Sitting in this beautiful house in Goa, with the birdsong and the frangipani trees outside, the last two weeks feel like a dream away. I have just washed out dresses and tops that I wore in Pushkar and Calcutta and on the night trains, all the dirt of India washed away, and now the laundry smells as fresh as Ariel!

Back in Pushkar, the camel safari through the desert started off very sedately and picturesque.

We passed fields full of rows and rows of roses, all cut back and just starting their spring growth; amazing to see such cultivation of flowers for leis and garlands amidst such sandy soil. John’s camel was definitely gay. It had a model girl’s walk, placing each fat foot delicately in front of the other. My camel was the best behaved and so gentle, so much so that my camel wallah spent the whole time yelling on his phone. You would think he was making vital decisions with his stockbroker. Meanwhile I was left alone lurching along, while everyone else had their camel wallah holding their ropes.

BUT disaster struck. As the camels came to rest and we all had to get off, Susan’s foot had not been in the stirrup and as the camel knelt down she careered off its back and fell heavily on the side of her face and her glasses cut into her brow. She was unconscious for a few minutes and there was a lot of blood. But help was at hand… the camel wallahs just got out a lighter, burnt up a piece of old cloth from under a saddle, and stuffed the black ash into the wound. Hey presto, the bleeding was staunched.

Susan lay on the ground until she recovered a bit, and then they put her on a wagon and she was taken back to the hotel, drawn by a camel with a very frothy mouth and a horrible engorged tongue.

We were told that it was very horny and needed to mate – apparently this frothy mouth is very attractive to female camels! I have learnt so much. In an emergency if you can’t find any material to burn, you can always stuff the wound with turmeric… failing all that, I suppose a plaster would do!

John’s camel looked quite bored and couldn’t stop yawning.

When it was time to remount, we were all a little apprehensive about getting up there again. Susan was lucky she was quite near the ground when she fell off. Any higher and it would certainly have been a few broken bones. I wonder what the native cure for that would have been!

That evening while Susan was getting five stitches put in at the local clinic, the rest of us were hurled away to a private house where the hostess had offered to cook us a homely meal. We sat in two rows on her roof, with a tin plate on our laps. Her husband came round and spooned out curried cauliflower, cabbage, dahl, pickles, rice, chapattis, and it was absolutely delicious. For an after dinner chat, our guide Nari told us about his religion. We had been quite involved with the Hindu faith up till then, so it was quite a treat to be told about the Parsees or Zoroastrians. They are quite a small group, but very select and very successful in business. I think they see themselves as being quite an elite sect in India. They don’t encourage incomers, or approve of mixed marriages. But the most interesting thing about them is that in death they don’t like to pollute the world in any way, they prefer to be devoured and so become part of the life cycle.

In Mumbai there are tall chimney- like structures, rather like wells inside. They are called the Walls of Silence. Into these go naked dead Zoroastrians and they await the vultures to come and dispose of them. However in recent years, farmers have been using diclophenac  to treat their cows, and also humans have been using it too. It stays in the system for years. Well, that’s all very well, but it attacks the vultures’ kidneys and the birds have been dying.

This is catastrophic for the natural disposal of the Parsees. They are lying in the wells, creating a smell and only the crows and rats and possibly the black kites are eating them, not as efficiently as the vultures. We went back to rest. It had been quite a dramatic day.

The bus ride to Jaipur was dry and dusty. India sprawled around us with its shacks, small businesses, potholes and lorries, all making a cacophony of noise. On the back of trucks in large childish capitals is painted ‘BLOW HORN’. We entered the pink city (favourite colour of the god Vishnu) and pulled into our next hotel. Oh my, it was lovely.

A former palace, painted intricately throughout, hung with dead leopards’ heads, and an array of guns and stuffed furniture from an age of past glory. Pictures of Her Majesty and Philip climbing the stairs, and Jackie Onassis and Nehru waving from their respective  cars on the drive, adorned the walls. John and I duly snapped ourselves as a memento.

We were taken to the City Palace and saw portraits of the great rajas that once ruled.

Some were fat and adorned with every jewel from their jewel box, others lay back on silken cushions, but it was Raja Jai Singh that I liked. He was aesthetic in his portrait. Plain, unadorned, modest, and yet he was the most proactive of the rajas. He was unique in the way he devoted his life to the study of science, and in the wilds of Rajasthan he was a citizen of the world of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. He built the most amazing observatory in the middle of Jaipur, all in concrete.

