Dudhsagar Falls

From my position in the travel hammock – bright orange against the endless variations of green within the forest, and the bright aluminium of the MacBook Air – I can hear the constant white noise generated by India’s third highest waterfall – Dudhsagar.

The monkeys came close just now – threading through the trees, like a diminutive hit squad – attracted by the smell of cooking. Lentil and rice curry. Robin and Manuel threw sticks at them, while I stirred the pot. They have receded – for now. But they will be back.

We arrived last night, having left the Indian tourist Mecca behind us. In truth, Palolem beach was so beautiful, and our beach huts were so cheap, and comfortable, I could have stayed longer. In truth, I could have stayed there forever. So it’s a good thing I had Robin and Manuel with me, to save me from becoming a fully-fledged Goan Beach Bum.

We arrived here last night, having spent the day travelling. We only covered 70km from Palolem beach, but our first train from nearby Canacona was delayed by two hours, and we had an hour to wait for our second train. By the time we arrived in the village of Kulem, six miles away, where we loaded up with a few more supplies, nobody would drive us to the waterfall. I was flabbergasted. How often do routine business opportunities get passed up in India? Here we were, three European travellers, willing to pay someone for a ride, and nobody would oblige.

It turns out there are strict rules about visiting the waterfall. Licensed jeeps can only be hired in the morning, and taxi drivers are forbidden from encroaching on their business. The last train – which would have deposited us a mile away from the falls – had already left. The only way was to walk there.

We laughed as we smoked our cigarettes, and pointed at the mountain of stuff we had with us. In addition to our usual large backpacks and day sacks, we had cooking equipment and food to last us a few days, water, beer, and of course – a bottle of Old Monk. Traipsing six miles with all that was out of the question, and so, with that in mind, we set off walking along the railway line, in the direction of the waterfall.

My travelling companions derided me for my decision to wear flip flops along this unconventional route. But in truth, you can go just about anywhere in flip flops. We walked along the railway line, leaving the siding sheds behind, and passing through steep embankments, and forest. Every so often we would hear one of the mercifully slow moving locomotives approach us, and we would stand back, as the articulated, clanking edifice rolled by. Passengers and crew swivelled their heads to watch us, while the freighters continued on blindly, segment after rusted iron segment.

Darkness fell, and we were still miles away, loaded down like leaderless pack mules. However, we found a suitably rutted dirt lane, which we determined would take us to the waterfall, and followed that, and after about three hours, we got there – exhausted, and ready for our hammocks.

The moon was about two days away from being full, and the sky was cloudless. We saw the incredible natural spectacle as if in a dream. The surrounding forest was dark, the mountains were charcoal grey, and the waterfall was silvery, and luminous.

Its multiple drops add up to three hundred metres. To invoke a comparison, once again… that’s almost the height of the Eiffel Tower!

We watch the water cascade down the mountainside, as if in slow motion. The narrow tributaries near the top are like spun silk. They pass under a railway bridge near the halfway point, and then fan out across the black rocks in front of us, plunging into the large pool, which has been shaped by the waterfall, over countless eons.

I have seen pictures of the waterfall during the monsoon season. It becomes a vast eruption of water; something like God’s burst plumbing. At this time of year it is less forceful, but still… damn impressive.

We cast our eyes to the forest, which encroaches upon the water-sculpted rocks. It rises steeply, and we begin to climb through it, leaving our heavy bags behind. We find a plateau, with trees that look to be ideal for the placement of hammocks. They are young trees, growing strong and straight. We retrieve the bags, and haul them up the slope. They become tangled in trailing vines and snag on thorny branches. The additional bags we are carrying – filled with rice, lentils, pasta, water, and mixer for the Old Monk – further impede our progress.

We are comprehensively bloody knackered by the time we hurl our bags to the floor and set up camp. But we are in good spirits, too, because we have found an excellent spot; trees arranged in a triangle formation, ideal for stringing up three hammocks around a campfire. The magically convenient, immensely comfortable travel hammocks go up, and we gather some large rocks to make the ramparts for the fire.

