"Would you like us to arrest some one?"

We have been really terrible about keeping you all posted in the last week, but we have been kept busy with a series of mis-adventures. As you can probably guess from the title, one of them required a trip to the local police station!

It all started while we were writing our last blog entry, which was done from a little cafe during a torrential rain storm that started about two minutes after we logged on. We were extremely pleased with ourselves for having avoided it and spent the three hours of heavy rains in the safety of the internet cafe. When we returned to our hotel, it turned out that our room was not as lucky as we had been. Just that afternoon the owner had told us that the week before the hotel had been completely flooded after the rains and we could hardly believe it. When we got into our room that evening we discovered our backpacks floating in about ten centimeters of suspicious looking water, thus destroying our plans for a quiet evening at home. It was the time to experience being a dhobi-walla as we had to wash every single item of clothing we had with us by handand string them up around the coutyard of the hotel. As if that weren't enough, we discovered that at some point during the last three days, half of our traveler's cheques and a bit of cash had gone missing. Traveler's cheques can be replaced easily... or can they? In India the answer is; we hope you have a backup plan.

For the benefit of our loyal readers we will enumerate the necessary steps:

1. Spend about an hour looking for an "All-India" STD (no, that's not a disease, it's a type of phone connection).

2. Locate a trusty-looking Indian guy who happens to have a quiet office nearby and ask to make a phone call on his mobile.

3. Call the "toll-free" (10 rupees/minute) hotline. It won't work, try the other number too.

4. Wait to get connected (20 minutes).

5. Talk the representative, answer lots of seemingly irrelevant questions, get disconnected.

6. Repeat steps 3-5, answering different irrelevant questions this time.

7. Try to spell "Flute Maker" three times while the other guy in the room yells on his second mobile phone.

8. get a confirmation number (repeated five times, that other guy is still yakking on his cell a meter away from you).

9. Copy your passport, your receipt for the cheques if it's not water-logged (or left at home) and send it along with a "Police Report" by fax.

Ah, yes, the police report. Now if calling the help-line seemed like a simple task, wait until you hear about acquiring a police report.

Back at the hotel, the helpful manager explained how this works. First, you take several sheets of paper and fold about a third of it over for "police comments". Then you write the report yourself (addressed to the "Police Inspector") in the comfort of your hotel room and head down to the station with it. The station is exactly what you'd expect a sleepy local police station in India to be. Two desks, a Sergent with a big belly and a glorious mustache, a friendly female officer, a very important "head inspector" who's never there, and about ten other guys that seem to just hang around minding other people's business. Oh yes, and one officer (the alleged "Head Inspector"?) sleeping on a desk in the back room. And by on the desk, we don't mean with his head on the desk, we mean he was lying on it. Needless to say, no one really spoke English, but the female officer was trying her best, and the moustatioed Sergent was smiling. A lot. Eventually they understood more or less what we wanted - just a stamp and some serious looking "Police comments" on our margin and we would be on our way. After much discussion in Marathi (none of which Kim could follow), a phone call was made, judging by the amount of "Sir", to a higher ranking officer, and the phone was handed over to Boaz. A mysterious voice (the Inspector?) asked " What would you like us to do? Would you like us to arrest some one? Should we visit the hotel and pick some one up?" Thinking of the nice Gujarati brothers running our hotel, we had to decline. Having this once in a lifetime chance, we really tried to think of some one we might like to have arrested, but no one in Auranagabad came to mind. Much relieved that no one would need to leave the station, everyone got down to the paperwork. Everything was copied into three different police logbooks in Marathi (providing much debate on how to transliterate our names and address on "rue Marie-Anne est"). While all this was happening, the moustached Sergent chased away three girls who had their phone stolen, yelling at them that he was a busy man with better things to do.

But enough about that... we still haven't faxed it because the number was wrong... we'll keep you posted. But this was just the start. The following four days were a series of mishaps. We had our fair share of stomach issues, managed to throw up in the garbage can of a UNESCO world heritage site, got on a train that took us back to Mumbai instead of Baroda, Gujarat, about 500km to the north, discovered that it is impossible to book any train tickets on a Sunday evening, spent the night in a tight, smelly, humid, overpriced hotel room. The stomach problems continued, but luckily we had bought the "econo-pack" of Immodium. To entertain ourselves in our dark hours, we were trying to come up with an entertaining name for the opposite of a laxative. We would love to hear some of your suggestions. We have been trying to reverse this bad Karma by giving some money to any and every Saddhu/deformed beggar/poor lady by the mosque or temple/child who's probably a part of a begging ring. It seems to have helped, because a few days later, we finally found our lost paradise.

The lofty hill of Pavagadh rises 800m out of the surrounding plains. It is a jagged piece of rock with 5 plateaus believed to be formed when the toe of the goddess Kali fell from the sky. It is now a very important pilgrimage site, and people from all over central India come to pay their respects to the goddess. The mountain is covered with lush vegetation and teems with life. Swarms of butterflies (some the size of small birds) and huge dragonflies drift through the evening air. Gangs of naughty monkeys are lying in wait for travelers with exposed snacks and herds of centipedes make barefoot walking, even inside the hotel, precarious. The State of Gujarat's Department of Tourism was kind enough to build a neat little hotel in the middle of all this, with a balcony to see the view and watch the action. The highlight was a peacock strolling on the opposite roof first thing in the morning, just as the first rays of sun were cutting through the mists covering the mountain side. City slickers that we were, we didn't even know that they could fly...

We stayed there for one jasmine-scented night and the next morning explored the ruined city of Champaner, which lies at the bottom of the hill. The ruins, now a world heritage site, consist of several deserted pre-Moghul mosques. The site covers a large area, and some of the more remote mosques are quite hard to find and are hardly ever visited. After wading through through a labyrinth of small tracks in a wooded area, we finally found one of the more remote ones. e therefore were surprised to see a young Indian couple arrive on a motorbike several minutes later. They seemed to know exactly how to find it and were rather embarrassed to find other people there. The couple quickly disappeared into the darker recesses of the mosque. Now, that's what we call romantic!