He's a man-eater...make you work hard...

Well, Orchha certainly was all it's cracked up to be. It's a tiny village set in the midst of a crop of crumbling forts, flanked by a wide, fast-flowing river which oozes onto green plains to the west. After a whistlestop tour of the closest monuments, on Friday we rented Indian bicycles and creaked along a road through the nature reserve. The handlebars fold backwards like those on a Harley, but the saddle is almost as wide as a carseat, and high, forcing you to ride very upright - Dixie looked like Dame Maggie Smith in a BBC adaptation of a Forster novel. We made it out to a separate arm of the river and basked on the rocks, not quite daring to venture in (those stories about parasites, the bum-worms and the eye-worms, tend to stick in the mind). As afternoon waned we meandered back, stopping at the cenotaph of the Maharaja Singh for a few customary gasps and gapes. Orchhan architecture is like nothing else in India - completely devoid of onion-domes, for a start. The spires curve upwards like...well, I'll see if I can include a few pics.

It was as we clanked through the backstreets of Orchha (Dix had been on a bangle buying-spree) that we felt the huge, irresistible peace which presides over rural India. We sensed it again in Kajuraho, as we paused along a country road to watch local children quietly crossing the scrubland. The brightly-painted houses of Orchha village hunched exhaustedly in the sun. Up at the palace, on a hill to the south, we subsided into silence as a sadhu doodled on his pipe and the surrounding grasses cooed and croaked, gazing out to a thunderous horizon. In a land so mighty, it is little wonder that the people are so humble.

What could displace all that? It took a heavy bout of ancient sandstone erotica at the Hindu temples in Kajuraho to dislodge Orchha from our minds. You will perhaps be shocked to discover, as we were, that the seventeenth-century Chandela Rajput Hindus were a very horny lot. Kajuraho village is surrounded by numerous temples, divided by the nineteenth-century British archaeologist (and incurable prude) T.S. Burt into the Eastern and Western groups. At midday, in the fizzing sunshine, we hired bikes again and tripped out to the eastern edge of the settlement, where the curator of the Varana temple slipped suavely out of his doze to give us a quick tour of the Kama Sutra positions engraved on its side. In the afternoon, after lunch at the Raja Cafe, founded by a Swiss convert to the Indian way, we went for a peaceful stroll through the lush gardens that house the more impressive, and more famous, Western cluster. It was a diverting but perhaps logical fact that most of the tourists there were Indian, their cameras trained grimly on the carved Kama Sutra contortions as they dictated notes to their wives - we imagine. Our guide, anyway, was the gleefully crude Achna, a fifty-six year old who tried to convince us that a blatant depiction of bestiality, occurring as an anguished wife looks on, was part of a contemporary cure for impotence. So let me get this straight: the sulphur in the horse's anus was necessary to cure the erection blues, and restore (in his words not mine) a 'fresh banana'? Pull the other one, mate. Somebody, somewhere, is telling a very big lie.

The journey from Kajuraho to Bandavgarh National Park (where we are biding our time, with no small amount of trepidation, before safari tomorrow) was, as somebody from Sheffied might say, a 'reet slog'. We took a bus to Satna, and spent 4 hours on the stone floor of a waiting room, bent decisively over our books and a deck of cards. Prior to this, there came the Great Fast-Food Odyssey. Overtaken by a sudden craving for e-numbers, we enquired (I admit it! Take me away!) after a certain family restaurant by the name of 'MacDonald's'. After dropping our aim to the (we thought) much simpler demand of 'burger', we found our way via several puzzled Indian restaurateurs, and a long-suffering cycle-rickshaw-wallah, to the Maharishti cafe. Sure, the burger came chopped up into four portions and sprinkled with grated cottage cheese; sure, it was veggie, and sure, it hadn't quite escaped the mania of Indian chefs for spicing everything, but by God was it worth it. The rest of the night takes on a ketchup-coloured hue. Even the delay of our train for 2 hours couldn't dent our additive-fuelled sense of wellbeing.

