How to get from Thailand to Laos in style

We left our little hotel in Chiang Khong first thing and wandered down the road to Thai immigration where we hopped onto a longboat across the watery brown Mekong to Laos immigration in Huang Xai. A bit of form-filling-in, a small queue and thirty-five dollars later we were officially tourists in our eighteenth new country: probably our easiest and quickest border crossing to date.

Our very own chartered slowboat awaited us upriver and we boarded it using a series of planks of wood balanced between the riverbank and three slowboats. We passed bags and wobbled precariously all the way to the third one, our own, much to the annoyance of the members of the miserable orange truck group we'd met in Goreme who we smugly noticed had been stuffed onto the state boat and were sitting with their knees to their chins amongst their bags and rather a lot of other people. Setting off promptly, we sailed down the Mekong in style: some drinking at the bar, some sleeping, some reading whilst nibbling on sweet yellow bananas and spikey red dragonfruit, and me thoroughly getting into the spirit things by letting my hair tangle further into a wild mess in the wind as stuck my head out the side of the boat and listened to the Indiana Jones soundtrack. In entirely my own world for most of the day (with a break for lunch) I glid through a magic new world of mystery and excitement, our boat cutting through the milk chocolate water that divided the thick green jungle, little huts on stilts poking up amongst the foliage like Ewok villages.

After seven hours of sailing along in a very relaxed manner, fastboats whizzing past us like rockets from time to time, we reached Pak Beng, a tiny village which had somewhat flooded in the monsoon. After forking out a wad of cash to be transported a hundred yards in a longboat across the flooded road to the hotel we settled in and went for a leisurely walk up the road. The little jungle village was clearly in its early days of attempting catering for westerners with the advent of tourist slowboats stopping over for the night: several very tidy-looking hotels sat above little restaurants selling bagels and baguettes for the first hundred yards of the road before it collapsed into wooden and banana-leaf thatched huts lining the vaguely-tarmacked road. Stacks of tiny yellow bananinos were barbequed on hot coals, children chased chickens and a man walked a pig so enormous that its teats that dragged on the road.

The next morning we set off early once more in order to reach Luang Prabang mid-afternoon, the journey punctuated with another divine banquet of rice, coconut soup and bamboo shoots, fresh vegetables and slices of mango alongside a surprise karaoke session during which we all laughed hysterically at the tv whilst an Eastern European pop outfit covered timeless classics such as Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. The poor Laos, having evidently put this on for a treat, couldn't understand for the life of them why we all found it so funny.

We arrived in Luang Prabang mid-afternoon, Elaine hopping up and down with excitement at meeting Chris, her boyfriend, who has joined us for the final section of the journey. The rest of us jumped in a couple of large tuk-tuks to go and find our hotel.

Oh Mai

Currency: Thai Baht
Reading: Anna Karenina
Temperature: Mega hot and ultra-mega humid

We clambered into three sawngthaew (little red tuk tuk-cum-van things – and obviously I have not yet heard anyone call them anything other than 'little red vans' since we've been here) and trundled off to the luxurious Tri Gong Residence, a little whitewashed teak house down a small soi (sidestreet) in the Old City, where Carolyn and I were overwhelmed once again with air-con and a TV. I'd enjoyed roughing it in India but I tell you what, this happy-go-lucky luxury is remarkably easy to slip into (and not want to get back out of: Ella, I hope you're doing my room up in LA). We headed straight back out for food (ok, ok, we did turn the TV on just a little bit), finding the small but busy Somphet market only a few streets away, avoiding the tiny round black barbequed chicken kidney skewers and deep-fried chicken heads and instead taking some stir-fried vegetables with rice for lunch. I cannot, and cannot repeat emphatically enough, just how good it is to have greens again. At present I am virtually vegan.

