AMRITSAR. October 18th

Saturday. (returned from the border-closing ceremony). My tum feeling a lot better this evening, and I order a meal that I've been thinking about all the way home, half a butter chicken, rice, chapatis and two 4-cup pots of tea, (and thoroughly enjoy it, with no after-effects). I may not have made it to the obelisk at the site of the Durbars in Delhi, but the dining room at the hotel has two colourful pictures on the walls, one of the Durbar of 1902, and another from that of 1911, so in a sense I get to see something more realistic in relation to the Durbars, instead of just an obelisk. In the office of the hotel there are four miniature pen sketches from WW1, three from the trenches, and an incredible one of the Menin 'Gate', at a time when it was just a gap in the city walls of Ypres, with some horse-drawn gun carriages going one way, and a despatch-rider hurtling along in the other direction. You can imagine that all these pictures were hung on the walls in the 1920's, a generation before the demise of the Raj, and that no-one has ever bothered to take them down since.

When I came out of my bedroom this morning there were two German guys outside with two 'Royal Enfield' motor cycles in pieces. They left Germany 23 days ago, coming via Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The bikes ran perfectly until they got to India, and apparently sand from the deserts had got into a shaft at the bottom of the engines of both bikes, wrecking some bearings. They stopped making these bikes in England 40 years ago, but the same model is still made under licence in India, and they recently imported two new ones to Germany, and modified them for this trip. They have been able to get parts and some machining done the same day in Amritsar, and are now ready to put the bikes back together again. As I make my way to my room tonight one of them is out in the yard having a smoke, and we have a chat. He is actually a motor-cycle mechanic in Heidelburg, but likes to travel the world all through the northern winter, 'because people don't ride bikes in winter'. His friend has an English girl-friend who lives permanently in Goa, and he spends the northern winters in Goa and the summers in Germany 'working in construction or teaching kite-surfing' so as to save up for the rest of the year. They were very impressed by a bus load of older English people that they met along the way, travelling from London to Sydney. These people chartered one bus as far as Rumania, and another one from there to India. After India they will charter one in Thailand to travel through Malaysia and Indonesia.