That night, Robin rustles us up rice with baked beans, with some chilli powder thrown in – which hardly sounds like the makings of culinary greatness, but actually tastes great.

As our subsequent meals demonstrate, there is a kind of “halo effect”, derived from cooking food over a campfire. What would have tasted mediocre back home, tastes a lot better, when cooked over the open flame. If baked beans and rice, flavoured with chilli powder, was to be served at a dinner party in the average suburban home, there might be a strangled silence, as the guests wondered if their host had quietly gone insane. However, you serve this simple fare to the same folks sitting around a campfire, and they will oo and ah like they are in a Michelin starred restaurant.

We eat our food, crack open a few beers and play some music through the ever-present, and ever-useful, Boom2 speaker. The three of us are tired, but we are energised, too, by this place: by the sounds of the jungle, the mystery of the dark forest, and the warmth and cosiness of the campfire. Gemutlichkeit.

Before we settle in the hammocks for the night, we scuttle down the slope with our cooking pot and cups, and wash them in the fast-flowing water. Then we engage our tired limbs for the last time, and return to the camp we will call home for the next few days.

*

I had expected to write that I slept solidly through the night, such was my fatigue, settling into the hammock. However, I woke up many, many times.

Hammocks are comfortable things – insanely comfortable, and relaxing to a degree which is also insane. Until, that is, you decide to spend the night in one.

Those not used to sleeping in hammocks will find themselves shifting from one imperfect position to the other, regularly, throughout the night. The truth is, positions that are most comfortable when sleeping in bed are rarely so comfortable in the hammock.

I like to sleep on my side. This doesn’t work terribly well in a hammock, as the natural curve bends the body at a curious angle. The best position I found on that first night was a weird face-down one, squashed into one upward-curving side of the hammock. I achieved a good two hours like that.

Interrupted as the night may have been, it was worth it, of course, to wake up in the forest. A more beautiful, and natural, mid-morning wake-up would be hard to find.

We started a fire, and made tea, and decided to forego breakfast and catch our own fish – which we had heard are plentiful in the plunge pool beneath the waterfall. To that end, we fashioned our own fishing rods.

I took my cues from Robin and Manuel here, them being seasoned fishermen, and me not. We cut down some long, straight branches for the rods, and then cut grooves in the ends, around which we could wrap our fishing line. At the ends of the lines we attached our hooks. I had thought that would be the extent of it, but we also needed weights and floats stacked above the hooks, in that order.

The floats were easy enough to make – just bits of twig tied onto the line. The weights were trickier. We needed things that were small and heavy that could also be secured to the fishing line. In the end, I hit upon a solution: using material torn from a plastic bag, wrapped around small stones. It was a great moment for me, personally – not being much of an “outdoors-man” of the Bear Grylls type, while all the same… loving the outdoors.

During our whittling and threading endeavours we began to hear excitable shouts coming from the direction of the waterfall. We exchanged a look. People.

Other people had arrived to piss on our notion of being the only people here, fending for ourselves in the wild India.

Of course, we expected there to be other people here. The falls are part of a national park, and there are strict opening and closing times. Renegades that we are, we had infiltrated, and set up camp without the knowledge of the authorities.

There must have been two hundred people down at the waterfall – at least. They were nearly all Indian, and nearly all wearing bright red life vests. They were in family groups, splashing around at the edges, and there were groups of young men, whooping and hollering in the water. We watched them from the rocks. They were not good swimmers. One man thrashed his arms wildly, inching towards the falling water, bobbing on the surface like a sea turtle filled with plastic. The sight reminded me of my experience of Chavakkad Beach, where I was the only swimmer, and reinforced in my mind that swimming is not such a common leisure pursuit in India as it is elsewhere.

We were fairly dumbstruck at the sight of all these people. I mean, on the one hand, they were overwhelmingly Indian, and we were in India. So if anyone had a right to be here, cavorting around and having a jolly old time, it was them. On the other hand… it wasn’t much good for fishing!

So we shrugged our shoulders and thought When in Rome… or something like it, and climbed into the water.

