Yesterday (and I literally mean the whole day) I spent in Madras, achieving astonishingly little. The only thing I succeed at in Madras is getting bitten by mosquitos, and actually doing anything as revolutionary as travelling of few kilometres across town and looking in half a dozen shops is apparently impossible. Things would have been easier if, like I did previously, I took the bus. Taking buses in Madras isn't simple or quick, but neither is anything else. Hiring you own fuckign taxi for the entire day isn't either, so it turns out; at least not when you have to share it with other people.

It was suggested to me that I should share a taxi with Mick (old Brummie surfer, nice fellow). Mick had shouted down to me from his balcony the other day to discuss this. I went up to his room, where I found out he'd been "bitten by a fucking fish, mate". He had. He'd been up to his waist in water, and had been stung by some kind of manta ray, which had given him two small puncture wounds on his ankle and sent him immediately to hospital with a paralysed leg and a lot of pain. This had happened an hour or so ago, but he seemed to be coping. As far as I could tell, half of the agony had come from the fact that he'd been teaching two attractive young Swedish girls to surf at the time, and had had to go limping out of the sea suddenly, thus losing face.

Mick had casually mentioned to me that an Australian woman would be joining us, which meant we'd save another Rs250 on the taxi fare, as we split it three ways. This seems like a nice economy to me. It wasn't. Even the most money conscious person couldn't have put up with this fucking woman with the saving of about 3.30 pounds. She looks like a very ageing goth porn star with some of most awful fake breasts I've ever seen, and talks as if she takes half a bottle of valium and maybe some heroin every morning. When I'd first met her I'd wondered how she'd stayed so pale, considering she'd been in the country for so many months. Quickly I realised; it was because she was never out of the fucking shops.

Mick took me to see his workshop, where a few Indians conspire to effectively rebuild 60s and 70s Indian Lambretta scooters from scratch, which he then intends to ship back to England. I think I want a scooter, though my backpack is already heavy enough as it is. And I'll not dwell too much on the pointless three hours I spent waiting for this fucking woman after she spent five hours doing nothing instead of the maximum two she promised (we got back to Mamallpuram at 11.30pm instead of 7.30pm). I had an interesting conversation with a social worker and a rastafied beggar, anyway, which almost makes up for the wasted time.

I bought a sitar. I haven't yet tried to play or tune it, but I'm pretty certain it's a good model. I paid exactly Rs5,000, including case, extra strings, book and a few bits and bobs. Down the road, at the popular and overpriced Sapstwara music, they offered what seemed to be the same model for Rs7,000, albeit with a little plastic label saying where it was made on it. When I woke up this morning I saw my sitar, and realised how fucking massive it is. It really is. It's going to be like carting a double bass round the country.

Part of this is because of the bollock. In the South, more popular than the sitar is the rather dull veena. The veena, as well as the normal pumpkin gourd at the bottom, also has a bollock on the other end, to aid with resonating of the strings and suchlike. Probably beause of the popularly of the bollocked-veena, all sitars you buy in Madras seem to be fitted with this same, incongrous bollock. And the thing seems to weigh as much as the rest of the instrument put together, which can't be right.

Today is my day of rest. It began with a swim, followed by a return to my guesthouse to see a large group of Indians gathered around a man with what seemed to be a dead, ginger mink. I'm not sure what he was doing, or why he was scraping at the thing and giving the Indians bits of it to smell. For some reason Mamallpuram seems to be rife with people carrying dead things; on the bus, a lady tried to sell me two stuffed, and very astonished-looking, squirrels, and yesterday a man with a dog skin (head inc.) draped over his arm was wandering through the bus station. No one seemed to be buying.