Let sleeping dogs lie...

Life has slowed down to a pace almost beyond imaginable. I’m currently top of the improvers’ list in a course named How To Relax And Amuse Oneself For Hours.

This mainly consists of reading books (from start to finish, no less!), café hopping, rain dodging and watching India go by in its amusing way while waiting for the arrival of my intrepid camera.

(Which, by the way, is now unnecessary as the other one has had amiraculous recovery.)

Still no dreadlocks though, I’m happy to report.

The most difficult decision I’m facing each day is what to eat. Chinese, Tibetan, Israeli, Mexican, Continental, Italian, South Indian, North Indian, English - the array of cuisines is simply dazzling, but the end result probably more similar than the locals care to admit.



This morning I opted for an English Breakfast, Madam - toast, beans, eggs and hash brown. Sound familiar? Well it wasn’t. Cumin, turmeric, peppers, onions and chilli all made an appearance in one form or another and, while I certainly enjoy boiled potatoes, yes sir I do, I probably wouldn‘t eat them on toast for breakfast.

I ate all this while watching a particularly amusing game of Indian road roulette, whereby hoards of creaking tuk-tuks chug painfully to the top of the hill, before switching off the engines and juddering down the other side like out-of-control runaway trains, horns screeching as all manner of animals and people scatter into roadside ditches like confused ants.



Apart from the sleeping dogs, of course, which usually just continue snoring in the middle of the road as the vehicles slalom dangerously between them.

Nothing wakes the dogs. Every few metres there’s another one: mangy and flea-bitten, dozing in a doorway; napping on a rock next to the roaring river; asleep on a pillar in the middle of a construction site.



They only awake at night, whereupon they gather underneath my bedroom window and conduct howling wrestling matches.

Talking of strange animals, there appears to be a glut of them in Manali. So far I’ve encountered two absurdly decorated yaks, a sheep that wakes me up each morning with a ’Laaauuura’ sounding baa; and a crazy myxomatosis-eyed rabbit giant.

And when I say giant, I mean giant: as big and as white as a polar bear - or perhaps just a little smaller.

For the meagre sum of 20 rupees the equally-as-crazy-eyed owner will let you hold him. Personally I would pay 20 pounds to never even have to see it again.

Getting up close and personal with Buddhism

So now I must write about the journey and not the destination because, as Gandhi says, this is the bit that matters.

So there I was, on the bus from Dharamsala to Manali, with a friendly American to the left of me and a monk in front of me. I must have paid my penance in dreadful bus journeys, I thought to myself, this is like bliss!

So for about two hours we travelled along like this. The monk did not recline his seat an inch - so I sat there, ipod on, head on my special red fluffy pillow, and I had space for my legs and everything!

And while I sat there all comfortable and that, I got to thinking. The fact that this monk hadn’t reclined his chair an inch told me that he was a happy man. This Buddhism lark must really work! If I did Vipassana would I then be able to just sit there, all upright, and sleep like a baby - no insomnia - and be proud of the fact that I hadn’t reclined my seat and that the person behind me was also comfortable. What an admirable man!

(In India the bus seats recline so far that the person behind can no longer put their legs down, like a normal person, and can only sit in an upright foetal position - imagine someone giving birth and you are getting close)

So on the bus went, and on Damian Rice went, and on my philosophising went… until suddenly, BANG, and OUCH! The monk’s seat flew backwards and flew backwards and flew backwards, so far, until it almost hit the edge of my seat, where he stayed, more reclined than anyone else in the entire bus, and happily snoring away like a pig in shit until the end of the journey (which was about 15 hours).

So for 15 hours I had my legs either side of the seat, with his shaven Buddhist head between my legs.

There are so many lessons to be learnt here, I don't know where to start.

Monsoon, my old friend!

Hello monsoon, pleased to be acquainted with you once again. Thanks for marooning me in my favourite café, with nothing more to do than look out the window at you streaming down the road in great, fat clumps and sigh despairingly.



The roads, which are about as steep as roads get, have now turned into dangerous rivers. Clouds are floating past the café and jaunting off down the road, transforming the edge of the tarpaulin roof into Niagara Falls. Huge flashes of lightening are periodically illuminating the greyness, and the Gods are definitely moving house up there.

The music has been pumped up to top volume and you can still only just hear it and now there's talk of an apple wine monsoon party. BRING IT ON!

Faithful cloud which I am in, I salute you. No sarcasm intended, I’m genuinely thankful.

