This is going to be a long one… The highlights are summed up in the end for convenience. After we had survived India we wanted to get to somewhere where it's warm and comfortable and where people are nice. In other words, Thailand. We had booked the tickets to Bangkok but until the last days in India we didn't have much of a clue what we would do from there on. We'd been thinking about different islands, mainly Koh Lanta, Koh Tao and Koh Chang Noi (the small...

I felt like starting a continuing series in this blog and for me the obvious choice of topic was easy: travel innovations! I like to build things, to fix things and to fail at doing both. I also succeed every once in a while and this series will show the projects that have been at the better end of the scale. Some are going to be my very own design, some I've adapted to suite my own needs, some might be things that I've just plain stolen from other people. Who kn...

Our original plan for India didn't include a visit to Bodhgaya. In fact, we'd never even heard of the place before the damned "tourist information" in Delhi (blog entry Everybody Lies). The small town of Bodhgaya is known for the Buddhist temple built on the site where Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, sat meditating under a bodhi tree and eventually reached enlightenment. Since we'd already visited Lumbini, where the prince had been born, and were g...

Varanasi… One of the holiest cities in India and one of the oldest in the world. It's the place to be born, to live and especially to die in, since (according to Hindu beliefs) doing so will liberate you from the circle of endless rebirths. We just had to see it! We arrived by night train from Khajuraho and settled in Elvis Guest House by the ghats, the concrete steps leading in to the river Ganga. Our cozy little guest house seemed bigger than it actually w...

Being far away from home also means being far away from the comforts the familiar place offers us. I suppose this is especially evident as we started our trip from Nepal, and continued then to India. Both of these countries are really far away from the normal life we are used to. The cultures are totally different, and the living conditions and wealth of the local people seem to be from a completely different planet than in Finland. And sure we haven't even seen ...