Day 1 & 2 London - Dubai - Kozhikode - Kumarakom

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What a brilliant start to my trip got upgraded to Business Class on my Emirates flight from Dubai to Kozhikode! Would love to say that I played it cool but was an absolute geek and took advantage of the champagne, even though it was 1am and everyone was eating breakfast... why not I haven't got to work tomorrow, or the next day or the next day (you catch the drift).

First mistake we have made was booking a homestay 300km away from where we arrived into India. We have failed to realise quite how big Kerala is, so after spending nearly a whole day travelling to India we then had another full day of travelling in 37 degree heat carrying all our stuff on our backs - school boy error. It was a good way to experience very early on some of the cultural difference between the UK and India, and there are loads! 7 classes of travel and trains don't have set times, they just rock up whenever and leave whenever. We finally managed to work out where we should be headed and got on a train (2nd class we have to rough it sometimes after flying Business).

Second mistake was missing our stop only reaslising this when the conductor came and looked at our tickets, he wasn't angry he could see he was dealing with morons, so we had to get off at the next stop which I was glad of after being on the same train for 6 hours. Luckily we wre still headed in the right direction. Train travel is cheap our ticket for a 5/6 hr journey across 300km was about 6 quid! When we got off the train we then had another hr journey in a cab to our homestay. They didn't seem too pissed off that we arrived 8 hours later than we said we would, again they could see that they were dealing with women of well below average intelligence. They made us some lovely food which we ate and then proceeded to sleep for 13 hours.

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