The overnight train journey, in first class, from Mumbai to Jhansi, was made all the more pleasurable by sharing our compartment with the lovely Paawan and Sushma and their two gorgeous sons. As well as keeping us entertained during the long journey they continuously fed us with the delicious home-cooked food they had brought with [...]
We were pretty amazed to have arrived at the town of Bijapur in one piece. The six hour bus journey from Hospet was probably the most hair-raising so far. Despite passing numerous serious-looking accidents along the way our crazy bus driver persisted with his aggressive erratic driving style. One of his favourite manoeuvres was to [...]
We had been dreading the long bus journey from Kozhikode to the town of Mysore. It actually turned out to be quite a pleasant six hours with plenty of beautiful scenery to keep us entertained. Mysore was a lovely place to spend a few days. We stayed in the Ritz Hotel – a colonial building [...]
The busy coastal city of Kozhikode (formerly Calicut) was a stop off point to break the long journey from Ernakulam to Mysore. Although there were a few sights of interest we didn’t have the chance to visit any of them as the few spare hours we had we spent trawling around the city in search [...]
The much anticipated backwaters of Kerala certainly lived up to their reputation. We based ourselves in the town of Alappuzha, often dubbed the ‘Venice of the east’. There was not much to see or do in Alappuzha itself but it was a perfect spot to spend few days relaxing and doing some much needed planning. [...]
The massive gopurams of Madurai’s Meenakshi Sundareswarar temple, ‘writhing with multicoloured mythological figures,’ are claimed to be the greatest man-made spectacle of southern India. We couldn’t believe our luck as we arrived in Madurai to find that the twelve-yearly renovations were in progress. The allegedly stunning gopurams were completely covered in palm leafs obscuring our view. [...]
We took a bus from Chennai to the seaside village of Mamallapuram. Renowned for it’s stone carving tradition dating back to the fifth century, the town is still home to numerous craftsmen earning a living from carving stone. We were fortunate to be visiting during the annual dance festival which provided us with our first [...]
We had to returned to Kuala Lumpur in order to pick up our Indian visas and to make our first flight of the trip (to Chennai.) After much deliberation we decided to stay in Kuala Lumpur a few more days in order to spend Christmas there. We had been given some gift vouchers for the [...]
Travelling during the high season is always more difficult, particularly when it comes to booking accommodation. Whilst staying in Tanah Rata we made numerous numerous phone calls to guesthouses in Kuala Lumpur but there were no rooms available. It was after many unsuccessful phone calls that Geraint mentioned he had many Marriott reward points from [...]
Geraint was keen for a taste of the Malaysian jungle so we decided to head for the former British hill station of Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands. As our visit to Tanah Rata was during a Malaysian national holiday rooms were hard to come by. After numerous unfruitful telephone calls we were eventually successful [...]
