Stayed at: Good Karma Inn, 3 nights So, the day had come to drag ourselves away from the beach…as tough as it was, we knew it had to be done. Kochi was a 4 hour train ride North along the coast and it was very pretty, lots of green, palm trees and mangroves. Our guest house was quite centrally located in Fort Kochi, so once we arrived and settled in, we went for a little wonder to try and find some dinner, in the process, I got pooped on by a bird – shame we...

Stayed at: Swargam Hostel, Yoga, India, 7 nights (although, no yoga!) Points of Note: Coffee Temple became our favourite breakfast place – real baked beans and great coffee! Trains to Varkala were fairly regular, so we weren’t too concerned about getting up and out early, it was only an hour’s journey north. We knew that there were buses and trains going from Trivandrum, so the first mission was to get there. After failing to haggle with a tuk tuk driver ...

Where we learned the art of doing nothing Stayed at: Johnny's beach house, 6 nights Notes: Favourite breakfast haunt - Swiss Café (cheap and tasty and great chai!). Books finished; James - 4, Podgi - 0 We were up super early to get to the airport for our first flight to Mumbai at 7am. I had the whole contents of my hand luggage taken out by a very moody security person, not sure what they were looking at closer, but it all seemed very half-hearted! We had a 3...

Our bus to Udaipur was around midday, so thankfully didn't have to rush off anywhere super early. The tuk tuk took us to the 'bus stop' and it took us a while to work out that he hadn't just dropped us off somewhere random! We managed to sort out our tickets and sat down to wait. Although it was a sleeper bus, we'd just booked 2 seats - they allocated us the 2 at the very front - a good position for everyone to gawp at the only 2 whiteys on the bus! I dozed mos...

Our train to Jodhpur was at midday, so we had a nice leisurely morning drinking chai (how novel!). We were getting a lift to the station form the host and they checked the progress of the train before we left - just as well they did - it was running late (handy little tip; if you dial 139 from any Indian landline and you know your train number, you will be able to get a live progress report!)…only an hour delay, so not too bad by Indian standards, and as we w...