It is six days already since we arrived in India and I am sitting in a garden that is lush, green and oh so quiet. Only the twittering of birds for company. A lady in a rose pink sari is sweeping the fallen leaves from the lawn, and beyond this oasis is Pushkar, one of the oldest villages in India, set in a sandy desert and beside a Holy Lake. It was here where Brahma, the Hindu god of creation; dropped a lotus flower and water appeared.

Yesterday we were blessed in a special ceremony by a Hindu priest and anointed with water from the lake which holds the bones of Mahatma and Indira Ghandi and many more worthy souls I am sure.

Then we had threads tied around our wrists and a mark made from red paste and grains of rice smeared on our foreheads. Apparently the Queen and the Beatles had also been there! Such notoriety!

And today we are going on a two hour camel safari. It is here that the biggest and most famous camel fairs in Rajahsthan are held. I might try and pull out one of my camel’s eyelashes for future paint brushes I might make. In days gone by the Sultans of Udaipur (where we have just come from) had painters commissioned to record all their grand feats, rather like photographers nowadays. They would have tiger hunting and elephant fights recorded in minute detail. Also all the various battles were painted (with camel eyelash brushes!) showing hundreds of soldiers, each with an individual expression on their tiny faces, and mountains and blades of grass all minute and perfect. Fascinating to look at. I had a tiny masterpiece of the Taj Mahal painted on my fingernail. John had a tiger’s head. These guys have very good eyesight!

Delhi was mayhem! We ventured out of the Good Times Hotel (!) on the first day and visited the serenely beautiful President’s Palace and government buildings. This palace was once the home of the Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten. I tried to imagine Lady Edwina conducting her love affair with Nehru in one of the 350 rooms. It was all so elegant and such a contrast to what we saw the next day.

Monday morning in Delhi! We took the metro along with about a million others (there are 19 million people in the city), and our guide told us on the way in from the airport to ‘trust no one’ and ‘eat nothing that doesn’t have a skin’, and when we emerged from the station, we were confronted with the wonderful, colourful, noisy, chaotic city. The smells were wonderful, disgusting, delicious and overpowering.

We were on our way to visit the mosque built by Shah Jahan (of Taj Mahal fame) and so we marched through the vibrant chaos of the bustling Chandi Chowk Bazaar along the bathroom/plumbing street, then the wedding invitation street. There were tailors, barbers, chai sellers all busy about their business on the pavements beneath the spaghetti madness of overhead electricity wires. How do they take meter readings? How do they find the right wire if there is a fault?

A one-legged man attached himself to John and me, giving his services as guide through the gold, silver and sari streets for 50p.

We later got a tuc-tuc back to the hotel and got stuck in lunchtime traffic so ended up on a magical mystery tour that took 2 hours and we saw some amazing sights and had some amazing near misses!

The night train journey from Delhi to Udaipur took 12 hours. There were two 3-tier bunks and one 2-tier, so eight people altogether in a compartment. We had six people from the group plus an elderly Seikh couple. I was on the top bunk and slept next to the old man’s turban that he put on the little table next to me! It was pale blue.

I bravely ventured to the squat toilets early on, before the smells got too bad, and horror upon horrors, I was locked in from outside. I have never been so panicked in all of my life. I shook the door, cried ‘Help!’ for about twenty times and NOTHING. I really was freaked out. Finally a man passing by heard the door banging and let me out. When I got back all stressed to the compartment, John and our fellow group friends were sitting chatting, all relaxed and buying chai from the vendor that went up and down all night. Growl!

We arrived in Udaipur just a little shell-shocked and booked into the Tiger Hotel,  and all of us bee lined to the showers and scrubbed with a passion. Later we gobbled up scrambled eggs and omelettes and we were fired up for the new day!

We admired the intricate carvings of the Jagdish Temple – home to a black stone image of Vishnu, but he was out of sight under a checked table cloth, sleeping apparently.  Instead I took a picture of the elephant that was guarding the temple with a very cool guy sitting underneath.

Then it was the tour around the beautiful City Palace built by Maharajah Udai Singh 2 in 1559 (Udai Pur means King Udai). I loved the courtyard enclosed with delicate marble columns and shady trees, and some of the rooms were just groaning with history.

John particularly liked the paintings of brave horses wearing elephant’s trunk masks. These were put on to confuse their opponents’ elephants in combat, as elephants will not charge other elephants (apparently!). These battles were all recorded of course by the battalion of miniaturist painters, using the brushes of squirrels’ hair and camels’ eyelashes.

We sent our laundry off to the dhobi wallahs and just prayed they were not the clothes we saw being washed in the scummy water down by the ghats (stairs leading down to Lake Pichola).

We walked through streets at our peril – tuc-tucs, motor bikes, cows, cow poo, hundreds of stray dogs and all of humanity passed us by.

I did do a cooking class high up on the roof just beside the royal palace, such a lovely background as I stirred my lentils and made the chapatis!

Later we sat on a hotel terrace and sipped Nescafe and gazed at the beautiful palace and the exclusive hotel in the middle of the lake.

There was the equivalent of a Royal Wedding taking place in the Palace. The second richest man in the whole of India’s daughter was getting married. Bollywood stars, Arab Sheiks and all sorts of other la-di-da people were attending so we felt quite the nosy neighbours spying on it all. Such opulence, such razz-a-ma- tazz!

We have seen so many sights, some we can click and record, others we can only save in our mind’s eye. In Ajmer yesterday I saw a funeral procession with a dead body being carried on a wooden stretcher, covered in garlands, her sari and arm visible beneath the rose petals. Further down the street was the crematorium. I saw through the open gates the flames, huge and orange, burning and engulfing the slab, which was all prepared and waiting.

In Delhi the juxtaposition that I think sums up India was in a sight I saw from the tuc-tuc. On the lefthand side of the road was a man waist deep in a pile of rubbish, rummaging for something – anything,  and on the other side was a man wearing a suave tuxedo, his shoes polished like mirrors.

But here we are today, in this serene Pushkar Fort Hotel, set in 10 acres of grass with sprinklers, and a family of geese with their goslings looking very tranquil. It is wonderful to have a respite from the noise and confusion until 4 p.m. when our camel excursion begins.

Tomorrow we leave by the local bus for a three hour journey to the city of Jaipur. God help us on these roads where there seem to be no rules at all – just an urge by every driver to get there faster than anyone else.

Namaste – till next time.