Teetotal vegetarians and Bollywood superstars

Mumbai predictably was a huge shock after Sydney: a mad whirl of coloured saris, crazed rickshaw drivers and stray dogs. Looming Neogothic train stations to match London, crumbling Art Deco apartments, red buses and cricket but with palm trees, dust and Bollywood. Luckily there are mighty fine cake shops to help newcomers adjust, particularly those staying in the bed-bug luxuries of the Salvation Army hostel.

We spent a day as badly dressed ball goers in the back of the next big blockbuster, an instant introduction to the celebrity gossip and a chance to wear someone else’s ill-fitting shoes, then wandered the backstreets past temples strewn with drying laundry and small boys flying kites.

Rajasthan’s deserts further north seem to concentrate the madness. The women dress in deep pink, yellows and oranges, cows loiter chewing plastic bags and monkeys practice James Bond-style leaps between rooftops. Our first stop was the "pink" city of Jaipur, rather more red in reality and full of infuriatingly ingenious touts, but with an amazing observatory full of multi-storey Escer-esque sun and moon dials accurate to the nearest two seconds.

Anxious to escape the touts we moved to Pushkar's camel fair. On the outskirts of the town there were necklace-wearing camels as far as the eye could see, cows competing to produce more milk and men on wild-eyed albino horses. A dentist crouched in a mobile surgery under a camel cart and gypsy children contorted themselves into horrible shapes. Some bearded sikhs festooned with swords stopped to laugh at Tom's bald head and clean-shaven chin, but they couldn't match the distress caused by the ban on beer and meat...

The town itself was choked with pilgrims, men in day-glo yellow turbans, women in firey hewed saris with huge noserings covering half their faces. They'd come to bathe in the lake and were out on the terraces surrounding it from five in the morning.

We're now in Jodphur - the "blue city" and ancient capital of the princely state of Marwar ("the land of death"). A dark fort with cannon-ball scars sits on a vast rock overhanging the cluttered rooftops of the old city, looking out to the desert beyond. Inside are huge spikes to deter elephant charges, the handprints of widows leaving to throw themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres and Christmas baubles bought by the British. Tonight we board the night train to Jaisalmer further in the deserts to the west.