Wednesday 24 February: Angkor Thom (with photos still to come)
After filming at Ta Prohm on Wednesday morning, our next location is the south gate of the nearby city of Angkor Thom. I know this reflects little more than my ignorance, but I really had little sense of the scale of this late twelfth and early thirteenth century metropolis. With the other Khmer capitals built on or near the same site, this was an urban sprawl comparable to Los Angeles today. An infrastructure of roads and canals supported more than one million people, making it the largest preindustrial city in the world. Given how impressive many of its buildings remain, we keep reflecting on what an overwhelming impact Angkor Thom must have made on medieval visitors. Here be wonders indeed — and we have all of four hours to film them.

We start on the causeway that runs across a wide moat to the south gate. The figures of fifty-four guardian gods on one side pull the head of the snake Shesha while on the other side the same number of demons pull its tail. This is the Hindu creation myth known as the story of the Churning of the Ocean, in which the snake is wrapped around the home of the Gods, Mount Meru, which here is perhaps the temple of the Bayon at the centre of the city. The towering gate itself is topped by enigmatic faces. This amazing ensemble has probably witnessed more prestigious approaches than the short sequence we film of our presenter John McCarthy turning up in a Tuk Tuk.

Onwards to lunch, and then to the Bayon, the temple at the precise centre of Angkor Thom, which itself was at centre of the Khmer empire. The Bayon was built within the Buddhist faith by King Jayavarman VII, and on its many towers there are extraordinary enigmatic faces that are both the Bodhisattva Lokeshvara and in some sense also the king himself. These faces offer yet another wondrous visual experience, as you can both view them from far off, when they all but pull back into the stones, and climb right up to many of them, where they can be seen to revel in their subtle differences.

We film and film, guided by Professor Vudthy, with whom John talks both as they walk around the upper terraces of the temple and in a set-up in which they are seated at its base. The professor shows us another amazing sequence of bas-reliefs, and unlike those at Angkor Wat which depict tales from the Ramayana, these show historical battles in which the Khmer fought against the Cham alongside their Chinese allies.

Being the middle of the day, the sun is hot, hot, hot, but this has the advantage of keeping most of the other tourists at bay in the nearby cafés. We’re able to corral most of the others to stay out of the shots we want to achieve, and almost all seem oddly amenable to being pushed around, albeit politely, by a British documentary crew.

Just near to the Bayon is the terrace outside what was the city’s royal palace, and we have time to film some general shots, over which we can later lay voice-over, of John walking around. Here too there are amazing things: a sculptural wall of relief elephants and the odd “rope towers” seen across the royal square. Most of the city’s buildings, of course, were constructed of wood, and so have long rotted away — what we’re left with by and large are the religious structures intended to last for eternity.

As the afternoon winds down, we jump into the crew bus for the short ride to the big balloon. This is a well-organised tourist attraction that for the standard fee of $15 each is happy for us to take John McCarthy and camera up to see what we can see of Angkor Wat. Our presenter, however, is less happy once we’ve left the ground, as after a brave first piece-to-camera, he finds that vertigo forces him to take firmly to the balloon basket’s floor. Cue guilt from this producer, who hasn’t thought for a moment about the comfort of the talent. Cue even more guilt when the shot itself turns out to be wobbly and not that remarkable. A presenter’s acute discomfort is perhaps permissable for achieving great images, but probably not otherwise.

Once more, around 5pm we’re beginning to lose the light as the sun starts towards the horizon. But we have a wrap-up piece to camera to shoot for the Hinduism film in which Angkor Wat will appear; the Bayon and Ta Prohm will take their places in Buddhism. This we record with a background across the main moat of Angkor Wat which now is bathed in the light of a Cambodian ‘golden hour’.

All too soon, that’s a wrap, and we’re pitched into goodbyes, the paying of bills, a last meal, departure from Siep Ream (with a further eye-wateringly high excess baggage charge from Singapore Airlines’ subsidiary Silk Air), a brief stop in Phnom Penh airport, a longer one in Singapore, and then a thirteen-hour smooth but packed flight to Heathrow, with great service and only a so-so selection of movies (although the original of The Hustler, 1961, with Paul Newman, is a welcome re-discovery). We’re back in London with the whole trip having lasted less than five full days. It’s perhaps not the ideal way to travel but none of us would have missed it for the world.

