HAPPY 30th Birthday to Ian XXX We woke up late on my birthday and had a really lazy morning with no sightseeing or planning on the agenda. Bliss. Towards lunch Chris, Emma, Claire and myself headed out in our best Indian togs for a posh lunch at the Sunset terrace at the City Palace. On the way, and before we got drunk we stopped off at a few shops for some heavy bartering for some really cheap 'to be destroyed at Holi' clothes. I bought an extremely tastles...

We all arrived in Udaipur an hour early 6:30am, and caught a taxi with a big sikh guy back to lal ghat. We ended up after a complete hoooha of price changes and room changes all booking into the poonam haveli and all getting food then sleeping for hours. We just pottered and left Ian internetting while we all went off sneakily to organise his present, I (Claire) went and found a little silver man and got a money clip to be made for Ian with a tiger eye stone and...

We caught a "luxury" bus to Jaipur, it was the longest and latest running bus ever, it stopped for chai after 20mins then dinner after another hour, we were stared at the whole way, how threy have the energy for it we dont know. We arrived and were immediately ambushed by autorickshaw wallers, all shouting and trying to work out which hotel we were going to....they get up to 50% commision and then you pay double for your whole stay! anyway we managed to dra...

We caught teh governemnt run sleeper bus to Ajmer near to Pushkar. We had no real faith as no-one seamed to trust the baggage guy and a fight broke out but they were there when we arrived. Unfortunately is was 4am when we arrivd in Ajmer so got a rickshaw straight to pushkar hoping for a the public bus station to be open. We got taxed on the way in by some scumbags but were in no position to argue. We ended up paying for the entire night in a cheap hotel with a r...

we arrived at eth station an hour early and were told to walk down to wrong end of the platform and found ourselves running past 12 sleeper carriages with all our stuff including the huge picnic that Sanjay had packed for us. By teh time we got to our carriage they blew the whistle and the train had pulled away. Ian lept on but I (claire) tried but fell back. Luckily my rucksack stopped me from falling out completely. A guard stood with his arms folded and a big...