Here is short moment from a not too exciting Sunday afternoon, but nevertheless a little breath of sunshine and blue sky to cheer your: damp and dreary/utterly soaked and waterlogged (delete as appropriate) day. On the tourist trail (with no capital letters). I'm a bit short of time this weekend with spending some of yesterday socialising. (croissants and coffee with the Director yesterday morning and dinner at the Arizona Grill with Nilgun and Molly last night. Most of the rest of the day was divided between the office and the Hotel where I was making last minute preparations for this workshop. This morning I was doing domestics (meals and soups for the freezer because I think I shall be short of time for the rest of this month. So by mid-afternoon I was ready for something a little different. I had properly located the road up to Saidpur, the little village that is listed as a tourist attraction in the guides. It is obviously a somewhat minor one as there are no cafes with tables and umbrellas etc as there are in the viewpoint areas along the road into the hills. It is really quite close to the city and not very high or steep. The narrow tarmac road just enters into the little valley and kind of peters out in the village. The tarmac actually stops on the edge of the village and a rough stony track goes among the houses but then just becomes a narrow walking route. I pulled off onto a flattened area and decided to explore. Hardly out of the pickup, one of the locals starts to tell me about the historical significance and how this was one of the places the English came to get out of the heat of summer when this was India. He showed me the little school "Two hundred years old madam, and a very good school. It is a boys middle school and this was the swimming pool" Indicating at this point the area where the pickup was parked. So there's interesting. I managed to decline tea on the promise of taking it after I had a little walk in the village. That's not as easy to do as to say because the houses come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and are huddled together on the hillside (at this point the valley is quite narrow). The actual problem is to be sure whether you are on a 'street' or a path to someone's house. In places there is a four-foot wide are of concrete but in many places it has eroded away or was never there. Adopting the principle that if I couldn't see a door directly ahead and there were people coming towards me then I was probably on the main highway. This took me through a hotch potch of different buildings from small brick huts with tin roofs to stone built houses of two storeys and there was one quite big one being newly built with wrought iron windows, painted and rendered walls and a balcony, although it was slotted into space only just big enough to fit it in. The little track wound its way in and out among the houses and in one place under them where they appear to have joined the upper storeys of two or three at the end of the village. I had a lovely time just wandering through talking to some of the children (well, "Hello, how are you, goodbye" etc) and holding slightly longer conversations with some of the adults who were of course interested in where I came from and so on. Usually the women don't go beyond a simple greeting I suspect that they just don't know any English. At one point as I was deciding which way to go a young man waved me along one of the two available paths and I came back with an urn! The indicated path led into a potters' shed and there was this lovely three feet high Ali Baba type urn with a really elegant body and neck and it was just what I needed for a rather bare corner of flat. It was a snip at 150rs (less than £2 and what's more he carried it all the way back to the pickup, put it inside, and found a couple of half bricks to wedge it in safely, before going back to his shop. This actually happened soon after I set off but I then returned to my wanderings as previously described and eventually came out at the end of the village where a much wider track continued on into the valley. There was a truck up there but how long it had been there I don't know, or whether there is a way past the village at some point. However as I said I was a bit short of time today but I may take some stouter footwear with me another time and explore to see where that road goes. I wasn't too disappointed as I returned to find that the person offering tea had disappeared and so I climbed into the pickup and returned with my Ali Baba Jar, which is now sitting on a small coffee table looking as if it was made especially for that corner.