Sunali India/Nepal border End October/beginning November Dear India We have just come through the border and are now in Nepal. You might not realise this, but there is a remarkable difference between you and Nepal. Literally in the space of 100 yards! The Indian side was grim, dirty, grotty and very unpleasant; even the border officials were like this too. In contrast, Nepal was a complete breath of fresh air and so we were very happy to leave your countr...

With a ticket in hand, knowing who to speak to in an Indian train station with the right amount of begging and scraping and a suitably pathetic look, and a westerner can get away with murder on the Indian Railways. We had a ticket from Moradadawful to Gorakhpur, but had come further down the line to Lucknow to get on this train here instead. We chatted to the ticket counter who pointed us to the Enquiries counter who had a heated discussion amongst themselves an...

When the train that we hoped would be on left without us, and about 10 000 other Indians, things looked grim; and not just the place that we happened to be. Getting to Gorakhpur by bus was not an option - it was 700km away and nothing goes that far in India in a day! The train we had tickets for was going through Lucknow the following night and we needed to be there to catch it! Come hell or high water, that train was getting a complement of two white faces! But...

Ever since we had left Rishikesh and got another vomit comet bus to Ramanagar, we had no seem another single westerner for a good few days. Except for the Kirsten family, other white faces were difficult to spot. Well, they would be since we were far far off the backpackers' beaten track. Who has heard of Ramanagur? Have you heard of Moradabad even? Even our guidebook failed to mention this pretty large city in India, but it was where we needed to go to start hea...

We heard them, we saw plenty of their pug marks, we came across others who actually saw one and we trawled all over the Reserve, but we did not actually see a tiger. Damn! Some of the forestry and ranger posts were tiger and elephant proofed as added precaution. Houses and outposts were surrounded by 10 feet tall electric fences and 6 foot deep trenches. Only slight paranoid then...Seriously, a male tiger come weigh in at 350kg (which is a little bigger than an A...