When I came to India for the first time five years ago, I landed in Bombay. In the middle of the night I was transported by deluxe taxi ("Regular taxi not available") to my deluxe hotel room ("Regular room not available") in the tourist ghetto of Colaba, and it got worse from there. Both the air and the food were hot, thick and soupy. I couldn't step out of my hotel without being attacked by beggars, fake holy men, people selling inscrutable services ("Your toes very bad. I clean!"). If I stood still for more than two minutes, children began to offer me drugs and prostitutes. Along Colaba Causeway, the main drag with all the restaurants that the Lonely Planet lists, I could barely walk: the hawkers leaped in my way, waving idiotic hippie shirts at me and shouting, "Yes! Hello! Havalook!" I was so overwhelmed by it all that I chucked my itinerary and headed straight out of India to Kathmandu on the next available flight.

Coming back to Bombay now, I can't for the life of me work out what caused me so much torment. Sure, it's full of beggars and hawkers, but you just walk past them (or give a little money and move on). And as for the food, it's phenomenal. True, the best places weren't here five years ago. We've been breakfasting at Basilico, a cafe where you can get smoked salmon, melted cheddar and a poached egg on a bagel, and for splurges we go out to dinner at Indigo and have steaks or duck or tuna medallions. But the less fancy places are great too. Our hotel is mostly frequented by travelers from Gulf states, and outside it are a string of kebab stands that do exquisite things to small bits of mutton and chicken. Up the road I can get a fine roast beef at Churchill's, a savory orange chicken at Ming's Palace, even a Lebanese falafel at Picadilly's. I suppose none of this would be terribly exciting if I'd just come from Manhattan, but I haven't. First I spent a year in Korea, where good Western food comes from TGI Friday's, and then I traveled through India and Nepal for four months. For the first time in well over a year, I'm in a city where the cultural elite actually knows what brie is.

Considering this phenomenal bounty, it's a wonder we've done anything other than eat. But then there's the charm and sophistication of the city itself. Good bookstores and music stores are nestled into whimsical Victorian confections left by the British, and all of it is overhung with giant trees trailing long roots from their branches. There are no cows on the street -- they stay on the plate where they belong -- and no bullock carts, auto-rickshaws or cycle-rickshaws either. Taxi drivers simply turn on their meters when you get in -- no haggling. Further uptown are the chaotic old markets, including the famous Chor Bazaar or Thieves' Market -- now a place to buy old video cassettes and stolen car stereos -- but even there, you can always escape into a taxi and head back to the comfort and rationality of Colaba.

Did I just say "comfort and rationality" while talking about Bombay? Man, I *have* been away too long.

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We did take a break from Bombay for a week to visit the famous cave temples of Ajanta and Ellora. These are collections of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain temples and monasteries that were laboriously carved into mountainsides -- the sort of insane projects India is famous for. The temples at both sites are impressive, some of them downright lovely, and all of them quite mad.

I won't go on about the paintings and carvings; if you want to know about them, go buy a book. But one design element did stand out. At Ellora in a Buddhist cave from 600 AD, and again at Ajanta in a Buddhist cave from 200 BC, Jenny and I found ourselves standing in what was clearly a Romanesque cathedral. The ceiling was ribbed with arches that fed into rows of columns along either side. In the front wall was a window to let in light, while the rear section consisted of a semidome, within which was seated the Buddha statue -- just where the altar would be in a church. At Ajanta, there were even paintings of the Buddha and other sages with head haloes and full-body haloes that could have come straight from a Greek or Russian icon painting. They looked like no Buddhist art or temples we'd ever seen before, and they couldn't have been influenced by Christianity because the first one was built 200 years before Christ.

It got us to thinking about the spread of culture westward from India. We tend to think of Central Asia -- Afghanistan, Iran, the former Soviet republics -- as one great swathe of Islam, but of course Islam didn't exist before 622 AD, and it didn't reach all these far-flung lands until centuries after that. And we tend to think of Buddhism as an East Asian religion, prevalent from Tibet and China across to Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. But I've read of ancient Chinese travelers making their way to Afghanistan on pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines. And of course Alexander passed through, sprinkling the whole region with Greek culture. Perhaps the design for European cathedrals comes from the Greeks. Whatever the case, it's surprising how many links there are between this farthest eastward bit of Indo-European culture and the parts with which we're more familiar.

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Aurangabad is the hub city for Ajanta and Ellora, and it has to be our least favorite city in India so far. To begin with, the hotel was atrocious. If you ordered a boiled egg sandwich, you got boiled eggs and had to send them back for further processing. If you ordered anything else, what you got was inedible. In the evenings the restaurant offered live music, which consisted of an Indian band with drum pad, keyboards, guitar and vocals, each musician playing his own separate melody at very high volume and very badly. They performed immediately next to our room.

Like all Indian hotels they offered laundry service, but I had to go up to the roof to reclaim one of my shirts -- it had been moved into a pile of someone else's dirty laundry -- and several pairs of my underwear disappeared. When I demanded a small discount on my bill to cover the cost of new underwear, I was informed that "The laundry man, he is very poor man." This was undoubtedly true, but I still didn't have any clean underwear. I told the clerk to pass this particular charity case on to the hotel owner and see what he thought.

And then there was the Internet service. The hotel did have Internet service, but I was never actually able to use it. It was always in use, or unavailable right now, or the office was closed.

Still, if it had been just our hotel, I might have liked Aurangabad. But it was the food that made it such a horrible place. The restaurants tended to have "Food" in their names -- Foodwallah's, Food Lovers -- as if to reassure us. Their menus were varied, but it didn't matter because whatever you ordered had been deep-fried into oblivion anyway. Apparently Aurangabad specializes in mysterious chicken, because all the menus offer such delights as chicken 65, chicken Kentucky and chicken lollipop. Okay, so maybe the chicken dishes were bad news, so why not order something else? Jenny ordered paneer tikka, which is usually squares of Indian cheese that have been dyed with tikka and lightly grilled, but which in Aurangabad were about as cheesy as fried okra is vegetably in South Carolina. The best we managed over the course of a week were the slightly gray boiled egg sandwiches at our hotel.

Nor did the town have much more to offer. No, we never went to the smaller version of the Taj Mahal, nor did we visit the water park or the 17th-century water wheel. But what we did see of Aurangabad was grim in the extreme -- just smoggy and dull, really. When we got back to Bombay, we were once again gorging ourselves at the restaurants, scarfing down kebabs as if we'd been away at sea.

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We're back in Bombay now, enjoying a lengthy sojourn here. We sleep in, go out, eat, come back, watch cable. We've met a few locals -- friends of friends -- which has made it a more interesting place to be. We've shopped a bit, gone to the very fine Prince of Wales museum. But it's been slow and lazy, and that's been pleasant. Still, one of these days we really should get back to India while we still have time. I expect we'll move on sometime this week, heading south to Madras and the tropical mysteries of Tamil Nadu.

Eating my weight in beef every 36 hours,
Josh

PS: Mom, that last thing was a joke. I'm not actually getting huge here. Relax.

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"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India