FROM here on,'' said our driver, Amar Singh, pointing to the road sign that announced the state of Rajasthan, ''the road . . . is . . . very . . .'' But just then we lurched violently to one side and into a pothole which illustrated his point before he could finish. ''Bad,'' he said.
Ten days in the Golden Triangle on the way back to Hong Kong had been impossible to book in England. ''No, not that Golden Triangle,'' I would say, but not before provincial travel agents were already tapping their earnest way through directories to finda late-availability drug-running package to Burma.
Ten minutes of haggling by a New Delhi travel agent had produced car, driver and five-star accommodation in the other Golden Triangle (Delhi-Jaipur-Agra) at an indecently cheap rate.
The road to Jaipur, though its surface is execrable, is long, straight as a Roman road and rather beautiful, fringed with eucalyptus trees and maize the greener for the monsoon.
This bucolic idyll is the acceptable face of the Indian countryside, viewed from the comfort of an air-conditioned car. But in a country where the suspension of the visitor with Delhi Belly has to be stronger than that of the beaten-up thing you are travelling in, it is wiser to concentrate on children frolicking in a roadside pond rather than speculate on the percentage of everyday effluent that lies beneath the surface of what triples up as everyone's swimming pool, drinking fountain and lavatory.
It is 200 kilometres from Delhi to Jaipur. Despite a 6 am start and an open road afforded by the truck strike, the journey took seven hours. Our progress was impeded by the presence of the ubiquitous sacred cow, which holds carte blanche in India to freelance over all aspects of the infrastructure, staring out with placid vacancy at yet another multiple pile-up she has just caused.