I no longer have a need to feel guilty for not walking through the forest, up a mountain, down a waterfall, or participating in some sort of mental beauty pageant (sorry Jannet Angel - this body aint getting out of this café for less than a million pounds).

Or here’s a thought - WE COULD WHITE-WATER RAFT DOWN THE ROAD? It must be at least grade 4. I might have to hire a dinghy just to get back to my room.

But for now my feet are up, I have coffee in one hand, a book in the other and no reason to be anywhere else for at least 5 weeks. It doesn't get much better than this.

Same same but different?

Help. My inspiration is being strangled by stinky dreadlocks and squished by idendikit hippies.

Today I ventured into Upper Bhagsu - I’d been advised by the Finnish dreadlocker who had shared my bus that this was the place to be. Her exact words went something like this: “Is nice, you will like it. Is more Westerners than Indians and you can buy falafel and choclolate cake!”

On my way up there I bumped into said girl, alongside her friend. Or hang on a second, was it her friend or was it her twin - OR HAD SHE BEEN DUPLICATED?

Long blonde dreadlocks: check. Nose ring: check. Baggy trousers with elasticated bottom - like Aladdin‘s!: check. Vest top, anklet and obligatory blasé facial expression: check.

For the record, she almost completely ignored me, despite the fact I had spent hours chatting with her a few days previously.

“Namaste madam,” she said, in a mock Indian accent and carried on her dreadlocked way, no doubt heading down the hill to bang some bongos and smoke some weed.

Upper Bhagsu wasn‘t so great. More dreadlocks and facial hair than an entire family of overgrown and unshaven Mr Twits.

But much more importantly, an Indian lady called Jannet Angel - real name? perhaps not - just invited me to take part in the Miss World Traveller beauty pageant that's taking place in Bhagsu tomorrow. Going by her bright pink lipstick and illuminous red hair, it should be an interesting affair.

I said yes, of course. Watch this space.

From Delhi to Dharamsala

Phew. Have now escaped the suffocating humidity of Delhi’s pre-Monsoon heat. It wasn’t an easy escape, mind.

I just spent 13 hours on a bus being periodically, and ever so covertly, touched up for the pleasure of this mountain air. Two tablets of valium and not a wink of sleep, due to a voracious wandering hand that kept ’accidentally’ falling off the armrest and onto my leg.

And it wasn’t even a dirty old man. It was a young university student from Pune, who had earlier been part of a conversation in which a Finnish girl and I were explaining in detail what we would like to do to men who can’t keep their hands to themselves.

Chop. Their. Dicks. Off.

Perhaps he misheard?

So now I’m in Dharamsala, the home of the great Dalai Lama. Also home to about a million travellers, a billion yoga and meditation centres, a thousand ayervedic health centres and a rapacious Tibetan-themed marketing ploy.

I’m staying in a place called Bhagsu, which is a few kilometres further north into the mountains, which is full of winding alleyways and crooked houses and cows in the most inappropriate places.

Have found a room with a big window and a view out into the Himalayas. Unfortunately I think it might also have bed bugs, if the string of red welts on my arm are anything to go by. But for £2 a night and some beautiful mountain views, who’s complaining?

The innards and the outards

My first thought during the approach into Delhi airport was that the city looks much like the motherboard of my poor camera - an illogical union of square boxes and wiry roads, all piled together as if the world is running out of space.


Palatial houses and tower blocks jostle with corrugated iron and tarpaulin towns, the spaces between filled with bricks and dust and relics of life (or sanitiser in the case of my camera).

It’s like the city has been furiously shaken and replaced with its innards hanging out like a run-over dog, intestines spilling from rooftops and lingering in crevices.

I really knew I had arrived when I was greeted in the arrivals hall by a putrid smell of faeces (and for the first time in a week it had nothing to do with me YAY).

In my haste to escape the smells and the Eyes - ah, the Eyes! - I scrambled into a taxi forgetting I was wearing a rather large backpack and promptly tumbled straight back out again as it rebounded against the roof. Smooth as ever. The Eyes loved it.

Also have made dreadful error of all errors. During interminable boredom of five-hour wait at Abu Dhabi airport, I booked flights to Sri Lanka for 6 weeks’ time without taking into account the little footnote on my Indian visa, which says: “Cannot enter country within two months of last visit.”

Oops. So it looks like the decision has been made. I can't return to India. Can I feasibly call this fate or is it just pure stupidity?

And off to India we go...