It was cold. That’s the first thing to say about it. The second thing to say: it was filled with lots of meaty-looking fish. We could see them from the rocks. Wearing my snorkel mask, I saw them wriggling by mere inches from my face.

I couldn’t wear the snorkel for long. The cold was tightening my chest, and making it hard to breathe. I dived down a couple of times, but my lung capacity was shot. So instead I swam under the falling water, and felt myself drowning, briefly. And then I floated on my back, trying to control my breathing. And when I had had enough of that, I climbed onto a large rock, where I lay for a while, like a lizard, basking in the heat.

After we had banished the chill of the plunge pool, we ascended the slope, back into our forest world, and I rustled us up a lentil and rice curry, with turmeric and chilli powder. It tasted good. But then – lentils always taste good, in my experience.

We returned to the waterfall at dusk, once the crowds had gone home. We had our fishing rods with us. Manuel had succeeded in finding a grub, which he speared on the end of his hook. He tried taking up different positions around the pool, while I searched around for a worm, and Robin tried throwing in handfuls of rice, to attract eagle-eyed fish to the surface.

None of our efforts amounted to anything. Manuel concluded that the fish were sleeping. I concluded that all the worms must have had prior warning of my visit, because I must have lifted fifty rocks, and I didn’t find a single worm. I couldn’t believe it. I kept muttering things like, “No worms… not a single worm. Not a single God damn worm. I can’t believe it. I cannot believe it…” over and over, as I crawled about in the gathering gloom, lifting rocks. Not a great moment in my life.

So we returned again to our camp. Manuel announced he would cook us pasta, which was welcome news indeed. When an Italian decides he is going to cook pasta, over a campfire, you know that a great culinary moment is not far away. And indeed, it was good. He got the timing bang on – as expected. Al dente penne with a spicy tomato sauce. Unbelievable.

The next day, we decided we would load up with a few more supplies. In particular, we wanted some eggs. And more beer. So, we took down our hammocks, packed all our stuff away, and stashed our big bags among some shrubs. We were careful to leave some distance between our bags and the site of our camp, so that a chance discovery of the camp would not risk the loss of the bags.

Our destination was Kulem. We knew there would be trains from Sonalium, which was the nearest train station, about a mile away. We would get there by walking along the train tracks, and crossing the railway bridge, which spanned the waterfall so dramatically. To reach the tracks, we would scramble up a steep forested slope. It was necessary to prowl around in this fashion, like disoriented resistance partisans, because we were camping illegally, and so – we wanted to keep a low profile.

We set off. It was tough going, to begin with. The slope was indeed steep, and treacherous. Wearing flip flops didn’t help, but pride prevented me from making a fuss.

Having hacked our way through the dense undergrowth, and navigated past appallingly prickly plants, with thick, woody stems, and dragged ourselves under knotted masses of trailing vines, etcetera, we emerged into the sunlight, which gleamed on the dull metal of the wide gauge track.

We followed it along. Sparkling greenery enveloped us, giving way to the falling water of Dudhsagar.

The railway bridge roughly bisected the awe-inspiring, tiered drop. It descended in two tributaries, colliding in a pool just a little way below the level of the track. The water then ran beneath the central span of the bridge, and continued its descent – fanning out across the rocks, and showering the happy creatures, splashing about in their life vests, far below.

We paused midway across the bridge, and gazed down at the people, made tiny with distance. I snapped a few pictures and arranged the obligatory group shot: myself, Robin and Manuel, striking a pose, with the waterfall in the background.

Then we moved on; crossing the span of the great bridge, and entering the bore of the first railway tunnel we would encounter that morning. The inky blackness swallowed us, but not for long; the tunnel stretches were fairly short. As we passed from one to the next, I hung back, and took pictures of Robin and Manuel emerging from the darkness, silhouetted against the textured light.

Sometimes we would hear the distended honk of a locomotive as we picked our way through the gloom, and the same thought would occur to each of us: will we soon be sharing this tunnel with a large, noisy train? Flattened against the slippery stone walls, shielding our ears from the air horn, made terrible within the enclosed space?

Fortunately, we were spared such horrors.

