We're going into space...first stop Uranus!

We initially thought our campervan was quite cool with some nice alien pictures and star wars robots but then we saw the back which has the catchy slogan above on it which may have been why we were pulled over by the police within two hours of picking it up (it was just a random breath test cos it's Christmas but we still shat ourselves). Now we're in the mountains where it's chilly and raining and not what you'd expect from an Australian summer.
Now on to more important matters such as our burgeoning film career, or more accurately Pauls. While Sophie was too big for any of the balldresses the rest of the white extras were wearing and ended up in a fifties schoolteacher dress and wedge sandals which gave her the stylish look of a Hassidic Jew, Paul was given the role of chief journalist. This entailed a heavy antique film camera which was such a prized prop that it had its' own minder who stalked Paul around the set giving constant instructions on how to hold it. His outfit was pinstripe trousers with braces, a shirt, Buddy Holly style glasses and greased combover hair. He was on camera for pretty much the whole ten hour all night shoot (about 10 minutes of actual film) and was given a lot of personal attention by the director. After two shots, he just wanted to go and hide but bravely stuck it out for the rest of the shoot while Sophie went slowly insane getting up from a cinema seat and sitting down again in unison with the other extras (in what cinema does everyone sit down together, incidentally?) all of whom were COMPLETE FREAKS. From the ginger albino Indian flirt who Sophie initially thought was Russian to the very angry American reject who wasn't allowed on screen due to his non-fifties hair, from the woman with delusions of grandeur who kept pushing Paul off screen to the cockmunch referred to earlier who pretty much defies description, they were all the sort of people who'd expect to have nothing to do all night than work on a low budget film. He claimed to have been in 3 Bollywood films and obsessively showed anyone who was passing the billboard for the one he was in (we later found out he just did some dubbing for a security guard), thought all the Indian girls were chatting him up when they were really taking the piss, kept referring to a mythical Turkish girlfriend and his many travelling exploits in a loud voice even when NO-ONE was listening, the list goes on.......
The whole shoot was demented chaos and no-one knew what they were doing. Highlights included the director trying to beat up the security guard and a futile attempt to stop Mumbai rush hour traffic in a 200m radius when the filming overran. By this time it was 7am and Sophie was going psychotic, Paul was so wired he had no idea what time it was and a confrontation nearly ensued when we demanded our money and refused to do 'one more shot, one more shot'.
It was a pretty cool end to our Indian trip, even though by the time we reached the airport we were so tired we were hallucinating. Sydney came as much more of a shock than we thought it would and we really miss India. Here are our highlights; walking across Delhi at rush hour, gazing at mountains in Spiti Valley, watching the Tibetan performance in Dharamsala, talking to all the visitors in the Golden Temple, visiting a yogi and watching the puja ceremonies in Varanasi, cycling through the villages around Konark, climbing the pilgrimage trail in Tirupati, standing on a rooftop in Tiruvannamalai, gardening in Auroville, visiting the temples in Thanjavur and Madurai, seeing the elephants in Periyar, the whole of Sophie's birthday, taking a bus ride through the tea plantations and chilling out on the beaches in Costa Malabari, Gokarna and Agonda. Anyway that list is probably more interesting for us than for you but India is great and you should all go there.