Versive

The titles wont be getting better any time soon by the way. Sorry
I'm being a little kinder on your bandwidth today and providing clickable links to many of the photos, and not posting up so many that it takes a week to load each page

Straight into it - have a look, if you have not yet seen, the stunning scenery around Hampi. I particularly liked the boulder in the lower centre with the unaccountable divot in it. God knows what did that - same thing probably that left millions of rounded boulders in gravity-defying positions in the middle of Karnataka, I suppose.
Also, check out the tiny temple on top of the hill near the top right. Apparently it's quite popular - but what do these Gurus expect of their disciples: crampons and a handy knowledge of belay-climbing?:

Three weeks before this shot was taken that mud flat in the middle was a river - this time of year, halfway through the dry season and three months since monsoon - water levels drop rapidly - and dangerously - in many parts of the subcontinent:

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I invite you once more to look at the sheer magnificence of the terrain and scenery in this place; just a little way down from the ghats (steps) and the river crossing is this giant snake of boulders rising from the river and swarming the far bank, the fringes of said bank are lined with luxuriant palms and banana trees, and behind is (yet again) the Virupakshur temple which, despite its millions of appearances in photos of Hampi, still is something rather special to look at.
Beyond that even are the bouldered hills and ancient, tiny temples - what a place to stay, huh? I took this about 50 yards away fom my hut:

One of those roof places I mentioned in the last post about cheap travel here - one place even provided the mosquito nets themselves, and on the roof of the house of the owner was this setup so that she could accomodate even more travellers; 50 rupees a night, one sixth of the cost of a hut, and as long as you don't mind waking up with each sunrise (as you had any kind of choice ) then you're just fine:

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A couple more shots from the same roof, showing the extent of the place where we mostly stayed in Hampi; Goan Corner; which was, quite frankly, rather impressive considering it was all bamboo-thatched rooves but with solid walls. Every hut had woodworm that could probably have dug the channel tunnel a good deal faster than we did - the munching, crunching noise was amazingly loud, but you did get used to it.
Getting used to finding all the fresh sawdust on top of your mozzie net eaxch morning was a bit weird though.
Anyway, this is what some of the place looked like from the roof of the owner's house:

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And this was the actual view from my doorway every morning for a week - it ain't the beach, but it ain't half bad:

This is what these actual huts look like at Goan corner, basic, but neat, and with real actual genuine proper solid walls and everything:

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I found this guy in my room first time I went in there - there is a video of him in her too - he was massive by lizard standards over here, around 10", or 250mm, in length I would guess, most of them are half that so, you can imagine how excited I was to see him on the wall as soon as I moved into my new place! Unfortunately I couldn't resist, as always, trying to have a good look and he scuttled off, dragging his monstrous form over the edge of the wall in seconds - which led me to notice one important thing: these huts, although they have solid brick walls, have no actual filling between walls and roof so mosquitos, beetles, scorpions, lizards and crickets have freer access to your room than you do - you have to undo the padlock to get in, they just climb the wall:

Still, when you get room guests as cool as this guy, I couldn't mind in the slightest

Right, I have a bit of history with this guy: a swallowtail butterfly. Since arriving in Goa in November I have seen hundreds of these buggers and wanted to see what they actually looked like but, unique among the insect world, apparently, these little sods never actually need to land on anything, ever, for the entire course of their lives.
I chased them around - more literally, stood patiently whenever one flew within 50 yards of me - waiting for one to stop for a second for me to admire its glory but no, no, these little shits have a conspiracy against me, and only by waiting with a poised camera by their favourite food bush for lengthy periods of time, plus accidentally walking almost past this one quietly chilling out there, did I finally, finally manage to see one, and get this picture:

Okay, you gotta flip this one around 90 degrees yourself, and it's pretty low-light, and out of focus, but this was the ebst I could do while slightly drunk and swaying in the late evening light, trying to catch the reflection of the mountai in the water of the paddy fields:

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Sunsets. Aren't they nice:

Gotta flip these two, sorry:

And this one too - but isn't that just an amazing picture? It's easy to take good photos with this kind of scenery :

Oh, and the finest temple in Hampi next to, ahem, the finest poo silo in Hampi: in the middle of the main bazaar is this bizarre miniature version of the virupakshur temple in corrugated iron.
It's a giant shit silo for all the cow `leavings` that these sacred creatures bless the town with; quite why they put it in the middle of the main shopping and living area in the whole town is, frankly, the strangest thing in the whole place (and I met some AMERICANS here!! )
Again, you gotta turn this one around yourself with a deft bit of `right-clicking`, but hionestly, it may not be worth the effort:

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With all the crap I've espoused about the mistreatment of women, it is a strange thing to see that one of the billions of bumber stickers ont he back of a leading rickshaw, was this:

This culture I will never quite understand, I'm sure.

