the Ganges and watched the sunset which was really lovely and thankfully in a nice and chilled part of town! Later on we were getting hungry again and decided that we should try the local cuisine as we’d only eaten western food so far. So we went for a curry - what a mistake! We went to a rooftop café that specialised in Italian, but we thought that we couldn’t go wrong being in India and all that! We asked for the mixed veg curry to be spicy but were served something which resembled mixed veg cooked in peanut butter!!! Very odd and not particularly tasty, the other curry Shahi Paneer was OK but nothing special!!!

We were due to be picked up at 10 a.m. for our rafting at a hotel on the other side of the river from where we were staying, so we headed out a little earlier so we could get some breakfast before our trip. There was also a big religious festival on so we sat and watched the

preparations in the main square while we waited for our lift. A lad came over to us holding a sign with our names on and wearing a top with instructor written on it. I hadn’t seen him come up and only saw the piece of paper, so by the time I had got up and started to follow him, he was quite a way ahead. I saw the instructor on his shirt and jokingly said to Rob ’yeah if he’s an instructor I’m a Chinaman’! The lad who was wearing a top saying instructor only turns out to be Chinese - DOH!!! He didn’t hear me but I thought I’d best keep any other flippant remarks to myself! We were supposed to drive upstream for about 35 minutes, but we seemed to be going a lot longer, didn’t really think much of it really but when we finally did stop, the driver had a quiet word with us and said that we were the only people who had booked the 17km raft and the other couple who were in the car with us had booked to do the 27km raft so would it be OK for us to do the longer raft. We were like ‘oh yes of