Wednesday 24 February: Ta Prohm (with photos still to come)
Here’s today’s (rhetorical) question: is Ta Prohm the most extraordinary place I’ve ever been? Well, quite possibly. Ta Prohm was constructed at the end of the twelfth century as a Buddhist temple and monastery just outside the walls of Angkor Thom (for more on which, see next post). After the fifteenth century fall of the Khmer empire it was abandoned and the jungle reclaimed the site. Which was the case also at many other buildings in the Angkor region. At Ta Prohm, however, the trees and roots continue to grow through and on and around the ruins. The decision was made to leave site more or less as it was found, although some tidying up was done and partial restoration is underway. The effect, even as the inevitable tour parties traipse through, is mysterious, melancholy and — there is no other word — magical.

Really this is an experience to be pictured rather than set down in print — and soon over of Art of Faith II I’ll post a host of further snaps. But here I can perhaps gesture towards something of why the intimate intertwining of nature and culture makes such a strong impression.

The monastery was a huge edifice — more than twelve thousand people lived, worked and worshipped here. But now the trees — a mix of soft wood silk cotton trees and a hard wood variety also — have grown through the buildings, and in many places they tower above them. This a site of pure picturesque, with a strong sense of time passed without any intervention by human agency. It’s truly humbling to see this, and almost inevitably recalls Shelley’s traveller faced with the ruined statue of Ozymandias.

Yet there’s delight here too, a delirium of crazy juxtapositions that seem beyond even the imagination of Piranesi perhaps, or James Cameron. When you crouch down to discover the face of a tiny Buddha just visible between the tentacles of a giant root, the child within you finds it impossible not to be enthralled.

Look! There’s a tree encased in wooden scaffolding, an expedient to allow it to be cut down branch by branch rather than having  a massive trunk crash down on masonry. See! That root looks like a python reclining on a half-collapsed roof. There’s a root that reminds me of an octopus. And over that small carving tendrils drape themselves like strands of hair. You can even marvel at the ‘Tomb Raider Tower’,  a particularly impressive tree growing from the centre of the complex. For, dear reader, as you doubtless know, this is the location for one of Angelara’s most daring missions.

We wander around, open-mouthed, capturing what at the time feel like remarkable images at every turn. John interviews Professor Vudthy about the monastery’s history and the part it played in the wider story of Angkor. After nearly three hours, I’m sure we have the sequence we came here to shoot, but it’s hard to leave this enchanted forest. We even begin to feel a little guilty that perhaps we prefer Ta Prohm to the celebrated-for-centuries Angkor Wat. But we have one more main location here — and that’s a feeling that’s going to return to us. In the next post, bring on the Bayon.

Tuesday 23 February: Siem Reap (with photos still to come)
Just near Angkor Wat is one of the oldest of the many other temples in the region, Phnom Bakheng. This was built around 900 CE and was dedicated to Shiva — it’s also the vantage point from which Lara Croft first looks out over Angkor Wat in the Tomb Raider movie (more on this tomorrow). Presumably because the temple is built on what’s pretty much the only high point in the area, it has become an exceptionally popular spot from which to observe the sunset. So regardless of the damage that we and, today alone, hundreds and hundreds of others are doing to the monument, Ian, John and I tramp up the hill carrying the stripped down camera kit (which is still heavy, and especially so at six in the evening).

There are elephants that will take you up the hill for $20 a ride, but that’s not for us. Intrepid filmmakers racing the fading light do not sit alongside mere tourists in a howdah. But, boy, the 20-minute or so yomp is strenuous (which might have something to do with having had just the five hours sleep in the previous 40 or so). At the foot of the temple itself, which is already bedecked with terraces of tourists staring out to the west, we grab a first piece-to-camera from John, and then take on the steps to the top.

