...... and I was doing so well. 10 days in India with with my toilet routines fully intact and rumble free intestines. This all changed of course, and in spectacular fashion upon arrival in the south eastern city of Cochin. Thankfully it was upon arrival and not during the 10 hour journey south from the previous place as I didn't want to be first person to have to drop their shorts next to the road alongside the truck. I had it coming, not because I had survived 10 days without incident but rather as I had been served up a light grey coloured curry the night before in a restaurant and proceeded to go ahead and actually eat it. My first and last grey curry.

After a couple of nights of foul smelling wet stuff coming out of both ends (thankfully not at the same time, that would have been hard to control) things have settled down and I'm now pretty much back to full fitness. Cochin wasn't a bad place to be ill, nice hotel combined with a relatively dull town so I think its worked out all good. I even managed to squeeze in the organised city tour during a brief spell of orifice inactivity. Having said that being sick is boring more than anything else, especially when the choice of English tv channels is limited to the Discovery channel and BBC World (if anyone wants to know more about Canadian river otters or the latest on the Pakistani general election I'm your man). Also in Cochin I mistakenly agreed to attend a 'Kathkali' dance performance which is a 'unique Kerlan form of ritualized theatre' and also 'a bag of s***e'. It involves some guy putting on loads of make up and and an outrageous costume and then prancing around on a stage doing what can only be described as rubbish dancing while one guy smacks a drum in one corner and another bashes two bits of metal together in the other. I've posted a brief video of a guy demonstrating the facial expressions to the blog.

Prior to my spectacular fall from grace in Cochin the tour had headed south in the truck from Mysore to a former hill station of the British Raj, Ooty. One Brit apparently bought a load of land off the local tribe at 1 ruppe per acre with a view to planting a few crops up in the hills. After discovering that the tea grew up there rather well, every man and his dog got in on the act and it became a favoured retreat/money making hotspot for the British toffs. Even today there are still some hangers on and the local posh school is made up of 60% white kids. I was expecting a nice quaint English village type set up with red pillar boxes, village greens, and tea rooms. Instead Ooty is probably the dirtiest Indian town we've visited yet with suffocating levels of car fumes from the rickshaw wallahs.

Ooty is probably most famous for the toy train railway that runs up to the town from further down the mountain range, with Ooty itself sitting at around 2000m and its cool climate being another advantage for the Brits. In need to air and exercise I decided to give this a miss and opted for a day's trekking in the surrounding hills with a random aussie/english woman that was also staying in the same hotel as our tour group. We enlisted the services of 'Anthony', a local guide, and he took us on a jolly good stroll through the local tea plantations, villages, and right up to the top of a big hill with good views of the valley below.

The villages were probably the most interesting aspect of the day and probably were the highest scoring settlements on the goat index so far. The goat index is my own (and I believe much more accurate than GDP etc) economic indicator of wealth. It relies on an estimate of the number of goats per human inhabitants with a greater ratio of goats equally a higher level of poverty. These villages were roughly a 1:1 ratio and therefore not the most well off. This aussie/british crossbreed woman that I did the trek with was a bit of an oddball. She called herself 'Henry' which I initially thought was very strange until I realised it was short for Henrietta. She is in India trying to start up a fair trade/organic clothes company, with the manufacturing being based in a grotty town near to Ooty. Although well intentioned, I can't see it being a resounding success as after some basic questions I appeared as though she didn't really understand what fair trade was. Later that evening we went for dinner (grey curry) and then the following day we travlled down to Cochin in the truck.

After Cochin we yesterday had a short drive to a town called Alleppey from where we did a backwaters tour which is quite a generic tourist thing to do but you can see why as its a good escape from the chaos of India. We had a big boat for the tour group with a driver and cook and just cruised round the canals and waterways of the area. With little to do in the evening the group had to resort to getting the lady that speaks like a cartoon character to do impressions all night after she had professed to being 'rather good at them actually'. Of course they were absolutely atrocious and but their patheticness was amusing enough. After overnighting on the boat we are back in Alleppey today just for one night without a great deal to do before we head to a beach town called Varkala (also know as massageville USA) tomorrow.

Some more photos and some short videos uploaded.