Oh dear!! The holiday was going so well until ... food poisoning stuck. The unfortunate victim in this case was my beautiful wife who we suspect was attacked by some marauding germies hiding in a samosa. The day went as follows. It all started out bright and sunny. We woke up extra early and headed out to the first site - the Five Rathas. This was exquisite collection of rock carvings depicting Indian mythology and local animals. They quality and size of these carvings was amazing - considering their age, they looked amazing. After this, we headed on to Arjunas Penance, [View Full Entry]

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Now I suspect we look very much like tourists, because everywhere we walk, wer'e approached by groups of tour guides offering their services. Unfortunately a simple no is never enough to get rid of them. Instead, saying no seems to indicate that other guides and shop vendors should also approach, shoving their wares and services in your face. Its difficult to keep your cool in these situations - you try and be polite and say no, then no again, then no for the third time - but they keep coming, like a team of ants swarming to a ham sandwich on [View Full Entry]

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Today we flew to Tamil Nadu - a state in the south of India. Specifically we were headed for a little town called Mamallapuram just 50kms south of the capital Chennai. We had to catch a taxi from Chennai to Mamallapuram so we got to see a bit of Chennai. It was amazing - quite a culture shock. There were cows everywhere - on the street, in the alleys, standing in the doorways of shops, and sometimes even in the middle of the road. Since cows are sacred here, people make way for the cows rather than the other way. Thus [View Full Entry]

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My first impressions of mumbai (bombay) was driving in a dodgy taxi with a top speed of 11km/h through what I thought were backstreet alleyways but were infact the main roads of this confounded city. It was 2am and not a creature was on the street except for the occassional stray dog. Garbage was strewn on every corner, the air stunk of rotten sewerage, and I found myself asking what I was doing here. My first adventure involved catching the train down to Bombay downtown. I decided to be thrify and travel second class on the train. Terrible mistake. In india, [View Full Entry]

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If you can't guess, I went to Carthage today (for the uncultured Carthage is an ancient city that was once one of the most powerful cities in that part of the world - famous associated people include Hannibal the guy who marched on Rome with an army of elephant riding troops over the Italian alps). Today was my last day in Tunisia, so I left the luxury of the conference hotel and travelled into Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. Tunis is a bit of a hole - nothing much to see except for 2 main sights - Carthage and a beautiful [View Full Entry]

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Bit of a dud day today. Slept till 12, then presented my lecture and then slept a bit more. Went down for dinner - discovered that it was the grand conference final dinner which would involve lots of speaking, and thus decided to skip it and go to sleep. As a result, couldn't sleep that night so stayed up watching CNN (the only english channel that I had). I am so up to date on the Indonesian earthquake and the popes feeding tube!! [View Full Entry]

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Today was day 3 of the 5 day conference, and I was sick of conference. Bored stupid. So I decided to skip today and head out to Kairoun, apparently the 4th most holy city in all of the world. The trip to Kairoun was short and sweet - and uneventful 1.5h journey with none of the customary pleasantaries of Tunisian bus travel such as men with bad body odour or women who talk too loud. Women here (older women in particular) have no concept of volume - they just yell in their nasal annoying voices - just yell - I don't [View Full Entry]

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I am so bored. I hate this conference. Most of the papers have English titles and English content, but for some reason the presenters all have decided to present in French. The result is that I can't understand most of the sessions. I can thankfully at least read their slides fairly well, but its hard listening to sessions where you understand every 15th word. So in the afternoon, I went on strike and headed to the pool. It was quite disgusting because many of the tourists were fat old french ladies who had no qualms about sunbathing topless. Blurk!! Thus, I [View Full Entry]

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At the conference now. This place is fantastic. Its a five star resort with all the trimmings. Best of all, the price included all my meals to I get a buffet for every meal. The desert bar is amazing, about 10 different high quality deserts each meal. I am getting quite fat. On the flip side, the actual conference is a bit disappointing. Many of the presentations are in french - thankfully however I can read the slides, so its not too bad. The whole thing has been a bit of a flop - terribly organised, nobody knows what is going [View Full Entry]

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I headed out to two major tourists sights in Tunisia today, Matmata and Douz. Matmata is a countryside town set amongst the hills to Tunisia. The landscape around this region is typically described as lunar - it kind of looks like the moon - rough edged, cratered floors, dry arid sand. What Matmata is best known for is its troglodyte homes. Since the temperatures get quite high, the locals build there homes underground in pits. In fact, these were the exact homes that were used in Star Wars Episode 4 as the home of Luke Skywalker. It was pretty cool to [View Full Entry]

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