India smells. No doubt about it, India is a real "masala" of aromas, perfumes, fragrances, pongs, odours, whiffs, smells, stenches and stinks. Wherever there's standing water you'll get that heavy, sweet stagnant smell and the rivers just smell of excrement. But it's not all bad. Indians love flowers. The women adorn their hair with long skeins of jasmine; cars, buses and taxis are festooned with marigolds which have that bitter-sweet smell.

Walking down the road can be a real olfactory odyssey. The aroma of freshly baked pastries mingles with the heady perfume of flowers. Of course you'll be breathing in a foul mix of diesel fumes and rotting rubbish at the same time. This assault on your senses will send you reeling. In the early morning you'll come across street cleaners burning rubbish. This can either be a bearable "dry leaves" smell, or the noxious stink of burning plastic.

Of course, the sacred cows that wander freely along all the streets of India create their own set of smells - cow dung and urine can be particularly astringent odours, but worse than this is the smell of human excrement which is sometimes unavoidable. But a walk around the market will put things right. Just breathe in the delicious mixture of spices, chillies, aromatic oils, garlic, onions, coriander, fresh fish and all sorts of cooking aromas from tandoori to curries.

A visit to the beach will clear your head with its fresh sea-salty seaweed air, assuming you've managed to avoid the rotting rubbish on the way to the shore!

All these smells are a real part of India - good and bad - they typify the contrasts that make this place so wonderful, frustrating, beautiful and ugly - all at the same time.

Today we spend the day walking around the centre of Chennai and experience most of these smells at one time or another. In the time available there's only so much we can see, but our impression of Chennai is that it lacks an obvious centre and is spoiled by the awful smell from the river and other waterways which run through it.

We take a look inside Egmore railway station, one of the mainline stations in Chennai. We want to take some photos but we know that photography on railway premises is forbidden without a permit, so we call at the Station Master's office to ask permission. "Oh no,madam," says a nice lady in a saree, "We cannot give permission without Head Office approval." "But we only want a photo of the clock," replies Sarah. "In that case madam, I suggest you do not ask for permission." So we go ahead and take a photo of the clock, and a couple more besides.

We also visit the Law Courts, apparently the second-largest in the world after the High Court in London. We're hoping to sit in on one of the sessions. We can find the building easily enough, but we can't locate the entrance! (We later discover we went round three sides of the building, but the entrance was on the fourth). By now we've been walking for most of the afternoon, so we catch a train from Beach to Lighthouse, then an auto back to the hotel. Our rail pass expires today, and during the 60 day validity we've travelled on a total of 21 trains. Over dinner in the evening we drink a toast to the rail pass. It may not have been the cheapest way to travel but it's certainly saved a lot of hassle.