Chiang Mai is a quiet, clean square of tangled sois bound in by canal-like moats and the ruins of a wall that was built 700 years ago to try and keep out Burmese invaders. Clusters of beautiful golden temples appear here and there (there are around 380 in the province) but we took some time on our second afternoon to travel outside the Old City to visit one of northern Thailand's most sacred temples, Doi Suthep. Having taken a tuk-tuk out of town with with Andre (who we of course had bumped into within about an hour of arrival) and a girl called Mei who was on holiday from Shanghai, we (still marvelling at the sedate and organised lines of traffic) hitched a lift from a passing pick-up. We drove several kilometres up the steep, winding road into the rather wet cloud until we reached the spot that was allegedly chosen by a white elephant adorned with an ancient Buddah relic who wandered to the top of the hill and died there. It was a good workout to climb the steps to the complex but we were rewarded with a beautiful golden temple that shone despite the all-enveloping drizzle, and we wandered around contentedly for a while, watching families lighting waxy yellow candles and offering gifts of flowers at elaborately decorated shrines.

The next day, back in Chiang Mai proper, I took a day-long cooking course with Jen, visiting Somphet market first to pick up the ingredients we required and then spending our first day of real South East Asian monsoon in a beautifully laid out and well-equipped kitchen learning how to make tom yam soup, green papaya salad and sweet mango sticky rice amongst several other dishes – we were absolutely stuffed by the time we got back to the hotel. I am compiling a very long list of kitchen equipment for when I get back to normal life: I miss cooking!

After three nights in Chiang Mai we set off towards the Laos border in a couple of minibuses that Pete had organised. The six hour drive (which still seems like a quick trip to the shops after all our hardcore truck drives in Central Asia) took us past some hot springs where we stopped off to watch local Thais boiling tiny wicker baskets of speckled birds' eggs in the pungent-odoured water. We later stopped for lunch by the White Temple in Chiang Rai, another thing to take a place on my 'most bizarre things I have ever seen' list. Fairly recently constructed, the temple is an ornate, white, Narnia-esque building dripping with tiny mirrored mosiacs that shimmer in the sunlight, and inside we found three enormous buddahs (golden, marble and wood) hovering above a surrealy-lifelike waxwork monk. On the opposite wall a partially completed mural depicted huge, swirling dragons and religious symbols intermingled with mobile phones, space rockets and a tiny Keanu Reeves a la Matrix. Really.

Slightly stunned by the experience we journeyed onwards to Chiang Khong, our base for the night before we crossed the Mekong river to Laos. Our little wooden hotel sat on stilts above the flooded riverbank and we sat on the veranda as the sun set before wandering happily across the road for a traditional Laos barbeque for dinner. A bucket of hot coals placed in a hole in the centre of the table is used to heat a large and conical metal plate on which you cook your own meat; fish, eggs and Asian greens are poached in a little moat of boiling water into which the meat from the fat trickles, noodles are cooked and by the end of it – when you're already full to bursting – you've made your own soup to wash down your meal. Divine is not the word.

About Thai(me) *cough*

To say that arriving in Bangkok was a bit of a shock would be the mildest of understatements. I had literally no preconceptions of the place, having never been particularly interested in visiting South East Asia and thus never thought to research it; besides which it's really only the beaches, full moon parties and Gary Glitter that spring to mind when Thailand or its ever-smiling neighbours are mentioned. Samuel Croft had positively told us all that Bangkok was going to be “more mental than Delhi”, but to me now the two cities are completely incomparable and – sorry, Sam – he was completely wrong.

Bangkok airport is a huge, airy, metal and glass spaceship filled with royal purple signage, palm trees (have I made that up? I'm sure there were palm trees - but then I was incredibly tired) and hundreds and hundreds of tourists. And really, a whole new breed of tourist. Twenty-four hours previously we had been subject to wirey white Westerners banging on about spiritual redemption and yoga bunnies realigning their chakras at every given opportunity but now here, suddenly, only a two-and-a-half hour flight later we were surrounded by partyboys in vest tops that revealed flabby tattooed arms, heavily-sunbedded girls in hotpants with copies of Closer magazine sticking out of their fake D&G handbags, and wealthy-looking families on their way out to a shiny new resort for their summer holiday.

