Always go out with a bang (Or a splat)

Night before departure – Neither of us can get to sleep. Both feel quite bloated so try to lie on our backs.

Laura pop’s to the loo to find she needs to be sick. This happens about 15 times all through the night coupled with bouts of the runs so there is little sleep to be had. The force of Laura’s wretches propelled diarrhoea from the other end leaving Laura empty and seriously dehydrated. Doctor Joe thought it would be a good moment for Laura to neck a glass of rehydration salts, but the favour was returned with rapid regurgitation.

I lay in bed feeling sorry for Laura but also glad that at least one of us would be healthy for the trip ahead. How wrong I was.

At 6.45am we received our wake-up call. The pre sickness plan was to go down and have breakfast, but instead we hobbled downstairs to meet our driver for the next 6 days – Warren. I was feeling much less grotty after the evening’s fun and games but Joe was clearly entering a dark place ‘Please drive slowly’ he said in a small voice. Delhi in early morning is very smoggy and the drive out was slow and smelt bad. The further we went the worse Joe felt, but it wasn’t until we were on the inside lane of the motorway that Joe decided to ask Warren to pull over so he could be sick. There was a lot of traffic, and many lanes to cross so Joe was obliged to be a bit sick in his hands. He then blithely opened the car door and began to vomit in earnest, smacking the car door onto the vehicle next to us and breaking of its indicator. The driver of this van seemed a bit cross, but Warren was very matter of fact about the whole thing and we all drove on with no hard feelings.

The drive to Jaipur took nearly 6 hours. On the whole we didn’t do too badly, a couple of sick stops only and we used these breaks to sit down and get to know Warren a bit better. He’s a great guide, very knowledgeable and happy to let us sleep groggily or chat about things. He pitied our patheticness and put on a Hindi CD he thought would help, quite spiritual in vibe, with vocals from Sting. On the road the landscape opened up and at times could have been the English countryside, much greener and lusher than anything we’ve seen so far (but with monkeys and camels prancing about instead of sheep or squirrels.

As we approached Jaipur Warren pointed out fort after fort. Turns out that each Maharaja that came along didn’t fancy the idea of moving into the previous one’s palace so built his own. The decendents of the last one still live in one of them. Although we arrived at 1ish the possibility of sightseeing was too revolting to contemplate, so we went straight to the hotel to get some sleep. We’re staying in a heritage hotel, which I guess would be the equivalent of staying in a National Trust cottage/home. We didn’t get to our room as swiftly as we would have liked. Our host, Baba Haveli, was keen to make speech after speech detailing how honoured he was to have us, how we were his children - and his statements continued to get more and more ornate until finally he led us into a room and said that words alone were insufficient for him express his gratitude and happiness so he gave us each a gnarled garland of flowers and a warm bottle of water. Finally he showed us our room and we were urged to admire every single feature and decoration, including a risqué wall painting of a young girl washing herself.