Concealed in the cupboard.

I'm so sorry about the massive delay between India postings. I've no excuse. I'm putting too much drab detail in, but if I remember it I sort of want it to go down. At this rate I should've finished logging it all by 2022.

This probably needs an intro for anyone who's forgotten what I'm doing, which would be more than fair enough: this is a write-up of the nine weeks I spent in India in January-March 2004. I didn't keep any sort of a diary at the time so this is all from memory. Currently my 2004 self is on week one of a three-week tour of Rajasthan (and a couple of other places).

( When I emerge from the tent on the final morning of the trek, I'm very much aware that I've not washed my hair in three days.... )

The only time I'll ever get the dates to match....

( January 7th 2004 is the only day in my life thus far on which I wake in a desert and fall asleep sixteen hours later still in a desert. )

( The nine of us sit in a vaguely agitated circle in a scrubby clearing in the Great Thar Desert. )

I'm probably going to have another crack at Nanowrimo this year, so it's fairly likely January 7th won't be posted till December - apologies.

( At about seven am, a man lumbers along the corridors with two metal pails slung over his shoulder, murmuring 'coffee, chai, coffee, chai', and like an idiot, I let him go by.... )

Note: there are some random US English spellings in here - this is because my ancient version of word autocorrects my British English and I don't always catch it in the act.

In which I begin to give real people false names and initials. If you notice me suddenly calling someone by a different name, shout 'AHEM' at me. Quite loudly.

( The Jukaso Inn is in Sundar Nagar.... )

Next: an organised tour of Delhi and a night train to Jodhpur.

I'm having a degree of difficulty in working out where best to start my India diary. You're not getting my motivation for going, because that goes back years and has a lot to do with getting the song 'Mandalay' stuck in my head and other similarly irrevelant things, and that song's about Burma anyway. I'd quite like to start with the night before I flew out, which was spent alone in a tiny hotel room in Paddington watching Stephen Fry doing really well on Celebrity Mastermind, but then I'd have to go through all the hanging around at Heathrow and last minute panicking and walking in deranged circles around the airport in Abu Dhabi, and I don't want to do that.

For a prologue, let it be known that I'd never been away from home before, that I'd spent the preceding few years reading Lonely Planet guides but the preceding few months more or less paralysed with fear, and I was going to spend the next 9 weeks in India: 3 touring Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, 1 waiting in Delhi, 4 doing voluntary work in the Himalayas.

I'm starting in Muscat.

3rd January, 2004. Morning.

( I'm in three different time-zones )