I am reading Danny Bent’s You’ve Gone Too Far This Time, Sir! He is riding his bike Shirley from England to India. He writes

I stopped at a café and the flies descended upon me, dragging themselves away from the cooking pots and utensils. Bird life freely feeds on the bulbous flies. Seeing meat hung from pegs in the midday heat wrapped in flies, I was suddenly vegetarian again.

After washing the pots with brown water, the cook brought over my food with his thumb in my dhal. He removed it and wiped it on his never-been-washed apron. There was nowhere to wash my hands and the soapless spray handwash my mum had insisted on my using had been lost months ago. Dipping my hand into my food to take my first bite, I thought of the hundreds of hands I had shaken since waking that day and the number of people I had seen doing ‘number twos’ by the side of the road (there’s no toilet paper in India – this is a hands-on approach). I was repulsed for a second but my hunger from a day’s cycling got the better of me.

A mouse scuttled from beneath my chair and the obligatory swollen, pustulent rat lay in the gutter in the midday heat. It seemed to be moving but that was just the effect of the flies. The cows eat the fly-encrusted rubbish and they themselves are covered with flies.

… When I showered and dried myself, the towel was black with dirt. The smog and dirt mixing with my sweat from the heat was a terrible concoction to get off my skin.

Shit, flies, and heat: my definition of Hell. The whole s24o thing (bike camping not far from home) is looking pretty sweet right now.