Everyone seems to be in much more of a rush than anywhere else I've been in India. And there are more flash cars and mobile phones, more high-rises and higher prices. It seems oddly European in a way - partly due to the large number of old ornate colonial buildings that lie around every corner. There are pedestrian crossings here that motorists actually take notice of and the streets themselves are remarkably clean compared to everywhere else I've visited. This is thanks to a small army of sweepers who seem to continually clean the place.

This is my last port of call in India; early tomorrow morning (5am to be precise) I leave for Thailand. At the end of my time here I had planned to try and sum up my experiences of India, to encapsulate India in a paragraph. This now seems faintly ridiculous: I have only managed to see a fraction of a percent of the place and even so it is impossible to collate that into any kind of overall picture.

There is however one impression that I will take away with me and that is one of distance, in two senses. Firstly, India is huge. It can take days to travel by train from Kerala in the south to Punjab in the north. Secondly, there is the distance between those who have and those who have not. The scale of this gap is unlike anything I have experienced before. Sometimes I felt numb in the face of it and sometimes it made me feel sick and depressed - it's something I still have not been able to fully take on board.

I have only scratched the surface of India and just when I am beginning to start to get used to a few things (eating with my hands, thinking that people carrying impossible loads on their heads through crowded traffic is normal and having to haggle over prices) it is time to leave. It is such a strange, overwhelming yet familiar country. My appetite for India has only been whetted. I'll be back.