After the huge metropolis of Bangalore, we were happy to get back to a small town and looking forward to seeing Mysore, India’s sandalwood capital. We fought our way through the auto-rickshaw drivers and walked a block away to our hotel...The Ritz! (We knew we’d get to stay there one day!) For the princely sum of 400 rupees (less than 5 pounds) we’ve got huge rooms, kitted out with old colonial furniture, our own living room and a restaur...

The train journey to bangalore was great. We had booked the tickets at a travel agent before – hastle free at a small commission charge. The tickets cost over 3 times as much as the previous train journey for the same distance. This was because we had reserved our seats and gone up a few classes to 2-Tier Air-Con. This means we each had a full bed for the night and probably the most comfortable nights sleep in india. The beds in most of the guest houses...

Hi ! Right, we've left Goa. Caught a train from Margao which cost only 80Rs each (about 1pound) for a 400km train trip. Buying the tickets was an experience - I see why people like to queue up the day before and wait in an orderly line for hours before they are guaranteed to get their ticket. On the day of departure you can still buy your ticket at the station but you enter a mosh pit of frenzied elbowing and shoving... I am ashamed to say I resorted to ...

Itching to start our week of chilling-out on the reportedly beautiful beach of Pololem, we left Panaji, stopping off briefly in Margao, the main town in south Goa, to pick up Lisa (a friend of my sister’s), who is joining us to do some traveling for a few weeks. Lisa is living in India at the moment, working with her aunty who is setting up a community project a few hours south of Bangalore. Our backpacks piled in the front cabin with the bus driver,...

From Mahabaleshwar, we booked a double berth on a sleeper-bus to Panaji (or Panjim) in Goa. We’re starting to figure out that getting to a place in India is usually an adventure all of it’s own! We headed off down the mountain for the hotel which served as the sleeper-bus pickup point at about 7pm in a huge shared 4x4 with 2 other couples and their children. They were our age and one couple had been married for 8 years, the other for 13! As they we...