Most of the trains on this line were of the heavy goods variety; they were slow movers. We almost managed to leap aboard one, which was clanking along in front of us, but it was moving fractionally too fast for us.

More accurately, it was moving fractionally too fast for Manuel, who was wearing sporty shoes, and running flat-out in pursuit. It was moving moderately too fast for Robin, who was wearing walking boots. And it was moving hopelessly too fast for me.

I was still wearing flip flops. For anyone who hasn’t yet tried running along a railway line wearing flip flops, I have this advice: Do it! What are you waiting for? Get out there, you lazy couch potato! You may fall and lose a few teeth, but hey, no one stays beautiful forever.

Following our failed attempt at chasing down the train, we approached the little railway outpost called Sonalium.

Hardly a station, it functions more as a stopping-off point for commercial goods trains. It is a sleepy-looking place, staffed by some of the least-stressed railway officials in the world. They sit around, dozing in the sunshine mostly. They observed our approach through the mid-morning heat haze the way old folks typically observe new folks. That is to say, their gaze was steady, and their faces were inscrutable.

We asked them when the next train was, and – to our immense shock – we got vague, conflicting responses. So we sat down and had a smoke, and watched the ants marching around on the concrete. Eventually we heard the bovine note of an approaching freight train, and we scampered off down the track, with the intention of Shanghaiing ourselves aboard.

We stood by while the interminable column of rusty segments clanked past us, slowing all the while, until we were met with the tail end of the mobile edifice. This is a simple metal platform, open on all sides, with a little hut attached to it, affording basic protection from the weather.

There were three people already riding the tail section – a railway officer, and two civil engineers. The railway officer looked us up and down, and said he wasn’t really supposed to let us on… but he would. The civil engineers smiled as we clambered up the short ladder, and arranged ourselves on the platform. I leaned against the back rail, and one of them warned me against it; there is always a huge jolt when the train sets off, as the spaces between hundreds of couplings suddenly close. It could be enough to spill a hapless freeloading traveller onto the tracks.

And so we passed the few miles from Sonalium to Kulem quite happily, chatting to these guys, whose job it was – along with a million or so other Indians – to keep the world’s largest railway system running.

It’s a nice way to travel – on the back of these commercial freight cars. It’s hypnotic to watch the scenery scroll slowly by, as sunlight filters through the trees, and the wheels and axles and bearings pound out their mechanical symphony. It feels good to travel beneath the open sky. And when the tunnels close in, and the light trickles away, leaving perfect darkness in its stead – the non-visual senses come more fully alive. The endeavour of countless moving parts, and the press of cool metal, and the persistent sigh of the wind, becomes the world.

It occurs to me at times like these, that I would like to travel more in this fashion – perhaps covering great distances across the sub-continent. There is a romance to the idea that probably comes from watching westerns, where there always seems to be a couple of drifters, outlaws or runaways stowing themselves away in empty grain silos and drinking sour mash whisky while the desert unwinds.

However, the transport infrastructure in India is so expansive, and cheap, that such behaviour is uncalled for. Indeed, you would have to be a romantic fool of the first order to go from Mumbai, say, to New Delhi, eking out an existence on the back of a freight train. Not only would the journey take about a week, and be murderously unpleasant, it would result in a net saving of a few hundred rupees – which is small change for a western traveller.

Better to ride the freighters short distances, and keep the romantic fantasy intact.

Arriving in Kulem, we waved goodbye to our traveling companions, and restocked with supplies. As well as the beer and a few other foodstuffs, we bought fifteen eggs. These were presented to us loose, in a clear plastic bag. We looked at the scramble-in-waiting, and then at each other, and back at the eggs. How would we transport these fragile hen products? We wondered. I tell you what, I said. I’ll put them in my bag.

It seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. The sack that we had been given, containing the rest of the food, would certainly have crushed the eggs, had we put them in there. My bag was an over-the-shoulder type, with little inside it – except for a few important things, like my camera.

It’s important to mention at this point, that when I stopped to take the group picture of myself, Robin and Manuel standing in front of the waterfall on the railway bridge, I must have put down my camera case, and left it behind. Because it was no longer in my bag.

