bowling my way into the history books. I was wearing my bush hat so I became 'Shane Warne' to the locals, and one of the boys who was a pretty good batsman became 'Sachin Tendulkar'. We drew a crowd and I drew on skills not used since school, but eventually it drew to an end, the heat killing my energy, ruining my spin and reminding me that I had to get back to Bhavnagar before I was stuck here forever. The people might be wonderful, but Alang isn't the sort of place you want to be stranded in.

Huge ships are rammed into the beach just yards from each other

Finally, my Bhavnagar hotel just served to underline how friendly the area is. The previous night I'd dropped my bag onto a marble table and the bloody thing had come loose from the wall, smashing on the ground and shattering; even the Rolling Stones would have been impressed by my ability to ruin a hotel room so comprehensively. I assumed the reaction would turn into a barely restrained discussion on how much I would have to pay, but what was the reaction in Bhavnagar? 'I am sorry, sir, would you like to have a different room?'

I was gobsmacked, and hardly wanted to leave.

---

¹ This is a different act depending on where you are sipping it. Normally chai is served in a glass, either in a small full glass or a large half-full glass, in which case you just drink it normally. If you're served chai in a cup and shallow saucer, you should pour the chai into the saucer and drink the chai from the saucer. Finally (and this is more common in the south) if you are served chai in a cup and deep saucer, you should pour the chai into the saucer, then pour it back into the cup, and drink from the cup; this is to mix in the sugar that's sitting idly on the bottom, so if you don't like your chai sweet you don't pour it and mix it up. Oh, and service tea is the name for the way we drink it in England, with separate milk and a teapot, but that's service tea, not chai. Chai is to tea what McDonald's is to haute cuisine – it tastes great!

India: Amritsar

As pupils in school history classes we barely touched upon colonialism, an amazing omission given the importance of the British Empire in the continuing arrogance of the English abroad; if we did study it, it was only to mention British successes (such as the Battle of Plassey, the explorations of Captain Cook and the glory of Hong Kong) or to paint a vivid picture of the hardships forced upon us by the conquest of the developing world (such as the Black Hole of Calcutta, the Zulu wars and the exploration of North America).

But the British abroad were hardly angels; one only has to read Orwell's Burmese Days to see a different side to the glory of Victorian England and her supposedly benign influence on her subject countries. I am constantly surprised by how biased my education was; I expect such a thing to happen in countries with oppressive and dictatorial regimes, but in Britain, the Land of Hope and Glory, the inventor of parliamentary democracy, the epitome of fairness and high morals? I've begun to explore the other side of the coin, and it's an ugly story. I was fed propaganda at school.

One of the many donation plaques set into the marble walkways around the perimeter of the Golden Temple

It happens everywhere: CNN isn't neutral and unbiased, and nor is the BBC, but we like to think that they are (most people will get very heated if you question the 'correctness' of their news programmes). Nothing is neutral; I know this because I am a journalist, and as a journalist I know it's practically impossible to write something that's completely objective. But my religious education was a Christian education, and we never learned about any other religions, a major oversight that has thankfully been rectified in the modern curriculum; my history lessons were conveniently selective, even though history is supposed to teach us to learn from our mistakes; geography lessons were selective too, avoiding concepts of famine and ecology in favour of motorway names, county boundaries and the main products of Canadian territories. I know you can't teach everything, but you can at leasttry to teach a balanced syllabus.

So I have been discovering another side to life through my interest in colonialism. At school I never learned anything about Malaysia or British Borneo, but their histories are fascinating, and are a good example of petty squabbling between advanced nations, irrespective of the effect on the people originally living there. Australia and New Zealand opened up the worlds of the Aborigine and Maori, and Polynesia was a perfect example of colonial control that is both vindictive (nuclear testing) and beneficial (France pumping money into the country). I had to find out about this myself, and although it's been fascinating for me, it makes my education look worryingly incomplete.

Amritsar, the spiritual capital of the Punjab, is a perfect example. The Punjab is the home of the Sikhs, the easily recognised Indians who wear turbans, grow their hair and beards long, and who have set up very successful communities in places like Birmingham and the USA. The Punjab is now a peaceful state, but this is a recent development; until the early 1990s it was dangerous to travel here, and the region's history is a long story of armed struggle and bloodshed.

