As I jumped off the train at Hospet, weary headed from a decent nights sleep on a noisy old rattling train I notice that Danielle is looking worse than ever. Her eyes are bloodshot, shes looking frail, and a little grey. “How sick are you feeling? Is it better or worse than before? How bad is your stomach hurting?” I ask hurriedly focusing on avoiding the oncoming assault of a money hungry rickshaw driver. “That was the worst night of my life, I feel like shit” replied Danielle in an exhausted tone. “You want to go to Hampi, I'll take you, [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Besides our flight in and flight out, our little Indian holiday has been a bit like a choose your own adventure story. If we hear of somewhere that is interesting, read about somewhere beautiful, the only thing stopping us from going there is an ever shrinking bank account. There was one big budget item that we had planned on forking out for and by luck we saved a bunch of cash and had a couple of our most enjoyable days since leaving home doing so. A couple of months prior to leaving we were at the farewell party of a friend [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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South Tamil Nadu's tourism industry is thriving and surprisingly it is not on the back of the Euro, the Pound, the Yen or any other foreign currency. I expect that once we step foot over the border from Tamil Nadu into Kerala that things might just be a little different but in this part of the world Indian holidaymakers seem to outnumber foreigners by over 1000 to 1. With not much more than an ambition to swim at the very tip of south India we headed off from Salem extremely happy that we made the effort to see the orphanage [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Sitting a couple hours further south of Mallamaparum is a place which is in complete contrast to both the India we had seen on TV and the small dose of this country we have had since arriving nearly 2 weeks ago. Pondicherry or Punducherry as it is now known has a bus station just like every other bus station, the auto-rickshaw from the bus station was ridiculously overpriced just like every auto-rickshaw leaving from a bus station, the first few guest houses we tried to get a room in had the full sign on the front gate just like everywhere [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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This whole travelling on the cheap thing has its ups and its downs and this was particularly highlighted by our 200 Baht or AU$8 per night accommodation in Chiang Mai. On all but one of our nights we were awoken through our paper thin walls to the sounds of debauchery and seemingly hardcore sex but while it was annoying at the time in hindsight it is pretty damn funny and gave me an decent intro to this blog. Chiang Mai was a fantastic return to city life after truly being away from any hustle and bustle for a couple of weeks. [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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