A few more pictures from India. The first four were taken on Palolem beach, Goa. Fancy a super-cool, super laid-back holiday in a beach hut that looks like it has been made out of packing cases, and where every night is party night? Then Palolem Beach is where you need to be headed. The rest of the pics were taken at various places as I rode southwards through the Western Ghat mountains.




OK. These are prawns?


Looking across to my beach hut.


Ah, yes. The dogs! Feral dogs are everywhere in India. A large number of them live on Palolem Beach. They fight and play and bark and yowl there all night long. I love dogs, but I also like my sleep. If you are a more dedicated party animal than I am, you might not notice them.


Just a common or garden family outing in India.


For hundreds of miles down the western coast the landscape consisted of red sand, red dust and red mud.








This is a common enough sight on Indian roads. In the background is a plantation of rubber trees.






Well, I said I was sloppy about dogs. One night, I went for a midnight stroll round the city of Mysore and came across this mother feeding her litter of pups in the deserted streets.


Every Sunday evening at nightfall, three-quarter of a million lightbulbs ping suddenly into life, illuminating the centre of Mysore and transforming the palace of its resident Maharaja from earthbound edifice into a fairground of glittering... well, er, lightbulbs.

The palace was built by the British at the turn of the last century in return for the Maharaja's political support. A hefty bribe, you might call it. Not that it had any lasting effect. For, like his colonial overlords, the Maharaja is long gone and his palace walks now teem, not with peacocks, British diplomats, royal flunkies and members of the visiting elite, but with thousands of tourists carrying digital cameras and slurping on ice creams. Powers crumble, regimes rise and fall, riches and poverty persist, and the world staggers on.

Lighting the palace puts such a strain on the local power supply that part of the city is plunged into darkness every time someone throws the switch to begin the show.


It's a cliche to say that India is a land of contrasts but cliches get to be cliches because they are true. Those contrasts are nowhere more obvious than in the faces of the people. Some of those faces glow with an unmistakable aura of wealth and wellbeing. Others are darkened and shaded by a life of poverty.

Historically, India has always had a fabulously wealthy 'aristocracy'. More recently it has given birth to a super-confident 'middle class' of up-and-coming businessmen. I met this trio of kids at an India Day/Hindu festival. Affluence and confidence drip from their every pore.


Here is another group I met on the road, not quite so obviously well-to-do but clearly not from a family ground down by a life of toil. The look of calculation on their faces is real. There are a lot of tourists coming through here today and they want to be in the game if there are some major freebies on offer.


By contrast, here are a couple of lads from the tiny village of Sanyasipura which clings like an accident to the side of the main road. Faces like this haunt you all over India.


This small boy posed uncertainly for my camera before melting back into the holiday crowd. He has a particularly European looking face, I thought. A 'gift' of the British Raj, perhaps? In many parts of India you find a complex mix of racial features, European and African among them.


These two blokes live and work all year round on the mountainsides mending roads. Throttle your bike out of any corner up in these hills and you may have to swerve to avoid road-menders like these who squat perilously in the middle of the highway filling the pot holes with carefully broken and graded stones - no warning signs, no barriers, no protection from oncoming traffic, just a common fatalism or belief in the next driver's capacity to miss them.


I happened on this old chap while he was preparing for a funeral. He seemed unperturbed by the circumstances or by my arrival on the scene and was just as curious as anyone else I met to know things about me.

"Hello! What is your good name?" "What is your country?" "Do you like Karnataka/Goa/Kerala? (Never 'India' which seems to be a foreign concept here.)". Accompanied by an ineffably Indian waggle of the head, these are the questions you will get asked everywhere. The old chap wanted to know if I was married and whether I had children. What might you find if you could read behind face like this? He reminded me that my four-week experience of Indian culture was little more than a quick pyrotechnic blur.


And this... is Mr Selveraj, the most charismatic and cheerful conman I have ever had the pleasure of being skinned by. He was not just personally interested in unburdening me of a wholly excessive number of rupees (why would one person want so many?) but used all his skill to make sure I benefitted his fellow 'traders' as well. If I hadn't steeled myself against his charm I would have bought his entire stock of beads, and everything else in town, too.

Just in case I needed to get rid of any additional cash when I got back home, Mr Selveraj gave me his address and advised me that notes of any denomination were quite acceptable.


Indians have a unique way with the English language. An eighteenth-century floweryness and a delight in formal manners combine to produce an unmistakably Indian form of expression: naive and knowing at the same time.

Indian English is as idiosyncratic as the culture. There is no guessing for example what a 'military hotel' might be. It turns out that a 'military hotel' is not any kind of hotel but a non-vegetarian restaurant. The Rapsy is a 'military hotel.' I stopped off, and ordered a chicken dish of some kind which was... interesting. ("Chicken" is a very loosely defined term in Indian cuisine, and should not always be taken to imply that its owner ever possessed feathers.)


Indians are famous for their skill in mathematics.


Down in steamy hot Kerala, palm leaves are the building materials of choice and are not necessarily signs of poverty.


Need a builder's merchant's to pick up a few DIY materials? In this part of the world a European might be forgiven for not recognising one when he saw it.