The Development of Sikhism

A banner showing details of a donation from the Sikh community in Birmingham

Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539) who was, reading between the lines, a genuine hippy. He looked at Islam and Hinduism, and although he liked certain aspects of both religions, he was a serious liberal and wholeheartedly rejected the caste system of Hinduism and the intolerance and sexism of Islam. The result was his creation of a new religion, Sikhism, which blended the good parts of Hinduism and Sufism (Islam's mystical branch) into a religion of tolerance and universal appeal. Nine more gurus followed Nanak, each building on the faith and forming a loose nation of Sikhs in the Punjab area, the spiritual centre of which was the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

This was all happening during the Mughal reign, and under the progressive Emperor Akbar and his successors, Sikhism flourished. But the last Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, was a fanatical Muslim and spent most of his time tearing down Hindu temples and building mosques – thus alienating his subjects and paving the way for the end of Muslim rule in India – and Sikhism was suddenly under fire from the ruling class. This coincided with the leadership of Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708) who turned Sikhism around, creating a militaristic and highly organised sect that vigorously defended its right to exist and which elevated the concept of martyrdom to new heights. The result was a whole population of men who were honourable, valiant and seriously tough, characteristics that, one can argue, are still predominant in modern Sikh society.

Sri Akal Takhat Sahib

With the demise of the Mughals and the advent of the comparatively tolerant British rule, the Sikhs expanded their empire. The Golden Temple, which had had a chequered history of being repeatedly captured by Muslims and subsequently recaptured by Sikhs, stayed in Sikh hands from 1767 onwards. By 1839, under Ranjit Singh, the Sikhs ruled the Punjab, Kashmir, Ladakh, Balistan, Gilgit, Hazara and the Peshawar Valley (in other words what is now northeastern India and northern Pakistan) and had pushed the Afghans right back to the Khyber Pass. Ranjit had agreed in 1809 not to intrude on British territory, in return for being left alone by the Brits, but his successors flaunted this agreement, and in 1846 and 1849 the British fought two bloody wars with the Sikhs, eventually winning, and the Sikh empire was incorporated into British India. The Sikh culture, though, was allowed to continue unharmed, and Sikhs were included in the British army, much like the Nepalese Gurkhas.

This bloody history is an important part of Sikhism, if only because it is the reason for their distinctive appearance. Being on the move all the time, the Sikhs were unable to waste time on beautification, a stylistic nicety which has stuck: the knife, or kirpan – which is always carried and is even exempted all over India in signs proclaiming, 'No weapons allowed, except for Sikh kirpans' – is an obvious symbol of armed struggle; and the traditional short trousers are worn instead of lungis because lungis are pretty useless if you need to run quickly over rough terrain. But surely the most impressive consequence of the Sikhs' armed past is the long history of martyrs, all of whom are revered like latter-day saints.

The Golden Temple, being the central Sikh shrine, has a whole gallery devoted to Sikh history and its martyrs. Occupying five rooms above the northern entrance to the temple, the museum consists of paintings of the key events in the history of Sikhism, and although it starts off with some pretty mellow historical scenes, it soon gives way to the violence and bloodshed that marks this particular struggle for religious freedom.

The Hari Mandir, with the Sikh museum in the background

The first sign that something is up is a painting of a man being boiled alive, closely followed by another man being sawn in half from his head down. In each case it depicts a devotee being killed in the presence of his guru, but to me it wasn't initially clear if these pictures were showing religious persecution or an extreme test of bravery; what follows, however, puts one in no doubt that these are depictions of some of the more unpleasant ways in which Sikhs were killed by those of different religious persuasions (mainly Muslims) in a brutal attempt to convert them from their faith. There are pictures of Muslims butchering hundreds of Sikh babies, chopping off brave Sikh warriors' heads and, following on from these religious atrocities, a depiction of the 1919 massacre of an unarmed Sikh crowd by the British.