The image above fails to do justice to the steepness and the narrowness of the steps that Ian and I first expect John to climb (on camera, of course) and then up which we have to scramble with the DSR 750 and tripod. There are hordes of others intent on the same task, and not for the first time today I reflect on how modest an impact any notion of health and safety legislation has made to date on the temples of Angkor. Not only are we clambering up vertiginously steep steps with no handrails or similar — but quite soon all of these people are going to be making their way down them, in one big crowd, and after the sun has disappeared.

The top of the temple, an area perhaps the size of four tennis courts, is crammed with the peoples of most nations you’ve ever encountered. There are hippies and well-heeled Yanks, loud Koreans (sorry, but they are), elegant young women from Japan and an occasional monk. An immensely helpful official guide (who looks shocked as he declines my proffered tip) helps us get the camera up safely and then shows us Angelina’s vantage point to see the towers of Angkor Wat. This is the shot we’ve really come for, although you can never have too many sunsets on any project. The light is golden, but we’ve shot sufficient and we elect to scramble down before the sun touches the horizon.

Walking down the hill, as tired as I can remember having felt for many many months, I fall in with a thoughtful German tourist who’s on a month-long tour of Vietnam and Cambodia. He strongly recommends the sight in a nearby park of large-scale bats which go by the name of ‘flying dogs’, and he seems disappointed that we are only making a film about Hindu temples and not a wildlife doc. I ask, are the bats dangerous? Not really, he explains, or at least not for ‘us’, since they only suck the blood of women. Can this really be true?

Tuesday 23 February: Siem Reap (with more photos to come)
We have, believe me, been intensely busy since before dawn on Tuesday. So apologies for not posting over the last two days, but I’ll try now to catch up. After all, I’ve got a 24-hour trip home today, with more than a six hour lay-over in Singapore. Soon after we touch down at Heathrow first thing Friday, I intend that you and I are entirely up to date with our Art of Faith filming adventure in Cambodia. Which began for real around 5am on Tuesday, when we clambered into our crew bus and set out for the temples of Angkor. It’s still dark but there’s a steady stream of tuk-tuks on the road and when we get near to the site the ticket booth is already open.

You have your photo taken for the ticket ($40 for two days) that’s valid for the many temple sites across this area. And you’re constantly asked for this, plus — if you have a chunky-looking camera like us — you have to show over and over again the impressive-looking (and hard-won) licence from the ministry which permits us to film. Over two days, this must have been checked some thirty or forty times.

Arriving to watch the dawn at Angkor Wat, you have to stumble across the temple’s causeway in the dark with only occasional torches to give you guidance. These pinpricks of light eventually show you to a sandy bank where you jostle for a spot to stand. Sweet coffee for a dollar also buys you the right to a plastic chair. Soon there are hundreds of tourists here, checking their digital cameras (more tiny spots of light), offering a hopeful photo flash to the dark and peering, straining towards the east.

Out of the dark, the towers of the temple of Angkor Wat gradually emerge — and it is an impressive site, especially as the sky shifts from black to blue to an orange and then to a light pink hue. The towers have a mystery that somehow resists the contemporary, and you sense how extraordinary must have been the site for the first travellers from the west who came to these structures, still hidden within the jungle, in the mid-nineteenth century.

We shoot our introductory piece-to-camera with our presenter John McCarthy, and then begin to film the temple buildings as the sun rises. We walk from the west side around to the east, where the light on the buildings is spectacular. And at this hour there’s almost no-one here. The site receives more than two million tourists each year, and certainly later in the day it’s busy but never intolerably so. We’ve filmed elsewhere with bigger crowds and more interruptions.

We return to our hotel for breakfast and just after 9am we’re back at the temple. One of the problemsof the day (in addition to the sweltering heat and intense humidity) is the distances from the car park to temple site, over which we have to lug camera, tripod and sundry other kit. But the buildings are so remarkable that these feel like minor inconveniences.

Angkor Wat was built in the 12th century as a Hindu temple. What you don’t realise, even if you’ve read the guidebooks, is quite how it’s surrounded by hundreds of other temples of all sizes. These were constructed between around 900 and 1450 CE when this area was the centre of the ancient Khmer empire. Angkor Wat itself is on an island in an artificial lake, and this is part of why it’s so remarkable. But as we’re to discover there are many other, equally extraordinary sites in the region (and some perhaps even more so).

