The Ox Cart Driver

145K round trip of bone shaking and liver cleansing in Kannu's rickshaw today – we went north to a couple of places that make pottery. One in a small market town produces wonderful round red clay pots for water and black clay pots for cooking. The second in a small village produced slab ware which had gods on them which when fired were then painted. They also produced tiles with raised carvings of village life – all very crude and absolutely delightful (am sure there is a word for it but I'm tired and senility has crept in!). We passed bucket wells that were worked by oxen, a street side blacksmith with an old man winding the bellows, an ox cart, lots of chai and nibbles vendors, a camel, sheep, goats, cattle and, amazingly, some huge deer that were being bellowed at by shepherds on the hill above and cattlemen on the opposite hill who hate them eating their crops. The deer jumped into the road in front of us and then streamed away up a hill and jumped a wall. There was an enormous black buck with them and he was herding them on.

I make no excuse for the number of photographs – the pottery sequence takes up quite a lot of it – but when I delete them from the picassa disc they disappear from my computer altogether and I don't want to lose them