Today we enter the second half of our trip, and the last week has been the lowest ebb of the trip so far. Chris and I have both been ill. I saw a doctor on Tuesday who diagnosed me with gastro-enteritis and prescribed me antibiotics. I feel better each morning than I did the day before, but my appetite is still small and I'm not yet back to full fitness. Getting ill so soon after arriving in India has been a shock to the system, and I feel my sense of adventure and my desire to see new places: it's as if getting to the end of this trip in one piece will be good enough.

We arrived in Jaisalmer, in India's Rajasthan state, yesterday, having spent most of the past week in Jodhpur. We were exceptionally lucky to get ill in Jodhpur and not anywhere else as we were staying in a small, family-run guesthouse with (fortunately) the best bathroom in Asia and with people who really looked after their guests, even going so far as to take us to their family doctor. For four days, the guesthouse was our sanctuary and the couple who run it our surrogate parents.

Jaisalmer, the golden city, is exceptionally photogenic. Whether it's the warm golden colour of the stone, or the way the city's mediaeval walls tower above the barren brown flatness of the surrounding desert, or whether it's the painstakingly elaborate architecture of the dilapidated palaces and mansions in the old city, it's breathtakingly beautiful. This is India, though, so you can't afford to spend too much time craning your neck looking at the architecture or you'll step in a cow pat.

Of course, we're not the first foreigners to have discovered Jaisalmer. In fact, tourism is more or less the only industry, apart from the military (Jaisalmer is too close to the Pakistani border for India's comfort). But the presence of people who look like us is oddly comforting.

Being in a tourist town has other advantages, too: I don't have to eat Indian food. I'd been relishing the prospect of eating real Indian food in India, but since I was ill, merely the thought of it turns my stomach. Tonight, though, I discovered a new culinary delight: Tibetan food. Chicken momos (moon-shaped dumplings not unlike Japanese gyoza) were exactly what the doctor ordered and I'll be having Tibetan food at every available opportunity from now on.

We've had optimistic news from Nepal. The country's telephone system is now up and running again, and a contact of ours in Kathmandu has emailed us to tell us that we should not encounter too many problems getting around the country, and, in his view, there's never been a better time to go to Nepal. I'm inclined to agree with him.