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Helen and I spent three weeks in India early in 2003. This was Helen's return after 20 years and my first time there.

Firstly, some facts from my atlas to put it all in perspective: India is approximately the size and shape of a human hand (upside down), bounded by a big blue region around its base and a dotted red line along its top. It contains about 1.2 billion people or one fifth of the world's population. I think we met most of them.


Delhi from the roof of an empty market in the Old City.	Jama Masjid, a mosque in Delhi overlooking the Red Fort. See it a few blocks away? Oh, maybe not.

Helen, who was already in India for a conference, met me at Delhi. We spent the first day of our trip wandering around and getting a feel for the place. Talk about culture shock! Delhi was a riot of colours, noises, smells and people, as far removed as it was possible to get from sitting at home in front of a computer all day in Brisbane.

On our first morning we were immediately ripped off by one rickshaw driver but then taken on a wonderful extended tour of the Old City by another. The guy only had one arm but managed to pedal us around for most of the day and negotiate deals on our behalf with such competence that it took us over an hour to realise this fact(!). Then came the deaf and dumb guide at the Jama Masjid, but that's another story...

The traffic was nothing short of chaos. Lanes were ignored as all traffic just pushed in its general direction in one homogenous mass, often using whichever side of the road was most convenient. Every few minutes were cringe-worthy traffic violations that you might see once a month back home. The smog pollution was incredible (see the photos!) and it was interesting that more than half of the vehicles consisted of motorbikes and bicycles. Most bikes were 110cc postie style (Honda Hero was prevalent) with the largest I saw being a couple of 350cc Enfields.


Tracey our Intrepid... I mean Imaginative tour guide.	A woman and her donkeys doing road maintenance.	Helen at the Red Fort, Agra.

We'd signed up for a tour with Imaginative Traveller who had orgainsed an excellent trip of Egypt in 1996. Seven people had booked and paid for the tour, but upon our arrival we found that everyone else had decided to stay home, presumably because of our desitination's proximity to the India/Pakistan border given that the US was just about to bomb Iraq into freedom and happiness, and Britain and Australia (IT's main clientelle) had put up their hands as alternative terrorist targets.

So the tour went on with just us two, and we had our own personal tour guide (Tracey) and driver (Tulsi) for three weeks. Nice! Tracey did a wonderful job of putting up with us, and Tulsi was indispensible. If we thought the city traffic was bad, the highway stretches between main cities were something else again, with the car swerving at 100km/hr to avoid camels, cows, rickshaws etc and ducking into gaps between oncoming trucks. We just shut our eyes. Tulsi did a fantastic job but towards the end of out trip hit another car and then a buffalo crossing the road on the same day. In both cases everyone just kept driving/walking as if nothing had happened. I gather that if we'd hit a cow things could have been different...

We spent most of the time in Rajasthan, a province in North West India mostly composed of desert. The picture of Jaisalmir shows the density of population in the desert towns even in this inhospitable environment.

The architecture in the area was astonishing. The castles were built by Maharajas with unlimited wealth and manpower to withstand invading armies sweeping through over the centuries. Our photos of the buildings did not do justice to their true genius, but you can find many pictures of them elsewhere.


The Red Fort, Delhi. If an old guy outside tells you he's an official guide who can unlock the mysteries of the past for only 100 rupees each, tell him to get stuffed.	Amin the camel boy with King Kong, Mr Raj, and a mystery camel.

A highlight of the trip was a three-day camel safari through the desert, which was superbly organised. Each morning and afternoon we would wander the desert for a couple of hours, then come over a hill to see our next camp laid out waiting for us. The camels were remarkably uncomfortable to ride but it turned out that they walked no faster than us; whenever your ass got sore, it was just a matter of dismounting and walking alongside for a while.

The camels themselves were a scream, generally well behaved but only if they felt like doing what we wanted. We often had to take detours past tasty looking bushes, and if the camel had had enough for the day then that was that. They can be quite intimidating and like to let whoever's behind the reins know who's boss; do anything stupid and they just twist that big shaggy head around and stare as they keep walking.

The camel boy Amin was an interesting character. He tended the camels and did almost all of the manual work for the entire three days, and floored Helen and me by revealing that he was fifteen and had been married for four years - longer than us! He was a shrewd businessman who owned one of the older camels (King Kong) and at the end of the trip paid his last instalment on Mr Raj, the deluxe camel that was his favourite. In a few weeks he planned to race Mr Raj in a desert festival which could earn enough prizemoney to buy more camels. In a few years I expect him to be the camel magnate of Rajasthan.


"Blackface monkey no bite!" The baby that took a liking to Helen.	Discussing Darwin's theory of hereditary baldness with my simian brethren.	Helen with Mr Raj. Check out the long, sensuous eyelashes.

