This was the one thing that we were most worried about during our visit. The Indian food was supposed to be delicious but the standards of hygiene were generally quite poor with the risk of some quite serious illnesses if we were not careful. Our tour was half board with all of the meals being provided by our hotels but we still had to be cautious. For example, we could only eat cooked food that was still hot and no uncooked food at all - particularly salads; we could only eat fruit that we had peeled ourselves; no ice in any drinks and we always had to make sure that the seal was still intact on each of the many bottles of mineral water that we bought (some unscrupulous locals refill the empties with tap water which would, undoubtedly, cause us quite a tummy upset if we drank it).

Somehow Lina managed to escape without any tummy upsets and so would I, if I hadn't given in to temptation in one of the better five star hotels where the majority of our group also fell foul of the dreaded Delhi Belly (two of them were quite seriously ill). I had risked eating a couple of their cold puddings and the symptoms developed rapidly and were in full swing the next day when, unfortunately, we had to make a long journey over mostly bumpy roads (with my buttocks clenched all the way). The tablets I had taken only kicked in after we arrived (and then blocked me up for four days but I'm sure you didn't want to know that!)

Despite staying in seven different hotels, the food was surprisingly monotonous as, except for two of the hotels (in Delhi and Bombay), we were served almost identical buffet dinners every day, with very little meat content - just some very bony chicken and, if we were lucky, some mutton.

We were a little worried about the standard of the hotels we would be staying in. We had heard that they could be quite basic - particularly in the toilet department!. However, they turned out to be surprisingly good and mostly five star but with two very notable exceptions both of which were supposed to be palaces!

The first one was in Jodhpur (famous for its riding breeches) and really was a Maharaja's Palace. Part of it had been converted into a hotel (this is quite a common practice in India). The Maharaja and his family still lived there (we even saw him and actually spoke to his wife, the Maharani). They had converted the ground floor of the Palace into hotel rooms and built some cottages, supposedly in the style of traditional village huts, scattered around the Palace gardens and, as you have no doubt guessed, we were in one of these huts. The ones we passed, as we wandered through the maze of paths looking for ours, actually looked quite nice. Ours, however, was completely different and looked like something out of the Flintstones (as you can see from the picture). It was almost entirely stone (including the bed!) and had a tree running through one of the walls. It did have a proper bathroom inside but the shower was like a cave (within a cave). Needless to say it was alive with insect life and it was the only place where we needed our mosquito net. Luckily, our itinerary had been changed so that we only had to spend one night here (see the section on air travel).

The second so called palace was in Jaisalmer and was actually a poor one star hotel with an imaginative name. It was still in the latter stages of being built - some rooms had not been completed and they hadn't quite finished the electric wiring (both inside and out) which was positively dangerous in some places. There were also regular power cuts, which is supposedly a common occurrence in India but it only happened to us here and only occasionally did we have hot water - which was quite annoying as we got quite dirty in this dusty, desert region of India.