The six of us (Carolyn and I and our Departure Lounge friends: Andre; Simon the Oxford Physicist; a young, bearded Israeli; and a handsome Korean guy in a bandana), looking entirely out of place swathed in our stinking, grubby, flesh-covering clothes, wandered dazedly out into the not-so-humid, very clean and astonishingly sweet-smelling Bangkok air and clambered into a bright pink, shiny, air-conditioned taxi. It was heaven. We drove to the backpacker part of town entirely confused by the silence and organisation that surrounded us: not a honking vehicle within earshot, no cows blocking the road, no small boys selling coconut slices and every last scooter and car staying politely in its lane as we drove smoothly over huge, arching flyovers with views of vast billboards and glinting skyscrapers. Having found somewhere clean and comfortable to stay, Andre, Carolyn and I ate food on the street and collapsed with glee into our beds.

The following day was spent in exploration of the locality: the Khao San road filled with cheap bags and clothes and a few tiny side streets where we drank noodle soup and sat in absolute bliss at the relative hassle-free calmness. Two weeks later I am still trying to get used to the smiles, the friendliness and the distinct lack of being stared at.

On night two, whilst preparing to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics, we tried to get hold of the Odyssey crew in order to rejoin the group as planned. On calling their hotel, however, we were told that they'd stopped by but decided not to stay – and the receptionist had no idea where they'd gone. Due to a very boring incident involving technological difficulties resulting from an email account upgradee I was unable to check my email and we had absolutely no idea to find them. Used to leaving things almost entirely to fate at this point, however, weren't that alarmed, and went off in search of food. Happily, and in hindsight not all that surprisingly, we almost immediately bumped into Maura, Jo, Ann and Michael S: they had chosen a new hotel a stone's throw away from our own. And so the universe slotted back into place.

A day or so later, with bellies full of curry and bags bulging with new clothes (out with the salwar kameez, in with actual shorts and tshirts: my god, I feel human again) we took a boat up the Chao Praya river towards the station in order to climb aboard our overnight train to Chiang Mai. At the station – which is really more like a giant food hall – we at in the canteen, a wonderful little corridor of cheap food where I discovered that the Thais use as many insides as outsides of animals in their food, and vowed to be more careful when ordering from that point onwards. I stashed a small supply of banana cake, dorayaki and fresh pineapple chunks in my bag and we haded for the train.

My word, after four weeks of travelling on Indian railways it was like climbing aboard the Orient Express. Carolyn and I were absolutely astounded. I mean, Pete had forked out for the luxury of an air-conditioned car which was in itself ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIC (Odyssey continues to pay for transport despite the transport no longer being our lovely truck), but the seats were enormous brown leather contraptions that folded out into wide, comfortable sleeping berths – or rather, were folded out for us by the little man that looked after our carriage before being made up with clean white sheets, pillows and blankets. We drew our curtains for bed around ten and I stayed up till the small hours only to enjoy my cosy nest as I continued with Anna Karenina by the yellow light of a small lamp on my bunk.

In the morning we were woken at half eight and presented with our pre-ordered breakfast of eggs and the world's smallest sausage with toast and pineapple jam and after cleaning my teeth in the double sink between the carriages and a leisurely read of a photocopied English broadsheet we pulled very happily into the drizzly northern-Thai town of uChiang Mai.

Slight anti-climax

Our last day in Kolkata started bright and early before checking out of Modern Lodge at 10am. We then had the entire day to entertain ourselves, since our flight was in fact not scheduled to leave until 7am the following morning, and we filled our time with some final wanderings around the city, finding 79 Park Road where my grandfather once lived; watching a little man at the post office wrap up my herbal Tibetan medicine in cardboard and cross-stitch some material over it for safe posting; shopping a little; eating a little; and meeting a lovely South African chap called Andre who was on his way to Thailand too.

