Cricket hasn't been quite the bane of my life here that I thought it might. But it has cropped up in conversation with unseemly regularity.

My fave moments so far?

Number one has to be: 'Please, Madam - in future you must try to love cricket more!' (delivered in a beseeching tone of voice after I explained that I was a 'bad Australian' for not knowing about cricket.)

What else has been said? Let me see ...

... there's been a lot of 'Australia!! Ricky Ponting country!!' - which eventually prompted me to muse to Andrew, 'Gee, they REALLY like Ricky Ponting, don't they?'

My darling explained to me gently that this man was the frickin' Captain of the team, which was what all the fuss was about! I turned beet red, but Andrew then followed up with this corker: 'Actually, I'm not entirely certain about that Ponting thing ... better Google before you post that.'

I haven't Googled; the sad truth is we don't know who captains the team.

Another special moment was wandering through a police road-block late at night in Agra and getting shouted at by men with batons and guns. They trained their torches on us and barked, 'What country?!'

When we answered 'Australia', it was a chorus of 'Ricky Pontings!' all round, and we were waved on our merry way.

But going one better than all of this, was the conversation we had last night in Jodhpur. Our interrogator was all of about 17 years old, and the exchange ran like this:

'What country you come from?'

'Australia'

'Aaah! Your Mark Latham [former Opposition Leader in Oz] has just resigned! Now Kim Beazley is leader of the opposition! Do you like John Howard? I like to follow Australian politics because they are all so CRAZY!'

In a country like India, when something or someone stands out as 'crazy', that's quite a feat. Aussie politicians can indeed take a bow.