Okay, this is just cool: I took a rickshaw ride from Hampi into the nearest city, Hospet, because as usual the one and only ATM Cash Machine in Hampi had run out of money. This happened every single week, and was out of available funds almost half the time.
Why a banking organisation cannot have the foresight to stock up such an important and oft-used cash machine is beyond me; my only conclusion is that there is some backhander deal negotiated with the autorickshaw drivers, who's main hang out of some some 40 or so vehicles is directly opposite the ATM, and who always know exactly when it is out of money (and sometimes they even lie to you saying it's empty when it's not, trying to sway you into a 200 rupee round-trip to Hospet city to get some money out.) I was approached by one driver and told this once, but checked anyway and was able to take out enough cash to keep me going for two weeks, and on emerging was treated to a cheeky grin by the rickshaw driver who had approached me!

Seriously - this is the kind of corruption you'll see if you come here, it's all mild-mannered and in a a way a bit of fun, but all designed to tease just that little bit mmore money from the tourist's wallet.
Anyway I checked and it this time and it actually was out of money, so I went to Hospet in a bone-shaking relic of a rickshaw that actually lost pieces along the way, such was its state of dereliction.
Then again the road was kinda bumpy; we passed an arch each time we went to and from Hospet, and I always missed the chance to get a photo except this time - as we turned the corner at near-lethal speed I leaned out and got this photo, the rickshaw was at such an angle turning the corner, and catching the mirror place perfectly in the bottom corner, made this one of my favourite photos of the trip:

Some nicely-frame rocks and a little shrine-stone, up on the plateau above Goan Corner where all the thin and healthy peiople went climbing

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And I'm not sure if they'll thank me for this, but this in turn is Luisa, and Jon, showing a very difficult balance posture up on the rocks.
Anyway, I look silly 'cause I'm overweight, so they may as well look silly being fit and healthy, so here they are:

And this guy was just an amazing climber:

Okay, as you can tell by the background you have to flip this shot 90-degrees clockwise too, but I had you fooled there for a second didn't I?

Another one to flip around - do it, this is one superb photograph although the scenery, rather than the skill of the photographer is the root cause of this fact:

The shot along the ridge where all the climbers were donig their thing:

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And a few of them doing their thing:

Another great shot from up on the plateau; the fields and the Goan Corner complex which is what you see in the middle did a nice little geometric thing for me, so I took it like this:

Another flipper, these were some rocks right up near the boulders where those other healthy types were throwing themselves about; kinda looked like lions to me, somehow, or at least it reminded me of the Lion King.
A pleasurable absence of Elton John also made the scene even better :

Temple hill again - the one with the rock-climbing disciples struggle mightily to get to see their sacred guru (I suspect that there's actually a road or something going up the back):

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This is a small part of the plateau where most of the boulder climbing took place, viewed from the only rock I was able to climb myself - it practically had a ladder up against it
You can see my very good friend Jon in the corner, giving a sense of scale to this bizarrely patterned rocky expanse:

Jon again, perched on a big-ass rock and with me trying desperately to make it look like he was on the edge of some vast mountain - he was on top of a pretty big boulder, but the effect I wanted to acheive was something akin to a likeness of Edmund Hilary surveying his latest conquered cordillera:

Dunno if it quite worked out...

The plateau in other places (the entrance to it, for example, places that I could get to myself ) was home to these irrational boulders, or, as I believe they are better known `erratic` boulders

That was a poor and rather esoteric attempt at a joke, and seeing as not even dictionary.com or wikipedia.com has a page where I can link in to show you that the term `erratic boulder` is actually a valid phrase, it might not even qualify as a pun, let alone a joke.
That'll teach me to try and be clever, eh? The best wikipedia can do is this by the way - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_erratic
It was probably actually a badly inferred reference from the Discworld book Interesting Times, where the character known as `Teach` (itself, I think, one of Terry Pratchett's myriad brilliances of parody relating to the pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard who gave up an honest life to become the epitome or piracy), who used to be a geography teacher but has turned to the life of a mild-mannered barbarian, analyses a landscape to the mystification of the even more superb character, and far more superb barbarian, Cohen. He mentions that the landscape is not suitable for erratic boulders or artesian wells, an observation on his part essential to the plot of the book, but the terms `erratic boulder` and `artesian wells` just confuse poor old Cohen, who simply likes to chop bits off monsters or evil priests, nick the treasure and the slave girls or the magic sword, and bugger off for a bit to enjoy the proceeds.

Seeing as we are in the middle of a diversion based on my fond memories of this truly excellent book, I'm gonna mention as well that, although Pratchett introduced the character of Cohen in only the second discworld book The Light Fantastic as simply Cohen the Barbarian as a parody of the comic and film character Conan the barbarian, he later manages to extract further brilliance from the same enigmatic character 15 books and 8 years later in Interesting Times, by revealing that he has a first name, Ghengiz, making his parodical exploits of Ghengis Khan in the later story blend seemlessly once more into the finest fictional world ever dreamed up (in this guy's opinion).
If I ever achieve one tenth of the brilliance of Mr. Pratchett I will be a rich, happy, successful and almightily smug bastard until the day I die

Anyway, digressions aside here's them boulders I were tellin' you about:

These larger and less erratic-looking chunks of expatriate magma simply looked nice, and I can't think of any literary diversions so you can just have a look at the pretty pictures instead:

This also looked nice; actually it looked so amazingly green that I was wondering if someone had laced my plain sodas with something a little more exciting, but actually I had to wait a bit for all that

Anyway before there's a world shortage of smilies, here's the picture:

And this is Jon in full-on posing mode - the jammy bastard does actually look a bit like Mick Jagger (in certain lights) and also even the lead singer of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (Anthony Kiedis), at least not when he's taking the piss a bit like he is here, and to cap it all off he actually is the lead singer of a rather good rock/metal band, although I'll leave it up to him to define the actual styles because, quite frankly, I just can't keep up with all the definitions in modern music.
Anyway this is him, looking thinner than I'll ever be, standing on a big-ass rock he had just climbed:

Git

Anyway I clambered about over the ridges and hills in a different direction a day or so later, and found a whole load of great photos to take, which I did, and they're here. Amazing thing this `internet`, isn't it?

And I don't know if I've already gone over a couple of these but these are among the last ones for today, I promise - Lakshmi the tmple elephant having a morning wash down at the bottom of the Ghats in Hampi (on the non-beer side) about 8 in the morning.
Me scraping my arse out of bed, across the river, and getting set up in time to catch the old girl at this sort of time in the morning is something of a miracle in itself, but here she is:

You might remember what I said about the about boats that crossed the river in Hampi, and this one was frankly underloaded and practically deserted; I only count about 14 people and a bicycle on board; but these same craft were the ones taking up to 27 people and a motorbike across the river, so I hope this gives you a sense of the scale of matters:

And a moody and dramatic (I hope) shot of an ancient inscribed tablet in the Virupakshur temple in Hampi central (the one I was too cheap to go into, remember? ) with a lovely exanmple of some ancient Hindi script and a dramatic looking tree bringing up the rear:

And one of the Vittala temple again, with the musical pillars, and a group of Indian women there give you a sense of the vibrancy of the colours that people wear here as a matter of habit, I find both the temple, and the glorious love of colour just about equally pleasing:

Right that's about as much as I can manage, for now.
Tomorrow I'm gonna try and actually leave the hotel and see some sights - I have felt compelled for the past 3 days through a mixture of low-level illness, shame in my actions on the first night I got here (I'll explain, I'll explain..) and a desperate need to catch up on the pictures and sort through the possibly several thousand photographs that I need to get online, and out to you good people, to stay almost totally inside the building, I only went out half a day yesterday, and frankly it's now getting a little bit silly.

In a little change from the recent pattern (whereby I have been demolishing the rods and cones on your beleaguered eyeballs with hundreds of photos) I'm going to try out some administration. I need to do this to keep me as sane as I already am, probably questionable at best anyway, but at least I can still pose myself such questions so I may not have lost the battle yet!

The way I keep track of things and, frankly, think of any kind of halway decent material to put here in the hope that some of it becomes funny somewhere along the line, is by making notes as and when worthwhile thoughts occur to me. This usually happens, as I have mentioned before, in places of extreme awkwardness, so I find myself carrying around for weeks or even months, for example, little scraps of toilet paper with a neat phrase written on it in a shaky pencilled hand that I originally thought up while being violently ill in some ghastly little oubliette of a Goan toilet, or reflections on public behaviour and attitudes in India secretly scribbled on high-quality linen knapkins taken from expensive restaurants, where the theft of such knapkins is almost surely a severe offence, and if they had also read what I'd actually written about them and their countryfolk I could well have been dragged out into the street, and attached via a rapidly shortening length of rope to a handy lampost.

Thus some of my ideas come to me, and thus, I am now going to divest myself of a load of them so that I can feel good about the clearing of mental clutter, refresh my new audience members of some of the aspects if life in India, and so that I can once again actually fit money into my wallet.

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First off, I have some not-very-nice things to say about some of the people of this country. This is not my opinion of many of the people of this country at all, as most of those I have met are warm, thoughtful, dilligently hardworking and polite and generally all-round lovely people. The problem lies in the fact that among all these thousands of pleasant souls, the ones that engender strong reactions tend to be far more memorable, and these stronger reactions have been often been those of repulsion or anger. Even still, I am scratching from notes made 2 months ago and still remember my feelings quite acutely, so, please brace yourself for some negativity to start with...

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I understand that a lot of people here are poor - so unimaginably poor that we cannot even comprehend. `Extremely poor` in the UK means either jobless, houseless and living in shared emergency housing with bad bathrooms and maybe one horrible meal a day, maybe it means being a heroin addict and stealing electrical goods daily for your nightly fix, or maybe it means being totally homeless, where food and shelter are found through only the salvation Army and rooting through dustbins; a lifestyle where the density and integrity of cardboard is an important daily consideration. Not a lot of fun, I'm sure you'll agree. I have however known a couple of homless people in my time, and in England, they often manage to live surprisingly well even though they don't get to change clothes more than once in 50 days, they can almost always eat, one way or the other, and many enjoy some surprising benefits - we had a guy called Gary crash very occasionally on our sofa at out place up in Hull, for example, and he himself was never shirt of at least a pound or two and a little bit of food.
One other character known locally as `The General` was technically insane, but so polite with it that he was almost always seen up and down the city in local people's front gardens or driveways, with a politely but thoroughly battily requested free cup of tea! I think he actually was a serving officer in the Spanish army or something but lost the plot somewhere, yet remained courteously insane enough to get by as a surviving tramp for decades.