The camera case contained a pair of headphones, and I was very keen to get them back – so we agreed we would trace back along the same route to see if we could find them, rather than taking the road, under the cover of darkness, as we had originally intended.

This meant, of course, the camera was loose in my bag… which now also contained a bag, containing fifteen eggs.

(It should be said that the plastic bag containing the eggs was airtight, and knotted at the top, and seemed like it would be strong enough to contain any breakages that might occur. It appeared to me to be fairly robust, insofar as that label can be applied to a plastic bag. It inspired in me a level of confidence, anyway, which was wholly misplaced.)

We waited around for a train to take us back to Sonalium, and when it eventually dropped us off, the dusk was settling in. I checked in the bag. A couple of the eggs had broken during the journey, but the mess was contained within the plastic bag. I double-bag the eggs using another plastic bag, and we set off along the railway line, taking it in turns to carry the large food sack.

When we got to the bridge it was fully dark, and we had a look for the camera case, but there was no sign of it.

I was disappointed, and annoyed with myself. Another pair of headphones… I thought. Another bloody pair of headphones…

I have a terrible history of losing headphones. One minute they are there, and the next minute they are gone. And I never, ever see them again.

I reflect quite bitterly sometimes that there must be a number of people out there enjoying a superior listening experience, thanks to the technology they have stuffed in their ears – courtesy of Sennheiser, Bang & Olufson, Shure, Klipsch and other big players in the industry. Technology they never had to pay for, because they just found it lying around. What a charmed life these people must lead – popping out to the shops, or going for a walk along the railway tracks, and chancing upon some high-fidelity audio gear.

Thank you very much – they must think, as they push their new headphones in their ears, and enjoy an instant upgrade over the rubbish they got bundled with their iPhones.

Who are these people? I wonder, savagely, as I stumble down the treacherous slope by torchlight, on our way back to camp. My mind is following its usual track at times like these, paying no heed whatsoever to the far more serious technological disaster unfolding at that very moment, within my shoulder bag.

At some indeterminate point – almost certainly during the fraught scramble down that forested slope – the previously-sealed plastic bag burst, releasing its liquid contents into the next bag, which was unsealed. The egg began leaking into the main compartment of my shoulder bag, and pooling at the bottom, where my camera was located – entirely unprotected from the organic lava now consuming it.

The camera was completely covered in egg. Completely. It was dripping with the protein-rich slime as I extracted it from the bottom of my bag.

The camera was hot, and the screen was glowing bright orange. It wouldn’t respond to input commands, so I took the battery out, and set about the task of wiping away the egg.

It was a big job. The egg had infiltrated every orifice. I could see it had entered the telescopic lens assembly, and I had visions of it coagulating in there, and hardening, like concrete. This was just one of many probable outcomes that paraded grimly before my mind’s eye.

Having been there myself, I can report that de-egging a hitherto valuable, useful and well-liked piece of electrical equipment is a pretty lonely and depressing experience. There is the understanding that however bad it looks on the outside (which is really, really bad), the situation is worse where the eyes can’t see.

Despite that, I still made the mistake of loading the battery back in before the insides had had a chance to dry out. The camera came back to life, briefly; the lens unfurled itself – revealing a good deal more egg, and the screen came up with something sane and recognisable.

My brain dumped a generous load of endorphins on my neural pathways, and I felt relief course through me. I said to Robin, something like: “Ah good, the camera seems to be working.”

And then I pressed a button, and the screen wibbled, and went dark. I remember the wibble well. That was the visual manifestation of the short circuit that had occurred within.

Manuel – who is an electrician, by trade – suggested that a fuse within the camera may have been taken out, and that given sufficient time to dry, and a new circuit, the camera may yet come back to life. Manuel and I would be moving on to Bangalore, once Robin had flown off to Bangkok in a week or so. If the camera could be fixed – it would be fixed in Bangalore.

