aguyandabroad

Golden Mist is what we'd call Delhi's perfume range if it had one, gently scented with poverty, urine and the burned leavings of petroleum byproducts. If the dust everywhere doesn't do it for you, then the rage inspiring touts, rubbish and insane levels of homelessness will just buoy your spirits up to new levels of suicidal despair. While Kerala might have been poor, it was a generalised poverty which left few people poor to the point of homelessness or begging, but Delhi is another story. We've been based in Pahar Ganj at the Hotel Leeroy Jenkins for the last few days, trying to survive the recurrances of stomach trauma inflicted by dodgy food. After our lovely hospital inducing encounter with acute gastroenteritis we've been running about 60% of normal energy levels, so even after sleeping hugely ... read more

Today we bring you the taste of irony. We believe the last thing we said/wrote to you was..."so this is where we leave you. Tomorrow begins our great Train Ride to Delhi and subsequently the last phase of our holiday. Guess the next time we update this for Part 2 of 'Munnar to Delhi' will be from considerably further north and hopefully from far cooler environs than we're sweltering through currently." Yeah. Scrap that. For our last night in Fort Kochi before the train, we thought we'd go out for a celebratory dinner to a place we hadn't tried before, somewhere Lonely Planet recommended, which was also close to our homestay. So we headed out for a nice dinner of fish and squid, since we would tomorrow be leaving the coast and its dericious bounty of ... read more

We just realised today we've been on the road a month (okay, we could have said that two days ago, but it would have been leap year Febuary month and everyone knows they don't count). So that means we're basically two thirds of the way through our trip. In some ways we're glad, it takes a lot of mental effort to live like a hermit crab with all your belongings having to be packed up and moved every few days. So the concept of being able to collapse in a heap at home in our own space is starting to seem a little more attractive at times! Yesterday, feeling rather tired and a little meh, we decided to have a rest day. We also decided we wouldn't go to the wildlife sanctuary at Chinnar after all ... read more

We reached the end of our time in Fort Kochi after a pretty interesting five days including but not limited to: being served raw fish (not the tasty Japanese on purpose kind); having extremely honest waiting staff chase us a few hundred metres through a maze of alleyways to return Aisha's bag (containing passports, money, camera etc); and sundry other delights. At the end of that, what do you do? Like every good pack of fugitives known to mankind, this particular Bonnie and Clyde headed for the hills. Now for those geography obsessives amongst you there's really only one set of hills around here worth heading for. Known to the British during the colonial era as the 'High Range of Travancore' and to everyone else as the Western Ghats, it's the south western end of the ... read more

Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a boat with the man your man could smell like. More accurately, we're on a boat, and you don't want to know what the man in question smells like, but that doesn't sound as funny. We've been out for the last couple of hours on a backwater cruise houseboat around Alleppey and thus far it's been several of the better kinds of awesome. We'd both always wanted to go on a houseboat as kids but had never had that particular opportunity, so we were more than keen to go on a houseboat cruise around the 'Venice of the East' through Alleppey's nine hundred odd kilometre network of canals and waterways. Previously on 'A Guy and a Broad'...we were at the Green Palace. Last night saw a tasty ... read more