In the worst parts of India that I have seen, `extremely poor` means wearing the same clothes for an entire year or more, eating the same things the cows do from rubbish tips, being beaten up and beaten away from every doorway, street and shelter and having to SLEEP on the rubbish piles and, basically, dying from a cocktail of horrific diseases at most one or two years after achieving this unpleasant social status.
This is why I have no sympathy for panhandlers, because at least they can sleep in the street and have obviously the clothes of someone not about to die from Tuberculosis. Quite a LOT of people sleep in the street as it happens, in fact most street traders in most cities do because the temperatures are mild, and the people themselves are extremely hardy, and in the cities I've seen - maybe 15 or 20 of them so far - there must always be several thousand of street-sleepers who actually do okay out by it.

Panhandlers - beggars and harassers and false gurus and swamis - no matter how many people like me ignore them they always receive a little bit of free money every day, even if it is just a rupee or two, and this easily enables them to buy, say a couple of bananas, if they can't scrounge or steal or find some of way of getting that much anyway.
My point being, as shit as it is for them at the worst of times they can still eat food and avoid a painful death, the `extremely poor` with absolutely no way of gaining any money at all, ever, are a lot worse off.

Almost all panhandlers actually do relatively well I imagine; a few rupees from a few people every day for doing nothing more than faking a miserable expression and doing the annoying, hand-to-mouth beggary sign language that has served street people worldwide for centuries isn't all that bad relatively speaking; the ones I feel sorry for are the small traders, with sacks or clothes laden with cheap, tacky goods and fall-apart-within-minutes merchandise, because these guys actually DO need the money, and they are often supporting a small tribe of elderly or infirm relatives, or perhaps some of the many poor deformed souls too crippled to actually walk the streets to beg. There are thousands and thousands of severely crippled people in India, but many are actually deformed for economic purposes - children will, I was once shockingly told, sometimes be selected to have bones broken and set at horrendous angles so they can beg their lives away as one of the more reliable forms of family income.

The others I feel sorry for are the truly able but uneducated, of which there are millions, who are able and willing to work, but simply will never achieve any meaningful employment because the education situation here has been so dire for so many for so long. A great many of these people are women - far more than men - and the rights, treatment and situations of women in India is a topic only recently being even addressed properly.

I say what I feel about the liars and the beggars and the false takers of other people's money to justify to myself the fact that of all the people who have asked me for money in India, I have given some to only 2, both of them sharp street kids who made me laugh with their witty and self-aware banter, and I did that because I know that 99% of the beggars, arm-clutching children who follow you through two or three whole streets pawing at you and grabbing at your clothing, and the often suspiciously mobile `crippled` men who walk around with outstretched hands are false, fake liars, who are making a bad name for their country, and depriving those even worse off than they are from the little they might otherwise get.

Many, though, are just part of a racketeering scheme and really are as in bad condition as they appear, but who will receive nothing of what you give them because the whole begging operation is part of very well-organised crime, and every beggar has a handler who will remove all their takings from them each day and give them maybe their daily rations of drugs, booze or food, possibly a severe beating just to remind them how powerless they are, or dole out to them whatever it is that keeps them in these situations and stops them from running away from it all. It's not a pretty picture, but it justifies the fact that when I was in Margao I refused to give any money, not even any genuinely spare change to possibly the sorriest-looking soul I will ever encounter.

She was a woman of maybe 90, with the worry lines of someone pushing 120 - she stretched out her hands like they all do, and she had no fingers. Not one - at the stump where each should have been was a tiny bony pustule - she was almost certainly suffering from leprosy, and even aside the revulsion at her appearance, the fear of that terrible disease, and the fact that I had it on good authority that the begging in Margao is all racketeered, the reason I felt no sympathy was the look on her face, mouth stretched down at the corners so dramatically that they seemed to reach below her chin on both sides.

Despiteb her obviously terrible condition she still seemed more as if she was faking it completely - mugging like a terrible actor, this learned facade of mournful sorrow was as fake as a the Rebbock trainers you could buy at the entrance to the train station; if she has survived as long as she has, with no fingers, but has remained alive, she has some kind of support or can get plenty of change from other suckers, because this one just wasn't buying it.
This sounds harsh, I know, but I know exactly when someone is acting when they are patently so bad at it, and no matter how much money I could have given her - which would probably have gone straight to a controller anyway - she would be back onto the next person with the same lying look.

It is not that I have no sympathy with someone who clearly has a life that is shit in every way compared to mine (I mean, having lost all your fingers to leprosy, can you even imagine it??) it is that the whole thing was an act and I am disgusted by the way tourists are lied to all over the world and I stick by my belief of ignoring beggars even in the face of such truly horrible sights. In any case, moral and personal issues aside, there would be nothing I could actually do to help her anyway. If you DO want to help the truly poor of India, donate to NGOs and volunteer to help in medical centres, but giving change on the streets only truly puts it into the hands of criminals, cheats and thieves.