Of course, given its location in the holiest of all Sikh shrines, the museum can't avoid falling into the same trap as my own education. The theme throughout is the persecution of Sikhs, and although this is a well documented part of the story of Sikhism, there are other areas of Sikh history that are perhaps more controversial. The modern era has spawned the Sikh extremist, some of whom are willing to go to terrible lengths to fight their cause. It's a truism that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, but it is, after all, only a few years since there was peace in the Punjab, and today you still see photograph displays of Sikh extremists in bus and train stations, each of them holding a prisoner number in front of them and wearing a defiant expression. For some people, wars are never over.

But it's hard to imagine the Punjab as a war zone. The change of scenery from Rajasthan to the Punjab is stunning; from desolate arid desert I passed into a green and fertile land filled with fields of rice and wheat and criss-crossed by bulging rivers. The man next to me on the bus pointed out of the window and said, 'Is like England, yes?', and although I couldn't recall many paddy fields or palm trees in sunny Staffordshire, I could see what he meant. It was pure green; the Punjab produces 22 per cent of India's wheat and ten per cent of its rice, and it is home to the world's biggest bicycle manufacturer, Hero Bicycles. The Sikhs are masters of mechanics, and are renowned for their tolerance of other cultures and religions and their friendliness. This is not the product of terrorism, surely?

The Golden Temple

The covered marble walkway that leads to the Hari Mandir, from the right...

It's even harder to think of negative aspects of Sikhism when you visit the Golden Temple itself. A celebration of architecture, aesthetics, equality and piety, the Golden Temple is not only one of the most delightful temple complexes in India with its large tank and glittering gold and white marble buildings, but it's also one of the friendliest. In most Hindu and Muslim temples there's a slight feeling of intrusion; as a non-Hindu you can't go into a Hindu temple's inner sanctum, and you might not be allowed into a mosque at all, especially if you're female, but Sikhism makes a point of its tolerance. Anyone and everyone can visit the Golden Temple regardless of colour, caste or creed, and the four entrances surrounding the complex symbolise this freedom. It lends a relaxed atmosphere to the interior: you can go anywhere, see anything and the only 'price' to pay is to take off your shoes and cover your head. Would that all religions were so tolerant.

The temple itself is a stunning piece of architecture, an ancient structure rebuilt so many times after destruction and war that it combines the old and the new in a successful union. A huge square tank, filled to the brim with dark water and huge carp, is surrounded by buildings, all done out in white marble and gleaming in the sunshine. The walkway surrounding the tank is wide and, even in the direct sun, cool; and dotted throughout the complex are marble plaques and carved memorials to Sikhs who died in wars, Sikhs who want to be commemorated in their holiest shrine, and other plaques containing details of large donations. Every space has its value printed on it, from Rs500 to Rs50,000, and each one has a story to tell, from lists of dead soldiers to New York Sikhs announcing their departure for their heavenly abode.

In the middle of the tank is the Golden Temple itself, the Hari Mandir (literally 'the Temple of God'). A long marble walkway leads to this square block of a building, whose lower walls are covered in inlaid flowers in patterns reminiscent of the Taj Mahal. The roof of the building, a melee of bulbous spires and domes, is totally smothered in gold, and manages to offset the marble quite beautifully in an architectural equivalent of milk and honey. It seems almost contradictory, but these garish whites and golds manage to give off a decidedly peaceful atmosphere: sitting round the edge of the lake watching the world go by is one of life's more relaxing experiences, especially as, for some reason, you don't tend to get interrupted quite as much as you do outside the temple (although other visitors will of course talk to you, they are polite in the extreme).

...and from the left

Throughout the day loudspeakers sound out the constant singing of the Sikhs' bible, the Adi Grantha, and where the equivalent in a Hindu temple would probably be insanely lively, the Adi Grantha chanting is a glorious synthesis of styles. I've listened to plenty of Indian classical music, but I've rarely come across music as evocative as that in the Golden Temple: I kept thinking of Harrison's 'Within You and Without You', itself a mixture of western Beatles music and classical eastern sitar. A simple combination of keyboard, table and voice, I sat and listened for hours, marvelling at the complexity of a nation that can invent both wonderful classical music and infuriating pop.