He had made instruments so precise and accurate for recording time and seasons and star constellations.  As he said he wanted to create instruments ‘for measuring the harmony of the heavens’. We strolled about amidst the various tours and tour guides, listening to the Japanese and French and trying to keep up with our guy. In truth I wish I had worn a hat, as my brains were being broiled in the sun. Later at the palace I was quite flattered when a guard told me I had nice eyes. I admired his uniform, so we decided to have our photograph taken together. Such a happy couple! Then I saw some more guards, and thought I might just be friends with them as well!

Those rajas are something else though. Apart from my hero Jai Singh, there was the maharaja who had an obsession with toy trains… he had a 75m solid silver track running from the kitchen to the royal dining room.  Food was brought along to the tables on the train.  On one occasion there was a power cut and the trains went berserk, spilling food all over the guest of honour, the viceroy!

Another maharajah was devoted to his dog, and arranged a royal marriage for his pet bitch. Seven hundred guests were invited from all over India (the Viceroy declined) and the Princess Pooch sat radiantly dripping in pearls and rubies beside her husband ‘Bobby’ who was covered in the most expensive Mysore silk.

So many funny tales, I could go on forever, but I won’t. Instead we rested up and got up at dawn and made our way to the Amber Fort by tuk tuk.

Poor elephants are used to take tourists up and down all day long, some are blind, some are lame, and all are bored out of their minds.

Nari, who is a huge animal welfare person and works with tigers and snakes, hates this cruelty so we all went up by electric jeeps, and spared the beasts. For the first time this holiday I had tummy cramps, and felt a bit sick. Just as the local guide (not Nari) was showing us where the Kama Sutra was painted as a frieze around the ceiling of one of the rooms, I started retching into a sick bag that John magically produced. He is so resourceful! Anyway I recovered and all was well. Amazingly with all the dahl and curry and what not neither of us have been sick. I find a couple of fresh lime sodas do the trick.

We left Jaipur by train early in the morning, passing people lying wrapped up in bits of cloth in rows on the floor of the station. The whole place looked like a pavement hotel. As we chugged through villages awakening to the dawn we were hailed with a ‘twenty-one-bum salute’ (as one writer described it) as people squat to do their ablutions at the side of the track. It’s as if Indians, living in a country too crowded for privacy, have developed the knack of just not seeing or caring. As we trundle through villages that look as though they have been just recently bombed, we see concrete homes with roofs of rubble and twisted metal, plastic is piled up on earth huts, and the streets of sandy soil are covered in rubbish. Battered buffaloes, pigs, goats and mangy monkeys graze on the waste.

Yet there are women in bright saris, shopping, sweeping dust clouds about and carrying huge loads of produce on their heads. Children play cricket and fly kites. Men are mostly drinking cups of chai and resting on their haunches.

We arrive in Agra, the home of The Taj Mahal, but we are scheduled to see it at dawn the next day, so first we are frogmarched on to another bus and taken out to Fatehpur Sikri.

This is the site of Akbar the Great’s deserted citadel. Now here was a guy with understanding. He built his fort and wanted to unite all the religions so that there would be peace and tolerance. So,  practising what he preached, he married a Turkish Muslim, and built the most beautiful palace (all within the fort) for her with inlays of pomegranates on the walls.

He then married a Christian Catholic lady from Goa, and finally he married a Hindu princess from the Agra Fort, and in case he felt neglected if any of them had a headache, he had a harem of six hundred beauties.

I loved his games, he had a checker board made in a courtyard, and his dancing girls were the live pieces. They had to perform for him on their squares, in between moves.  Another game was ‘hide and seek’ in the harem room. I actually thought it was a bit unfair as there were no niches or recesses for the girls to hide. Hmmm.  ‘A cunning plan!’ as Boldrick might say!

His own bed was fifteen foot square, and was raised about ten feet above the ground.  It had once been adorned with gold, and underneath a fire was lit in winter.

Back in our lowly, not very nice hotel room, we got up at 4.30 a.m.  in order to see the Taj Mahal at dawn. Here Shah Jahan (the grandson of the hide and seek player Akbar and his Hindu bride) built his temple for his wife.

We did the Princess Diana thing,

walked about, marvelled that it could be so beautiful (in spite of having seeing it in so many pictures and postcards), and saw the sun glimmer and sparkle on the white marble. It was truly beautiful. Later in the afternoon we strolled around the gardens across from the river, also designed by Shah Jahan, and as I chattered away to John, sitting on an old stone wall, I caught sight of the Taj just beside us… it was so unreal.