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Unfortunately there is a lot of this, and there is no shame in asking for money among a certain class of people - and by class I mean liars, not social classes or Untouchables or lower castes or anyone else in that sense, I disapprove of the caste system here generally speaking like I do of the class system in England - I just mean people who, as their stock in trade, lie to other people in order to take their money.
I think you only see this in India more than in other countries because it has a population of over a billion, and because I follow, more or less, the Lonely Planet guides to cheaper hotels and like to visit museums and other tourist attractions, and the liars know exactly where their deceit is most profitable.

`Babas` are meant to be holy men, gurus or swamis or the like, but in Hampi they approach every westerner on the street, set up a situation in order to pose for photographs all friendliness and smiles, then outright ask you for 200, 300, or even 400 rupees just for the photo; and you are supposed to feel obliged because these are supposed to be `holy` men.
A whole family earns less than that in a week in some places - these `Babas` in Hampi abuse their own religion for huge profits.

Mark (or Ross - I can't remember which) was the guy I met in Goa who did the Rickshaw Run - http://rickshawrun.theadventurists.com/index.php?page=overview - was sat at a bar in Hampi drinking a beer and an unknown man walked in, took a glass from behind the bar, and sat opposite Mark and tapped his beer bottle with the glass. Obviously a bit confused Mark was politely trying to find out what was happening when the man just poured himself a glass from Mark's bottle, drank it all, and tapped the bottle again.
A stranger walking in off the street expected to be able to take a Westerner's drink right out of his hand, as it were, and when Mark got another bottle the man sat there again and tapped the bottle with his glass. Mark walked off with his new bottle and left the bar, followed by low shouts of complaint from the beer thief - this is about as cheeky as I can imagine anyone being short of stealing your wallet and keys, and coming back to ask your address and where you were parked!

There is a catchphrase with local kids all around Goa and Karantaka, it is "schoolpen" and you can be mobbed in places by hoards of them chanting it. It menas, quite literally, that they want a pen, for use at school.
Bullshit. Well, 90% of the time it's bullshit - I bought a few pens after being mobbed a few times, and had them handy for when I walked through a few poor areas in Goa; I got approached by a small tribe, dished out a pen or two, then the cries came back, much, much louder: "Ten rupee!, Ten rupee!" They were just as bad as the beggars - they don't want pens for school at all but have been taught to ask westerners for "schoolpen" and then try to keep up the attack by begging money from them as well.
You can't blame the kids of course, but some of the bastards who teach their children to beg like this from the tender age of 5 should be taken outside and given a thrashing! Of course in some paces, this is the most viable kind of family income and can be excused, if not exactly appreciated, but you just know that much of this is just the start of a long career of lazy idle-handed skullduggery, and kids deserve a better chance than just being taught to take, and take, and take, their entire lives.

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There are a few tourist trap people you see whith baby monkeys on choke-chains who come around the guesthouses, especially in Goa and Hampi. Monkeys are cute, but these are young monkeys, they've had their ears pierced, and they are yanked back on a metal garotte whenever they playfully climb on the tourists their handler has accosted - unless of course the handler gets some money, the monkey keeps getting dragged back and choked. I can't think of a more horrible way to exploit a creature short of making it actually fight.

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Now, bitching and horrible social commentary aside, I've just got some general stray thoughts here that I need to get down on paper, as it were!
One is that, if you wanted to, and could live at a certain level, you could survive as a tourist even in the popular areas - i.e. the ones with the greatest natural scenery - for months and months with only a couple of hundred pounds, enjoying all the great people you meet as fellow travellers, eating and drinking in restaurants every single day, and soaking up some of the most incredible natural scenery the whole time.

The formula is thus:
Cheap guesthouses - wherever you are, no matter how crummy (and I've stayed in some really crummy places ) the owners have somewhere even less desirable for you to sleep. The best trick is sleeping on the building's roof, if they have proper buildings (most places in Goa are elaborate bamboo-thatch-and-pole constructions, even the popular guesthouses which are really just large hut compounds) and picking up a mosquito net and some string. If you have a mosquito net, and enough string, and can get yourself clear of the ground, then you can live and sleep in India almost anywhere outside of the cities.

Eating out - there is a stable Indian meal called a Thali and it is usually enough to fill even fat bastards like me up; within this simple name includes rice, sambar (a thin, spicy veg soup/gravy), dal or dhal (quite thick lentil soup), curd (literally curd; the stuff you get from treating milk somewhere between the milk and yoghurt stages - it's horrible at first but you get used to it), pickle (basically a highly flavoured chilli sauce), a roti or paratha or two (indian breads - basically like thinner naan breads in the UK) and sometimes popadums and some extra vegetables as well - and these Thalis usually cost around 15 to 35 rupees.
Most muilti-cuisine restaurants will charge you 50 rupees MINIMUM for the msot basic of dishes, like chicken fried rice or an Indian veg dish with gravy or a smallish plate of falafel or the simplest and smallest of vegetarian pasta dishes, and most main courses cost about 80 to 250 rupees, everywhere you go, but the Thali still probably costs you just 25 rupees, and is a complete meal.