The Golden Temple is a rich place, too. It's obvious when you look into the glass donation box, where people donate their spare change to contribute to the re-gilding of the temple's roof (most of which is being financed by donations from Birmingham's Sikh community). In one cursory glance I saw US$50, US$20, US$10, US$5 and US$1 notes, rupees from Pakistan, £20, £10 and £5 notes, German marks, gold rings, bracelets, earrings and a whole pile of large denomination Indian rupee bills. The buildings sparkled clean, the restoration work went on tirelessly, and the sense of community was tangible.

A lot of this is down to the Sikhs' no-nonsense attitude to communal living. Pilgrims get free accommodation in a number of buildings dotted around the temple, and the communal kitchen, the Guru Ka Langar, serves free food at intervals throughout the day. Sharing showers, sharing meals, sharing dormitories: all this was quite a change from the life of single hotel rooms, your own table in a restaurant and en suite bathrooms, and with the Sikhs being so friendly, there was no feeling of embarrassment or intrusion into personal space.

But even in this egalitarian society, we westerners were in an enclosure with good fans, lockable lockers, our own washing line and a guard or two at the door at all hours. Nobody could look in, so we could prance around in our underwear in the way that all westerners, of course, do, so in one important sense we weren't a part of the community, because we could get our seclusion whenever we wanted. But it felt good; genuine peace outside would have been impossible, and as for sleeping outside on concrete, even the hardiest westerner would have problems with that, regardless of it being free.

India: Aurangabad

Wednesday 18th March was a long bus-transit day north from Bijapur to Aurangabad. For absolutely no reason Aurangabad almost totally failed to light my candle, and despite my booking in for three nights, I hastily departed after two, having explored the local sights (such as the wonderful caves at Ellora, which did light my candle).

This early departure was almost entirely down to the place in which I stayed. Aurangabad is home to a genuine Youth Hostel, and with its fairly convenient location and extremely cheap charges (Rs20 per night, or about 30p) I went for it. I will never again stay in a Youth Hostel unless I have no choice: they all have the same grim atmosphere, and although it's hard to put my finger on the exact reason for this depressing hostel vibe, it's been present in every one I've stayed in, from Australia to India.

Perhaps it was the institutional feel of the whole set-up that set my teeth on edge: lights out was at 10pm, the manager was not a 'manager' but a 'warden', there was plenty of sickly sweet Christian messaging posted on the walls and the buildings looked like they had been auctioned off from the set of Carry On Doctor. But the real reason for my total failure to enjoy Aurangabad Youth Hostel was the type of person it attracted. Calling them 'strange' would be a kindness.

To be fair, my experience of Youth Hostels hasn't exactly been good anywhere. My one memory of the hostel in Perth was of one particularly depressed traveller spending a Saturday night lying in a pool of delirium having taken an overdose of Prozac; the paramedics were most courteous as they carted him off, gibbering quietly to himself.

Youth Hostels are home to one particular type of weirdo: the hostel networker. He is normally (but not always) young, is pretty shy, has travelled extensively but never outside the international network of hostels, and tends to have some kind of oddity about him, whether it's a habit of staring blankly ahead, a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or just a lack of social normality. There are a few girls too, but they have nothing going for them except a future career teaching Physics for the Open University.

There will also be a smattering of Japanese, a few serious Germans, a couple of headcases with tattoos and strangely cropped facial hair, and at least one resident weirdo who has been there longer than anyone can remember and who still doesn't quite fit in.

I booked in for three nights but could only handle two. It felt like leaving school at the end of term when I finally lugged my pack out of the door and hailed a rickshaw: I even felt like playing conkers with the driver, but either he didn't know how to play or he misunderstood me. Instead he just covered his groin with his hands, smiled nervously and shuffled me into his cab.

I couldn't get in quick enough...

India: Bangalore

Bangalore is the yuppie capital of India: certainly its streets are cleaner and its teeth brighter than any other Indian city. But despite the veneer of western capitalism, Bangalore remains a typically Indian place, proof perhaps that however hard the Cult of America tries, it will never conquer the second largest population mass in the world.

Yes, there are supermarkets, but their shelves are tiny and the goods overpriced. There are signs everywhere proclaiming, 'We prefer Visa,' but this turns out to be a blatant lie: find me anyone who wouldn't rather have cold, hard cash. There are comparatively few cows blundering through the streets: I only saw a handful, though they were particularly fine specimens. There are rubbish bins, but they still overflow with rubbish, attract flies and stink like a sumo wrestler's jockstrap. And the people are as aloof as city dwellers anywhere in the world: smiling at them produces a total blank, and apart from a handful of happy-go-lucky locals, Bangalorians obviously suffer from the dehumanisation that comes with successful capitalism.

