and so to bed....

mumbai airport....wrong day, wrong flight and just glad to be getting out, grateful that i could fund an emergency flight...

but now...in edinburgh for ten days...and having spoken, at length, to klm who appear to acknowledge that they overlooked telling me that my flight had been changed and seem to accept that mumbai is not the kind of place that you want to find yourself stormstayed in...

and, it seems, to no great surprise, that the travel guy in mumbai lied to me; that i was booked on the friday flight...and so...

but already i miss india...and have butterflies at the thought of a quick return...to kashmir and the valleys...yet more new landscapes thrown upon the eyes in cascading realms of beauty...

it is, i think, the most intriguing, sometimes infuriating, heartbreaking and uplifting place: an always colourful full scale assault on the senses - and, possibly, an odd kind of drug, a hallucinogenic laced wanderlust experience where reality becomes, evermore, a point of view, not always your own:-) all of which makes me think of Rimbaud...to become a seer by the systematic derangement of the senses...and in a letter, "I is not I, I is another"...all i can say is that i think that the experiences of india change your worldview, alters in some way the mindset...

and at first glance edinburgh, and in other days other places, seems, even in the sundrenched, but cold, light of today, slightly dulled. it's a bit like the next stop after varanasi would always be dulled in the recent experience of the beauty and wonder of the place that you have just left..and i haven't seen a cow yet...

which makes me think of a moment in the alleys of varanasi...we were walking along during holi when someone pointed out that we had come to a place where the cowshit was in even more plentiful supply than the "norm" to be met with a voice from above, "yes, not just cowshit, much human shit too!" and a burst of laughter...

and i try to make sense of the attraction she holds for me...i had a thought a long time ago, that, some of us, leave a part of ourselves in india, maybe even a portion of the heart, and that it calls you back to check on it...and, maybe, also for india to check upon the small portion of her that you have carried with you...romantic nonsense no doubt:-)

and so to unpack and then repack for the north; as ever it's been a steepish learning curve but we'll see if i have actually managed to retain any of the information...would be a nice change:-)


and thusly did the first part of the adventure end...in chaos...what will part two hold i wonder...