The Grog Bloggers

With an additional three weeks up our sleeves we decided that we would check out the Nilgiri hills district and in particular a place called Ooty. We have made an effort on this trip to eat a wide range of local cuisines where available and situated right next door to my old work in Sydney was an award winning restaurant named Nilgiri's, so I thought that it must be a great place to sample some fresh and inspiring food. Travelling anywhere in India takes time and after doing a little bit of reading we decided on our route to the hill station of Ooty knowing that it would take 2 days to get there if we didn't want to rush. We checked out of our Ernakalum guest house at around 6.30am to make a 7:15 train ... read more

Over the past two weeks we have transformed from being filthy backpackers to filthy package holiday makers. We don't have any more than Tamil Nadu to compare this part of India with but the contrast between Kerala and our home state of the previous month is like comparing a Ferari with an auto-rickshaw. After travelling only seventy kilometres or one and a half hours north west from Kanyakamari and suddenly we were back in the tourist territory that we hadn't really seen since leaving Bangkok over a month ago. The drive in to Triviandrum on yet another crappy bus was a pleasant introduction of what was to come in Kerala, passing by multitudes of rice paddies, swaying palms and never ending waterways. We jumped off the bus, determined to make our way back to the ocean ... read more

I am a long way from being a religious man but when 1300 orphaned children first sang a song to Danielle and I and then followed it up by saying a prayer for us I, for the first time in a very long time was not completely critical of Christianity or any other religion for that matter. I mentioned in my update from Mamallapuram that we struggled to find a conversation that did not revolve around yoga or meditation for the first few days of being in the town. The first people that we were able to talk to properly without holding in laughter were a bunch of lads from England who were completing a portion of their Gap year working in an orphanage in central Tamil Nadu. At 18 I was running a muck as ... read more

Admittedly since decided that we would spend some time in India before heading onto Europe, Danielle and I have had moments of anxiety and nervousness about travelling to a country that we really did not know that much about. Our preconceived notions of India was that the whole country would be littered with pollution, smell like shit, be uncomfortably hot all of the time, we would be hassled by beggars 24 hours a day and that we would have diharea within minutes of setting foot off the plane. It is now a week in and we are still yet to encounter any real culture shock. When the flight attendant on our Tiger Airlines flight TR 638 begun to spray the aeroplane with a deodorisor upon decent into our first port of call Chennai, the two of ... read more

Since the last update where I was in transit from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang we have done quite a bit more moving. Luang Prabang was exactly as I remembered it from the last time we were here, nothing like the party town that is Vang Vieng (thank fuck). It was quiet, picturesque, full of older travellers and incredibly overpriced. Arriving late we settled in at a guest house for 130000 kip, dropped our bags and went exploring the town once more, fortunately this time around the rain held off while we were there and we saw more than the restaurants on Th Sisavangvong road. Luang Prabang itself is jam packed full of history and is a clash of cultures with obvious French architecture and the sound of 15 or so fluorescent orange monks smashing drums ... read more