The High Court in Bangalore

Other similarities between Bangalore and western cities are quite apparent, but as in everything, the spectre of Indian insanity looms large. For example, Bangalore sports little red and green men at pedestrian crossings, but in true Indian style nobody takes a blind bit of notice of them, and they're useless anyway: one set I saw gave you precisely four seconds of green time before reverting to red, not even enough for Linford Christie to get across. Coupled with this are the traffic police, who stand at traffic-light-controlled junctions, directing traffic by whistle; it's as if the official line is to ignore the lights, which is exactly what happens. To be honest, crossing the road when the red light should be stopping the traffic is probably more dangerous than crossing when it's green, because when it's red the rickshaws are concentrating more on not hitting the traffic crossing their path than avoiding something petty like pedestrians.

Bangalore still has beggars – a particularly insistent type, too – but instead of living in lean-to tents on the high street, they sit outside shops selling genuine Ray Bans and designer clothes. Not all, though, are as street-wise; I saw my first case of elephantiasis in Bangalore, the disease that makes your limbs swell up so much that your legs look like an elephant's: it was quite a sight, and my heart went out to the poor bastard.

Bangalore's rather red Public Library

Perhaps more surprisingly, Bangalorian rickshaw drivers use their meters, a first for me in India: everywhere else they steadfastly refuse to use them because they can always make more money out of a dumb tourist by quoting a crazy price and haggling it down a little, but in Bangalore it's illegal not to use the meter, and unbelievably the drivers tend to obey. The only problem with the meter is that instead of getting worried about being ripped off for a trip that may or may not be a long way, you end up getting paranoid about whether the driver is going round and round in circles, just to up the fare. My first rickshaw driver didn't help things: I wanted to go to a place called the Airlines Hotel on Madras Bank Road, and he started heading for the airport on Old Madras Road, which would have cost me an extra Rs50 if I hadn't been paying attention.

In the Buff

A delightful sign outside the train station

But surely the biggest shock that awaited me in Bangalore was the availability of beef, or to be more precise, 'buff'. Yes, the cow might be sacred but the buffalo isn't, and perhaps a reason for the near lack of them in the city is that they're available in burgers, pizzas, steaks and stews; it's not that common, but there are restaurants serving buff, and I found myself drawn inexorably towards the smell of burnt bovine like a rat to the lilt of the Pied Piper. I didn't realise how much I missed the taste of beef until I'd tucked into a meal of buff soup and buff pizza at one of the best Euro-Indian restaurants I've seen. Along with this luxury, beer is freely available and is drinkable in pleasant surroundings as opposed to the prisons of Tamil Nadu, and you can find such western icons as Wimpy and KFC dotted around (but no McDonald's, yet). And possibly as a result of this surfeit of gluttony, I noticed that a sizable proportion of Bangalore's middle-aged women were quite fat, a disappointment after the sleek beauty of the rural areas; the younger generation, however, were decked out in hip-hugging 501s and curve-enhancing mini T-shirts, with hardly a saree to be seen. It was an intriguing sight, wandering past a huge queue full of young couples all waiting to see the sexy BMW in Tomorrow Never Dies. (And in fairness, the young men of Bangalore looked smart in a way that I didn't believe Indian men could, with their designer tops and smart pressed trousers; the odd lungi made an appearance, but for the most part the male Bangalorians looked as well turned out as the national cricket team.)

Busy Banglore traffic

I decided to take advantage of the cosmopolitanism of Bangalore by developing ten rolls of film and mailing them home. Even Kodak makes no sense here, though; on the receipt I received for my deposited films was a disclaimer, which said, 'Because days used in colour photographic materials, like other days, may change in time, neither prints nor copies will be replaced or otherwise warranted against any change in colour.' Isn't it sheer poetry? Whatever it means...

