More India

I am in Varanasi, having arrived by a surprisingly comfortable sleeper train. We'd had a yoga session before setting off for the train, and for some reason this meant that I took the one-hour delay on the platform and the occasional cockroach in the cabin with a feeling of enormous calm.

I left you in Ranthambore having seen a tiger. That day concluded with an eight-hour bus ride to Agra, and the next begun with a visit to the Taj Mahal at sunrise. It is in fact as amazing a building as is claimed; richly-inlaid marble everywhere, with fantastic lattice-work screens around the tomb.

Afterwards, to Agra Fort and to Fatipour Sikri - two gigantic palaces built by Moghul emperors, in massive red sandstone whose carvings retain their intricate relief. The palace design is full of hidden gardens, which in the Indian sun are amazingly striking.

There is much dust, there is much pollution (the brick kilns on the Jaipur-to-Agra road particularly), there is much litter since presumably the tradition was to throw it into the streets to be devoured by the pigs, and the laboratories of the second agricultural revolution have as yet not produced a plastic-digesting pig.

I have taken 474 photos, and written 0 postcards. But there's a free afternoon today.