At 10 in the evening we found a French boy who also needed to get to the airport and shared a taxi there with him before settling in for a long night in Kolkata airport lobby. Thankfully, security was incredibly tight and noone was allowed in without a ticket so we had the place almost entirely to ourselves until check-in, at which point everything continued to go suspiciously smoothly and we were allowed into the departure lounge, passing the rather aggressive 'No Liquids' signs armed with several bottles of mineral water.

And so it came to pass that, at 0647 on 7th August 2008, precisely three minutes before departure, a lowly airport official was sent to meekly inform us that our Air India Express flight had run out of fuel and was standing casually outside waiting to be filled up. Three hours later the lowly airport official was sent back out to meekly inform us that although we now had fuel we also had a burst nosewheel and no replacement, and that someone was off trying to borrow one from another airline. I mean, really, who doesn't carry a spare tyre? In England, this sort of treatment would probably be responded to with quiet resignation, and any frustration would most likely be pent-up (though displayed through much huffing, arm-folding and leg-crossing) and released in a strongly-worded (and no doubt entirely pointless) letter several weeks later. Not so in India: a very vocal throng of men herded themselves over to the official and would not leave him alone for the best part of our wait, demanding free breakfasts and regular updates and finally issuing a rather severe ultimatum to the poor chap (who, let it be noted to his credit, wasn't even an airline representative).

Thankfully a nose-wheel was eventually scrounged and, though they were still fitting it as we boarded the aircraft, we managed to take off six hours after our scheduled departure. The flight itself was miraculously short and comfortable and with a light lunch and Bollywood flick provided, probably in the hope that we'd all quickly forget the six-hour ordeal at Kolkata airport during which we were tormented by shockingly overpriced drinks and snacks and five other Bangkok flights boarding and leaving bang on time.

The Explorer's Final Thought #2

Kolkata is just how I remembered it, just wetter. For the last four days the air has been thick and wet and hot, the sun occasionally breaking through the heavy grey clouds to make everything even hotter before the heavens finally cave in and Kolkata is drenched in fat warm drops of rain. That's the only time the temperature has really been tolerable and the rest of the time Carolyn and I osmose through the air, hair stuck to our clammy temples and sweat trickling down our backs, fronts, everywhere.

We spent our first evening at the cinema watching The Dark Knight, which I assume is brilliant if (a) you're not 20 minutes late for the start of the film because your watch has gradually been losing time for the past month, (b) the sound quality in the cinema is actually good enough to hear what is going on and (c) the film doesn't break halfway through a scene – although at least it was at the end of a sentence – for an intermission, or stop altogether when the projector breaks down two thirds of the way through the movie. It was worth it just to have piles of Dairy Milk and popcorn on our knees though: the cinema has never been such a treat.

Without a Lonely Planet, and with me having checked out the main sights a few years before (also Carolyn loathes sightseeing and museums: on this point I do not wish to linger) we've otherwise spent our time eating very tasty tandooried meats in bustling local restaurants; wandering New Market chased at a fast walking pace by men with baskets on their heads; and generally enjoying spending the last few days to ourselves at our own pace. Which, admittedly, is pretty much a standstill.

And so here I sit in a small, sweaty internet cafe off Sudder Street (Lou, do you remember the Sky Blue Cafe?!) on the day of our flight to Bangkok. The last month, which has made up a little holiday within a holiday for Carolyn and I, has flown past in a haze of honey pancakes (for Carolyn) and butter chicken masalas (for me). I have scratched nearly forty mosquito bites, waded through floods in Delhi, sat amoungst chanting Tibetan monks at the Dalai Lama's temple in Little Tibet (McLeod Ganj), watched seven films, eaten breakfast whilst inhaling burning dead people and visited my father's birthplace. I've rethought my travel plans at least five times* and am thoroughly overexcited about the final nine weeks of my overlanding trip, however it takes shape.

