Step out of the bubble…1.

It needs to be a good day - last day, Saturday, no office day.

Inside the bubble we drive out of Hyderabad northwards, our destination Golconda Fort. As we drive away from the city it soon becomes obvious that I’ve entered yet another level of existence. I seem to move from world to world so easily around here. One moment I’m in a busy city street surrounded by offices and professional people in pressed white shirts and bright silk saris, and the next I’ve gone back in time seeing things that haven’t changed for fifty, two hundred, maybe even five hundred years. In this time – zone the narrow streets are lined with workshops; blacksmiths, copper smiths, carpenters, mechanics - all working out of tiny roadside kiosks alongside metal merchants, tea houses, butchers, and who know what other ancient trades? For the first time the majority of women I see are dressed from head to foot in loose black robes, rather than brightly coloured saris or jeans and T-shirts. I’ve seen Muslim women in the city but not in these numbers, we must be in a Muslim area.

We approach the outer wall of the fort - forty feet high and made from irregularly shaped, but precision mason-matched granite blocks. Some of them are covered in intricate carvings, but even without these embellishments the wall is impressive. As we pass through the narrow gates of the outer wall someone has painted in red paint ‘no urine you here please’ directly onto the stonework, and I think that taking a pee here would be too perilous anyway - the road is so narrow and the tut-tuts, wagons, and buses pass so close to the deep red stonework that I think you’d have to be really desperate to risk it. Good job I’m not bursting.

We scrape through the gate and high on the hill in front of us I see the fort. It looks massive and it’s still a mile or so away – even at this distance it looks like a long, hot, steep climb to the top and (groan), I’m wearing flip- flops.

I wait by the entrance to the fort as a guide is engaged. It’s already hot and it's not much past ten. As I stand here, surrounded by postcard sellers and kiosks advertising that they are officially able to sell me Coca-Cola, I realise that this is the first time since I arrived that I’ve been out of the bubble - other than walk to or from an office or hotel.

I am out of the bubble and standing in India!

The guide leads us through the Fort’s huge wood and iron gates and into the inner wall. In front of me are hundreds and hundreds of steps, winding their way upwards to the palace on the summit at the top (can summits not be at the top?). I prepare myself for my worst nightmare - exercise. We are standing in a high, open-sided stone building. The roof is vaulted and looks a little like an inverted egg carton, the guide is explaining about the building, waving his arms around to emphasise the dialogue. He smells of stale sweat and strong tobacco and I’ve no idea what he is going on about, he talks too quickly and I move back from him, his words drop in and out of my weakening hearing.

He points at me and tells me to stand on a large, square slab of stone directly under the centre-point of the ceiling. He tells me to clap. I clap. My clap is loud. It reverberates around the ceiling repeating itself in an ever-diminishing echo.

CLAP! CLAP, Clap, clap, clap, p, p, p, p, p.

He tells me to move away from the slab and clap again. I move away and clap again.

Clap – no echo.

The inner building was designed as a warning post. Unbelievably the ceiling is so perfectly designed acoustically that it magnifies the clap and throws it upwards and outwards. Apparently it can be heard in the palace above us and was used as a signal to warn that enemies were on their way. It was used for other things as well but I have no idea what these other things are, as I only understand what the guide is telling me because I’ve just done it rather than heard it. I make a mental note to get a hearing check – I won’t actually have one though…my hearing is fine.

We begin to climb the steps. They go up an awfully long way and I can’t see any benches along the way – on well, here goes.

The first climb is easy. After a couple of hundred steps the guides stops and points down to a massive stone water tank that’s been cut into the stone. It looks to be about half the size of a football field and at least a hundred feet deep. There’s a layer of rank water at the bottom and dozens of plastic bottles float, not moving, on the surface. The guide tells us that this is the first tank and that further along our climb there will be others. The point of these tanks was to move water from ground level, through a series of tanks and clay pipes, to the palace above. The guide begins to explain how this was done – his voice drifts in and out of range and I realise that I will never know how gravity was defied and water made to run uphill. I think of my own ideas – a system of scoops and pulleys driven by donkeys, a massive wood and leather Archimedes screw, buckets. We move on and begin to climb the steps again. I stop thinking about elephants squirting water with their trunks, through a series of huge bronze tubs, and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other as we climb another few hundred steps.

We stop off at a number of points of interest on our journey upwards; more water tanks, a grain store that was to become a prison for some evil Wazir whole cheated the ruler, a garden or two. I’m sweating and gasping for breath. Above me – only another two or three hundred steps away – I can see the palace. I’m thirsty, there are drinking water stops along the way, but the metal spouts sticking out of the rusty water tanks are consumed with flies and…well, just and.

I’m almost there. The guide and my colleagues are already admiring the view. I still have another fifty or so steps to go, I pretend that I’m busy taking pictures to give myself a chance to stop wheezing before joining them, I wonder what my breathing would be like if I still smoked. I stop thinking about cigarettes as it’s making me want one, and after ten minutes or so of not taking photographs, I no longer sound like a pig with asthma and join them.

The views are amazing and if it was not for the smog haze we would have been able to see for miles. Even so, the views are good and I can see the outer wall in the distance. There are three walls in all and looking at them I realise that the Hill Fort of Golconda must have been unbreachable, a fact that the guide confirms by telling us that the Fort has never fallen to anyone in it’s six or seven (I didn’t catch it exactly) hundred year history – not even to the English.

After a while it is time to begin our descent - but before we do we stop off at the lookout point and our guide signals to his friend below. Far down in the egg box I can just see his friend walk to where the central slab must be. He raises his arms and claps.

CLAP! CLAP, Clap, clap, clap, p, p, p, p, p.

It works! We easily hear the signal from far below – the enemy is upon us!

Out of the corner of my eye I see a flash of emerald green. I look to see what it is and there in a tree is a largish green bird with a long blue-green lyre tail and a very long pointed beak. It’s beautiful. I think about asking our guide what sort of bird it is, then change my mind and decide to Google it later – after all there’s nothing wrong with my eyesight, well nothing that a pair of strong reading glasses can’t deal with, I probably won't catch what the guide says.

And then it’s the steps again, a different set, and going down, but still steps and – Oh my God – they are so steep! I clutch the wall and try to look nonchalant as I carefully put both my feet on one step, then another, and gingerly work my way down them.

At some point along the way we stop off at the Harem - another large stone building where the ruler kept his many wives - we sit for a while laughing about eunuchs and trying to guess how often the king rotated them – his wives not the eunuchs – and then it’s back to the long climb down.

I survive the climb without the need to attach crampons to my flip-flops and we reach ground level. We stand in another huge vaulted building and the guide starts telling a story about some guard who did something or other and was either beheaded or maybe he was made king - I’m not really sure, because all I could hear was the sound of thousands of bats in the alcoves to either side of where we were standing. I hate bats.

We walk through the galleries and at one of them the guide tells me to stand in a corner and talk to the wall. He tells my colleague to stand in the opposite corner and talk to the wall also. I have experience at talking to walls (well at least metaphorically) so I find this to be a piece of cake. The acoustics in this gallery allow sound to travel around the walls so that two people in opposite corners can hold a conversation – so much more sensible than standing in the centre of the room and talking face-to-face – as it happens we don’t have much to say to each other anyway and end up discussing the weather.

We walk out of the galleries and into the light - and that’s it. The tour is done. We pay the guide, walk back to the entrance, and wait for the bubble to pick us up.

Hill fort – tick - what next?