Train Travel!!

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We ate like kings, neither of us were ill, and we can now whip up a mean curry, southern indian stylee! Parotta (flaky pancakes), fish moily (cocunut curry), dhal fry, kashmiri rice and veg pakora (deep fried, battered veg!). This will be our new signature feast, no more butternut squash risotto!
We chilled out a for a few more days in Varkala, although I got lobstered, and couldn't go in the sun very much. We spent a manic afternoon posting a parcel back to the UK, which you have to get stitched up by a tailor, only to get a taxi up the hill to the post office, only to find that parcels weren't accepted after 3pm! Grrr. Still, succeeded the following day and then caught the wrong train from Varkala (having watied at the station for 3 hours) back up to Kollam (we then had to wait there for 2 hours), when we really wanted to down to Trivandrum (which we eventually arrived at 7.5 hours later), the entire journey should only have taken 40 minutes! Blame? THe jury is still out!
Travandrum, capital of Kerala, was worth the journey, we ate some seriously good food and perhaps the greatest breakfast to date; a 2 foot diameter rice pancake, folded around potato and onion curry, with a selection of three curry sauces to dunk this finger food into! One each, washed down with freshly squeezed pineapple and grape juice - 1 pound all in!
Managed not to see any of the fabulous temples and zoological gardens as we were averting a disaster - when the man in the photo developing shop (we were printing out the photos of the family we met in munnar to send to them) seeminlgly deleted all 600 photographs! He rushed our camera into what seemed to be an Emergency ward, and fortunately photos were recovered. Thank goodness!
We arrived in Kannyakumari, those with India maps, it the most southerly point of the Indian subciontinent. We watced sunrise at 6 this morning over the Bay of Bengal (on our left), and are going to see it set from the same point over the Arabian sea (on our right)
6 hour bus ride to Madurai (city of temples) tomorrow - we don't trust ourselves with the trains at the moment!

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