A lovely luxurious journey in a taxi was a real treat for the 2 hour ride to Alleppey from Kochi, after all it only cost as much as the bus would when it was split between the 4 of us, it’s a rare treat that we get to use taxis between places as they are usually too expensive! The taxi driver was very helpful when we arrived and suggested a place to stay and as we were only planning on being in Alleppey one night we went with his suggestion - an ok fan room with (we were told) hot water. [View Full Entry]

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Catching the local bus from Palolem to Margao for our train journey to Kochi in Kerala in hindsight probably wasn’t a good idea. With a huge push and shove effort (translation: Donna elbowing people in the head and stomach) we got the last 2 seats on the bus...unfortunately for Neil his seat was next to a 23 year old Indian guy who not only struck up a conversation which lasted the entire 3 hour journey, gazed lovingly at Neil's face at any opportunity he got. As an aside - travelling in India is exhausting not because of the distances involved, but [View Full Entry]

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The beaches of Goa was just what we needed for our Indian Christmas, yes this blog entry is a bit post-Christmas so we won’t go on about Christmas too much. During the 9 hour train journey from Mumbai to Goa the scenery slowly changed to palm trees, rice paddies and luscious tropical greenery of Goa. There are so many beaches to see in Goa we couldn’t possibly see them all in this, our one month snapshot of India. We got off the train at Madgoan station in Margao and following Donna’s OCD like research prior to our visit, we headed to [View Full Entry]

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Having diahorrea and sickness was not the best thing to get 1 hour before a 15 hour bus journey and yet this is what happened to Donna for our Volvo ‘sleeper’ journey from Udaipur to Mumbai (Bombay). The bus itself wasn’t too bad, we had a double bed thankfully made out of plastic. The main problem was that the bus made sexist toilet stops. What we mean by this is that it stopped 8 times through the night for men to have a pee but only twice where the women could get out and do their business. To cut a long [View Full Entry]

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A strange title but very suitable as you will see when you reach the end of the blog. The train from Jaipur to Udaipur ran almost like clockwork (if you discount an hour’s delay) and took 8 hours on a 2AC sleeper carriage - the second poshest class on the train...we know how to travel in style! It wasn’t that posh really, we had the bottom berths and an elderly Indian couple had the top berths and we offered to swap with them so they wouldn’t kill themselves climbing up and down the ladders. The rickshaw drivers outside Udaipur station put [View Full Entry]

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We got to Agra Fort train station very early to arrive in plenty of time to get our 6:15am train to the city of Jaipur south of Agra. The train platform was littered with Indians sleeping wrapped in blankets looking like they had been there for many hours, which is not unusual for an Indian train station so we thought nothing of this. However, the train was first delayed for one hour, then two hours, then three hours until - at last - six hours later the train finally arrived. In that time two other foreigners and ourselves seemed to be [View Full Entry]

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How do you like the snazzy panorama picture of the Taj? Yes we took this with our new camera...not bad eh for amateurs? Our 2 hour train journey from Delhi to Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) was very classy with us being served a pot of tea each, newspapers, breakfast and even chocolate éclair sweets. We used the pre-paid rickshaw stand to get our rickshaw to the hotel but Donna decided she didn’t like the attitude of our designated driver, she says he pushed her and shouted in her ear one too many times and so demanded to the policeman [View Full Entry]

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We are finally back with another country to blog about and wow, what a country! We travelled to India via a marathon journey of a flight from Manila to Singapore, another flight from Singapore to Chennai followed by a flight to Delhi...all done in 24 hours without stopping in a hotel, but sleeping in Chennai airport...hey, it saved us £5! So obviously we were very tired when we got the taxi from the airport to the cheaper area of Pahar Ganj in Delhi where we had some very nice accommodation booked (£10 for a fan room with hot shower, cable tv [View Full Entry]

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As travellers, it always seems like a good idea to go back to places where you had a good experience. For the second time in 6 months we have been very disappointed by places we have revisited. We should have known things would not go smoothly when stupid Cebu Pacific wouldn’t allow us to book flights online, it’s website has an inability to accept foreign bank issued credit cards. When we finally managed to book our flights to Cebu, a week before leaving we had the flight times first changed (both going and returning) then the return flight was cancelled and [View Full Entry]

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Ok, ok we said we weren’t going to do blogs for places we have already been to...that has gone out the window due to the fact we went on a shopping trip to Hong Kong, bought a new camera and just couldn’t resist taking loads more pics: so here is our double-take Hong Kong blog! We decided to fly into Macau (*officially the worst airport in the world...we’ll go into this later!!) as it was cheaper than flying to Hong Kong itself and we then hopped on a ferry to Kowloon to make our way to the fantastically luxurious Chungking Mansions. [View Full Entry]

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