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.

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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.

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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 :D ) 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.

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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 :D

Morning all!

Current time -> 10:12am