Our guide is Professor Vudthy, who has acted as fixer for the trip and now shows John around. We film the astonishing bas-reliefs, with their scenes from the Ramayana, and then climb towards the summit of the temple. Here beneath the central tower would have been the statue of Vishnu to whom Angkor Wat was dedicated. But in later years Vishnu was supplanted under a new regime by the Buddha, and the Vishnu figure now has a subsidiary place in one of the lower galleries.

Like the Hindu temples that Ian and John filmed in India, Angkor Wat is a symbolic mountain and home to the Hindu gods. Access to the holy of holies was reserved for the king and high officials, and they had to climb vertiginously steep stairways to reach the top level. Even the modern wooden steps are a challenge, but before lunch we clamber up and film in the galleries and courtyards to which only the most privileged of the kingdom would once have had access.

After lunch (delicious Cambodian curry served in a green coconut) we film again in the complex, trying to achieve some sense of its complex layout. Around the central ‘mountain’ is a symmetrical layout of towers, courts, galleries and entrances, and then beyond these the pools and moat. each element has a place in a rigorous cosmology, but it’s a little hard even to orient oneself without shots from a chopper. (No, not on a Sky Arts budget.)

By around 5pm we’re drenched in perspiration and really pretty tired. A swift bottle or two of Angkor beckons back at the hotel, but we decide that what we really need at this point in the day is a rapid climb to the top of another nearby temple. For which, jump to the next entry…

Monday 22 February: Siem Reap
At least you can see what we drank with our (delicious) supper last night. This post is something of a place-holder until I can post further about filming at Angkor Wat. We’re aiming to get up at 5am Tuesday morning so that, with thousands of other tourists, we can observe the sunrise over the temple (and hopefully film it in glorious HD for Sky Arts). I think it’s fair to say that we don’t have much sense of what time it is either here, in Siem Reap, or back in London. We took a twelve hour flight from London to Singapore, hung out in the airport for some six further hours, and then crossed into another time zone in flying through to Siem Reap. Greetings, meetings, dinner and then a deep sleep of, oh, at least three hours!

What an extraordinary place — and what an extraordinary history the country has lived through over the past decades. Within five minutes of a meeting we’re being shown a colleague’s finger cut off at the first joint and a smashed bone in his leg — both, he says, the results of being tortured by the Khmer Rouge. But seemingly that’s all in the past, and the country is keen to attract tourists and to show off its extraordinary heritage. Angkor Wat is one of those places that I’ve wanted to come to for years and years. Perhaps long ago I saw a documentary about it on television. With luck, it won’t disappoint… but rest assured that I’ll blog my reactions both here and over on Art of Faith II during the next three days.

Monday 8 February: Khajuraho
After the nightmare drive to Khajuraho it’s a surprise to wake up and find ourselves in a neat little tourist town. Low rise hotels line the roads into the centre, catering for every budget, everything from the basic-looking Hotel Gupta sitting a few yards from the road behind a dusty car park, to the Radisson, set back and shimmering white in green and shady grounds.

Nothing in the town rises above a second storey except its temples. They are the heart of this place, the reason that all the tourists come here down the long bumpy roads. Without these monuments to the vision, power and wealth of the Chandela dynasty at the end of the tenth century, Khajuraho would be a very sleepy little market town serving the farming communities around it.

The temples are situated in a perfectly manicured park in the town centre. Every way you look there’s another spire, or sikhara, rising above the trees. They have a very different look from the south Indian temple towers, the massive gopuras we saw in places like Madurai and Tanjavore.  The sikharas taper upward with gracefully sweeping lines, rather than ever-decreasing tiers as on a wedding cake. Less massive than their southern counterparts, these buildings have a wonderful delicacy about them.

Not so delicate are some of the images carved on the friezes and panels on the temple walls. Much of the Hindu temple sculpture we’ve seen reflects human experience, from mighty kings leading their armies to victory, to simple people toiling in the fields. And the temples themselves are intended not only as places of worship, but also as places that can bring the worlds of man and the many deities closer together. So the gods are shown manifesting very human attributes and emotions; anger, compassion, humour, generosity and love.

