This entertaining, offbeat travelogue by an Irish tv documentary maker is a true story of deluded maharajahs, murderous environmentalists, sex-obsessed yogis, and bizarre high-society belles. It stretches from women throwing themselves on funeral pyres in the deserts of Rajasthan, to mind-reading children in Himalayan forests and devious missionaries on the shores on the Ganges.

It begins in the Himalayas, where Manchán (aka Mocha) has blissfully dropped out, when suddenly he gets a call from his brother who is coming to India to make a tv travel series and wants him to present it. First, he has to sort out Tara, a patient in the local leper station who is threatened by the community for being gay; he brings him to Delhi, leaving him in the care of a band of hermaphrodite dancers.

Do the brothers succeed? Is Tara forced to make the ultimate sacrifice that the eunuchs demand? And what of the Norwegian man who begs Mocha/Manchán to track down a two thousand year old immortal yogi? It’s a bizarre and truly helter-skelter journey through the subcontinent, ending in triumph on the roof of the world with Manchán and his brother managing to befriend the Nepalese secret service and thereby escape years behind bars