If you can live on Thalis, and you can survive happily on one a day if you eat in the late afternoon, you can eat in India for practically nothing.

Drinking - in restaurants if you like a hot cuppa, get used to black tea; it costs about 5 or 8 rupees a cup, is better for you than tea with milk and the milk here; being unpasteurised buffalo or goat milk and never refrigerated properly; is always enough to totally fuck up a proper cup of tea anyway (I say this for the benefit of you, Mother, because I know just how dear to your heart a good cup of tea is ), and you can happily plough through 3 or 4 cups for the equivalent of about 25p.
Coffee, also, taken black, is superb - and around Karnataka it is REAL coffee, probably the first real coffee you've had in your life. This is stuff picked and dried within the last week or so somewhere just up the next mountian, with absolutely no chemical treatments, just optional jaggery - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaggery - or chickory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicory - to taste - both also grown in nearby plantations and locally processed probably just a few miles from where you're drinking it. I love Indian coffee, it tastes thinner than anything in the West but it tastes like it actually came from plants, not laboratories!

If you like soft drinks - get used to the genius that is the plain soda. Most of the reason Coke (TM) and Pepsi (TM) and similar products are popular are because they are fizzy and the novelty still just hasn't worn off even after a century and a quarter, and all that sugar basically just rots your teeth away and gives you a brief high and subsequent low, no matter how small and unnoticed you don't actually gain a thing from it.
Plain soda is the carbonated drink of choice for the ultra-budget traveller, and often is so fizzy that parts of your nose start twitching alarmingly as if a sneeze capable of removing a nostril is about to make an appearance (the sensation of which I just love!).
It's also the best cure for indigestion and actually even heartburn short of licensed medicines - if you want to kick-start your guts into getting through that huge roast turkey you just shovelled down your face hole then the best thing to do, besides munch a lump of charcoal, is drink some fizzy water, right?
Exactly.
It usually costs about 8 - 12 rupees, or about 13pence. For a soft drink in a restaurant, you really can't do much better.

Booze - don't drink beer in bars, for Pete's sake; find the place the local alcoholics and winos go for their torporiffic fixes, and buy the cheapest, nastiest rum or brandy they have. Usually a whole big 75cl bottle (yes, they give you that extra 5cl over here we've been missing out on all these years!) will cost you about 100 to 150 rupees in Goa or Hampi or most of Karnataka (outside of the cities) which is the price of 2 beers in the restaurants.
Score?
Score.
Get used to cheap rum and plain sodas too - it'll lighten the load on your wallet, and cure your alcoholism faster than anything else when you realise what that shit you drink actually IS, when you don't lace it with E-numbers and fancy chemical processing.

Transport - of course getting to and fro in your world of cheap Indian sightseeing can be either the most, or least expensive thing that you do.
The trick is really to ride the buses - they go everywhere in India and cost, quite literally, almost nothing. A 200 kilometre journey can cost just 35 rupees - 40pence.
The problem is that, as I shall tell in a soon-forthcoming tale, they are seriously bad for your physical and mental health, and are often even more crammed than the trains and the bumpy roads can actually sperate your vertabrae, such is the reckless speed at which these things are driven.
The best way is the train; cheap class. Sleeper class or, lowest of the low, 2nd class train travel costs only about 4 times as much as the buses, which still means you can get from one end of Karnataka to the other - 900 kilometres or more - for just 550 rupees, about £7.20.

You can't even get from Southampton to fucking Bournemouth for less than 8 quid in the UK, a trip of just 40 kilometers.

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Getting away - actually, I'm stumped on this one myself. I have a bit of a problem at the mom' as I need to get to Laos, but really, really don't want to pay £350 for a couple of flights to do so.
Any suggestions or help really is welcome! I think I may have to get to the Madras (Chennai) on the East coast and get a boat to Burma or something, then train it through 3 countries to achieve my intended rendezvous with Greg in Laos.

Anyway that was one scrap of paper finished with - and another post completed.
There are plenty more to come, believe me....

Current time -> 08:24am

Last night or, rather, this morning since I finally left the lobby computers (and the poor guy who sleeps in the hotel lobby) at 12:30am, I could not sleep. Not for love, money, toffee, nor beans could I sleep, probably not even for unified world peace could I leave the realm of the awakened such was my state of unyielding consciousness.
I made the mistake of ordering several of those vast jugs of tea (which I'm again just starting on) during the day so my caffeine levels may have been somewhere close to the lethal level; I think if you added it all up I drank somewhere around 24 to 28 cups of black tea since waking, something my Mother would be proud of me for. She, too, is a certified Tea Addict, although actually she's just a Tea User, technically, because addicts go to meetings about these sorts of things.

I had also strangely passed out from about 1pm to 5pm as well, which is odd because I did fuck-all of any effort in the morning except wander the streets and a small bit of parkland for maybe only a mile or so before quitting like a pansy in favour of autorickshaws in order to seek out my daily quarry: the most overcrowded, un-tourist-friendly cinema yet created. Needless to say, I shall not be seeing 10,000 BC for a while Is it out in England yet? Am I talking abiur a film people now buy from Amazon and Play.com in my homeland??