The relationship between Shiva and his consort Parvarti, for example, is renowned for its physical passion and dramatises the central importance of procreation in Hinduism. Kama, the pursuit of love and sexual fulfilment, is one of the basic paths which the faithful follow, alongside dharma, following a righteous path and artha, seeking prosperity, on the way to achieving moksha or spiritual liberation. Given all this it’s not surprising that many sculptures are sexy but nothing we’ve seen so far has been remotely hard core.

Khajuraho changes all that. I daren’t go into detail but suffice it to say that all human (and not only human) sexual activities are played out in carvings of the highest artistic level. Yet it is erroneous to read anything smutty, let alone downright pornographic into these images. This is what I’m told by our two contributors – the head of the site’s archaeological department and a guide who has lived all his life just across the road from the temples. They both insist that the sexual acts on display are merely metaphors for achieving spiritual balance. The archaeologist even goes so far as to suggest that because the figures aren’t smiling or moving they are clearly not engaged in real sex. Well really – since when don’t lovers smile at each other and since when has any stone carving actually moved?

The souvenir touts who swarm around us as we leave have a more realistic take on all this. Smiling wickedly they produce key rings whose spring-loaded recreations of the carvings leave no doubt as to their interpretation of what the tenth century stone masons were trying to convey. Yet, silly souvenirs apart, most people won’t leave Khajuraho thinking of its erotica – that only plays a small part in the bigger picture. There are more than 20 temples still standing out of over 80 that were built here. Today there is an atmosphere of fantasy; a thousand years ago, as the Chandela kings wandered among their creations, the setting must have been entirely magical.

Across the road from the temple park and behind a row of stalls selling clothes, snacks and mementoes, is a monument to one of those kings. A large building within a courtyard, it is topped with grey onion domes and has a shabby white-painted facade. The monument is now home to the Rajah Balwant Singh High School and our driver, Assaram asks if I’d like to have a look round. His seven-year-old boy is one of 300 students between the ages of four and 14. It is the lunch break and one of the 15 teachers gives me a quick tour.

As we walk past the kids sitting outside eating their packed lunches, he tells me that this is a fee paying school and much better than the state schools. Some of the classes are held in the ground floor rooms of the main building, others in the smaller rooms around the outside of the courtyard. They are mostly cramped and poorly lit. There is a blackboard but nothing else; the kids sit on plastic mats on the floor. The state schools must be dire.

Countless crocodiles of schoolchildren in smart uniforms like the children here, have filed past us grinning widely or nodding shyly as we say hello. It had never occurred to me that their classrooms could be so simple. Perhaps that is just me being foolish or blind, yet India – and I’ve been here a number of times now – remains utterly surprising and confusing. While the contrasts between rich and poor are so stark and there are many situations where you find yourself staring across a cultural divide, in many ways India is just a more colourful and noisy version of life back in the UK, with people working, making homes and having families. After all, even though we may not be familiar with words like artha and moksha, aren’t most of us essentially aiming to follow a Hindu-style line and do right by our fellows, earn a decent living, have a little love and tenderness and reach some sort of spiritual or emotional understanding and peace?

Many thanks to John too for these images.

Saturday 6 February: Sanchi 

At the entrance to the site of the Great Stupa at Sanchi a Bodhi tree rises high, covered in bright green leaves and with multi-coloured prayer flags wrapped around its trunk. The story goes that it started as a cutting from the actual tree under which the Buddha gained enlightenment over 2,500 years ago. Or rather that the cutting was taken from a tree in Sri Lanka that was taken from a cutting of the original tree which grew away off to the east in Bihar state.

It’s a nice story and whether or not it is true, Sanchi has the same serene atmosphere that I have encountered at other Buddhist sites. The gently rounded hilltop is dotted with the remains of temples, monasteries and the magnificent stupas that are the heart and soul of the place. Basically a stupa is a mound and looks like a deep, upturned wok. Which doesn’t sound that great but they are very powerful, albeit simple structures. Originally small burial mounds to contain the ashes and belongings of the Buddha and his followers, as they became objects of pilgrimage they were often enlarged, but remained solid with no interiors. I think it’s their shape, which leads the eye off in every direction, which makes them so calming. And though temples were to become far more elaborate, the stupa continued as Buddhism’s basic building block.