There was an abundance of animals everywhere. Cows, being sacred, walked wherever they bloody well wanted through the streets and ate whatever they bloody well felt like. We were entertained over cocktails one evening watching a hotel bouncer trying to keep a determined goat out of his hotel. We saw many elephants, monkeys, and beautiful half-sized bears, but almost always on leads and being forced to perform for us tourists.


It's like looking in a mirror... This photo kills me.	From the diary of Captain Bolitho, fearless desert explorer: "Day three. We are about to embark into the desert once again for the most perilous leg of the journey, and it will be at least two hours until the next campsite. We can only pray to god that the food, beer and tents are laid out ready upon our arrival."

I especially loved the monkeys which were to be found aplenty at most parks and temples. They came in two varieties: "redface" and "blackface". Helen was earlier told to watch out for the redface monkeys, but that "blackface monkey no bite" which became her catchcry for the trip. However I soon disproved this assertion at Ranakpur temple by giving peanuts to all but the overly dominant king monkey, who grabbed my leg and bit me for this insult. In fact, feeding monkeys turned out to be one of the most dangerous activities of the trip; within seconds of revealing any bag containing food the nearby monkeys would compete to knock it out of your hand, and those little bastards are tough.

One baby monkey took a liking to Helen and kept running up her leg, then launching himself off with a backflip to scamper back to his mother. He got sick of this well before we did.

Tracey thought we were nuts, so to speak, as nobody else on previous trips had seen the monkeys as anything more than a curiosity or an annoyance. When it came to filling out the questionnaire to describe our favourite part of trip she said "Cameron, please don't put 'the monkeys'". What else could I put?

The traditional women's dress in Rajasthan is either a sari or sari-like top with trousers and shawl in nice vibrant colours. Almost everywhere we looked in this dry desert area were beautiful splashes of colour.

The standard way to get around any Indian town is via tuk-tuk or motorised moped. These things are built like tanks and perform like lawnmowers, but are usually there when you need one. Helen and I were riding one in Udaipur when the driver decided to pick up a family going the same way. To our astonishment twelve others squeezed on and off we went, though the tuk-tuk is designed to seat only one driver and two passengers.


A colourful flower seller.	The ubiquitous tuk-tuk. Fifteen of us rode on one of these.

There had not been signficant rainfall there for four years so the area was was even more dry and bare than usual. Isolated patches of greenery stood out a mile off, and were usually irrigated crop fields. Many lakes that we passed were nothing but dry dusty basins, and the locals were praying that the next monsoon would reach them.

Tourism in India has been badly hit by the recent terrorism paranoia. In fact, once we got off the beaten track we would often not see other westerners for days, and even stopping off for a cup of tea in a roadside cafe would be a spectacle that would attract a crowd. From a purely selfish perspective this meant that we were treated like royalty, and often had entire hotels (previous royal palaces) practically to ourselves.

The downside of this attention was that we were the focus of beggars and hawkers wherever we went. The hawkers were especially bad news; smooth, well dressed guys who attached themselves like lampreys and could not be removed without considerable effort. A typical encounter would go like this:

"Sir, hello."
"Hello."
"Sir, your country?"
"Australia."
"Australia! Sydney, Melbourne?"
"Brisbane."
"Brisbane! In Queensland! My brother lives there. Do you like cricket?"
"Yes."
"Steve Waugh, Shane Warne. Matthew Hayden comes from Queensland."
"I didn't know that."
"Steve Waugh was in my shop last week. It is just around this corner..."

We were easy targets but after a few days grew innured to this sort of thing, and learnt to just say "namaste" to those we passed who didn't try to sell us anything, and ignore those who did.


Chillis laid out to dry in strange geometric shapes. Possibly spelling "eat me!" in an alien tongue, the country's first line of defense in case of invasion.	Rajasthan gypsies.

Apart from scamming dumb tourists, the national pasttime appeared to be cricket. Everywhere we went impromptu games were being played in alleys and vacant blocks of land, and most guys we spoke to knew more about the Australian team than we did. This was just before the World Cup was about to commence, and the Indians were understandably proud of their team which included Sachin Tendulkar, the world's greatest batsman of recent times.

Once we were identified as Australian, the question put to us most frequently was: "Who will win the cricket?"


A friendly welcome in Daspan.	Showing the local potter a thing or two. The language of shaped mud is universal.

We spent two days wandering about a little village called Daspan, where we were accompanied by a respected village elder and invited into people's houses and farms to get a feel for country life. This included spending the evening at a local wedding which was a memorable event. A good portion of the village squeezed into the bride's house in traditional clothing and there was a lot of noise, laughter and throwing of flowers during the lengthy ceremony. The bride, reluctant to leave her family, spent the afternoon sobbing in a room upstairs and cried throughout the ceremony, but apparently this is par for the course and they all left for the groom's house after the ceremony.

We had a wonderful time in Daspan although it was the one point during our trip that we got sick. I vomited with dignity on the steps of the local Hindu temple.


One of the countless female road gangs.	Teaching future generations that the women must do all the work.

