The Jaipur Express - our first true experience of cricket and curry

Now you all know that India is a chaotic country but you probably think that buying train tickets would be a straight forward process. Wrong. It couldn't be more complicated or confusing. First you need to get a form, fill it in and go to the reservation window. Finding the right window is a challenge in itself with about 15 different counters each one resembling a bookie's stall at the horses just before the off with everyone trying to place a last minute bet. Once you've confirmed your reservation, you pay at a different counter. When we found our counter after 20 minutes the man kindly informed us that 1) our train was sold out and 2) we would in future be better off going to the tourist booking centre on the second floor.

We made our way to the second floor but of course you need your passport to buy tickets, which clearly we didn't have. Why would we have our passport? We were only hoping to travel to Rajastan, not Afganistan!

Anyway, we got to Jaipur with our shiny new ''SS Viru Shewag 309'' cricket bat (2 quid - tourist prices), which was attracting some glances and the odd shout of "cricket player?" but no offers to mark some stumps and actually play. Did we look that good?

We toured Jaipur - the pink city- with our rickshaw drivers, Super Salim and Ali and really enjoyed the city and what it had to offer. However, the real fun started late on the second day. We stopped for a chai and some roadside bites- samosa and kachori (lentil based dumpling) - and were recommended the Four Seasons restaurant.

That's where we headed. The contrast with the rickety shack where we had the snacks and chai and the Four Seasons couldn't have been more pronounced but both places were delicious. We opted for a dosa to start and followed by two thalis. The dosa was the tastiest thing eaten yet, by some distance. It is a savory Indian pancake served with a spicy soup and an unbelievably delicious coconut sauce. The thalis - pictured - comprise several different, bite-sized dishes, all of which were devoured and enjoyed. Including the salad, despite many warnings to the contrary. It didn't really matter if we got a case of Bombay bum, we only had 13 hours of the train to get through!

How to spend the remaining two hours before our train to Jaisalmer? Playing cricket at the train station of course!

At first, people seemed reluctant to approach the two weird foreigners playing cricket at the front of the station but after one brave soul took up our invitation to play we soon had a complete team, of very varying standards it must be said but a team - including a member of the Indian army! - nonetheless. The floodlights were on and play was intermittently broken by a stream of locals taking a leak on the boundary edges.......!

(The army officer doing his best to bat like his hero MS Dhoni at Jaipur Railway station at 11pm)

There were a few incidences at the crease that caused a lot of excitement - read screaming, shouting and general hysteria- and would under normal circumstances have been referred to the third umpire but train stations in India and impartial decisions weren't ever going to happen, the foreigners were out and on their way to Jaisalmer.