Robin kindly presented me with a sealable bag containing a sachet of damp-busting crystals for my camera to live in until it reached the repair shop. I thanked Manuel for the advice, and Robin for the bag, but deep down I knew: the camera was dead. That screen wibble, followed by blackness, was ominous indeed. It spoke of catastrophic systems failure, of fried internals.

As I washed the egg out of my bag in the cold water issuing from India’s third-highest waterfall that night, I cursed my immense, unfathomable stupidity. Just the day before, I had been thinking how much I liked the little camera, as I prowled around the waterfall, taking pictures of monkeys and so on. It was perfect for my photographic needs. And now it was lying in a miniature body bag – egged to death.

Still, I retained some hope that a camera wizard might resurrect it, once we reached India’s tech capital.

*

In the unforgiving light of the next morning I did a brief egg-tinerary. We had eight eggs left, out of fifteen. I set about the task of building a fire. Breakfast would be served yet, God damn it.

My all-time favourite method of cooking eggs is the poaching method. More specifically, boiling water in a pan, stirring it to create a fast-moving vortex, and cracking the eggs into the middle of it. The centripetal forces keep the eggs from spreading out too much, until they are solid enough to hold their shape on their own.

Over a kitchen hob, I have found this method to be effective in turning out the perfectly cooked egg. I have found the method to be so reliable that I now have total confidence in it. My failure rate these days is very low.

Over a campfire, the situation is different. First, the pan must be stabilised on rocks and burning logs. The heat reaching the underside of the pan tends to vary a good deal, bringing one side to a rapid boil, while the other gently steams. Stirring is done with a stick. And in the end, the eggs must be extracted – without a colander in sight.

I positioned the pan as best I could, within the flames. Manuel looked on, thoughtfully. He had never before witnessed this method of cooking eggs.

I made my preparations. I would be using six of the eggs – two eggs each. To simplify the process, I broke all six into a cup, prior to stirring the water. When the time was right, I would dump them all into the pan at the same time. Their gelatinous, globular nature would ensure they separated out again into individual eggs during the cooking process.

I stirred the water. I poured in the eggs. We watched as they rotated rapidly. They started to turn white almost immediately. The rotation slowed. We waited. I wobbled the pan a bit; the last thing I wanted was for the eggs to fuse to the hot metal. I prodded the eggs.

And herein lies the secret – the key to the egg poaching, and the reason why it beats other methods – like boiling in the shell. Prodding the egg reveals what is going on inside the yolk. Prodding should be done with a finger, and it is done so quickly there is no risk of burning the outstretched digit.

The prod revealed the egg to be firm on the outside and squashy in the middle. Time to extract.

Manuel helped me pour away the water while holding back the eggs. Once drained, I shared out the delightfully wobbly things into plastic cups. They were served with crisp sweetbreads from our food stash.

Again, it’s a meal that would hardly have passed muster in the “civilised” world we once knew, but which tasted great from the comfort of a hammock, in the forest, with the smell of wood smoke tickling our nostrils.

*

Afternoon. Manuel links to the Boom2 speaker and plays a variety of hip hop and trance and mixed in with all that is the song “So Far Away from Me” by Dire Straits. It reminds me of my dad, who used to play music by the rootsy British rock band when we were going places in the car. I find myself staring off into the trees, from the embrace of my hammock, feeling mildly stoned, playing along to the rhythm on my goat skin drum. I can do it with zero effort, simply by lying my fingers across the surface of the drum.

I feel like the music is carrying me, generating the electrical impulses I need to move my fingers. With the drum lying against my chest like this, I feel like I’m echoing my dad’s heartbeat, so closely do I associate the music with him. He died twenty years ago, when I was eleven years-old.

I hear the words… “So far away… you’re so far away from me,” repeated over and over, and it makes me think of him, and others who I have left behind.  

My reverie is broken by monkeys; the same family of curious opportunists we saw on the first day. As expected, they are closer this time.

We have bananas – thanks to our supply run yesterday. I begin munching on one, and the monkey descends halfway along the nearest tree, which supports the foot of Manuel’s hammock. I take another bite, and the monkey moves to my eye-level. I share my banana with it, and after two mouthfuls, it scampers back up to the tree canopy.