Anyway I passed out in the afternoon; perhaps, not incidentally, after reading a few Hemingway short stories. I like the man's stuff in general but I think maybe he took his first name a little too seriously throughout his life, and never got around to writing much of a positive nature. I understand he didn't think it worth much of a laugh in the end and shot himself: the importance, perhaps, of NOT being Earnest.
At half-past midnight I tried in vain to sleep, mosquitoes are allowed free access to the rooms here because I'm too cheap at the moment to stay in a place with mozzie screen on the windows, so they practiced their impressions of WWII Stukkas on me for a bit so I gave up, spent a few angry minutes with strings, fixing points, hazily-understood physics and vast swathes of fabric and erected my mosquito net in my room at last.
The next half-hour thinking happy thoughts about anguished mosquitoes dive-bombing into the permethrin-poisoned layers of my woven bunker still didn't manage to ease me blissfully into sleep, though.

I haven't drunk any booze in two days, and have also eaten only one large meal a day and didn't over-order as I usually would have done, so had left myself without my two normal standbys of passing-out-in-emergencies (i.e. a big bottle of spirits, or enough food to handicap my digestive system into a state of total bodily shutdown) so all I had were my medicines, including my last 2 Valium.

Pharmacists in Kannur were strangely relectant to sell me valium, they actually wanted proper doctor's prescriptions which, although technically a legal requirement everywhere, no-one else seems to give a shit about anywhere else I've been. It's okay to do this in India too - if you're travelling, you really NEED things like Valium because train journeys can last up to 36 hours if you were mad enough to go North to South all at once, and the conditions aboard mean you just don't want to be awake on the bigger trips.

Now don't get me wrong, I love the trains here especially the cheapest 3 classes because that makes them actually cheaper than getting a taxi, I love trips of a few hours or so, but really, anything more than 6 hours in the cheaper classed seats where 4 or more people sit across each other's knees on every bench that was designed for only 2 human bodies, and where every inch of standing room is filled by a body or a bag, is a bit too much to handle and it's better to not be in any way conscious.
Imagine if you will a train carriage, built about a foot narrower than the English type, with literally 220 people or more in it. This is 2nd class train travel in India, and many of those aboard are the panhandlers and beggars; the poorest people who can afford to travel by train in India and may be wearing clothes unwashed for weeks or even months at a time, and these are the people who get CLOSEST to the tourists to ask them all for money.
I'm allowed to have some fucking Valium, methinks.

-

As it happens, my medicines overall are rather precious to me; another reason I couldn't sleep was because I was ill, hence the only one-meal-per-day thing, but I could normally have cured that in a trice and happily passed out had I not been over-caffeinated and under-tired; in my medicine kit I have just about everything.

I have acidity and heartburn tablets enough to cure an actual fire inside a person's body, I have painkillers, tranquilisers, laxatives, constipatives, malaria medication to do an appreciable amount of good in Africa, I have antiseptic creams, mosquito wipes and 70% alcohol (undrinkable) wound-cleansing wipes, and, one of my favourites, a substance of suspiciously oily consistency called Rumbalaya, which is actually an extra-strength form of the muscle-relaxant cream Deep Heat, just pretending to be ayurvedic.

In short, I have everything needed to lick your wounds, ease your itchings, burn your bodily tissues into an ecstatic jelly, numb yourself to all physical sensation, launch counterattacks against all the chilli peppers you can eat, shit yourself, knock yourself out, block your intestinal tract for up to a week, or simply just get really, really high, depending on your needs at the time.
I love me medicines and, piece by piece and part by part, they love me.
But, I only had two damn Valium left.

-

I wandered around my room switching things on and off for a while, and opening the drawers in both the desk and the other weird cabinet thing in my room: I am always slightly disappointed whenever I open a new drawer that there is not a handgun inside, as there would be in any decent televison show or film from the 1980s. Furthermore, furniture in hotels is always like furniture in films from the 1980s so I always expect, hope, to slowly draw back the carpentered tay and find a neat, polished revolver nestling inside, ready for me to draw out at a moment's notice should a bad guy come into the room, or so that I can slowly and ominously remove to go off and perform some wicked and sinister deed.

I considered involving myself in some push-ups and on-the-spot jogging to weaken my body's attempts to keep me alive, then realised it would take more than the feeble number of pushups I could manage to tire me in any appreciable way, and jogging is only for the early morning or late evening at the beach, as far as I'm concerned. With no way of measuring how far you have travelled the exercise, pardon the pun, is pointless.

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Those single meals I've been enjjoying each day have so far all been takeaway pizza from Pizza Hut. Yeah, I'm that much of a slob - but I have my justifiable reasons which I'll tell you in another entry. When Pizza Hut deliver they leave behind an array of condiments both vast and confusing (tomato ketchup, chilli flakes, and italian seasoning? These together are about half of what all pizza is made from. Why not order the item with the right amount of each of these on them in the first place?) yet, in a twist of irony that didn't escape me, they were all the food I had along with a packet of saltine crackers, and I know that every time I stuff myself silly my body wants to shut down and process all the poisons and saturated fats I've thrown in there in a vain bid to save me.
These were all things invented to compliment meals, but together, with a little imagintion and a lot of desperation I made them into a meal themselves, and after consuming 8 packets of ketchup, 5 sachets of chilli flakes, two of italian seasoning and a whole packet of disgustingly over-flavoured saltine crackers I found myself not only unfulfilled and fully awake, but more than slightly disgusted.

