Nepal is very like India. Its main religions are Hinduism and Buddhism, the ethnography is similar to North India, but it became apparent from the condition of the streets, which seemed cleaner, that it was a different culture. The bus was stopped a couple of times during the night and all the natives got out to be searched by the most affable looking soldiers I've ever seen. At dawn we zigzagged down into the valley of Kathmandu, surrounded by green mountains.

The next day was Monday so I went to the Indian Embassy. Getting the visa is known to be a long process, but the Indian's don't seem to mind. First you have to have your details telexed through to your own country to have application approved. This means: Wait in a queue to get the papers;find a black pen, fill in the same form twice (no carbon paper for duplicate forms). Queue again to hand the form in and pay some money. Come back in one week. I was lucky to be given Friday as my return date. All that could have been done on-line from elsewhere.

So Ma'ayan and I had a week to kill, which we accomplished with admirable ease. Sitting in cafes, playing chess, strumming guitar in our room, talking about our families, lovers, problems, including stuart story , doing bits of email a spot of meditation - we even saw a couple of sights. There's a temple where corpses are burned - that was quite smelly, and a monkey temple on the side of the valley. You climb right up to a large stupa, and wonder round the complex where hundreds of monkey's live freely, swinging on the prayer flags, scratching their genitals, and begging food from visitors. Having chai at the bottom again, we met an American Christian, who had fallen in love with Nepal, and was involved in various development projects. He told how the revolutionary Maoists were actually providing education and healthcare in some of the country's most isolated villages. That's the first time I heard an American say something nice about communists! He was staying with a family from the village where they filmed Himalaya (Caravan) a very prominent film in this part of the world, and was about to set off on a 20 day trek to that village. Wow.

Meanwhile Ma'ayan and I were passing the time in perfect harmony, and as got to know each other better there was a feeling of intimacy arising, and the urge to make a pass was becoming harder to suppress.

Things were hotting up between India and Pakistan, I was being advised from all quarters not to return to Dharamsala, which is close to the Pak border. What to do? My computer was there, I had agreed to spend a month there making a game and to sell the computer to the cybercafe in exchange for rent. I had to consider setting up the whole arrangement again. I found a computer training centre and wondered in and was shocked and flattered that they wanted me to teach them Director and 3D. They were prepared to pay me a full wage for only 2 hours training a day, and what's more, I liked the guy. I've tried this a few times in India, but never felt so wanted.

When Friday came, I rickshawed at dawn to the embassy. The driver didn't have any change so I told him to wait. It turned out that my application had been cleared on Wednesday. So I queued and got a form, and queued and handed it in, and borrowed a black pen, and queued and handed it in again, and gave my photo, and . . . they didn't have any change either. Back to the rickshaw, we found a bank, back to the embassy to pay. They offered me a four month visa, but I acted stroppy and got six months single entry instead. I finally picked up my new visa that afternoon on a third visit to the embassy. In the end though I decided, as the war looked less likely to return to Dharamsala and at least tie up my loose ends, so I used up my single entry. That means I can't enter India again without first re-applying in London. Which would be jolly inconvenient if I had to evacuate because of some stupid war.

Ma'ayan and I had very much hoped to be able to catch a train direct from Gorakpur to Dharamsala, so the moment we arrived we went to the station and joined a queue each. I noticed there seemed to be a large number of people jumping the queue, and as I got closer to the front the queue slowed down as it formed a kind of Delta. The guy behind me seemed to be telling me to make a fuss, but this was my first such queue, and I didn't know the language. Ma'ayan got to the front first, and was directed to another queue, we both went and it turned out to be the woman's queue. Then she was directed to the other ticket hall, and while I was looking after her baggage I noticed that her queue wasn't moving at all. So I joined one as well. It was the middle of the day, and hot. The fans lolled around and created no breeze. A few slept on blankets sprawled the hall floor. In the central hall, families were camped solidly, my hall had about 20 queues, but at least my queue was moving. A man in a uniform turned up and argued with the queuejumpers. It seemed like quite an organised system, especially as the queuejumpers were often clutching more than one order slip - maybe they were professionals of some kind? I even made it clear to one or two that I wasn't tolerating that kind of behaviour. Ma'ayan's queue however, still wasn't moving. She learned that it was a queue for women and VIPs but they never got around to serving the women. Despite my efforts, and the inevitable delta, I got to the front and managed to get on the waiting list for the train that night - 400th on the waiting list in fact. We understood that this was ok because the standard process is to tell the conductor you have a plane to catch and slip him a few rupees. I even managed to get a ticket for another backpacker who was going nowhere in the girls' queue.

