Hello and welcome to my last blog entry before I come home. Last time I wrote I was on the mend from a lurgy, and I am proud to announce that I managed to drag myself out of the hotel to do a bit of much needed shopping. My bargaining skills were greatly hones by my illness, and I managed to pick up a few bargains! I was knackered afterwards though! On Friday morning we got up reasonably early to get into people carriers for a journey to the RanthambhoreNational ...

Well hello and greetings from rural Rajasthan, where I haven't been able to get to the internet for five days but luckily my lovely guide has agreed to lend me her laptop so I can at least type what promises to be another mammoth blog and send it when I get to Jaipur. So on Friday I got up nice and early to fly to Delhi, and arrived at the airport with three and a half hours to spare before my flight so that I could ensure to change my ticket. I actually got t...

So I left you on the journey to Mamallapuram, where we spent another night. As we arrived quite late we did nothing in the afternoon, but the following morning was reserved for sightseeing. We hired bikes and rode around the (relatively) quiet streets to see some of the amazing monuments in the town. Most of these were created between the 6th and 8th century, carved from rock, and depict Hindu stories in breathtaking detail. I kind of lost track of the many stori...

I can only beg your forgiveness for the delay in giving you this update. I have been so busy for the last week that it's really difficult to get enough time on the internet to do it properly, and the longer I waited, the more time it was going to take! I have now devoted three hours of my afternoon to writing this blog which I will do in 2 parts so as not to crash the computer. The first half will appear today, the second half will appear tomorrow. So I had le...

Ok, this could be a long one and I have to go and ride an elephant in an hour so I will tell you as much as possible of what I have been doing... I am in the south western state of Kerala at the moment, which translates to "land of coconuts" It is a communist state, in fact was the first communist elected government in the world in 1957. It is relatively affluent and well educated compared with a lot of the other Indian states but prices are still chea...