DANNY ROBINS' INDIE TRAVEL GUIDE TO... INDIA

We're putting the Indie into India this week.

The sub-continent is getting a bit of a bad press just now because of all the negative publicity surrounding the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, but of course it remains a truly mid-blowing place to visit.

This time of the year (October - December) is actually considered the best time to visit. It's post-monsoon, skies are clear and temperatures are nice but not too hot.

One little old indie travel Guide can't really do all there is to see justice, but hopefully there are a few ideas here to whet your appetite for a future trip...

First off, how indie is India? The Indian music scene has been very dominated by Bollywood for a long time. Film soundtracks account for about 65% of all sales. Confusingly, Indian pop music like that featured in the films is often known as Indi-Pop, but what about real Indie music? Well actually there is now a growing alternative scene that seeks to do something different but because of the dominance of traditional and film music it's hard for these artists to get signed and get their work to the public.

There was an interesting initiative last year when, John Leckie who produced the Stone Roses' first album, Radiohead's The Bends and the first two Muse albums travelled to India for a project called India Soundpad, funded by the British Council, auditioning bands and choosing four which he brought to tour the UK and play at the Great Escape and make an album.

The bands mix western indie music with Indian music - there's Advaita, Indigo Children (described as a 'young Supergrass'), Medusa and Swarathma.

So, there is a growing scene out there - a lot of it happening in Delhi. There's something quite nicely cyclical in the fact that some of the bands that really started 'alternative music' back in the 60s - Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Doors - were influenced by Indian music and the now some of the bands at the forefront of the Indian alternative scene are influenced by western music.

Indians also seem to love their rock and heavy metal. There's quite a few rock festivals around the country - Iron Maiden have a big following there!

So, it's a big country, where do you start when planning your trip? Well, first off let's get the famous highlights out the way...

The whole point of the Indie Travel Guide is to root out the alternative side of places, and you can certainly 'do' India without getting locked into the tourist trail but it would be a shame to go all the way to India and not see:

The Taj Mahal, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It's in Agra, about 200km from Delhi and was built in the mid 17th century by Shah Jahan in memory of his third wife.

The Golden Temple in Amritsar, a spectacular monument and the holiest shrine for Sikhs.

The Ghats of Varanasi - You've probably seen these in documentaries on TV - they are the flights of stone steps leading down to the River Ganges, the sacred river of Hinduism, where people bathe, priests perform rituals and people are cremated. Taking a boat trip along the Ganges is the best way to see all that goes on. There are lots of Hindu festivals between September and December so it's a great time to visit the ghats.

Udaipur in Rajasthan in known as the 'Venice of the East' or the 'City of the Lakes' it's one of the most beautiful and romantic cities in the world but the best reason to go there is because it's where they filmed the James Bond film Octopussy.

Using trains and planes, you could fit all those into a two week holiday (without much time to sit down), or more easily into a three week trip.

Getting about... Follow in the rail-tracks of The Darjeeling Limited...

India's railways are pretty iconic and have featured in some memorable films - most recently Slumdog Millionaire and The Darjeeling Limited.

So many of the tweeted tips I've had this week have been about taking the train. It still remains the best way to get across this giant country and experience the sights sounds and smells that it offers... You'll see loads of amazing things en route and you're almost guaranteed to get talking to locals.

The rail network is vast - Indian Railways are the biggest employer in the world, with 1.5 million staff.

There is no real train called The Darjeeling Limited but you can go on a steam train to Darjeeling, which is in West Bengal and it's quite an experience. Known as the 'toy train' it travels at a speed of just 12kph and will take you through forests, past tea plantations and even in a spiral loop at one place called 'Agony Point'. Best of all it only costs 60 pence.

When taking the train you can choose to rough it in third class and pay miniscule prices like that or, if you're happy to pay more, then that old world Agatha Christie/Orient Express style of train travel with civilised fine dining and gin and tonics as the sun goes down does still exist in India. The Indian Maharaja Deccan Odyssey is one such train - you travel from Mumbai to Delhi - it takes seven nights and on the way you can go tiger-spotting and stop off at the Taj Mahal.

As ever, seat61 is a great resource for planning your journey and 80trains is also interesting - a blog put together by a journalist and a photographer who travelled around India by, as the name suggests, eighty trains.

Some quirky tips from listeners...

I had a good twip (tweeted tip) from Adrian Stirrup who urges you to check out India first's and indeed only wax museum. It's in the 'Baywatch' Theme park in Kanyakumari at the very southernmost tip of India. You'd think waxworks were a bit of a thing of the past but this one only opened 5 years ago. It boasts statues of "many current international figures like the wax counterpart of Arnold Schwarzenegger." "The accuracy and precision is such that the models and originals look the same", claims one website. Not so says Adrian who says it's actually like a 'still version of Stars in Their Eyes'.

Mike Shaw recommends The Raj Mandir Cinema in Jaipur, which he describes as "bright pink, with chandeliers, the campest place on earth" and also the Calcutta Museum in the Town Hall in Kolkata, which apparently features an animatronic model of India's great poet Rabindranath Tagore (the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and apparently the only person to write the lyrics for the national anthems of 2 countries - India and Bangladesh). There's also a poetry karaoke machine. Intriguing...

He chucks in one last tip which is to buy Indian newspapers - both to find out what's going on (many of them are in English) and also because they may come in useful if you need to visit a public toilet. And I don't think he was talking about sitting reading them... yuck.

Meet Real Slumdogs...

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire showed audiences a glimpse of what life is like for the very poor in the slums of Mumbai, India's biggest city.

It's now possible to go on a guided tour of Dharavi, Mumbai's biggest slum, where over 1 million people live in an area just 2km square. Doing this sort of tour definitely divides opinion - some people will see it as voyeuristic and some will see it as depressing but it's definitely not exploitative. Reality Tours, who run it, do not take a profit from the tours - all the money goes back into the local community. You will inevitable find it shocking and saddening seeing the conditions people live in and the sweatshops they work in but if you're wanting to try and really understand India and see beyond the tourist trail this is a sensitively handled and thought provoking tour that will allow you to do that whilst financially helping the people who live in the slum at the same time. Tours are restricted to just 6 people and led by a local guide. You can read here a blog by somebody who went on the tour

And finally, how about a spot of camel racing?

'Mela' is very important in Indian culture. It means 'gathering' or 'to meet' and it's often associated with festivities surrounding religious festivals. Melas happen all over the sub-continent at various times throughout the year. It can be great to see places at Mela time for a really memorable experience.

One Mela that's coming up soon and sounds rather fun is The Pushkar Camel Fair happens every November in Pushkar, a small town on the edge of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan. This year it's running from around the 12th to the 21st when it culminates in the Kartik Purnima full moon festival. It's an amazing spectacle - attracting 300,000 people (that's like 2 Glastonburys) and 20,000 camels. There's camel trading, lots of festivities and yes - camel racing in a big stadium.

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