Manuel – who is also enjoying a mid-day laze in his hammock – also peels a banana, and another monkey – the largest of the group, descends, and accepts Manuel’s generous offer, stuffing half the fruit in its mouth.

Meanwhile, other members of the gang are cavorting in the trees, doing what monkeys generally do. One of them leaps over to the tree at the foot of Manuel’s hammock, and pisses at him. And it is definitely at him; it is a deliberate act, and there is no mistaking it. The stream misses Manuel by inches, and hits his shoes. The Italian is in a relaxed and good-humoured frame of mind, and laughs at the spectacle.

Two monkeys are positioned above Robin’s hammock, and one of them – by accident or design, I cannot tell – dislodges a large, heavy branch – which crashes to the ground, next to his head.

It appears we are under attack – and under siege – for our remaining bananas.

We try offering them biscuits, but they show not a flicker of interest. It’s bananas they want.

And after a time, they lose interest, and they melt back into the trees.

They leave us to spend the afternoon lazing in our hammocks.

I laze in my hammock, while Robin and Manuel laze in theirs. We snack on biscuits, we read, we sleep. We listen to music, and we listen to the sounds of the forest, and the sound of the waterfall. Occasionally, we hear the disembodied cries of tourists, splashing in the plunge pool. But they are less raucous than they have been on previous days. There are a few clouds in the sky, and it is cooler today – but when the sun breaks through in full force, its golden light shines through the forest, making it luminous.

Vines intersect the leaves and the branches, at every conceivable angle, following every possible curve – like the tentacles of jellyfish, frozen in space. They are sinuous, pliable and strong. They are perfect conduits through the jungle, for the monkeys, whose feet are perfectly adapted to grasp them.

This is our last full day here, and the three of us are more than happy to spend it lazing in our hammocks, doing nothing at all.

Well, I say that. There is always something to do. There are joints to roll, and there is the fire, which won’t look after itself. Dinner won’t cook itself.

Speaking of which… Manuel has just prodded the fire back into life, and he is going to cook the remaining pasta, using the two remaining eggs.

*

The pasta was unbelievably great. All the food we cooked over the campfire turned out great, and that is despite the lack of freshly-caught fish we had hoped we would be gorging ourselves on.

After dinner, we took our various pots and items of cutlery down to the waterfall. We also took body wash, and towels. Having cleaned the items we brought with us, we lowered ourselves into the cold water, and performed our ablutions.

It felt great to wash away the smoke and grime that accumulates from travel, and camping in the woods. It was a nice opportunity to say farewell to this place. From my position in the plunge pool, with the great cascade of water just a few metres away, I could see the railway bridge, which was a dark outline high above. The falling water was silver in the light of the full moon, and the forest was dark, and enveloping. I felt privileged to be here, without a hundred other people splashing around in life jackets.

We packed up our camp this morning. I checked my camera – to see if a fairly significant miracle had occurred… but it was still dead. I sealed it back into its body bag – to be opened again only by a trained electronics wizard in Bangalore.

We left Dudhsagar Falls by way of the main entrance, and marched to Solanium train station, where we waited for one of the clanking, wheeled behemoths. One turned up, eventually, and we swung our heavy bags onto the platform at the back.

We hitched a lift with three other Indian guys, one of whom was staring intently at me, from the off. When I got my iPhone out his expression became frankly suspicious – until he realised I was making a video, and he smiled radiantly, craning his neck to get in the shot. He hardly spoke any English, but he was able to name two Premiership footballers. He did so with great enthusiasm, and watched for my reactions, as though I might know them personally.

We waited around in Kulem for a few hours, before boarding the night bus to Hampi.

And that is where I am now. Installed in my berth, in a bus that is quite comfortable, rushing east, through the early dusk. My memories from the last few days are like scenes played out around a campfire. I see the monkeys climbing down to us through the trees, and taking our bananas. I hear the waterfall, somewhere between the rumble of the tyres, and the distant growl of the engine. And I can still smell wood smoke, when I sniff the vest I’m wearing.