Bonjour!

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Hello there my enlgand-dwelling buddies! It's Al here, poor Tara is in bed today with a bad tummy so I thought I'd write an update as havent for quite a while! im in a groovy internet cafe in Pondicherry and Tom is about to choose a dvd to be played on a giant widescreen screen, tis bloody massive! oasis live is playing on the speakers though which of course makes me very happy, but a failm will be fun whilst im typing away!
So i think tararara left you when we were about to take the trip to Kerala. ooo that was a train journey to remember. We were both knackered and I was in a bit of a mood and had a cold coming along, so wasn't in the best state to be lying on the dirty floor next to the stinky toilets squashed next to a party of indian men! We turned up at the train station about 6 hours before we had to depart, and just sat around chatting to a german dude and fretting about which train to get. As I think i've mentioned before, the train system in India is one hell of an experience, you need to scramble to get aboard and have only a minute or so to do it... and this particular time we didn't even have a seat or bed! hmmmm... so we trekked up and down the whole train a few times, which was pretty hard with our backpacks when there are people filling every nook and cranny, and could find no help or space so we finally decided to rest on the dirty cockroach playground outside the delicious-smelling loos. We decided that we are hardcore travellers and could stand it, but were comfortable for only about 30 seconds until some Indian dudes, who also just had waiting tickets, plonked themselves in our area! I read a lot and listened to some music and Tarzan tried to have a snooze, but it was really quite horrible so we didn't sleep until around 2am when some nice men helped us find some beds. I awoke quite early, at around 7am and had a lovely morning, albeit very dirty and smelly as I didn't even clean my teeth, sitting in the open doorway of the train watching the beautiful Keralan landscape go by, writing, reading and swaying to Nick Drake. Those of you who know Tara will know that she can sleep almost anywhere, so she had quite a restful night I think.
When Tara awoke, we spent a good couple of hours singing Oasis songs at the top of our voices (see, India doesn't change everything!) with our feet dangling out of the train. We finally arrived in Kerela, in Allepey where we started our houseboat tour around midday and the first thing our buddies said to us was that we were disgusting. Thanks for that! True though, we are very much higher members of the Skanky Travelling brigade now. I recall one quote from one traveller to another which was " mmm you smell nice, have you had a wash?"...see my point?!
So we finally chose a houseboat, and hired it for 2 nights with 7 of us for 900 rupees a night per person. I know that's a lot of cash, but it was cheaper tha some of the less luxurious boats and ours was fab!
I really wish we had pictures for you from the Backwaters, it was soooo beautiful. We just spent the days lazing around reading and talking and drinking!
after that headed to munnar, a hill station similar to Ooty with lots of tea plantations and pretty landscapes...we then spontaneously headed to Pondicherry, a french colony on the other side of India..took us 20 hours or so to get there and then it was so hot that we spent most of the time hiding under the air coniditioning in a groovy place called coffee.dom which had the internet ad a giant tv screen and 200 dvds to choose from! Pondicherry was a strange little place, not exactly a siteseeing town more of just a place to wonder around and it in the mix of india and france..weird!
sorry this is all so brief but we are in fact in thailand now and want to get up to date! so we'll do the bangalore stories soon also!xxx

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