Having left the Shekhawati region we made our way in an old white taxi along to Bikaner, a desert town to the west of Delhi. Here we went straight to 'Vijay's paying guesthouse' to meet the 'Camel man' Vijay himself. Vijay is one of two of the main men when it comes to camels and being right in the middle of the desert we thought we really had to find some desert ships to spend a few days with.

The first night we stayed in the main town and quickly discovered that Vijay's wife Daisy was a great cook and so I asked if she would mind if I sat in the kitchen with her and tried to follow some of her recipies. She happily ran me through some authentic recipies - a lovely, creamy paneer (cheese) curry made with plenty of ghee (butter) and curd (cream) giving it the consitency and taste of a spicy Kurma. Out in the desert the recipies traditionally have much more butter and milk used in place of valuable water which also has the added benefit of keeping the food fresher for longer as the fat acts as a natural preservative...Eleanor loved finding this out. We made some tasty and spicy bindhi (Okra) and a mixed lentil Dhal all swept up with some homemade chapatis. On subsequent nights I was shown a basic chicken curry recipe along with a few aloo masala dishes and some Khadi - a lovely youghurt and onion based sauce which is either mixed into dhal or rice to add some flavour.

The nect day, we went out to the desert in a jeep, arriving in a little village to pick the camels up. Immediately we were led accross to our two camels which were looking pretty chilled, kneeling down having a rest...that was until we were ushered over to scramble on to their backs.

Now, if you have never seen a camel in the flesh they are bloody massive and look a little like the resultant lovechild of a drunken union between horse, giraffe, cow and diplodocus. The moment I hauled myself onto the back of my camel 'Boss' he gave what can only be described as a roar which at the time I thought was the beginning of his one-camel revolution against the vegetarian status of the camel race.

So, a camel stands up by pushing up their back legs first which are somewhere in the region of 1.8m metres long creating a pretty big angle. When these legs are fully straightened they wait a random length of time before jerking up on their front legs. This means that the rider is first thrown so far forwards that they start wondering whether incidents with camels are covered in their insurance policy and then just as they are finding the right angle of leaning-backedness the camel throws them the other way and as a final check for suitable rider material the camel then also starts itching itself by kicking its legs around which means they sway around quite a bit until they are finally happy that the monkey riding them knows exactly who is calling the shots.

Things got, I hesitate to say, smoother from there on in and we spent a great day riding through the desert turning ourselves a lovely shade of shrimp. After quite a few hours we arrived at a small hut and as dusk set in, our camel men cooked dhal and chapatis over a gas stove and made some hot masala chai. We set up a table and ate our food in the pitch black (we did turn on a torch for a few seconds but this resulted in bombardment by all kinds of nasty insecty flying things) and halfway through some local musicians who live in one of the desert villages nearby turned up and played some traditional folk music with drums, an accordian type instrument and the double flute which is ... do I really need to describe that?.. 2 flutes played at once, one acting as a base a little like a reed in a reed instrument and the other for the melody.

We finished up dinner and camped out overnight on top of a hut (sans tent as it was a clear evening) and then made our way back to Bikaner the next day sitting on the camel cart rather than the camel itself.

All sounds very nice? Never, and I mean NEVER attempt to sit down on anything at all the day after having sat on a camel for a prolonged period. I had bruises in places that should not be subjected to such injuries...and another thing...Camels have the same digestive systems as cows and produce just as much methane. Sitting on a camel cart inches behind a well fed camel can make even the most juvenile (me) discover the unthinkable - it is actually possible to stop finding fart noises funny. Well, as funny anyway.

Following the camel trip we felt ready to face some more temples and made our way out of town to the Karni Mata temple in Deshnok.

According to the local hindus, Karni Mata was an incarnation of the goddess Durga and on hearing of the death of her son asked Yama, the god of death, to restore his life. Yama refused initially but in the end, and I am a little hazy as to how, her son was re-incarnated as a rat and all male children decending from Karni Mata's lineage are supposed to be reincarnated as rats also.

This has the upshot that rats rule the temple at Deshnok. They are fed, the temple has special hollowed passageways in the walls to allow the rats to move around easily and locals consider it really lucky to have a rat run over their bare feet. That's correct. Bare feet. Just because there are loads and loads of rats does not change temple ettiquete and you do need to be fully bared in the foot department to go into the temple. There were some exceptions including the American we saw with plastic bags tied all the way up his legs to his knees but I'm not convinced this is really considered very respectful so we had to go for it.

Really nice. I should also add that many followers dip their hands into the bowls of milk provided to the rats and take a little sip themselves and it is also a custom to feed the rats balls of sugar, taking the little treat away from the pampered rodent halfway through and finishing it yourself.

We went home and I had the longest shower I have ever had.

That's nearly the end of our time in India. To finish up we went back to Jaipur for a night and had an excellent meal in a little place hidden up a sidestreet with fresh tandoori chicken and a mutton curry. Mutton in India means goat by the way and for anyone who has never tried it you really should, it is delicious - the consitency of lamb with a more mild flavour a little towards beef. Then we bussed it back to Delhi where we stuffed ourselves with curries and Indian sweets before jumping on a plane bound for Singapore to face a week of planes, buses and more planes on our way to Indonesia for a bit of diving.