I've missed my truck buddies dreadfully and can't wait to (somewhat enviously) hear their tales from Nepal and it will be great to be back on the... well, whatever it is I'm getting on, I'm still not sure what's taking us from Bangkok up to Laos, through Vietnam, Cambodia, back through Thailand and down through Malaysia to Singapore. I'm excited about the change of pace, the change of food and not having to shout at men for groping when I'm so modestly dressed I might as well be wearing a burka. Bring on the final part of our odyssey overland through South East Asia.


*but at present am planning to finish the trip in Singapore and then amble slowly back up to Kuala Lumpur before flying to LA to hang out with my nephew and new niece for a few weeks before heading home.

Not vary-nicey. Sorry, that's AWFUL.

Our overnight train trip to Varanasi was considerably better than the journey to Hardwar, possibly because it's considered to be such a dodgy trip for tourists that we were put in a carriage with lots of other white people and some beige-uniformed men with guns who showed us a bit of paper advising us to not take sweets from strangers in case it rendered us unconscious for many hours before waking to find someone had made off with our belongings. Thus we arrived entirely unhassled and fresh as daisies first thing the next morning in one of the holiest places on the continent, attacking the pre-paid taxi rank and subsequent VERY BUMPY RICKSHAW RIDE and general wandering about in the old city trying to find somewhere to stay with great gusto and panache.

We stayed for just one night in Varanasi: I had visited before (albeit ten years ago) and was not overwhelmed with enthusiasm about going back. Certainly every other traveller we'd spoken to had slated it viciously as being full of relentless touts and nuisance-makers. However much to our surprise and distinct benefit we had arrived on a festival for the eclipse so not only were we surrounded by yet another million orange pilgrims but the whole event distracted nearly everybody from bugging white people and we were able to wander around without much hassle. We breakfasted on the roof of our hotel, inhaling the sweet fumes of burning dead people on the burning ghats beneath us as we ate our toast, and then retired to the freshly painted lilac room we had rented for a tiny fee. So freshly painted was it, in fact, that every time we opened the door we got covered in lilac paint. Anyway, after a short nap we ventured down into the orange masses to watch them washing themselves in the milky brown water of the Ganges, a river that has 1.5 million faecal coliform molecules per 100ml: 4,000 times the World Health Organisation’s bathing standard limit.

The following evening we left for Kolkata on the Howrah Mail train along with a selection of very overly-friendly pilgrims (one of whom I found on my bunk as I prepared for bed), but we were safe under the enthusiastic guard of Abdishek, a 22 year old student from Orissa. Having taken it upon himself to protect us with his life he made various arrangements with the guard and police to make sure we would be well looked after after he disembarked at 2am, tucked us into bed and gave us each a 2 rupee note that his grandfather had given him – with 'This was my life's best journey' scrawled on it for us. On departure, Abdishek handed over to a 24 year old sikh boy called Simma who was even more overenthusiastic about meeting us (if that was at all possible) and spent the early morning approach to Kolkata showing Carolyn every single photo on his phone. He also helped us to a taxi on arrival and we made it to Sudder St, the main traveller's enclave in Kolkata, a little tired but entirely in one piece and in time for a much-needed triple-layered toasted chicken sandwich for breakfast.

Moving quickly on...

Chandigarh is a large, sprawling city carved into a grid by wide, clean, tree-lined streets and enough flat, green, enormous roundabouts to make you feel like you're waltzing into town. In the interest of getting the blog up to date (mainly because I feel like it's gone rather downhill and I'd like to fast forward to some more interesting bits) I think I'll leave you in the hands of Wikipedia if you want to read a little about the extraordinary architecture and history of the city, but we stayed for only one very expensive night and left early the next day for Kasauli, the town where my father was born and my grandfather headmastered the Lawrence School in the nearby village of Sanawar.