I crept downstairs and stole some bottles of water and orange juice - every budget hotel here in India has the staff sleep in the lobby, and almost always the lobby is where all the hotel's refreshments are kept, often in a locked fridge or two, but in this one, a trustingly-open display stand and a fridge actually incapable of being padlocked. The fools.
Hotels like this simply don't reckon on people as sneaky as me; I can walk incredibly lightly when I need to (despite still weighing well over 100Kg) and had put on thick hiking socks to soften my footfalls yet further. Sneakier yet, before leaving England I made sure I had torches with varying levels of brightness and even of colours unlikely to penetrate the eyelids of wary sleeping guards; I found my way in and out of the lobby using an extra dim blue-bulbed light (green is the most visible colour to human eyes, then red and white, and lastly blue. Look it up; trust me, I'm a sneaky fucker ) and slunk off with my free goods.
Look, I may tell them about it in the morning, but honestly, if they're too cheap to put mosquito screens on the windows making every guest lose precious bodily plasma every night then a couple of errant orange juices and water bottles are quite an acceptable compensation, in my mind.

-

Still, none of this was actually any good, and in the end I had to bite the bullet around 2:39 in the morning (not that I was counting ) and necked my last two precious Valium tablets, 20mgs of peace and quiet that might just let me rest my bones.
I knew I had to be up and active at about 7:30am so this, frankly, was a stupid bloody idea and I should have had one of the things at half-past midnight and just set my watch alarm, but hindsight is only good for the philosophical and the smug, and I'm not feeling either this morning.

The really great thing about the Valium, of course, was that once taken it I knew the time constraints weren't practical for my purposes so I ended up taking them not to sleep, but because it's actually really rather nice, is Valium, and it meant I could sit and read outside of my mosquito net (which never raises above the bed properly and always scrapes you annoyingly at both ends) and not give a shit about the frequent aerial mosquito assaults launched against me, because after twenty minutes I was over the irritation mountains and in the happy valley of contentment, and I spent the next couple of hours reading some superb books of humour and amusing myself with my medicine collection; adding a few normal strength painkillers to my stomach to make sure I really wasn't even noticing the mosquitoes, smearing soothing creams on my thumb wound where, in Madikeri, I had recently sliced a large part of it almost entirely off while out in the forest; before you panic as you read this, Mother dearest, it's really okay now thanks mostly to a stellar chap called Stefan who I was trekking with who, having served many years in the German army, knew what he was dealing with straight away he sorted it out and bandaged me up so well that it's almost healed already, only a few weeks later; and playing with that most favourite of ointments and creams: the Rumbalaya.

Has anyone ever else got the Deep Heat out of the medicine cupboard at home when you hadn't actually pulled a muscle, and just experimented rubbing it over your limbs? It is a most satisfying experience and I recommend that if you have any in your house, that you go get some right now and spread it out over your shoulders. Give it a minute, wait for the soothing burn, and.... ahhhhhhhh. Doesn't that feel great?
We've all got tension in our shoulders, unless we've actually acheived enlightenment and are sitting smugly somewhere under a lotus tree, so this is the best thing you can get next to a massage without a) having to leave the house, b) worry about whether the masseuse wants you naked or not (you can never tell, it's a bit of a minefield), and c) have to pay more than about £4.50 for the experience.

I sat reading Bill Bryson's book about England, Notes From A Small Island, and the superb Bill Cosby volume called Time Flies, whch really is an excellent book. Bill Cosby is one funny, funny man, and even without the influence of Valium I found myself howling with laughter reading it. After a while I turned over happily to note that the tie was 5:15 in the ay-em already and dosed up another bodypart (tops of the thighs, always a little bit knackered, felt fantastic) with my trusty Rumbalaya and settled back for some more highly enjoyable, lightly-drugged reading pleasure.

I drifted off somewhere about half past six (I heard the Muezzin calls at 6am so I made it well past that), ridiculously close to my target objective of sauntering down to the lobby at 7:00am to order an urn of tea and fire up the computers, and my emergency body clock only kicked in in time to wake me for 8:22 so, in fear of having already lost one of the only two internet computers in the lobby to some other early-rising bastard, and still quite heavily drugged by valium induced sleep clearly awoken from the deep sleep phase, I fell down the stairs, thanked tha Dark Lord that one of the computers was free, ordered an even larger than usual jug of black tea and began writing this little account

I kept notes of all the times, and a few choice phrases that had occured to me during the Valium'ed phase throughout the night, but, due to my silly timing and inability to forward plan, this morning you are not seeing any more glorious photos of Hampi but are instead reading the dribble-laced account of one man who simply couldn't get to sleep

Morning all!

Current time -> 10:12am