Just when you think that India can't get any stranger, along comes a place like Malana and gives your cerebral cortex something even stranger to wrap itself around.

Malana is a tiny village nestled six kilometres above the town of Jari in the Parvatti Valley. In Jari they are building a dam, so you can drive your car to the top of the project and leave it there. After that, you've got a beautiful and difficult 3 hour trek through forest and river to the top of a mountain.

Malana Mountain. If in France some places, by stint of miracle, produce the finest wines or cheeses or even chickens, high above the valley and on the slopes of the Malana Mountain a micro-climate produces the most famous cannabis plant in India.

The stuff grows wild; it is a weed after all. Approaching Malana the cannabis plants grow to the height of 3 or 4 metres, their trunks as thick as bamboo's.

But the real surprise in Malana is not the vegetation, it is the people. The inhabitants of Malana, long isolated thanks to geography, have held onto a practice which some say used to be widely held in all of India up until the Raj. This is the practice of un-touchability.

As non-Hindus and cow-eaters, foreigners are considered to be casteless and unclean. It is therefor forbidden for us to touch anyone or anything in Malana. The villagers have built a series of cement tracks through the place and these cement tracks are for us, the impure. Everything off the track is forbidden and as you walk the locals will jump from the track into the mud so as to avoid any physical contact with you.

As you stay there for a while you begin to realise that everything is cleaner and more pure than you are in their eyes. A sacred place by the small temple is littered by paper and a dog shits on it while you look, but if you get too close all hell breaks out and people will scream at you to get back.

The main temple is an ancient wooden affair, the outside walls carry no idols; but there are dozens of deer heads and animal horns nailed to the old boards. The threshold to the temple is covered by cow dung looking like some of Dali's melting watches, but there will always be someone there to make sure that you don't get anywhere near the sacred place.

The irony is made all the more sharp by the fact, easily verifiable, that these villagers never wash. Never. Since we began our trip we have smelt some unwashed peasants, but these holy folk take the cake.

Also, the village itself, in its majestic natural setting, is a garbage dump. Litter is just thrown into the streets and behind houses and no thought is given to the fact that the garbage of today lacks the biodegradability of the garbage of yesterday.

The history of the village is lost in memory, although the general consensus by local historians is that when Alexander the Great (or Megalou Alexandrou as we learnt to call him in Greece) came through these parts some of his soldiers settled down in Malana. These then are their descendants.

There is some physical proof to support this. The unique carving on many homes and the temples is an elephant, even though elephants are not indigenous to these hills and it is well known that Alexander's boys used the elephant to cross the treacherous mountain passes of Afghanistan on their way to conquer part of India. Also, most of the people have green-grey eyes, unusual in India.

The main industry in Malana is called 'cream'. All day and every day the fields are filled with men, women and children. They take the cannabis plant in full flower and strip it of its leaves, then roll the stalk and flower between their palms until the resin is squeezed out. This resin, black and thick, covers their hands like a paste and at the end of each day when they go back to their homes the paste is scraped from their hands. This is called cream and it sells for between 70 and 700 rupees a gram, depending on the quality. (46 rupee = 1 American Dollar)

It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that everybody in this village is filthy rich, beside being just plain filthy. A lot of the money goes to bakshishing the local police who are thankfully absent from Malana. Also, they built the cement track to keep the ferengi under control. The rest of the cash is said to be sitting in bank accounts in Mandi, happily collecting interest on the capital.

One thing is for sure, the money is not being used for garbage collection, building sewers or bathrooms with hot and cold running water. The filth of Malana and the Malanese (Malanesians?) in contrast to their holiness is a paradox which is difficult to accept.

The other irony of Malana is that most people visit it after hearing about the strange religious beliefs of the people who live there. Few people climb three hours just to get stoned, since cream is widely available all throughout the valley. People come because they are curious about the un-touchable aspect of the place, and it is this magnet which may eventually change the ways of Malana. There are, by the way, three guest houses run by real Hindu untouchables.

Slowly exceptions are being made, and one young man did touch me, explaining that he would perform a ritual cleansing later. Teenagers call out 'hey, baby!' to tourist girls. In another generation, Malana may just turn into yet another Indian village.

Go now.