Well it feels like ages since I last wrote a blog and with the internet being ridiculously expensive here it won't be long.

To leave India it would take us 4 days of traveling to reach Chennai, where we would fly to Bali. From Darjeeling we caught a jeep to NJP railway station, I was crammed with 4 others in the rear of the jeep, whilst Ant got the front seat with 5 people. By the end of the journey I was thrown into the front with Ant and I would spend the rest of the trip with my right shoulder firmly stuck under the drivers sweaty armpit, with my leg being constantly hit with the gear stick - this is the norm for all the locals, but for us Westerners its pure madness!

As usual our train was late (though only 1 hour) and with Ant and I being on the wait list, we didn't find out till the last minute what our carriage number was - 27 hours later we arrived in Calcutta. After hearing some horror stories about Calcutta we decided not to stick around and had a ticket booked to Chennai for the same day, though we did have to spend 6 hours there. A friend described that arriving in Calcutta felt like you'd had cow s*** thrown in your face - he wasn't much off. In an odd way I really liked the place, it was utterly crazy and just trying to get a taxi to the tourist district was a nightmare, the streets were filled with taxis, cycle rickshaws, human rickshaws (a poor man pulling people along in a carriage), people taking their daily baths, trams, buses - wow this place was so chaotic! As we arrived in the area tourist area we drove past hundreds and hundreds of people standing in a line with plates, we soon found out that as it was Sunday a local mission fed the poor. We spent most of our 6 hours walking around the area and using the internet, I think with a few days there I could grow to love it, but for now the time we spent was more than enough!!

Calcutta to Chennai another 20+ hours on another late train. In Chennai we decided that we'd splash out for a nice room, $US15 with all the mod cons - aircon, TV, when you normally pay $US3 this is splashing out. Well, that is the last time we'll splash our in India as instead of luxury we got bed bugs (first time ever since I started traveling 10 years ago), construction noise and rude staff - give me a cheap room anyday! After kicking up quite a big fuss about the dirty rotten bed bugs we were quickly upgraded to one of their best suites - still not happy though!

After spending 2+ months in India we sought respite in Indonesia, and respite we've found.

First we spent 5 days in Ubud, where Ant and I celebrated our 1 year wedding anniversary, we spoilt ourselves with an expensive hotel, wicked massage, ate at beautiful restaurants and just spent the day relaxing and pampering ourselves, I've decided that every year now we'll have an official A&N day - its Ant's turn to choose what we do next year, he's already talking about speed racing. Ubud is wicked but very very touristy, the nice thing is though you can walk 10 minutes out of town and be walking in the middle of the rice fields.

Our friend Peter has now joined us, so from Ubud we headed for Lombok and the Gili Islands. It took us a torturous day to get here, but now we are staying on Gili Air in a small bungalow a 2 minute walk from the beach. This place is out of this world, there are no cars or dogs on the islands so the place is pretty quiet - though the darn roosters do start crowing at 5am, if I ate chicken I would have gone out and slaughtered them to eat, but as I'm nice and placid I just curse them! There are no roads here, just sandy paths, it only takes 1.5 hours to walk around the whole island.

There are small bamboo built restaurants dotted along the beach and all of them serve the best food - Gado Gado, Pepes Ikar - I think we are in heaven. We've been spending our days snorkelling, lazing on the beach, watching the beautiful sunsets, drinking cocktails/large bottles of Bintang - there isn't much else to do than relax. Today the boys have gone off fishing and we've promised a local lady who runs a warung that we'll bring the catch for her to cook (they'd better come back with lots of fish), I in the meantime enjoyed getting a massage at our bungalow. Tomorrow we are thinking of going on a snorkelling trip where we are guaranteed to see some turtles.

In 3 weeks we'll be in Australia, in the meantime I think we'll just settle on Gili Air and enjoy get some proper lazy days in paradise.