It's been an amazing week, our last in India (click left to see last piccies in India) has been full of the usual ups and down that seem to go hand in hand in this country! We left the mountains and headed to the famous town ofAmritsar where the "peaceful" music of the famous golden temple blasted our ear drums to bombay andafforded us a really peaceful night's sleep... earplugs in and eyemasks on!

The temple was absolutely breathtaking though, we were completely dumb struck by the thousands of people, in all their colourful dresses and turbans and the evening fireworks reflecting off the surrounding pool accompanied by millions of tiny candles made it a truly awesome sight.

As usual we go from the sublime to the ridiculous as we headed to the border for the famous closing ceremony... something which is very difficult to explain in words... picture a cross between the ministry of silly walks, monty python, a football match, a music concert and a school sports day! An MC revs up the crowd and gets everyone chanting (about 10,000 people go every day) then they get members of theaudience to run up and down with the indian flag (all these activities being mirrored on the Pakistani side of the border) then the guards come out and strutt their stuff in the most ridiculous series of high kicks and marching. I think it's one of those things you have to see to believe!

Next... Bikaner, with a short stop in a transit town called Bathinda where we literally could have stepped off the moon and we would have got the same reactions! People were SO amazed to see us there, we sat at the station and within minutes had a crowd of about 100 people seated around us in a neat semi circle straring and pointing! bizarre! Seb looked at a little girl and she burst into tears, we must look worse than we thought!

Anyway, we arrived in Bikaner at 1am to "The Camel Man's" crib and were greeted by the man Vijay himself who is like the pimp daddy of camel trekking in this area! His hotel serves amazing food and they treat you like one of the family, we even got to partake in the daughter's 11th birthday party! After a quick trip to the rat temple, which as the name would suggest is a temple full of rats... uuuurrrrggh... slightly nautious now... we went to look around the old city. I was in a particularly short-tempered mood and had kind of had enough of the constant kids shouting WHAT IS YOUR NAME WHAT COUNTRY HELLO SIR HELLO SIR HELLO SIR and slapping your hands to the point where I almost started shouting and slapping back and couldn't really enjoy walking around the city and looking at things, so we called it a day! You need to have to be in a constantly good mood in this place to survive!

So the next day we hopped on a camel and escaped to the desert! couldn't get much further from the hustle and bustle of the city. Camels are cool, they just lope along, no worries, sit, stand, walk, eat, drink, pee, poo, it's all the same to them. We were lucky with our companions on the trek as we had a really friendly couple from NZ and a croatian girl and we kept each other entertained swapping travel experiences and stories. Other cool things about the desert... clear starry nights, the dung beetles pushing poo up hill with their hind legs, gazelles, white scorpions, musical entertainment, long afternoon siestas in the shade of the trees (there was quite a few in this desert to my surprise!), watching the sunset from the top of a sand dune, attempting to make conversation with EXTREMELY boring danish people and a slightly deranged soutern californian who owns a camel, a zebra and a horse and wants to learn how to make his camel dance, also camped at our site, and getting off the camel at the end of the second day when all of us (especially the men) were suffering some serious saddle sores!

So final stop in India is Jodhpur (Sorry mum we're notgoing to the taj.. too much hastle and lots of money!) this place is really something though and I'm glad we finished here. The Mehrangarh fort is the main attraction which sounds pretty dull but it is not! It is definitely one of the bestestest old buildings I have ever seen on the planet. It's got massive walls and stuff and you get this audio guided tour to tell you all about the various battles and the history ofthe Maharaji kings and queens that used to live there... really cool. This city is nicknamed the blue city cos of all the blue houses and you get an amazing view cubist style of the houses below...

Finally we are back in Delhi and just about to go and see a bollywood movie as apprently that is something not to be missed...

tomorrow... Hong Kong! See you there!
Lots of love
Katie and seb

Ps. Link to Delhi driving... very scary!