Pune, Maharashtra: Pune looks great in the Lonely Planet guide. The street plan is beguiling with its array of gardens, communes, temples, restaurants and coffee houses, hotels, bookshops and (self-styled Oxford of the East) university. Nowhere in the guide does it hint at the fact that Pune is an auto-rickshaw infested shit-hole, a festering scab cast off the wound of its more illustrious Maharashtran neighbour.

I head for one of the flea-pits opposite the station. But the next day the heat and the jet-lag finally catch up with me and I am flu-ridden. I check out of the pit and go for an expensive hotel - £8 a night! En-suite bathroom and TV - but the place still has an unmistakable aroma. For two days I eat nothing but a packet of biscuits and watch the final test between Pakistan and Australia. In the evenings I read Kazantzakis, watch Premiership football and sleep through till the following noon.

On the fourth day I head for the Osho commune with an open mind. After perusing the expensive range of new-age courses on offer, and hanging out at the coffee shops frequented by emaciated he-ain't-heavy types in crusty rags and dreadlocks, constantly smiling through heavy-lidded eyes, I come away with the doors to mind just that little bit more closed than they were before. After a small number of conversations that revolve around the twinned themes of personal aura and where to score good shit, I am feeling alone and sorry for myself.

If in doubt, keep moving. So, still making it up as I go along, I thumb the Lonely Planet once more (perhaps some travelers' equivalent to reading the runes) and choose the remote promise of Mahabaleshwar, a hill station four hours south from Pune. I chant the name ten thousand times before I can pronounce it correctly. I leave by bus the next day. This is the first of many, many near death experiences. Bus drivers here will their overburdened, spluttering steeds round mountain passes with idiotic abandon. Overtaking even more overburdened vehicles on blind bends, time stands still and often plunges into reverse as the last drops of air are groaned from my frightened lungs. But we survive (a key part of the vocabulary in this country).

It occurs to me that Sega could develop and market, with huge success, a game based upon the Indian bus driver. Your object would be to cover as much distance as possible in a given time, pitted against other drivers operating the same routes, whilst coping with obstacles such as cattle, crumbling roads on mountain bends, oncoming kamikaze drivers and your own vehicles decrepit nature. It would be a sure winner (all rights reserved etc.)

The air is clean up here and the views indeed spectacular, but all the rooms are booked and I will have to move on. Very well. I buy an overnight bus ticket to Goa and kick my heels for the rest of the day. I have to take a government bus (a two hundred year old, windowless hunk of twisted metal) to a hotel just outside Surur on route 4, where I will meet my overnight bus. It all sounds very dodgy, and I have visions of bumping into an Indian version of Cloughie passing a brown envelope to an Indian Terry Venables in the roadside café.

In the bus station there is a TV with a huge, male, riveted audience. Inevitably they are all watching cricket. I join them. India are socking it to the Aussies in the Wills International tournament. Sachin Tendulkar toys with the bowling, hitting every ball out of the park with effortless superiority. The crowd is obviously delighted and, grinning some, turn to me saying "Sachin - number 1!" (Tendulkar - who still looks like a boy - will one day surely be Prime Minister.) On learning that I am English, some venture the names of Atherton, Stewart and Hick. Whether they are making fun of me, feel sorry for me, or haven't seen any of them play for a while is not clear. But it is all characteristically good-natured.

At Surur I meet Ludo and Gaille, a young French couple. They too are heading for Goa, but on another bus. We agree to meet when we arrive. As it turns out we spend about three hours together waiting for our buses. Theirs arrives first (only two hours late), and mine is about three hours late. I am beginning to believe that the guy who sold me the ticket has a cousin with the guesthouse at the Surur bus depot. But finally it arrives, and I am so tired that I manage to sleep despite the Hindi film blasting away at distortion volume.