The terrible weather finally drove us out of Madikeri. Of course, the weather improved once we got on the bus, and after an hour or so, we even had partial sun. Halfway down the mountain, the bus stopped and we had to wait for another broken down bus to be cleared from the road. The passengers from that bus had been waiting on the roadside for over an hour, and eagerly crammed into our bus. The remaining four hours to Mangalore were hot and sticky, but we met a n...

So John and I have been trapped indoors pretty much all day.  Madikeri, where we spent today and yesterday is one of the rainiest cities in India, and it's pretty hard to enjoy the city when it's pouring rain.  As a result, I finally got caught up on my journal entries, so I've posted two or three in the past day or so.  If you're interested, you'll probably have to check the archive type thing to read 'em.  Before I ge...

I shouldn't be here writing this right now. I should be lost somewhere near the border between Karnataka and Kerala. As it is, I'm sitting in the city of Mysore. It's not where I wanted to end up today, but it's better than having to set up the hammock on some roadside in a rainstorm.John and I jumped on a bus from Calicut to Cannur at 8am. Four hours later, we were in Cannur, and trying to figure out if there were any buses that went directly to ...

Our plan for a jungle hike didn't work out as well as I hoped. We caught a bus from Kozhikode to Kalpetta, which is one of the jumping off points for Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary. While on the bus, a man sitting near us helped us to find the correct stop and then tried to tell us that we needed to get on another bus to get to Wayanad. I didn't believe him, and told him we were going to grab some breakfast in Kalpetta before continuing on. He was happy to po...

We left Varkala and made our way up to the city of Kollam.  One of the big tourist draws in the state of Kerala is the backwater tours.  A network of canals, rivers, and lakes links a large part of Kerala, and cruising around in a canoe through the rural villages sounded like a pretty cool experience.  We booked our trip through the government office and headed out to the jumping off point.  I won't go into the details of the tour too much...