I also managed to track down some more excellent music – Sheryl Crow's latest and Radiohead's OK Computer – and as I wandered down the road towards my shabby little hotel room to try them out, I stopped dead in my tracks. Surely that couldn't be the smell of kretek wafting down the street... but there it was, Gudang Garam for sale at the kiosk! If anything, this sums up Bangalore: to become truly stylish, you need American jeans, a German car, a British accent and Indonesian smokes. Thankfully you'll still be an Indian, though.

The Sights of Bangalore

A gum tree in pretty Lalbagh Garden

The sights of Bangalore aren't that numerous, but the ones that are worth a visit are pretty impressive. Government buildings dominate the wide, tree-lined boulevards, with the bright red monstrosity of the High Court and the modern and highly stylish Vidhana Soudha, home to the Secretariat and State Legislature. Above the entrance to the latter is the inscription 'Government work is God's work', which might help to clarify quite why government work involves so much bureaucracy and paperwork; the civil service is truly the home to the Holy Triplicate.

In the south of the city is a botanic garden, probably one of the best in India, and although the grass was brown and the plants wilting from a serious lack of rain, Lalbagh Garden was pretty impressive. The lakes glimmered, the trees cast their shade over the dusty lawns, countless Indians lay prostrate and motionless on the ground, and copious litter skittered down the paths in the afternoon breeze; it was pleasant, despite the people casually throwing Pepsi cans into the undergrowth regardless of the nearby litter bins, and although it didn't buoy my spirits like Kings Park in Perth or the gardens in Singapore, I felt at least that the work of the 18th century botanists who laid it out in the days before the British wasn't entirely wasted.

And on my way back to the shops and shysters of the main shopping area, I came across a delightful little sign on the pavement. 'Urinating, spitting and littering in public places will attract administrative charges,' it said, and I couldn't resist kneeling down to copy these priceless words down. It was only than that I noticed the smell: I must have been standing in a puddle of at least four hours of God's work.

India: Bhavnagar

'Welcome to the city of Bhavnagar,' said the man on the train as he hopped off, picking up his son whom he'd been trying to wake up for the last ten minutes, with little success. I'd changed trains in Ahmedabad, staying long enough only to admire the fast food joint at the station (the first I'd seen since the Wimpy in Bangalore), and had wasted no time in heading even further south. This was a new state, Gujarat, and I didn't want my opinions to be tainted by the industrial black hole of its capital.

Bhavnagar is notable for nothing (at least, as far as the visitor to India is concerned). I was staying there as a base from which to visit the ship-breaking yard of Alang, some 50km to the southeast, but Bhavnagar reminded me not only of the delights of travelling in a rarely visited state in the off-season, but also of the main reason for my enjoyment of India: the people. I have come across wonderfully friendly pockets in India – Hyderabad, Thanjavur, Bijapur et al – but Bhavnagar wins hands down as the friendliest place I have been. English was almost non-existent beyond pidgin greetings, but communication doesn't have to be in tongues: people ran up to me to shake my hand and to try to find out what I was doing here in India, children shouted out, 'ElloElloEllo!' for five minutes after I'd passed, and even the old men squatting on the side of the road smiled back with toothy grins as I greeted them (a rare occurrence: even in the friendliest places the older generation, those who remember the British rule, tend to be too reserved or resentful to smile at foreigners). The man on the train had been the tip of an iceberg of warm generosity.

The Aman Chache crowd, posing for the camera with my bush hat

On the Saturday afternoon that I arrived I decided to meet the locals. The best way to do this is to try to mind your own business, so I found my way to the central park, sat down in the shade of a tree and started reading a book. Sure enough within five minutes I had a crowd of maybe twenty young men goggling at me, gawking at the maps and pictures in my guidebook and listening in uncomprehending awe as I described my trip with hand signs and city names. After half an hour of this entertainment (tiring for me, riveting for them) I wandered over to the other side of the park and as I was about to leave to go for a siesta, I spotted a group of old and middle-aged men under a neem tree, yelling and screaming like school children at recess. I just had to go and look.

They welcomed me into the group with smiles and invitations to sit down: not one of them had any English beyond the incredibly basic, but this didn't matter. The object of their fascination was a game they called Aman Chache¹ which I will describe here in the same way that a North Carolinan might describe chess: after hours of watching I still had no idea of even the most basic rules of the game. But it was fascinating to watch...

