Fifteen months after the Mumbai terrorist attacks, security remains very… well, Indian. Sort of ho-hum karma. Hotels check beneath cars with mirrors on rollerskates; some look in the glovebox, some glance at the luggage, few do both. It gets more perfunctory as the queue and hooting grows but with Mumbai traffic it’s hard to know what’s queue and what isn’t, what’s road rage and what’s habit.
At the Leopold Café you’re frisked by a man with a rifle over his shoulder that would take down a chorus line of rhino with one shot. It was early morning and just a few Europeans inside so when waved to any of the tables, I chose one a little too close to the serving counter but with the best overall view.
A waiter took our order and without prompting pointed out the bullet holes in the walls they’ve kept after renovation and then lifted the tablecloth a little in front of Alex and pointed to a saucer-shaped hole in the marble floor between her feet. “That’s where the bomb went off,” he said, clicking his ballpoint. ”You want snack too?”. Suddenly the ho-hum’s replaced with a little chill that I’ve chosen that table out of thirty and Alex has picked that particular chair out of four. We skipped the snacks, just had coffee. And didn’t linger.

After two fruitless days last week criss-crossing the Gir National Park’s dusty hinterland for the elusive Asian lion – smaller than their African cousins and lacking their natural sense of rhythm – we were on the verge of asking Alex to volunteer as tethered bait when our guide Desraj got a radio call from rangers who’d spotted three cubs resting up in the 95 degrees after a morning kill. Reversing our Jeep through the teak forest for better close-ups, (and a faster getaway should the kill have merely whetted their appetite), Desraj would have qualified for a hefty tip till we spotted his diamond-studded ear lobes.
By the time we reached the dirt track again, (and this being red-tape India), a Camera Permit Inspector with waxed moustache had monitored the call and was waiting to check our paperwork, (500 rupees for each camera over seven megapixels), while the guide and driver surreptitiously slid theirs under our seat. It’s a jungle out there.

Land of Contrasts? Tell me about it. Yesterday we trained from Cochin, a local second class stopper laughably called the Parasuram Express, which hugs the Keralan coast for eight hours of swaying hell as an army of shouting hawkers march the aisle with chai, coffee, curries, fried bananas, dodgy torches, Hindu fiction and religious tracts, all of which could be optimistically described as colourful – but not the toilets. These squatting hole-in-the-floors offer nothing but nothing to grip for support and though I was able to brace my head against a wall Alex had no such luxury, so a real toilet in our beach cottage last night proved heaven – until pressing the flush button revealed too late I was sitting on a state-of-the-art Toto Eco-Washer and my scream, as a freezing burst of water intruded off the Richter, had Alex rushing in lest I’d discovered non-brochure wildlife.

While accepting the maker’s claim the saving of paper contributes to preserving the rainforests, I’d sooner be lashed to the top of a mahogany tree as Brazilian loggers circle with buzzsaws than experience that again.