Oh, the joy! My twentieth day in India, and the first day in which I've found myself in a truly nice place! Cool breezes! Fresh air! Views in every direction of the dark green, densely forested surrounding hills, with peaks sporting hats of heavy cloud. And these bisected by the famous River Ganges, rushing tidal-like along in this monsoon season, and twisting away into the distance. And peace and quiet, finally, away from honking horns and screeches of brakes! It's wonderful, but also just an incredible relief, like finishing an exam and sitting down to that first pint in the pub after weeks of single-minded, fear-fuelled revision.

Paula, by all accounts, had much better luck prior to my arrival in India, within the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the two that combine to form the southernmost tip of the country. Kerala is possibly known foremost for its luscious green, tropical landscape, and Paula found relaxing, rural settings or peaceful, coastal villages with beaches and sea views to hang out in whilst in Tamil Nadu, as well as the quaint, French café culture of Pondicherry's tree-lined boulevards, which she tells me were far from unpleasant.

Downhill since I arrived, though! And climaxing in the unbelievably unpleasant Taj Ganj district of Agra, with it's mostly desperate or unpleasant local population, suffocating heat, consistently poor quality food, and these aspects alongside the general dirt and decay that sunk lower still than all that we'd seen before (all of which I'll go into greater back-dated detail about at some time in the hopefully not too distant future - yes, Agra warrants further criticism than that!).

That's not to say we've had a terrible time, and that we've disliked everything about India. Far from it. We've met wonderful people, eaten delicious food, and delighted in witnessing or involving ourselves in many of the elements that compose India's unique cultural identity; the head waggling, the nerve-defying openness, the giving of alms, the bureaucracy, the camaraderie, the spirituality. It's just that all of these good experiences have, by our inadvertent doing alone, to be fair, been set against the backdrop of the heat, noise, smell and suffocation of some of central India's large, relentlessly chaotic, faceless cities. We've repeatedly been escaping from one fire and stepping straight into another, with our hotel rooms our only havens from the outside. And unfortunately, these havens have been far from oasis-like, with questionable cleanliness, wafer thin partitions between them and the streets below, and even the welcome cooling air provided by fans subject to frustratingly frequent power cuts.

Which has been difficult, to say the least, and is therefore why it feels so good to be here! And all the more appreciated after a final, real endurance testing journey to get here over the last sixteen hours. Our "AC" sleeper bus standing for air cooled (i.e. by the windows being open-able), not air conditioned, as we'd anticipated, and I don't think I've ever been repeatedly jolted around so much, by such a terrible driver, aided by such abominable roads. In fact, the word "jolted" doesn't do the experience justice. Imagine one mate locking you in a wardrobe on wheels and dragging you along a rocky beach by a length of rope, with another mate occasionally swinging a sledgehammer at it, continuously, but with insufficient pattern to allow for anticipation, and from varying angles. For an entire night. (For ladies, obviously that won't make sense, so just substitute the word "mate" for "evil stranger"). One time, briefly having managed to fall asleep, I was thrown upwards so violently as to get air between my entire body and the bed, and then in the same movement propelled forwards so sharply that I whacked the top of my head loudly on the end partition, to a degree that I can still feel the bruise now. And then after an hour not managing to get a bus at the crowded and unhelpful local bus station to make the final twenty-four kilometres, we paid excessively for an auto-rickshaw instead, which then proceeded to struggle in traffic for two hours, once again in uncomfortable fume-ridden heat, before finally getting us here.

Phew. So I'm in no rush to leave. And hopefully Paula will feel likewise!

Incidentally, India blog updates have been non-existent to date, in part because I've been rendered mentally devoid of energy by the aforementioned heat and various other conditions, but also because the word "wifi" is about as common here as the word "juxtaposition", or indeed the terms "stopping distance" or "toilet paper". I'm surprised, as Facebook, for instance, is as common a verb and noun amongst young people as it is anywhere else in the world, if not more so, and I've read that a huge chunks of the global IT industry have already moved or will be moving here, so India is far from technologically under developed. Maybe, as I've speculated previously in other Asian countries, handheld mobile technology is simply bypassing portable computers with wireless connections. I don't know, and I'm even boring myself now, but anyway, it's difficult to find wifi, via which to upload my musings. OK, excuse making finished.