Despite its fiery reputation, most of the food I have eaten so far in India has not been particularly spicy.

My first experience of real Indian cuisine was of the Rajasthani food cooked by Mukta and Bunti at Durag Niwas guest house in Jodhpur. What a treat! Meals were generally made up of some sort of gently spiced vegetable curry along with rice and chapatti. One of my favourite meals was made with curried milk curd along with some sort of bean/berry type thing. Sometimes for special occasions there would be sweets too, However I generally found these excessively sweet and oily and could not manage to eat very much of them.

Near the clocktower in Jodhpur is a shop that boasts the best lassis in India. These lassis were definitely very good, but actually I preferred the saffron lassis across the road. However the best lassi I have had so far was from a wee shop in the alleyways near the Ganges in Varanasi. The curd was made in big ceramic vats. This was mixed with just the right amount of sugar and spice and served in a small ceramic pot and topped with a bit of delicious curd crust. Yum!

Although I have spent all of my time in northern India, many of the restaurants here also serve south Indian food. One of my favourites is masala dosa, which is basically like a huge savoury waffle stuffed with potato curry. It comes with a bowl of spicy soup and usually comes with some sort of creamy coconut sauce. Particularly good for breakfast!

Ladakhi food is also different from typical Indian cuisine. It seems to consist mainly of various forms of vegetable noodle soup. The noodles are made fresh from flour and water which is made into a dough and rolled out into shapes. The soup itself is probably quite nice, unfortunately I managed to consume some just before a bout of giardia induced vomiting and somehow couldn't really tolerate it after that.

Yak butter tea is also a dominant feature of Ladakhi cuisine. I had been pre-warned about this tea, but actually it is not as bad as it sounds provided you think of it more as tea flavoured soup rather than fatty salty tea. I can certainly see how it would go down well after a hard day's work in the middle of a cold Ladakhi winter.

The food in Nepal is different again. Dal baht seems to be the main food that is eaten (often 2 or 3 times a day) and was my main form of sustenance while I was trekking. It consists of rice, a reasonably bland lentil soup and often potatoes and some unfamiliar green vegetable. If you are lucky you also get some sort of spicy pickle thing. The good thing about it is the servings are large and usually you can get seconds. Perfect trekking food!

Along with these typical local dishes, some of the more touristy restaurants also do a variety of western food. I tended to avoid these as they often came with an unexpected Indian/Nepali twist. These restaurants also served some more unusual menu items. These included hot coagulate (perhaps this was a miss-spelling of hot chocolate? It did come under the drinks category but I wasn't game enough to try it), French fried (I'm not sure what the French customers thought of this) and the dessert which seems to be popular in Ladakh and Nepal called 'Hello to the Queen'.