Aman Chache (or Chopat)

Mucking about like naughty schoolboys, the Aman Chache players were always acting up

Under the greenery of the neem² was a large square piece of sackcloth, on which was drawn a large plus-sign, each arm of which was divided into three squares across and eight squares along; three of these squares had Xs in them. There were four teams of four men each (it's definitely a game for the boys), each team sitting or squatting along one side of the large sack cloth. Four game pieces were distributed to each team – the four team colours being red, green, black and white – with each piece made out of wood in the shape of a large, very blunt bullet. To complete the set was the shell of half a coconut and six small sea shells of the variety that are roughly oval in shape, with smooth white backs and evil slits in the other side, lined with ridges that under a magnifying glass would remind you of a shark's mouth.

Each person would take it in turn to throw the six shells, which would land jaw-side up, or smooth side up; by counting the number of jaws you would get a number from one to six (so the shells did exactly the same job as a conventional die). There my understanding of the game evaporates.

Some numbers were special, some not so special, but I couldn't discern a pattern. Sometimes pieces were moved, sometimes not, but I couldn't discern a pattern. Sometimes pieces were turned onto their sides, sometimes onto their heads, but I couldn't discern a pattern. Sometimes pieces were taken, sometimes they were added to the board, but I couldn't discern a pattern. And eventually someone would win, but even in that I couldn't discern a pattern. 'This an ancient Indian game,' was how one spectator explained the rules: funnily enough this made everything quite clear.

The universal language of lending someone your bush hat so they can look cool in a photograph

But it wasn't the game so much as the people who were fascinating to me. Sitting and standing round the board was the most assorted collection of Indian men you could ever hope to see. On one corner was a gaunt Muslim with his long chin beard, no moustache and white cap fitted over his short hair; he concentrated hard on the game, seeming serious but ever willing to join in the jokes and laugh along with everyone else. Opposite him was a man with such an incredibly hooked nose it made his moustache look like a furry caterpillar trapped between his upper lip and his nostrils. Just along from him was an evidently well-educated man who analysed the game, provided a running commentary on every move and tactic and, when he threw the shells, twisted his wrist in such a flourish that it didn't really matter whether the throw was good or bad, because it looked so stylish; even taking other pieces was a display, as he smashed the piece taken with the victorious piece, sending the unfortunate one careening off into the dust.

Dotted about were four clowns who spent most of the game throwing stones at each other, pretending to get furious with each other and, on the point of throwing punches, collapsing into huge grins and belly laughs, dragging everyone else with them into their boyish humour. I imagined their conversations were along the lines of:

'You hit me first.'

'Didn't.'

'Did too, he saw it.'

'You're mad, mad as a monkey.'

'Who are you calling a monkey?'

'You, mad man.'

'Oh yeah?'

'Yeah.'

'Well you're just as crazy...'

The others kept nudging me, pointing at them and tapping the sides of their heads. Everyone loved it.

And all the while the men fished out beedis from their top pockets³, filling the air with acrid blue smoke that added a certain mysticism to the event, a ritual only matched by the frequent chai breaks and passing round of the cold water. After four hours I had to eat something, but I would return the next day on my way back from Alang, and I would be beckoned over, made to sit down, plied with chai and made to feel utterly welcome once again. I sent them copies of the pictures I took – which they thrilled to, posing like adult kids – and I hope they give them as much pleasure as they did me.

Elsewhere in Bhavnagar...

It's all smiles as the shells get thrown

Bhavnagar had all the fun of the fair, literally. Dominating the dried-up tank in the centre of town was a large Big Wheel, flanked by lethal looking contraptions designed to fling you around at gravitational forces beyond the healthy. This was an opportunity too good to miss: a real Indian fun fair, totally free of western influence and teeming with cultural niceties to make the rides themselves almost irrelevant. I eagerly paid my Rs2 entry fee and slipped quietly into the bright lights and noise of the dangerously clanking machinery.

It didn't last long. Each ride was Rs5 a go, so I headed straight for the boldest ride of the lot, the Big Wheel. Creaking tremulously it started up with eight of us dotted around the huge wheel – business was not exactly booming at the fair, to be honest – and after an experience supposed to be thrilling but not medically threatening (though with the thought of only Indian engineering maintenance keeping me afloat it sent my heart palpitations higher than is regarded as healthy) I stumbled through the exit gate into the throng.

