Hi! Again, i have been slack and now have to write lots of blogs and have a mammoth photo uploading session! You will notice that all of the blogs have this elephant, because i haven't put any pics on yet, sorry! Please read all the other blogs i put on after this, and checkout all the pics, because there will be lots!

So, i think i last wrote in Kochin. We took the 'overnight' train there that left at 5pm and got in to Bangalore at 4.20am! Couldn't have been a worse time! But the train wasn't too busy and we did manage to get some sleep on it which was nice. Jack bought 8 samosas for the journey, i ate one before we got on the train, and Jack ate the other 7 before we got on the train... so not so many snacks for the train! We got in to Bangalore on time (were kind of hoping it would be delayed so we didn't get there so early, but it doesn't work like that!) and when we got there, there was a cafe open at the train station so i got a coffee to wake me up a bit. Jack spotted 2 rats and lots of cockroaches while i was ordering so he didn't buy anything!

We had a hotel booked there, so we went outside to try and get a rickshaw. They were quoting 100 rupees and it should have only been 40 so we walked instead!!! It was ok at that time of night, no traffic and no people on the streets so it made it easy to walk. We only got a little bit lost and arrived absolutely shattered at our hotel at 6.00am. The hotel was next to the city market which was absolutely packed at this time in the morning, with people selling flowers and massive trolleys of fresh coriander, the smell was delicious! (which is a nice change from the usual smell of pee and poo). The hotel had a 24 hour checkout, which meant we needed to check out at 6am the next day! But that was ok because we booked a train to Mysore the next day for 7am.

The room we had was great, it was huge, cool, and had a tv with table and chairs! We watched a little TV and then slept and got up at 10am. We decided to have a look at the MG road area which is where the shops and bars and things are. We had a wander and found McDonalds for breakfast! It's rubbish though because they don't sell beef it's only chicken or veg or fish. Not the same! After that we went to a big fancy shopping centre, which had Marks and Spencers!! It was a flash mall, but really expensive. They had this thing called the 'Scary House' which was like a walk through ghost train - worst 40 rupees i ever spent! It was too dark to see, and the people who are supposed to be scaring you are whispering 'turn left!' so it was a bit crap.

We both started off enjoying Bangalore, but it's always the same thing that ruins a place - the rickshaw drivers. For a journey we knew to be 30 or 40 rupees, they were quoting 150 to 200 rupees!! One guy even said 300 rupees! We laughed. A lot. But then started getting really annoyed, it was ridiculous. We headed back to our hotel (i think for 50 rupees which was too much!) and just stayed in that night, we were really tired and needed to get up early for the train the next day to Mysore. The next day, we did the walk to the train station again (about 2.5k's) because the rickshaw prices were stupid.

See the Mysore blog....!