Our rail connection to Umaria, near to Bandavgarh, was the scene of perhaps the funniest train-related misfortune yet. Awoken in the night by a sudden urge to use the loo, Dixie nudged me with the puzzled revelation that we had apparently reached our destination two hours early. As Indian trains are rarely on time, let alone ahead of time, we dismissed the claims of the men on the platform and prepared to go to sleep. Still, out of curiosity, we hovered around the train window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the name of the tiny station as the train pulled away. Duly it came: 'Umaria'. Cue: absolute panic. Simultaneously deciding to stay put and leg it before the train picked up too much speed, we found ourselves, bags in hand, dithering by the open doors of the carriage. The flagstones were already moving by too fast to pick out any detail. Dixie, bless her, jumped first. I saw her go arse over tit as the ground whipped away to her left on landing. After a moment's hesitation, I followed. E voila! There we were, at four in the morning, my guitar still clanging, sprawled in the dust twenty feet away from each other on the only platform of a station in the middle of nowhere. The whole thing was pure slapstick. Shakily, we issued weedy cries of triumph and held up our thumbs: nothing broken.

In a way, I pity the commuting and the homeless who watched this morning a moving train ejaculate two bleary-eyed Westerners headfirst. They must have thought we were suicides; at the very best, they must have thought they were dreaming. I'm amazed my guitar survived it. The thing is obviously built of stern stuff - it has to be to survive ten minutes in India. Still exchanging high-fives and shuddering at what might have happened had we hesitated for five seconds or landed badly, we crawled into a sleeping bag on the floor of the station and waited buzzingly for the 7.30am bus to Tala.

Confusion over? - not a bit of it. An hour and a half into our bus ride we were heckled from our dawn-enraptured reverie by a tout, on the bus, at my shoulder, crying 'Koom Koom! I have a gypsy! Come to my gypsy!' I thought I must have had a bang on the head after all. It turns out that the tiny smattering of houses in which the bus had hesitated was Tala itself, at the edge of the Bandavgarh Park entrance. It really is difficult to tell the difference between a gaze of Indian expectancy and one of Indian curiosity - it turns out that the whole bus had been staring at us for five minutes, patiently waiting for us to alight. 'Kum Kum', as it's spelt, is the name of a local fleapit popular with travellers. And a gypsy? A make of jeep, driven by hawkers, which has multiplied to tremendous numbers in recent years following determined cultivation and now moves in herds around Tala and the surrounding woodland.

It transpires that we have visited Bandavgarh at exactly the right time, a fact that we keep repeating smugly to ourselves. Traditionally off the tourist map, there is little chance of the crowds that scare away most of the wildlife at Madhya Pradesh's glossier parks. We have crawled, slept, stumbled and leaped our way here exactly a week before the season kicks off, with climate perfect, smiles and signs freshly-painted, and tigers raring to go. We undertake our full-day safari tomorrow (for the not inconsiderable price of 1730 Rs. each, including entrance, guide, jeep-hire etc) exactly one day before the park entrance fee is hiked up by 50%.

A short hunt unearthed the Mogli Lodge. The place is pure Jurassic Park, with fans whirling in large, purpose-built, empty rooms, waiting for the first flush of excited tiger-spotters. It also has, strangely, the accompanying sense of doom - it seems the place is too perfect, too neat not to expect a tiger raid sometime very soon. There is a pretty veranda on stilts that a hungry beast could clear in a leap. On the other hand, it also lives up to its Jungle Book eponym. Lads from local tribes haunt the place, disguised as staff. It's 3km away from Tala village along an ill-humoured dirt track (which it is unsafe to walk at night: supper-time for those peckish predators) and only 1km from the start of the tribal settlements - where, recently, a man-eater carried off four children and some cattle before being shipped to a zoo. The park, actually, has no fences - a fact which had us tittering nervously when we were told. But, I suppose, you've gotta go there to come back. See you on the other side.