The naughty schoolboys of Bhavnagar fighting

I was followed by one of the boys off the ride. Latching on to me, he tugged at my arm and said, 'Dollar!' I told him to bugger off. 'Rupees!' he continued, and I told him to bugger off. 'Paise!' he ventured, and when I told him to bugger off for the third time he neatly summed up his command of the English language by sticking the needle in the groove marked 'Dollar! Rupees! Paise!' and following me with his stuck-record mantra cutting through the noise. I tried another ride, a seriously spinning set of two-person cars that ensured the little Indian boy who ended up in my car couldn't avoid being flung into the spleen of the funny white man next to him. He thoroughly enjoyed himself, but I felt pretty damn queasy afterwards and went for a wander round the attractions to clear my head, still accompanied by cries of 'Dollar! Rupees! Paise!'

The fair was small but was obviously a focus for the single young men and women of Bhavnagar: to put it bluntly, it was the Indian equivalent of the pick-up joint. Stunningly crafted costumes adorned beautiful young women as they stuck together in giggling packs, while depressingly out-dated young men in teddy boy haircuts and mundane clothes adored themselves in the vain hope that the women would follow their example. But was it a vain hope? Judging by the way the girls enjoyed this primitive display of male strutting, the course of true love can obviously still run smooth even if one half of the couple has all the charisma of a latter-day Elvis.

The smiles of Bhavnagar, surely the friendliest place in India

When my head had stopped spinning and the money mantra had drifted into the background noise⁴ I started off for home, but on the way I met a very friendly couple of young men on their incredibly cool moped who, after opening the conversation with the somewhat confusing 'You want woman for sex?' and an inquiry into whether I had any alcohol (Gujarat being a dry state), turned out to be as polite and interesting as the rest of Bhavnagar. They offered me a lift on their bike back to my hotel, I acquiesced, and I soon found myself being paraded in front of their friends at the local Hindi tape stall, telling them that I thought Hindi music was the worst noise I'd heard for years and that I'd rather die than buy a tape off them, but thanks anyway. We all laughed, they took me back home and I fell into a deep, contented sleep.

---

¹ I've wondered for ages what on earth this game could be, and I haven't been able to find any references to Aman Chache on the Web, but Nutan Mehta kindly contacted me via my Guestbook with the following information. 'I am from Bhavnagar, residing in the US for the past forty-plus years,' he writes. 'The game you described has another name called "chopat". "Cho" is a conjunctive like "quattro" for "four", and "pat" is "plane" or "area", thus "four-plane". I think the game parcheesi is very close to chopat. The shells are known as cowry shells. I used to collect them as a boy. It's not just a street game but was played in many homes. My grandma was crazy about it.' Thank you so much, Nutan; I really appreciate you getting in touch, and it's helped me track down an entry in Wikipedia on the subject, which explains the rules. That sound you can hear is the penny dropping...

² A fascinating and typically Indian tree, the neem is not just used for shading games of Aman Chache. Its leaves contain a mild poison that kills bacteria (though doesn't harm humans in very small doses), and as a result neem extract has been used as a kind of toothpaste in India for hundreds of years. Smearing neem on your teeth kills the bacteria that cause tooth decay, thus preserving your teeth so you can chew pan and reallybugger up the enamel...

³ The Indian top pocket in the ubiquitous Indian shirt is the equivalent of bank, corner shop, handbag and personal organiser all rolled into one. Beedi packets sit next to rolls of bank notes, mixed up with addresses, tickets, receipts and normally some little sweets to suck on. It makes some men look positively Amazonian with this huge bulge on their left breast, but it's amazing what you can fit in a top pocket. And there's a couple more in the trousers too...

⁴ Which included lots of hissing. Indians get each others' attention by hissing instead of yelling, so every time you walk through a bazaar or a street where people want to talk to you, the air fills with 'Tsss! Tsss!' and you have to quell the western irritation that comes with being treated like a dog rather than a human. It's not rude, though, it's just another cultural difference, but one that takes quite a bit of getting used to.