We are really lucky to have Yoichi Yamagatta, a Japanese Buddhist, as our contributor. He has been living at nearby Bhopal for the past four years leading a Japanese government funded rural health programme. In his spare time he comes to Sanchi and sketches the buildings, their details and decorations. He shares his knowledge of the site and its place in the development of Buddhist art and architecture with enormous warmth and enthusiasm.

We sit chatting as he sketches an elephant carved on one of the exquisite gateways that lead through to the colonnaded ambulatory passage that runs around the stupa. A gentle breeze stirs the quiet, warm air around us. Yoichi tells me that he comes here on most of his days off to spend the day sketching, trying to connect with the artisans who worked here 1500 years ago. Next year he is due to go back to Tokyo but such is his love of this holy hill top that he thinks he may stay on. Pointing out over the wide, green plains that lie below us, he observes that there are other hills nearby, but for some reason this one was chosen to be a place of pilgrimage. He reasons that probably this was a place of worship long before Lord Buddha’s time.

Yoichi reflects on how faiths have always borrowed ideas and adapted them to express new insights into the meaning of life. So too, of course, have nations and cultures evolved.

Making this series has taken me to wonderful places across Japan, China and now India, meeting fascinating, wise people like this gentle man. For the umpteenth time I’m struck by how privileged I am to have this job.

Some people are even more privileged though and we have to leave the site for around two hours to make way for a party of VIPs, members of the State Parliament and their families, to have a look round. A convoy of more than a hundred vehicles sweeps up the hill and fills the car park. With them come a small army of soldiers, yet despite a sudden profusion of carbines, AK47s and Sten guns, Sanchi maintains its soothing and welcoming atmosphere.

Not so soothing or welcoming is our hotel here. It’s called the Gateway Guesthouse. When we arrived the gateway was definitely closed and it was a while before our driver’s hooting encouraged two grim, gun-toting guards to let us in. Once in reception, where one is always greeted with a smile, only long faces greeted us.

A very odd place indeed but we reckoned that they were totally preoccupied with a major party they were clearly preparing to host the next day. And in retrospect the party was probably for all those VIPs.

Sunday 7 February: To Khajuraho
From Sanchi we drive back to Bhopal, stopping at a level crossing to film some train action. Being India, train action tends to be great, with trains a mile long hurtling past with horns blaring constantly. Being India, you can set the camera up right beside the track and no one bats an eye – filming, or ‘shooting’ as they refer to all our activities, tends to be pretty straight forward in public places.

From Bhopal we take a train to Jhansi and then embark on a four hour night drive to Khajuraho. Given the distance is only 100 miles away you’ll appreciate that the trip isn’t the easiest. It is a long grind over often rough roads with heavy traffic. But though uncomfortable – at times surreal even, it is a great travelling experience. We are undoubtedly less fazed by the madness of the driving here now, better able to roll with the manic rhythms of humans, creatures, machines and physical environment.

There so many people out on roads. Whole families walk along, even toddlers, right at the tarmac’s crumbling edge. Our headlights catch women in Saris walking with stately tread, bales of grasses or bundles of firewood balanced on their heads, their poverty borne with such grace.

Farm workers endure a commute of grim confinement standing packed so tightly they sway, probably even breathe as one. We count 17 people in and hanging from one auto-rickshaw. The passengers’ faces remain impassive as the machine buzzes into the night, its path lit by a feeble headlamp.

It seems odd that so many people are on this road as villages, let alone towns, are few and far between. Tania explains that people head off this road on tracks to their villages ‘in the interior’. Away from the main road all is darkness and with so little light pollution the sky glitters with stars.

An eerie tune by Lebanese musician Claude Chalhoub gives me an MP3 soundtrack as we stop at a police checkpoint. We are waved on and find the road getting very rough again. Where are we going?

At times it feels as though we are journeying through some wild frontier place, where people travel by ox-cart and pull off at night to set up camp around blazing fires. And the villages are little more than one street affairs with little stalls lit often only with candles. After a long stretch of dark, potholed road we are suddenly passing a blaze of coloured lights around a huge tent. It is guarded by men in old style costumes, sporting false beards and sitting on horses. A wedding party. Fantastic!