We spent three very contented days up in Kasauli, a very charming little place so high in the mountains that much of the bus journey lead us through the clouds with wet green trees appearing only feet ahead of us as we wound towards the town. Whilst we were there we got very wet in a lot of rain; visited a beautiful old church which featured some stunning stained glass and some terrible piped bhangra; avoided some very large monkeys and a very angry baboon; and sat in our lovely guest house with bags of steaming vegetable momos and an English language movie channel and relaxed as hard as we could. We also walked the 4km over to Sanawar, the mountains stretching below us dotted with wobbly looking buildings and the lush green steps of the tea plantations. When we reached the Lawrence School, Shoki's friend Assima took us on a very impressive tour, including a visit to India's oldest printing press, housed in the school, where all the school notices are printed up. As we wandered around, gaggles of neatly uniformed children hurried past us with the nervous excitement (that so quickly passes) that bubbles up on the first day of term, every one of them smiling happily and greeting us with a 'good afternoon, madam'.

From Kasauli we took a very brightly decorated bus to Dharampur and the little toy train back down the mountain to Kalka, an incredibly picturesque journey broken by 103 pitch black tunnels in which a lot of whooping and cheering went on. At Kalka we rushed to the ticket hall to buy tickets for Delhi, noticing the train was in just fifteen minutes, and found a queue at least sixty people long. Carolyn strode happily to the front of the line and nonchalantly purchased two unreserved tickets for the Himalayan Queen and we ran to the platform, bought provisions, and scrambled on board to find ourselves an empty side berth.

Six hours later, and with an array of male admirers gazing at Carolyn for most of the trip, we arrived in New Delhi and eventually found Deepak who had been sent to collect us. Two days of air-conditioned bliss at Tim and Odette's - including a wonderful, wonderful dinner at Shoki and Gita's - set us up for our final run across the north of India to Kolkata.

Plans? Flexible.

The next morning we woke early and prepared to move onwards to High Bank, a traveller's enclave a few kilometres walk north - still within Rishikesh - the departure of our swami also signalling the departure of any hope of free yoga and meditation lessons at the ashram. We didn't take any breakfast, hoping for a ten minute trip in a shared taxi, but had failed to take into account that the place continued to be flooded with pilgrims as we discovered that we had indeed arrived at the start of a fifteen day festival on the first of the two busiest days.

And thus not a single taxi would stop for us and we tramped up a very long hill in stifing humidity, the drizzling rain dampening the heavy bags hanging off our every limb. We followed streams of pilgrims, many of whom had walked barefoot for 500 kilometres to reach this auspicious point where the Ganges emerges from the Himalayas. And so we traipsed for a fraction of that until we finally managed to persuade a vikram to cram us in with some pilgrims as the main road was closed and added another 3km onto our walk. We arrived, as ever, sweaty and exhausted at our next destination, but found a room with an exquisite view of the mountains and river and settled in for a good few days in this respite from the orange madness.

We stayed several nights in High Bank, enjoying lassis, cake, CHICKEN (I had been vegetarian for days) and lemon honey tea; rejuvenating massages, hatha yoga and sleep; a cooking lesson with Mama G, a tiny but voracious little lady who produced the most delicious pumpkin curry and taught us to roll chappatis; and the company of our lovely truck buddies who rocked up at precisely the same hotel a few hours after we arrived. We wandered down to the river to watch pilgrims throwing their ornately-tinselled wickerwork into the chocolate milk-like water and head over the Lakshman Jhula bridge to start their walks back home.

Our truck buddies - and Archie - left, not without some difficulty involving a flat battery and consequent traffic jam, the day before we planned to, and after we had checked out and were enjoying a final chicken noodle soup with garlic bread (which quite literally took the form of garlic. On bread) before our bus journey to Shimla, the idea suddenly took us to head in a slightly different direction instead: to Chandigarh, from whence our truck buddies had come. And thus we checked back in - to Mama G's - spent an evening playing cards with some Israeli girls and a coupe from Birmingham, and left early the next morning to catch a series of buses to Chandigarh, a city unlike any other in India.

