Today is the first rainy day of our trip, and we're in Delhi, which doesn't look any better in the rain. Chris and I have left Rajasthan and this evening we'll take the train to Gorakhpur, near the border with Nepal. I'm feeling better now, and feeling more comfortable with being in India. In Rajasthan we did some great things and met some fascinating people, and now I feel that my passion for travelling has recovered to a certain extent.

In Jaisalmer, near the city walls, a young Indian woman engaged us in conversation (something that almost never happens in India) and invited us to her home for chai - sweet Indian tea flavoured with spices. She told us she was twenty years old, had three children and was pregnant with a fourth. Her sister, whom we also met, was twenty-five and had seven. The two sisters lived with their husbands and children in tiny windowless stone huts with earth floors and thatched roofs reinforced with plastic sheeting - the sole concession to modernity. The elder sister's husband was a musician and instrument-maker who made rauntas, traditional Rajasthani stringed instruments, in the way his father and grandfather had taught him. As we drank chai, he played his grandfather's raunta while his wife sang and breast-fed simultaneously (presumably that wasn't part of the act). These people's warmth and hospitality, not to mention passion for their nation's culture, seemed at times almost too good to be true.

The following day, we were up before dawn (also singularly rare), to take a camel safari into the desert. We rode all day to an isolated patch of sand dunes where, together with our camel drivers and a couple of other tourists, we slept in the dunes under the stars. Deserts are often thought of as lonely places, but this one was fairly heavily populated (this is India, after all) and we passed several isolated settlements, fields and flocks of goats. Still, this is as close to solitude as you're going to get in India, and it was refreshing, not intimidating, to wander off a little into the dunes, and hear the silence of the desert, and sleeping under a vast canvas of stars was only matched by waking up to sunrise over the dunes the following morning.

I'm afraid to say my aversion to Indian food continues. I'm in a land of delicious curries and yet this morning, like a package tourist, I headed straight for the New Delhi branch of McDonald's. I can, however, report that McDonald's in India doesn't serve beef.