We continue on across the central Indian plain. The remoteness of Khajuraho has been seen as a reason for its temples to have survived so well, so long. I can believe that. I think it’s going to be a rather special location to end our ‘shooting’ in India.

Tuesday 2 February: Bombay (or Mumbai)
Steering a sailing boat you are forever moving the tiller or wheel. To counter the effect of wind, current and waves and keep going straight you have to make constant and sometimes quite large adjustments. Steering a car on a tarmaced highway you should need only to move the wheel a smidgen to keep on track. So it’s a bit alarming that our driver from Bombay airport swings the wheel between 10 and 2 o’clock just to go dead ahead.  Mind you, his Fiat taxi is so old that it’s a wonder it goes at all. Still even if we’d been in this year’s limo we’d have got to the Gateway of India no sooner. The traffic in the capital of Maharashtra state is at times as fast and furious as elsewhere, but for long stretches it just crawls along.

On one of the faster sections — along a boulevard running beside the Arabian Sea — we overtake a car with a sign on its roof announcing that it belongs to the JB Driving Academy. The young man at the wheel looks utterly terrified. And no wonder, learning to drive in these conditions must rank as one of the most difficult ways of gaining a licence in the world. I hope that the poor lad gains some sense of security from the neat and camouflaged ear muffs he is sporting. It is s source of constant confusion to us that so many people — mainly men –- are wearing these aural warmers in India’s oven heat. The car has bits falling off it — testament to many bangs and scrapes — and though I can’t see the instructor’s face, I imagine it to be deeply lined, permanently twitching and munching on handfuls of valium.

We see the Gateway and have lunch in a famous cafe, Leopold’s. The leading story in the English language newspaper is about a political spat caused by a spokesman for the right-wing nationalist party Shiv Sena, that Maharashtra should be kept for the Marathi’s and that all the ‘foreigners’ who come to seek their fortune in the city should not be catered for. His political opponents are keen to jump on this and call it rampant, racist regionalism and insist that the ‘foreigners’ are all Indian citizens and as such should be allowed to live wherever in the country they wish.

It was the Shiv Sena who changed the city’s name from Bombay to Mumbai in 1996. Being a PC kind of guy I’ve always used the new name. But Tania tells me that very few Indians do — preferring to stick with Bombay.

After Leopold’s, a hectic place filled with tourists and locals and one of the places shot up in the terrorist attack of late November 2008 ,  we manage a bit of shopping before heading back to the airport in time for our flight to Aurangabad.

Wednesday 3 – Thursday 4 February: Ellora
No two ways about it, the Kailasanatha Temple at Ellora is a wonder. Going around you find yourself sighing over a lovely statue and then have to draw back and remind yourself that this piece was carved from the living rock, as was the room it is in, as was the entire temple. The imaginations behind this and the 33 other cave temples and monasteries — some Hindu such as Kailasanatha, some Buddhist and a few Jain — must have been vast and inspired.

We spend two days at the caves and have two contributors, one speaking on the Hindu caves and one on the Buddhist. They both insist that the architect were divinely inspired. After telling us about the history of the temple, our Hindu contributor insists on taking me right to the farthest corner of Kailasanatha to some carvings hidden by workmen’s’ scaffolding. It features Lord Shiva flirting with a young woman. Even in the gloom one can clearly see that the artist has caught exactly the girl’s demure, blushing, upward glance at the god.

Our interviewee on the Buddhist areas is an architect and he tells me that his own work is inspired by the place, and specifically by its connection with and respect for the world around it. He says that Ellora reminds him that his ego is not important and that he should leave himself open and humble in the hope of finding the right way forward on his building projects. He would like to achieve what the designers here did and ‘reveal the beautiful structures that were already there, waiting in the mountainside to be discovered’.

On our way out of Ellora we come across a company of monkeys. With grey coats, black faces and very long tails they sit under the trees demanding nuts and bananas from the tourists. They scamper up and, with very long fingers, snatch any offering from the palm of your hand. Tania tells us that these are langur monkeys and that they are fiercely territorial. So much so that they are used to scare off other monkeys from the government buildings in Delhi.

