I have just spent the weekend visiting friends in Bangalore, which involved a pleasant and varied drive up highway 7 from Dindigul. NH7 is apparently the longest road in India, at 2369km, and one day it would be fun to start at Kanniyakumari and take it all the way through Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, to end at the Hyderabad Gate, at the entrance to Varanasi on the Ganges.

My journey was less than 400km. I started on the wide plains of the upper Cauvery delta, where the wind was extremely strong and many new wind farms have been constructed. The landscape is dry – red sandy soil and acacia bush – and bare rocky strangely-shaped mountains rise a thousand feet or so out of the plain. Suddenly, however, you hit a green belt – the area irrigated by the Cauvery river. Dense plantations of banana and coconut line the highway, and along the river itself are a number of temples.

The hills then start to appear – medium-sized hills covered in bush through which the road winds on its way to Salem. To the east are the Kolli Hills, or Kolai Malai – relatively unspoiled ranges rising to four thousand feet or so. I have not visited them, but the entry in Wikipedia is quite enticing. Salem, on the other hand, is not enticing at all, though it has a famous history and is strategically situated where a number of important routes come through the hills. The city has expanded to take in the ring road, so traffic is fairly nightmarish and it took me 30 minutes to struggle through.

North of Salem, the road soon reaches Thoppur and then abruptly climbs several hundred feet up to a new level. Monkeys – the common-or-garden ones which you see at the side of the roads in all the forested areas, not the more attaractive langurs, which stay on the hillsides – are everywhere and stopping for a quiet picnic was impossible. Motorists will insist on flinging food out of the windows.

From Thoppur, through Dharmapuri and on to Krishnagiri, the scenery gets wilder again and the hills more bizarrely shaped. Some are mere piles of boulders which look as though they are ready to tumble; others are smooth cones of granite; some have sheer faces; the accessible ones may have a shrine or a small temple on top. In between are paddy fields whose vivid green makes a stark contrast to the red soil and grey rock. At Krishnagiri itself, a huge rock with a Vijayanagar Fort towers over the town.

Then comes the final leg. The traffic from Chennai has joined us at Krishnagiri, and the Highways Authority are busy widening the road to 6 or 8 lanes and putting in a number of flyovers. You can imagine the scene. The road climbs to three thousand feet in a series of gentle curves to reach the plains around Bangalore, and around 40km south of the city centre, you enter an urban landscape. With no rain yet, and continuous construction, it was all a bit dusty.

I am sorry I don’t have any photos of the trip – I was busy driving and needed at least two hands. But I hope you enjoyed the description.

The ocean around the Andaman islands is one of those blue colours which you get in tourist brochures and which makes you wonder how much the photo was tinted! Not so – the blue is intense and true, arising from white coral sand reflecting a blue sky through relatively shallow unpolluted water.

People have come here for diving for many years, despite the difficulties in getting here: and I see that recently the surfers have started to eye up the Andamans and their waves. It is nearly 900 miles from Chennai to Port Blair, and there’s nothing to the south-west except Antarctica, so the waves have a chance of building up.

We went there for a week’s relaxation and bird-watching. I had marked off in the bird book the endemic species and in 6 days we managed to see 2! We weren’t straining ourselves! Many birds could be found around the lodge where we were staying, and could be viewed from the veranda with binoculars in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other, which is infinitely preferable to lying face downwards in a mosquito-infested swamp or freezing to death on a Scottish moor.

The resort – Barefoot at Havelock – was on Havelock Island, which is one of the few islands open to tourism, and had a resident elephant which swam each day off the beach. The elephant had been employed by loggers when it was younger, and the animals were persuaded to swim from one island to another following the work teams. However Havelock was not completely logged in earlier centuries and we were stunned by the height and variety of the trees.

One photo perhaps needs explaining – the tiny sand crabs created the most complex designs we have ever seen. Twice a day – between the tides!