We are now in Aurangabad, a dirty, dusty city about 350 km east of Mumbai. The reason we are here is to visit the caves of nearby Ellora and Ajanta. We hired a rickshaw yesterday to see Ellora and some of the surrounding sites. First we went to Daulatabad Fort, and then visited the tomb of Aurangzeb, a Mughal Emperor. It was quite strange as it was a very nondescript, simple place. A blind guy rattled off a 'guided tour' at the speed of light, I think we would have understood more if he'd spoken in Hindi! We then went to the Ellora caves, very interesting, lots of caves cut into the hillside, all carved out of sheer rock. There was one massive temple which looked amazing. Later on we went to a mausoleum called Bibi-qi-maqbara, expecting a simple temple, and found the most bizarre thing: the Taj Mahal! It's a replica, about a third smaller and a lot tattier than the real one but still very majestic. Aurangzeb (whose tomb we went to) built it for his wife, just as his father built the Taj Mahal for his wife.

We arrived in Mumbai on a flight from Goa on Friday afternoon. It was great to be back in the city again after Goa. We thought that Mumbai would be the kind of place we'd love and we were right, it's great. Still very noisy and dirty with people sleeping everywhere though! We didn't have much time to explore before going to Aurangabad, but we covered quite a lot of ground.

The architecture is great, a lot of gothic buildings, skycrapers jutting into the sky on every street, lots of tree lined wide roads thronging with busy prosperous looking Mumbaikers, the occasional tourist and the ubiquitous street hawkers. These vendors line every walkway, selling every kind of useless tat you can imagine, plus food, clothes, books, electronics etc. As we walked down one street, a message must have been passed between the hawkers and as quick as a flash everyone threw their wares into blankets or picked up their stalls and ran! We presumed the police must be on their way, of course these people are here every day illegally and so clearly most pay baksheesh (bribes) to the police. Perhaps some had missed their payments! Bribery is the rule, not the exception, in India. It occurs all the time for Indians, but the police are worse than most. Most are corrupt and whereas in England the presence of a policeman would be reassuring to a tourist, in India we always feel uncomfortable and uneasy with them around. I'm sure there are some good policemen around, but not many!

Anyway, after a minute or two of panicked flight, the call went out that it had been a false alarm, and the revealed vendors came scurrying back. You can't blame them for running, if caught they would have all their stock confiscated and have to pay big bribes to stay out of prison.

Out hotel for the night sounded promising - Hotel City Palace...Well it was certainly in the city! One out of 3 isn't bad! Our room was a box, 6ft square, no windows, no bathroom for Rs 900 (a fortune, more than twice our far nicer rom in Palolem). But it did us for the night. We dumped our bags and went for a walk, and feasted on our first McDonalds in two months (lots of items!). We walked back to our hotel eating an ice cream, being trailed by the most persistent beggas we have ever come across. A boy of about 10, holding a baby, stuck to us for 10 minutes yanking on our clothes, pulling on our limbs, and doing whatever else he could think of! (Didn't have a broadsheet handy!) We made it clear he wasn't getting anything but it still took our security guard to chase him off.

We caught the 16.35 from the magnificent CST train station. We sat next to a lovely couple who were originally from Punjab, but had lived in the USA for 30 years and were here on holiday. As most Indians do on train journeys they had brought a big picnic, and he insisted on sharing it with us, despite our polite English insistence that we were ok (I was hungry!) We ate chapattis filled with some kind of egg and chillies - delicious!

Much later, we rolled into Aurangabad to find there were no retiting rooms available (like very cheap hotel rooms at a station). We weren't allowed outside because, "It's not safe, there's an emergency! Bad people are around, they have been chopping armns and legs off!" 'Crikey' I thought, 'that's not good'. There was no space anywhere on the floors as all the homeless people were sleeping everywhere. We were shown to the upper class waiting room by a helpful guy and told to spend the night there. There were loads of Indians sleeping on the floor in here too! As we sat on the hard metal chairs, I wondered how we would get throught the next few hours.

After a while of pondering this thought, I decided to try again, and so followed a conversation with the enquiries clerk that went something like this:

R: Is it possible to get a taxi?

Man: You want four chappatis?

R: No no, a taxi to a hotel?

Man: Ahh, you want aeroplane!

R: (Nervous laughter) Are there any hotels near here?

Man: (Sighing and shaking head to colleague) Sorry sir, no bananas sir.

Eventually I got through to him and settled on a compromise of having the manager's office for the night. It even had a sofa amd we only had to share it with one rat, which I didn't dare tell Katie about! As we didn't know what the situation was I decided to stay awake. Katie somehow managed to get a couple of hours sleep. At six, the helpful man from earlier arrived to escort us to a hotel nearby. It turned out that the emergency was a curfew, and the poor chap who I imagined having his limbs chopped off was just a statue! But the desecration of the statue (of DR. Ambedkar) had enraged the Dalits (lower caste people) and there had been lots of riots across the state, trains set on fire etc, so the police had to impose the curfew. We were fortunate in that the previous two days the town was under all day curfews, and it was only lifted as we left the station. Previously even the hotels were locked up and closed, but such is India.

Today we went to another set of caves in Ajanta, these were earlier than Ellora and all Buddhist. They are amazingly well preserved as the had been hidden by forest when the Muslims destroyed Ellora in the middle ages. We had an interesting minibus ride there, the guide was 10 minutes late getting on the bus and a family of Indians went mad at him for being late! He had a tantrum and refused to apologise, made the bus stop and got off but then got straight back on again. Then the people who had a go at him were an hour and a half late coming back to the minibus. During the tour, poor Katie felt like she was back at school, the guy's English was crap and he kept quizzing Katie on what he'd just said, and she kept getting caught out by saying yes and nodding to everything. But in the end she got the hang of his accent and learned lots about the caves that no one else did.

We're getting the night train back to Mumbai tonight, and we have 5 days there and then we fly out. We'll be very sad to leave India behind but we can't wait for Thailand!