The hour and a bit journey from Trivandrum to Varkala in the rickshaw was not too bad, although a couple of times we caught ourselves sucking in air sharply as the driver Sasi darted between lanes into the path of oncoming traffic. We passed through Trivandrum and into the surrounding towns. At the roadside stalls selling fruit, vegetables, drinks and fish. On one particular fish stall the old lady had what looked like three tuna fish each one about four feet in...

After a good nights sleep on the train from Chennai, we awoke about 4 hours before arriving in Trivandrum, Kerala. The scenery once again was laden with coconut groves, rivers, farmland and the occasional hillock or rocky outcrop. The soil was now the deep red that we'd first seen in Goa and we looked out the train window and just smiled. The train tracks in some places were elevated and where this was the case we had sweeping views across the vast coconut and b...

The berth on the overnight train from Coimbatore was shared with a woman and her two young children. The kids wanted to sleep almost immediately after departing Coimbatore which meant that we had to take our positions in the two top bunks. This gave us some time to ourselves. Jan stuck her headphones in and nodded off to some garage tunes and I caught up on some reading, the book is Red Legs by John Greene and it's a cracker. We arrived at Chennai at around 7am...

The overnight train from Bangalore to Coimbatore left about an hour late but arrived on time. We had a berth to ourselves...almost. As we pulled out of Bangalore station a mouse darted out from the corner of the cabin an went under the bed. All food and bags were thrown on to the top bunk and we squeezed onto the lower bunk for a surprisingly comfortable 8 hour journey. We arrived at Coimbatore at 7am and neither of us were in the mood for the hussle-bussle of ...

We had an easy 3 hour train journey from Bangalore to Mysore. We booked seats in the old fashioned, non air conditioned first class compartment. The roomy booth was fairly clean and the four huge fans bolted to the ceiling made the morning temperatures more than bearable. The great thing was that the windows fully opened too. Very quickly the urban scenery surrendered to the countryside, the air felt fresher and the pollution lifted from our lungs. The warm sun ...