The future is, yes, orange

Following the relative serenity of the Hardwar ashram we headed an hour south-east-ish by shared taxi to Rishikesh. That of course makes it sound relatively simple, but naturally involved standing at the side of the road for half an hour arguing with a man who wanted to put is in the back of a vikram that already had ten people in and, for that matter, had ten people in who definitely didn't want two white women in there with them. Having sorted this small matter out and also negotiated not paying quite literally ten times the price that they were each paying, we crammed ourselves in the front alongside the driver, his companion, and the driver's wandering hands. Carolyn ended up on my knee pretty quickly and so we bumped along happily to Rishikesh - the world's capital of yoga, thanks to The Beatles - stopping once, only briefly, to allow an Indian Myna to chase a mouse across the road in front of us.

In Rishikesh, we followed the advice of a dark-souled Italian man called Mauritzio who we had met in Hardwar and wandered off to find an ashram in a distinctly non-touristy part of town, and having been turned away from the one he had mentioned we settled in next door. It was simple, clean and not un-friendly, which tend to be the key features of an appropriate place to rest one's head, so we put our bags down and went out to get lost in the tiny winding streets and find somewhere to inhale a quick thali. The evening was spent curiously watching as families gradually appeared to come and meet the ashram's swami, each group of middle-class Indians disappearing into his room to see him with donations of money and sweets. Some time later, his open surgery complete, he marched past us - all deep orange robes, dark grey wet perm and white facepaint - complete with a small entourage including a lady who had had her feet repeatedly kissed by devotees - and was ushered into his great, black, shiny 4x4 and whisked off... probably to his private jet.

We made friends with a lovely bespectacled old pilgrim who was also staying in the ashram and was somewhat warmer towards Carolyn and I. He took us next door to another ashram and introduced us to a swami who stayed at the ashram nextdoor-but-one, the most comical and delightful chap I think I have met on my travels so far. He was entirely ageless, his wrinkly but younthful and toothessly smiley face sprinkled with prickly stubble, his forehead streaked with three white stripes, and this friendly picture framed with a bright orange headscarf tied neatly beneath his chin. Tubby around the middle and slightly stooped as he picked his way with a red umbrella he happily gave us a quick but incredibly detailed tour of his ashram on the banks of the Ganges as the evening brought a light refreshing rain that sadly brought him to the floor when he slipped on the wet ground. He retired very quickly, on that note, to do his evening prayers, but it had been somewhat reassuring to discover a true and gentle religious man having seen the swami of our own ashram saunter off like a celebrity only an hour before.

The future's bright...

It was an entirely different bus journey, the trip to Chakki Bank, not just because we were winding out of the mountains into wet, green paddy fields and tiny settlements of beautifully painted houses, but because their were no reclining seats, it was daylight and the best part of the whole of the state of Himachal appeared to be travelling west with us. It was not entirely comfortable; Carolyn squished up against the window with the monsoon leaking in, and I with a distinctly boney old lady using my breast as a cushion for her razor-sharp shoulder blade. We arrived at Chakki Bank station with only four hours to go till our train and so were able to enjoy the relative cool of the evening as we ate dal and chappatis and batted away mosquitoes (somewhat unsuccessfully) until it turned up about 45 minutes late.

After the hottest, sweatiest, stickiest night of my life we arrived in Hardwar and stepped off the train into a heaving orange mass of pilgrims equipped with wicker baskets and arches decorated with reams of tinsel and ribbons. We had, of course, chosen the busiest weekend in the spiritual high season to turn up, so we stopped for a chai and watched the very orange world go by till it was quiet enough to venture out to find a rickshaw. With far more trouble than it's worth going into we found ourselves a chap with spikey orange hair and a bristly moustache to take us to Moyhal's Ashram on the outskirts of town, a huge white marble institution that was somehow more like a hotel than an ashram but where we found relative calm and quiet and three meals a day included in the price of our room. The yoga teacher had just left so there were no classes to take, but we occupied ourselves happily with reading and writing and creating bedroom playcamps with our mosquito nets.