Calcutta at 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night. Not my usual choice of arrival time, but it was unavoidable. Sleeping bodies lined the streets…5, 10, 15 in a row lying perpindicular to the crumbling buildings while shoeless shirtless destitutes rummage through garbage around abandoned bicycles and rickshaws. My taxi careers through the bumpy streets avoiding the worrying number of vehicles with no headlights despite the lack of functioning street lamps. I tell myself this will just be the outskirts of the city and the backpacker area will be different… 30 seconds later we pull up outside Hotel Maria.

The man at Maria was having none of it. He was fast asleep atop the wooden table at the door of the guesthouse and grunted “full” at me when I politely enquired about availability. The next hotel on the street had a room though, which was unfortuante really as apart from being well overpriced it was one of the worst places I have ever slept (if it had been free it would have been too expensive). The fact that he said “you have lock for door?” four times and told me “even when standing outside room, you are locking door” left me mildly alarmed. My choices however were limited.

Suffice to say it wasn’t a great start, but after awaking the next morning, moving hotels and starting to explore the city, I found a very different and happily surprising side to this initially unwelcoming place. In the past few days I have reason to put it at the top of my list of recommended cities that people seem to avoid (Manila and Jakarta are up there too) – good food, a fascinating history and very few liars makes me rate it far higher than Delhi as a lone traveller.