India is the most incredible country on earth. The smells of the place will linger with me forever; burning sandalwood - surrounding a roaring corpse inferno or silently smoking in the doorway of a temple, Excrement and urine everywhere from cow, ox, goat, monkey and (most commonly) man. Used fuel spluttering from the engines of trucks, mopeds, buses and cars (give me a Hindustan Ambassador over any supercar!) or the pungeunt odour of the cycle rickshaw-wallah's ...

Imagine this scene; you get on a long overnight bus, and the first thing the driver says to you is "if you fall asleep, then i will fall asleep, and if i sleep, you all sleep". Not the ideal start to a 14 hour Himalayan jeep ride overnight through a former warzone. I am glad it was at night as at least we couldnt see just how close to the edge we were nearing, but the sight of a nodding-off driver is not one id ever like to see again, on any road let al...

After a bone shaking two day bus ride from Manali to Leh, we found ourselves at the bottom of the Himalayas. A friendship based on shared busride hardships and then several friend of a friend introductions later we had a group of eight great people with which to hang out, eat, and most importantly, organise the trekking trip of a lifetime. First comes Ian, one of the nicest, genuine men we have ever met. He introduced us to Keith and Tina from Ireland, whose rig...

Varanasi has got be (at least to my westernised way of thinking) the strangest place in the world. Within a 2 minute walk from our guesthouse were a pile of burning corpses. Some done to a crisp, others with thier flesh just starting to sizzle, all being watched rather somberly by freshly shaven ehaded male family members. Apparently it takes 3 hours to fully burn a human corpse, and rather a pricely sum if the family opts for some of the extremeley expensive sa...

Namaste I think its fair to say that over the past couple of months we have become fairly world-weary and jaded travellers, where perhaps we dont appreciate new exciting things quite as much as we should, or get bored a little too easily. A new place quickly lost our interest and everything was, as the irritating SE Asia phrase goes 'same same'. That has all changed. India is like an explosion of colour, smells, dust, and noise. We have only been here a couple ...