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Three huge bangs on the door awake me from my slumbers. I peel my eyelids open just enough to see that it's still dark outside. The purpose of todays task comes rushing into my head, and the trial begins - the Devil on my right shoulder whispering "Go on, go back to sleep, it's 6am! You don't have to get up now, you can always do it tomorrow", while the Angel on my left shoulder is saying "You know you gotta get up. If you don't get up now, you'll never get it done, and then there'll have been no point in coming here....."<br /><br />

Alternative India

Conor Meleady
2006-02-28 08:27:43

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Three huge bangs on the door awake me from my slumbers. I peel my eyelids open just enough to see that it's still dark outside. The purpose of todays task comes rushing into my head, and the trial begins - the Devil on my right shoulder whispering "Go on, go back to sleep, it's 6am! You don't have to get up now, you can always do it tomorrow", while the Angel on my left shoulder is saying "You know you gotta get up. If you don't get up now, you'll never get it done, and then there'll have been no point in coming here....."

Unusually, the Angel won this time, and I blindly throw some clothes on, make my way downstairs, and somehow manage to negotiate a rickshaw ride, more from instinct then anything else. For today, I have 3572 steps to climb, not something to be done in the mid-day heat, even in December.......

The size of India is staggering. It first hit me looking out from Bundi fort across the surrounding countryside. A country of over 1 billion people, yet vast spaces of wilderness still to be found. And, despite the huge amount of tourists that arrive every year, massive areas of the country, the majority in fact, remain relatively unvisited.

Take a look at the map - the whole centre of the country, from Gujarat in the west, across Madhya Pradesh, east to Bihar and Orissa, and south through Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh and (much of) Karnataka, are off the tourist track. And then there's the seven north-east states, tucked away beyond Bangladesh. It was my intention in the 4 weeks I had until Christmas, when I wanted to be in Mumbai, to get a little taste of some of India's hidden gems, in the states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.

Heading south from Udaipur, the first major city is Ahmedabad, a huge, busy, and typically polluted city, whose one redeeming feature is a little Muslim quarter where I filled up on all the meat I had been missing throughout Rajasthan. ...