Sat here eating my very last Middle Eastern breakfast of cucumber, tomato, cheese, olives, jam, egg and bread (it's getting hard to feign interest in it) right before I catch the metro to the airport for my solo flight to India.

There's many stories to tell from the past five days but quite a lot of them involve a toilet so I won't bother you with them. However, there is a great one about another ridiculous hotel - ridulously filthy - which I'll recount when I arrive in India.

Scared. Wish me luck. Weeeeeee.......

Fame, at last!

I’m not going to be a diva about it or anything, but I just thought you’d like to know that I have finally made it. Fame, at last! It’s been tough, but worth it.

I'd been in Damascus for two days, when some hip Damascene guy arrived at the hostel with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth looking for English movie stars (extras) to star (appear in the background briefly) in a film about the English invasion of Bedouin territory in the Gulf.

Naturally I was reticent in the beginning, but he let me eat my breakfast and made a promise to deliver champagne to my dressing room before I agreed to set off on the ‘twenty-minute’ journey.

One and a half hours later, and we’re still cruising the desert hunting for the mysterious ‘set’, with myself and my fellow act-tooors wondering whether instead of meeting fame we were about to meet our untimely deaths.

Fortunately this wasn’t the case.

I will prove this with some glorious photos of me sweating my tits off in the desert all in the name of art.

The film is called Gate of Clouds in English (or a load of squiggles in Arabic). Please hunt it out and take glory in my one moment in the limelight.

NB: The champagne never arrived, and for that matter neither did the dressing room. Sigh.

A room for Pythagoras

Ridiculous hotel number two: Near the clock tower, Aleppo, Syria. I would tell its name but I’m not sure it has one. Let’s call it Triangle Hotel for posterity’s sake.

We found it as one usually finds things in Syria, through a combination of sign language, phrasebook prodding and meeting a man who knows a man who knows a man who knows a man.

“Cheap otel? Nice otel?” we say, in an attempt to stray from the Lonely Planet trail.

“Oh yes, yes, nice otel, cheap otel. I give you good price, but you no see because room full at moment. Check out 12. I show you other room. Same same but different.” We approve of the room and the deal is done.

So after a hard day of wandering the back streets of Aleppo, we ambled back to the otel for a siesta.

But to our surprise, we found the room in a state of much confusion. This room didn’t have four walls like a normal room, oh no. It was a triangle room. A TRIANGLE. Not only a triangle, but an extremely tiny isosceles triangle.

To give you an idea of precisely how angular it was, we couldn’t even close the curtains due to the ceiling fan rhythmically slapping them into a whirling red frenzy.



Add into the mix some truly gaudy orange seventies wallpaper, polyester leopard-print bed sheets, shutters containing centuries worth of dust, and a fan that sounded like a harem of sparrows being strangled, and sleep is not your friend.

Aleppo and a brand new baby

We’re now on day three of life in Aleppo, sat by the Sheraton swimming pool admiring the higgledy-piggledy city from the monolithic and hideous - but calm - walls of the hotel. It hasn’t all been like this.



Upon arrival we utilised our very smooth Arabic skills - “Salaam alaykooooom! Errrr, do you know errr cam-errr-ahhh shop? Can-non? We buy where?” (Yes. Our language skills are on fire) - and following an exhaustingly hot goose chase around town, we finally struck gold in an underground warren of shops stuffed wall-to-wall with spare car parts and tyres. Well, where else?



Sat behind a filthy desk, smeared in what I assumed to be oil, sat a rotund man who knew a man, who knew another man that owned a shop nearby in which sat a dusty and forlorn looking Canon digital camera.

After some equally smooth haggling, we took the replacement camera baby to explore the new city of Aleppo. I say new city, but what I actually mean is ‘newer city’.

Aleppo is reputedly one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world and the Al-Jdeida quarter was built during the Ottoman era, which makes it approximately 600 years old. Pretty old for a new guy.

So fuelled by a novel breakfast of fava bean soup and raw onions with flat bread, we set off down the crooked alleys to find an almost indecent abundance of photography opportunities.




It was a Friday so the streets were shuttered and peaceful; devoid of women, pavements dotted with turbaned and sleepy men languishing in the shade.

If Canon can't then nobody can

In my last entry I very nearly wrote: 'These things come in threes, I wonder what wıll go wrong next?' And yes. Yes. They do come in threes. And they appear to be gettıng progressively worse the higher the number.

My poor Canon baby has broken. My beautiful Canon baby. My well-behaved, well-travelled, shiny camera baby has been blinded by a vat of sanitiser. All life exhausted, just a ghostly black screen eyeing me with its idle nothingness.