As the sun sets over the Deccan our driver Ballagee takes us home with a very un-Indian and cautious driving style. We stop at a fruit stall and as well as apples, pears and figs, buy some things I have never seen before. A large, smiling woman with very dark skin and a dark mane of hair slices up fruits for us to try. One is a small round fruit a bit like a hairless kiwi but with brown flesh that has the consistency of a just-ripe plum and tastes of caramel. Another is a large, knobbly pink fruit with a soft, creamy texture. The first is a chico, the second a custard apple, or, as Tania puts it, ‘custard apple variant’.

The light is almost gone as we leave the woman with her piles of fruit under a makeshift tent. Almost immediately we hit a traffic jam. It turns out that two trucks have crashed head on. We later learn that six people died in the smash — on their way home from a wedding. It’s a great relief, after the carefree flamboyance of our southern driver Chaundru, that Ballagee is very careful.

Friday 5 February
On the train from Manmad to Bhopal, we have four bunks in an AC Two Tier coach. While the carriage is pleasantly cool, its double-glazed windows are very murky, giving the passing countryside a fuzzy appearance. This and the curtains that shroud all the bunks create a rather cosy, introspective atmosphere. Three of our bunks are on top. As I write this post Ian is sleeping in one, Tania in another and all the kit is lashed down on the third. Seb and I sit on the fourth — on the lower tier. A couple of hours ago a man appeared down the narrow corridor handing out meals. We had a pretty decent veg curry. Every quarter of an hour or so someone comes through offering cold drinks, fruit, sweets or hot tea or coffee, with the cry ‘chai, masala, chai!’

There are two other bunks in our area, containing a family with a sweet little girl. Unfortunately when Ian and I grin at her she bursts into tears. Fortunately her parents and grandparents think this is very funny. They chat, share fruit and play with the little one and then settle down for a sleep.

It feels as though we have entered into a small, self-contained world that is speeding across the endless plains of Maharashtra and beyond into Madhya Pradesh and the city of Bhopal, our jumping-off point for the Buddhist site of Sanchi.

Many thanks to Ian Serfontein, as so often, for the photos.

Seb Grant

Monday 1 February
By way of excusing the worsening syntax, can I introduce my new obsession: ‘keyword English’? Perhaps it’s obvious, but ‘keyword English’ is the employment of a very simple sentence structure when trying to communicate with principally non-English speakers.

So for example one might say, ‘Tonight evening. Where Go?’ or “Leave. Tomorrow. Six. Yes?’

Obviously our wonderful Punjabi fixer Tania is much more accomplished in this art than I am, but it really does help in conversing with native Tamil speakers. Special mention to our patient, fantastic and, er, very fast driver Chundru who has been incredibly good-natured with my attempts to communicate — especially when, at times, I sound more like Yoda.

Anyhow…

Mahabalipuram story. I tell. (Enough ‘keyword English’ – Ed.)

Six o’clock this morning saw the five of us (John, Ian, Tania, Chundru and myself) paddling in the Indian ocean while the camera rolled for a time-lapse of the rising sun. Sadly the mist prevailed and we were only partly successful — but it felt good to be up and John recorded a smart piece to camera introducing Mahabalipuram, a small town of some 12,000 people, made famous for its remarkable granite-carved bas-reliefs, caves and sculptures.

I won’t share too much about the sites themselves because (a) I’m writing this on the short flight to Mumbai and all my notes are in the hold; and (b) I’m hoping that you’ll see the fruits of our labours when the films are broadcast on Sky Arts later in the year –but briefly, while it’s believed that the sculpting was done in the 7th-8th centuries by the Pallava peoples, there is considerable mystery about the sculptures themselves. What was their purpose? Were they all to stay in Mahabalipuram?  And crucially, what else is there of the sculptures? The devastating tsunami in 2004 actually revealed further works.

Our interviewee for the day was the fabulously named, Mrs Kulashaker — warm, witty and knowledgeable, she was everything we could have wished for in a contributor.

Sorry — blog curtailed. ‘Could all electronic equipment be turned off, as we prepare for landing, please?’

Goodbye Southern India. We’ll miss you.