KEY POINTS:
It's been a long day in India.
Thanks to the wonders of global roaming I first knew something was wrong when a text message landed at 3am. The words "Are you all right...we are worried" are ones that always send a chill through me when I am travelling. Inevitably it means something untoward is happening in my vicinity.
It didn't take long to get up to speed. All day there was saturation coverage on Indian news channels, including those in English.
It was surreal to be sitting up in bed in the five-star Samode Palace hotel in the hills behind Jaipur and watch the violence and drama unfold.
It was also sobering to realise that in one week I and my group of 11 Kiwis, mostly from Auckland, would have been in Mumbai, staying in a hotel just a few minutes' walk from the Taj. On my tours we always walk past the historic landmark hotel too and we also pass the targeted railway station.
My group were, as Kiwis so often are, remarkably calm. Concerned for the people killed and injured, of course, but in no way going to panic.
In fact when I explained to one tour party member that we had a "bit of a situation" his first thought was that the All Blacks had lost a game on tour.
The crisis reached Samode in other ways too. A young woman and her two children were getting ready to leave at the same time as us. They'd been at dinner last night but today there was no sign of her husband. She told me that he'd been called at 2am and told to catch the next available plane to Mumbai. Her husband, who'd I'd chatted to over the buffet table the night before, was the BBC's South-East Asian correspondent. Their family holiday had been brought to an abrupt end.
We haven't decided yet what we will be doing next week - the drama is still playing out in Mumbai and at present we are still 900km from the city.
Life is going on in its usual chaotic and colourful way in Jaipur and of course the local tourism operators are understandably desperate to assure us all will be well. And it probably will be but there is undoubtedly a sense of being rather closer to the action that we Kiwis are used to.
Sunil, our Indian guide, says we need to just take one day at a time - tomorrow will take care of itself. And so it will but Mumbai isn't the end of my dilemmas.
We are flying Thai Airlines and at last report (and to be honest, the Indian media has barely mentioned the situation in Thailand so I could well be out of date), the Bangkok airport was closed and no flights were operating between there and NZ.
So we might not be going anywhere fast - maybe we might be best to charter a boat, head for the Horn of Africa and wait for the pirates. It possibly might be quicker than my options at present.
Meanwhile India is already analysing what went wrong: why the Taj has been on fire for so long, how three prominent policemen were gunned down so easily and, of course, deciding where the terrorists came from.
As I write this the commentators are discussing the possibility that they were Pakistanis - I am so hoping it wasn't as one can only imagine what that would do to the fragile relationship that exists between these two countries.
So it's time to switch off the computer and the television and pray that by the morning, for the entire region's sake , tomorrow's news is less grim that today's.
Jill Worrall
Pictured above: Citizens hold placards as they protest against the government's inability to prevent terror attacks in Mumbai, India. With corpses still being pulled from a once-besieged hotel, India's top security official resigned Sunday as the government struggled under growing accusations of security failures following terror attacks that killed 174 people. AP Photo / Rajanish Kakade
