Sorry, first of all, to have been out of touch for so long. Since I last wrote, we've covered quite a lot of ground - most of it in the Himalayas where internet cafes are unsurprisingly few and far between, and when they do appear they are painfully slow. It would probably have taken the last three weeks to write one email and send it!

I have to admit that the last time I wrote I wasn't in the best of spirits - Rajasthan was trying, mentally and physically. The temperatures were up to 40 degrees and it was exhausting every day just doing a bit of sight-seeing, traipsing around from place to place, being followed by people and hassled constantly. Beautiful places though which I might try and write about later when I have more time - Rajasthan is a country in itself, desert fringed and spectacular. It's about the size of Poland with almost twice the population - near 70 million - and it takes quite a bit of time to get around as you can imagine. From the last place we spent much time in there - Jaisalmer (right on the edge of India's west side, near Pakistan), where we did a painful and thankfully short camel trek to the dunes and back (yeah, very touristy I know), we took a train twelve hours north to a dusty, desert-swirling place called Bikaner. This town was fairly unremarkable except for one thing - a temple devoted to rats. It was an hour's rickshaw drive out of town and aptly in a fairly non-descript, grotty village. Now I don't claim to understand a religion which celebrates and worships cows and monkeys, but is there any good reason to give rats holy status? They are clearly filthy vermin and nasty little b*****s to boot, but in Bikaner temple they are not only fed and worshipped, but treated as incredibly auspicious. If one scurries over your (unshoed) foot, it is very good luck; if you see a white one, you are in for eleven years of good luck or something. Insane. There was some implausible story attached to it all, which I instantly forgot, but it kind of summed up Hinduism to me. The place was swarming with the blighters, lapping up free milk and gobbling free food offerings, crapping and shagging, the happiest rats in the world I imagine. Anywhere else, they'd be poisoned.

We hastened to the nearest train station and headed north on an overnighter out of Rajasthan and through the state of Punjab to Chandigar. I won't linger on the train journey because it brings back unpleasant memories - suffice to say that if you ever go to India and do it by train, especially going through the desert, do it in first class. We unwisely took second - a slight step up from animals - in a - cart class. We slept fitfully and woke up coated in a fine dust/sand solution which, even with repeated showering, refused to come off. Thankfully, a couple of bhang lassis and biscuits before we set off helped us through it all. We arrived in Chandigar at about 9am and had entered a different country. It was Milton Keynes. The city was built from scratch in the 50's as a kind of light-industrial/service centre and new capital of the Sikh state of Punjab (the wealthiest in India) and designed by the French architect Le Coboursier. Like MK, or the Keynes as I fondly call it, it is divided up into sectors. The centre of town is called Sector 17. We stayed a few blocks away, in Sector 22. It was clean, green, orderly, the cars weren't driving like maniacs, there weren't any roaming elephants or cows strolling down the road, and for a couple of hours it was bliss.Then it became boring and I realised it was utterly soulless and singularly lacking in attractions like any new town in the world. We spent the afternoon strolling down long boulevards past green parks and roundabouts, pretty flowerbeds and faceless buildings and then got bored.

The train next day took us to the mountains. It's a narrow-guage railway that climbs an astounding 1500m in less than 50km. It climbed up through cool green pine forests and out of the muggy, sweaty plains of Punjab to the mountain country of Himmachal Pradesh, sparsely populated with only ten million souls and relatively small - only about the size of Scotland or Bosnia. During the journey, which was rather uncomfortable on wooden seats and about as fast as a sloth on moggadon (5 hours), I met an interesting Indian gent named Davreet who recommended me a loop through the mountain state which would take us about 600km east and then north through the Kinnaur and Spitti valleys - on the poilitically sensitive Tibetan border - to Manali, via the Kuznum and Rohtang passes, 4500 and 3900m respectively. This would not be an easy trip, he said. We arrived at Shimla and breathed clean mountain air for the first time. The temperature had dropped to a much more managable 25 degrees and it was cloudy. Shimla has the air of a British town in the Alps, and in fact it was the centre of the Raj administration during the summer months when it got too hot on the plains. We spent two days just strolling around and enjoying not being bothered by the touts and rickshaw drivers (as there were none there). Our hotel looked out pleasantly on to the surrounding mountains, and all we had to do was plan our attack on the Himalayas over the next two weeks.