I just had to leave the stupid black box under the watchful beard and tiny spanners of a mullah named Murat down some side alley ın Adana, disturbingly close to a street lined with rotting goat's heads. (I'm starting to regret that Adana Kebap.)



But let's forget about that shocking picture of my camera's intestines for just a second (pictures courtesy of Mr Breslaw)...

We stayed ın the most superbly pink hotel last night - Akdeniz Oteli. Do look it up if ever you fınd yourself in Adana. Barbıe would be truly spoiled wıth the coral-coloured wardrobes, pale pink walls, baby pink lace curtains and pink floral wallpaper border a la MumandDad'sbedroom circa-1989. The picture of cherubs kissing on the walls just about topped it off.

According to our Lonely Planet the hotel has recently been renovated and has handsome furnishings. We think this might be less about the delicate room furnishings and more a dubious euphemism for the abundance of prostitutes in the very special hall-of-mirrors hotel bar. Just found this on a more recent Lonely Planet web page.

Insane... but totally sanitised

Rain. Bloody rain. Everywhere! Also hand sanitiser. Everywhere. No joke. I’m literally more sanitised than I’ve ever been before. And that, unfortunately, has nothing to do with sanity. The co-codamol and valium combination is safely eroding any remaining sanity.


We just spent an hour under the cover of the spice market drying our drenched feet and testing my new camera lens (did I mention I bought a new lens?), when a friendly one-toothed man offered to sanitise my hands. What a nice man! Ooh yes please, I said. But he tipped it up and nothing came out. He shook it. Still nothing. He prodded the top... still nothing! So he shook it and prodded it and shook it again... and BINGO! Whooooooosh... the entire bottle exploded all over me. All. Over. Me. All over him. All over his face. And the camera. AND THE LENS. Head-to-toe. Sanitiser to lens. It was like the fatal meeting of Bridget Jones and Mr Bean.

Aaron came round the corner to find me soaking wet and smelling like a toilet duck, frantically rubbing my camera with a useless, soaking wet piece of tissue... all the while being circled by a ragged man rubbing his bright-red, squinting eyes, muttering illegible Turkish expletives (see below).



We didn’t stick around long enough to find out whether he had actually blinded himself with his own stupidity. I didn’t fancy sanitising my lungs as well as my entire body and belongings. So we shuffled off to a cafe and are now looking out at the rain, ridding the air of all bad smells. I literally could hire myself out as a human air freshener.

We also lost £50 today. That was fun. Although technically I should say Aaron lost £50. The only feasible explanation we have is that instead of putting the money in his money belt, which was under his trousers, he just put it inside his trousers, so as we walked away from the cash machine the notes fell out of his legs, like a human cash dispenser.

Brilliant. Redistributing wealth to the needy. That’s the optimistic way I have chosen to look at it instead of beating him with my soggy umbrella.

We just booked a 20-hour train journey to Adana, which begins at midnight tonight. It’s a feeble attempt at chasing the sun but I’m not entirely convinced of its existence right now.

With two major mishaps under our belt I’m thinking maybe we should just take some valium and put ourselves to bed before boarding the train. A lot can happen in 6 hours.

Prolapsed sun and stormy back

We’re here! And alive. Yay! No missed planes and no mishaps (minus the prolapsed disc five days ago, of course, but I’m choosing to ignore that in favour of valium and codeine... in which case I should technically edit the first sentence to read: “I’m half here”).

But first things first - Istanbul: The blue mosque is not really blue at all, it’s grey (the liars), and that colour basically matches the sky, except the sky is a lot wetter and so are my feet. Gladiator sandals and monsoons are not a good combination, for future reference.



So to sum up, I’ve brought a prolapsed disc, a Monsoon wardrobe and an actual monsoon with me to Turkey. Perfect. If only the Monsoon wardrobe was waterproof.

In other news, Aaron has new Birkenstocks which are literally eating his foot away like some kind of expensive German leprosy, so we’ve spent the day hobbling around like a pair of half-wits. To add to that, my back has been so stupidly painful I haven’t even been able to drag my special disabled wheely backpack along on its wheels, which has left Aaron in a bit of blistered double backpack-carrying dilemma.

So right now we’re frizzy-haired, mute and bleary-eyed, sat in a bar correctly named the ‘Backpacker Bar’, listening to Salt-n-Pepper and Eric Morales blaring from the speakers. Eurosport’s on the TV, and in front of us are two pints of Carlsberg. British much?