Earlier this week I was beginning to be a little worried. Only 4 days after finishing up at work I had a beard, had been strictly sticking to a vegetarian diet and was living on an eco-farm in Shekhawati.

We both knew it was a risk when we left to take a year off work but the speed at which we appeared to have become new age plant worshippers really took us both by surprise...

Please don't be too worried by this revelation, I know how it looks on first glance but to set things straight - the beard happens every holiday, the vegetarian diet was completely forced by the fact that we have been staying (accidentally) at vegetarian households the last few days and the eco-farm happened to be just a nice place to spend a few days while we explored a bit of rural India.

Anyway, what have we been up to this week? Early last saturday we left Delhi on a train to Jaipur. We had only been able to get the top class of seats as we had booked so late - this meant that as we boarded the train each of us was given a... rose! To be frank I would have preferred a hamburger or even, given a nice juicy burger is perhaps the least likely thing you would find in the whole of India, just a bag of peanuts but the powers that be clearly felt we needed a prickly red flower to hold for the 5 hour journey...

On arrival in Jaipur - known as the Pink City due to the houses and walls in the centre of town being coloured with an orangey-pink paint originally done to differentiate the houses of the higher castes from everyone else and now carried on for tradition - we got in a motorised rickshaw to the hotel and began planning the day.

We got in another rickshaw later on and began our tour of the town's many sights - a number of forts, palaces and a huge observatory built hundreds of years ago full of huge structures all designed to track the sun, moon and starts via aligning parts of the structures with the sky. To finish our day of city sightseeing we had the obligatory surprise 'tour' of a textile factory (to be followed, according to our driver, by a tour of the painting factory, gem dealer and his Uncle's carpet shop) so we bought a couple of scarves, made our escape from the shop and told the driver to forget the rest of the factory tours he had (so kindly) lined up for us as we would not be abe to pay him if he kept taking us to these places. This seemed to give the incentive he needed to get us back pronto...

I should stop here and add that Jaipur should really stop calling itself the pink city and go for the 'tout city' title instead. They are everywhere and I can tell you that having the same conversation at leat 25 times each day really starts to get a little wearing. It goes a little like this:

Tout: Hello Mister, where you from?

(Translation - Ha! White boy, do you speak any languages that I do so I can sell you something you really, really don't want)

Us: Scotland.

Tout: Oh...do you speak any English?

(Translation - I have something you need so little you just have to speak English so I can sell it to you. Where's Scotland?)

Us: Just a little (followed by a few made up words in something sounding like a hybrid Chinese Spanish cross)

Tout: Great, Scotland is a nice country. People are really nice, I have many friends from Scotland. How long have you been in India?

(Translation: I'm honestly really, really trustworthy. Otherwise I wouldn't have any Scottish Friends, would I? You look very pale, you must be straight off the plane and that means that you have nooooo ideaaaa how much things are meant to cost.)

Us: Yes it is. We have been in India so long we can't really remember. Eleanor's Mum is from India - that's where she gets the blonde hair - so we come here all the time.

Confused Tout: Oh, long time? OK. See you.

(Translation: Awww, no point in wasting any more time, off to the next willing target - one scarf for 3 times the price!!!)

And so on, many , many times...

The following day we took a car with a driver for the day and made it to the Tiger Fort (nothing, and I mean nothing of interest to report there) and then to the Amber Fort - a huge fort perched on the edge of sheer cliffs just outside of Jaipur where decorated elephants plod up and down the the hill to the fort all day past tourists and monkeys alike while carrying the lazier element up the steep hill to the fort itself where there is still an active temple.

While the Amber Fort was quite an amazing place we were pretty fort-ed out after a couple of days and have to say we didnt really fall in love with Jaipur so decided to move out towards the countryside to escape the cities for a while and made our way to Shekhawati region which we had been told was a more rural area well worth seeing.

This is where the eco-farm comes in. On arriving in Shekhawati we opted to go to this hotel which is on a small farm where the family who own the houses still live. You stay in small round huts made traditionally of mud where the electricity and water is all solar powered and there is an organic farm out the back where they grow all of their own food. Normally. The lack of monsoon this year meant it looked a little um...arid but it was still a nice place for a few days. That said, the whole organic thing does mean absolutely no insect control which meant the rooms had quite a few termites, ants and other crawling things wandering around happily unaware of the existence of man made chemicals. Now, it would really be against the spirit of the place to fumigate the room with a generous portion of DEET. It really would. I'm just saying.

Anyway, for some reason neither of us got any insect bites that night. Odd.

The next day we asked our driver to take us into some of the villages where we visited some Haveli's, large, old and very colourfully decorated houses built around an internal square courtyard to allow the air to circulate the houses and keep them cool. These were built by wealthy businessmen who moved to the larger cities to make their money and in order to compensate their families for their absence - and to show off to all of their neighbours just how successful they were - they became more and more elaborate. Again, very pretty but when you've seen a couple (along with local child who makes himself your unwanted guide and then asks for payment when he's finished making things up about the place) you've probably seen enough.

Back at the huts we asked the owner to give us a cooking lesson and then spent the next morning cooking lunch making all of our own parathas, puri's, chapatis and various vegetarian curries over a couple of hours finishing up with a cup of steaming homemade masala chai before hopping back in the taxi to the desert town of Bikaner...where we were seeking out Camels, Camping and ...ok sorry I won't start on that whole 'C' business again but will update you if and when we survive the desert.