Monthly Archives: June 1997

On a ‘luxury’ bus somewhere between Udaipur and Jodhpur … We had only just set off from the last service station twenty minutes previously – before pulling in again at an incongruous road junction flanked by cafés.  The bus had been late to arrive, we had spent half an hour at the service station at [...]

Makesh, one of the boys from the School knocked on my door around midday. He was desperate to have something western from me, a T-shirt ideally. I said I couldn’t really spare one.  He loitered so I offered to teach him the rather over complicated card game of cribbage. “That’s western” I thought. I won, [...]

Having waited for Ajit for several hours, because he had promised to return my photos, I decided that I would send squeeze a Fax, having only just realised that, unless Indian post was exceedingly quick, she wouldn’t have had sight nor sound of me since the I left on the 13th. At a price of [...]

I took it easy most of the day doing little more than sitting in a restaurant updating my diary. Ajit had promised to take me to the Monsoon Palace – so when he met me at six and informed me it was too late to catch the sunset at the Palace I was naturally disappointed. [...]

Today I decided to take things easy.  I stayed in bed until twelvish and was finally up and around by one o’clock. Later I would go and check out buses to Pushkar via a travel agent’s as recommended in the guidebook. I decided that now would be a good time to meet the landlord and [...]

I checked in to The Golden Palace Hotel having had a restless night at Shampoo Villas.  Aside from the runny bottom and the traffic noise first thing in the morning, I had been disturbed by the cleaning boy; who insisted on coming in and half-heartedly moving a brush over the floor and then asking for [...]

Hotel Shambhu Villas, Udaipur. I awoke around eleven and decided that there was no way I was going to check out by midday. So I relaxed a little and got ready for a day of sight-seeing and post-office hunting, which as vaguely indicated on my map. After an omelette at the roof garden restaurant around [...]

8am. I awoke to find the train stationery and the people in my booth collecting their things together. “Udaipur?” I asked hopefully – they nodded. I got out of the train and found a bench to sit on to collect my thoughts. It was already noticeably hotter than Bombay.  Task 1: find a hotel. I [...]

1pm, Central Station, Bombay. I had enjoyed the taxi ride to Central Station. Halfway, we had paused at a set of traffic lights and in the queue (not lane) next to us the owner of a privately owned vehicle had got out and was having a heated argument with the driver of the taxi in [...]