KOLKATA Oh! Kolkata!

We've left our tour group, for better or worse. On our own again, as they go back to Delhi and we travel on to Kolkata.

Sharing the night train with the Biswas family and their beautiful children, it's a fun journey and a good start to our first tentative outing.

First impressions of Kolkata: bloody awful. The taxi driver does us over the odds, then can't find our gaff, a la Delhi. The gaff is damp, the bathroom grim. Buy some Harpic, FFS!

Robbing old scrote. Lesson learnt.

Roy the manager is canny though. He books our train for us out of town and buys us beer (at a canny mark up - swings and roundabouts).

Our first walk out, to find the post office, takes us along the six-lane main road, on the side of which live families in small huts (there's no other word), each the size of my cycle hangar back home.

A half-naked baby crawls in one, a dog lying outside, a man washes his motorbike in a fire hydrant, the man next to him washes himself.

The post office, a fabulous, wood-panelled relic, with original fixtures, fittings and staff, is tucked behind a smelly market. The street is gloomy, heavy, lined with dusty, down at heel shops and houses.

On the way back we spy and dive into a Domino's Pizza restaurant. At the hotel, nothing is drying.  Bed and sweet dreams.