We got a hotel for the afternoon, but the man behind the desk was so adamant that we took a room with air conditioning which was not what we asked for, that I walked out and went next door for a room where the shower was out of order. It struck me that the Nepalese were much nicer than Indians, and that things more often than not worked in Nepal.

Later a man called us over and directed me to his friend the travel agent, who tutted and said we would never get on this train with such a long waiting list, and reckoned he could do better by getting us on an indirect train. He sent one of the young men hanging around the office to the station bearing an order slip. Though he were back within ten minutes, it turned out not to be possible, and the next runner couldn't get us on the train to Delhi that night either. We resigned ourselves to spending another day in Gorakpur. The next day, he got us a ticket to Delhi for the day after, but the cost was suspiciously high, and we decided we'd probably been conned.

In the air conditioned internet cafe we downloaded some music, and I couldn't help but send Ma'ayan this poem, which I'd written on the bus out of Nepal. It concerned a moment towards the end of our stay in Kathmandu, when we had held eye contact while lying on separate beds:

Locked looks
Link our heads;
Bridge the brook
Between our beds.

The three or so poems I've written recently have all been inspired by girls beyond my reach, and it was in that spirit that I wrote. Nonetheless, this poem brought her down to earth.

A friendly man approached us on the platform when we weren't sure what to do next. He noticed that our ticket only covered half the distance to Delhi, but he thought it wouldn't matter. He had to 'speak' with the conductor too. The train pulled in looking absolutely choc-a-bloc, we put our bags randomly on the train and he and I trotted the length of the platform several times looking for the conductor. Eventually we found him, and he listened to my new friend with the indifferent air of someone about to be bribed, but he was sympathetic, and beds were found for us in this train which was probably running at twice its capacity. Peeping in the windows of the sitting carriages, the Indians were so sardined I couldn't see out the other side. They weren't going to get much sleep.

In Delhi recouperating another night for the final nightbus to Dharamsala, I was reminded again of 'business as usual' in India when the electricity was cut, and after a moment the street was roaring with generators. Power cuts are so frequent in the capital of India that each business equips itself with a generator. Ma'ayan's visa was about to run out, but she heard that there was a quick and free way to get a 15 day extension, which would give her time to return to Dharamsala and get her stuff. Having slept on the train, we had most of the day to nip across town. They asked her to come back at two, so we had a basic basic free lunch in a gurdwara, where I observed the hugest wok I ever observed. People sat in parallel lines and a couple of guys walked up and down ladling daal and distributing chapatis. Two O'clock became three waiting outside the office building in a rickshaw, and the guy wouldn't let me into the building to review our plans. We would have to leave soon for the bus. When she came out though, my stress had been wasted, because she had to go to the other side of town the following day. In the end we took 6 days to return from Kathmandu.

I was beginning to get fed up with India. Poverty isn't the actual problem here, its just that for one reason or another, nothing ever works properly, and nobody cares enough to do anything. Even with people pushing into their static queues, the average Indian will do nothing about it. Back in my room in Dharamsala I realised there was no running water in my guesthouse in the daytime. They fill up the tank in the evening and hope it lasts until morning. Every storm without fail, the electricity goes. Here's a quote from Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad. An Englishman in South America is trying to set up a business.

"he had to accommodate himself to standards of corruption so naïvely brazen as to disarm the hatred of a man courageous enough not to be afraid of its irresponsible potency to ruin everything it touched. It seemed to him too contemptible for hot anger, even. He make use of it with a cold, fearless scorn, manifested rather than concealed by the forms of stony courtesy which did away with much of the ignominy of the situation."

All the same, I don't want to use up spaces in trains, and buses are a most unpleasant way to travel; so I'm gonna get me an Enfield.

Matthew