The schools were something. The couple of lower caste schools we visited consisted of a patch of dirt for the parade ground, surrounded by two or three patches of dirt with thatched rooves for the classroms. Each class of 40-50 kids would sit in the dirt listening to the teacher. The caste system was well and truly evident, with children of the Untouchable caste not even able to afford these basic schools.

At one school we sat in as guests of honour while the kids recited poetry and performed hilarious dance routines for prizes. These were nothing more than a pencil or a sheet of paper for colouring in, but obviously treasured by the kids. Out of about two dozen presentations, two were made to girls.

During our travels we were intrigued by what seemed to be endless groups of women squatting in groups by the sides of the road. These turned out to be road crews(!). In order to address the problem of millions (hundreds of millions) of people without work, the govenment had instituted a scheme in which farming families in remote provinces could earn a trivial wage by manually improving the local roads. This entailed the men sitting around in the shade talking while the women and kids sat on the side of the road digging trenches by hand and carrying the landfill to nearby dumps, all in their wonderful traditional costume.

In the cities the opposite seemed to be true; for any problem a dozen guys would turn up to fix it while another dozen would gather to watch.


A girl doing the weeding in traditional Rajasthan dress.	Stairway up the giant sundial.	An old hand explaining to a youngster why the men sit around talking while the women do all the work.

Udaipur was one of the cultural centres of the area. As well as featuring the famous City Palace and Lake Palace, this was where the Mewar school of miniature painting originated. These miniatures are detailed, being painted with single strands of hair, but at the same time spectacular and epic in scope. Some paintings were several metres in size and contained thousands of exquisitely detailed characters.

We spent one afternoon in Upaipur negotiating the purchase of a Santur (an Indian hammered dulcimer) and one full day in Delhi pursuing a catalogue of the miniature paintings of the City Palace of Udaipur, for which Helen curses me to this day. After spending six fruitless hours scouring the best bookshops in Delhi, we returned in defeat to find the catalogue sitting on the shelves of a store literally a few doors down from the hotel. Karma!


The remarkable observatory at Jaipur. The big pointy thing is the sundial.	The Lake Palace at Udaipur.

Helen was familiar with Jaipur from her conference and insisted that I visit the outdoor observatory. This was really something; dozens of strange monuments handmade from marble, each serving some astrological purpose and allowing the maharaja of the time to plot the course of the stars with unprecedented accuracy. The central feature was a giant sundial several stories high nestled within a massive strip of curved graduated marble. This device gives the time at any time of year to within a few seconds.

Tulsi grew up in this region and at most towns would disappear to visit relatives friends when not driving us somewhere. We would sometimes bump into him and he would be very happy to see "his tourists". He was kind enough to take us out to India's (the world's?) largest cinema in Jaipur to see the latest Bollywood film, which was loud and larger than life, as you'd expect.


The holy lake of Pushkar. It is strictly forbidden to photograph this lake, so unfortunately you'll have to go there to see it.	Holy cow!

The holy city of Pushkar is the stereotypical mystical Indian city, a mecca for mystics, gurus, and only the hippest of backpackers. If you have multiple body piercings, henna tattoos and want to pretend you're Indian, this is the place for you! It was also probably the cleanest, most beautiful and laidback city that we visited. The calm, friendly atmosphere and the absence of beggars and hawkers was a relief.

The lake around which Pushkar is based is said to never run dry, being a single teardrop from the eye of Shiva, although Tracey seemed to think that the pipes which pump water in from nearby mountains might also have something to do with it. She had a superb grasp of the local religions, but being a spiritual, cultural and intellectual void it all went in one of my ears and out the other except for the following snippet: Brahma couldn't wait for his wife to return so grabbed another woman and cleansed her by passing her through a cow's digestive tract in order to marry her.

The Taj Mahal was just breathtaking. The whole building basically consists of a single room containing two coffins, with a surrounding hallway and crypt underneath. Every surface of the building consists of beautifully inlaid marble, and its overall design was brilliantly conceived. It appears to shrink as you walk through the archway leading into its grounds, and conversely it appears to grow much larger as you walk backwards. In addition, the whole momument appears to float in the sky as you approach it through the gardens. The four minarets are tilted outwards by a few degrees to tumble out rather than in should they fall.


Some fancy gravestone named after a 60s rock group. Procol Harem, Jefferson Airplane, Taj Mahal, something like that...	Doing my best "little Aussie battler sees the big wide world" impression.

Well, that's my naive tourist's slant on India. It was a fascinating experience (although hard work at times) and we only scratched the surface of one small region. We look forward to future trips in other parts of India.


A colourful fruiterer.	An ugly crowd developing at the Jaisalmir market.


A temple in the middle of a field.	A rare view of greenery.


Temple of the Winds.	Now there's something you do see everyday.


Jodhpur, the Blue City.	Jaisalmir, the Gold City.