Varanasi was exactly what I had imagined India to be and this was the ideal place to complete our tour of the subcontinent. We had booked in to a hostel on the Ghat in the centre of the old town. Our taxi dropped us off in the middle of a market street in full flow with people everywhere, we were met by a relative of the hostel owner who had come to walk us the final ten minutes to our accommodation. He took us through a tiny alleyway between a café and spice ...

Chennai was the setting for the final scenes of Chennai Express, the first Bollywood film we watched in India and we arrived early morning in to the train station that looked as if it could have been the one used in Slum Dog Millionaire. We stayed in another plush hotel and had a driver to show us the sights that began at St Thomas Basilica which had been built over the tomb of Apostle St. Thomas. We took a drive to the naval museum on the site of Fort St Geo...

It was a long drive from Kerala to Kanyakumari which is the southernmost tip of the sub-continent and in the state of Tamil Nadu. It was the first time in India that we even noticed a crossing in to another state because our driver being from Kerala had a deep rooted hatred of anything and anyone from Tamil Nadu. He argued with everyone he met which was unnerving at first but we could see his point of view, he was stopped at numerous check points and had to pro...

The main attraction in Kerala is the backwaters of Alleppeywhere our driver is from, we pulled up at a dock that is full of cars and minivans dropping off tourists and embarked on to a thirty metre boat decorated with bamboo and reeds. We were the only guests with three "sailors" a cook, a deckhand and a captain but we were left alone to enjoy the laid back life of river cruising while sipping the milk of a coconut with straws. There were plenty of other boat...

We took an overnight train and arrived very early in Bangalore for a day tour of the city before we would be leaving again on another night train to Cochin. I had seen footage of Indian night trains on TV and was expecting the experience to be more hectic than it actually was and we had more space than I had imagined. We didn't sleep too well, after all we were on a train with just a curtain to block out the light and noise but we were happy to find we get pr...