Last days in the North Amritsar has to be the dirtiest city we've ever visited. Visibilty was so bad you could barely see the end on the hotel courtyard. But at night, the golden temple really did look quite magnificent. We almost blended into the background of Sikh pilgrims - except for a bunch of teenage girls who ran up to us to shake our hands and to tell Rachel how beautiful she was. I'd never seen her blush so much! The next day we went to the Indian/Pakistan border at Wagha to see the famous border ceremony. After all of [View Full Entry]

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Hindu weddings A friend of mine, Lorraine had introduced me by email to a good friend of hers, a guy called Abhey. Abhey's drinking ability had given us a day long hangover when he first visited us in McLeod, and now we travelled to his hometown of Palumpur to go a Hindu wedding. We were quite honoured by this, although it transpired that in a Hindu wedding every man and his dog turns up, often just for the free grub and frivality. I would be well at home! Rachel and Jade our french friend from McLeod who'd also been invited got [View Full Entry]

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Mcleod Ganj We left Dehli on the overnight train, an interesting but not half bad experience. After a night of broken sleep we arrive in Pathenkot for a dal breakfast and catch the toy train across the Kangra Valley. The 5 hour train journey was a few hours longer than the bus but it is much safer than the bus and the views are spectacular so we spent the 15 rupees and went for it! 20pence well spent I think. We arrived in Kangra expecting to find a town and bus station, instead we find tiny windy mountain roads and the town [View Full Entry]

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Delhi Wow what a start to India! Thankfully Sri Lanka has given us the foundations to cope with India, we woke up feeling rather cold in the Indian autumnul sun after Sri Lanka's scorching heat, we find the food rather bland after Sri Lanka's burning chillis, we find the scams and touts boring and predictable having heard it all before and even the driving is only mildly more scary than in Sri Lanka. We started our first day in Delhi with a special tour of the city! We were shown around Delhi's underworld by a former street child who works for [View Full Entry]

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This next entry comes many days after the last. In this small of town of Unawatuna, life has become very slow - such a contrast from the first week here. The days have been filled with lounging and reading on the beach, eating, walking to other places to eat and sleeping.  We've finally met plenty of travellers to share stories with, which has been great - much needed from my side. On our second night we met some guys who were working at the turtle hatchery in Bentota. Seven weeks of tickling baby turtles' bellies might have been just toooo relaxing [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday we planned to head back go Colombo but before embarquing on another, slightly better planned train journey we filled our morning with a visit to see the giant Buddha that impressively towers over Kandy. It was amazingly peaceful up there and the views were lovely. We had the observation car booked for our train journey back to Colombo, this is the way we should have travelled to Kandy had we been more organised, we have learnt our lesson! The observation car is the back carriage of the train, the only one you can book seats on, it has fantastic views [View Full Entry]

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Well the next days didn't go exactly to plan - we awoke to Rach being the first food related casualty :-( Instead of travelling to Sigirya, the ancient palace, she spent a day mostly in bed. I went out and visited the nearby Buddhist bookshop to research why Buddhism isn't a religion and what meditation is all about. After over an hour of research, I realised this would take more than a glimpse on a few books. That evening, we had to go for the only safe place that Rach could stomach the smells - Pizza Hut! This felt a little [View Full Entry]

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Colombo to Kandy After an exciting nights sleep in an open plan, open air house, listening to the monsoon howling a gale around us we got up to enjoy a traditional English breakfast with Sunethra- I say traditional... Sunethra tells us that when the English were in Sri Lanka they always started with fruit, followed with toast and jam and had scrambled egg last ... Totally backward if you ask me. Anyway, we followed this with over an hour o backpack fitting time- I have never had a bag with so many straps! Our plan today was to travel to Kandy, [View Full Entry]

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Well, now that we've finally got our bags and visa's sorted, we thought it might be about time to write about some of the actual cultural experiences we've had. Chilling out at the guesthouse, and oasis of calm in chaotic Colombo, it's given us a chance to put our heads about the parapet and reflect on the experiences we've had so far and to look forward to some of the things we're going to do in Sri Lanka. We've barely met a Westerner since we've been here! Aside from Tom the sweaty sock who has had similar fun obtaining an Indian [View Full Entry]

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Well despite the odds and contradicting stories about whether we could and couldn't travel via Delhi without a visa, we've now made it through to the transit lounge. Ok, so we don't have our main bags (which are now somewhere in the air on a direct flight to Sri lanka courtesy of a private shipping company and £180!), but it finally feels like things are going right - in fact for the first time I'm not worrying at the back of my mind about getting sent back to the uk (as certain stories online would tell :-S) The flight was very [View Full Entry]

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