We had the two most enjoyable days of our Indian adventure in a small village called Nedumudy in the Keralan backwaters. The area is a series of canals and rivers which people live alongside farming rice. We stayed with a local villager called Matthew and his family who wer perfect hosts, feeding us plenty, providing travel tips and teaching us the Indian board game of Corram which we were hopeless at. We had arranged the homestay through another local man, Thoma...

Having recovered from our stomach complaints in Varkala we felt brave enough to venture onto the train up to Allappuzha, the jump off point for the Keralan backwaters which is one of the biggest tourist attractions in southern India. Basically it's a series of canals and rivers which you can cruise around in vessels of varying sizes. After checking into a pretty basic hotel we wandered up to take a look at the houseboats. These are big boats that are kitted out ...

Varkala was meant to be a bit of r&r time on the beach. Another train journey which started by me accidentally insulting my fellow passengers on the platform as I sat with my flip flops off and my legs resting up on my rucksack. I didn't realize that showing your bare feet is considered very rude here and had no idea why the train guard was gesturing to me so animatedly. About an hour later on the train, Steve realized my mistake, so we won't be insulting any...

This is as far south as you can get in India and where the Arabian Sea and the Indian ocean meet. We never quite worked out if there was a reason but there were hundreds and hundreds of Indian tourists there, many queuing for hours to take a little boat over to an island where the Vivekananda Rock Memorial which commemorates the life of an spiritual teacher from the 19th century and the neighbouring statue of a local poet which we assumed was an ancient monument ...

A flying stop here as we'd forgotten our previously well-honed instincts as travelers and having not done our research, got to this festival town on the day the festival ended. We did however go to probably the most interesting museum of our trip; the Gandhi museum. The first section of the place was a history of India and a no holds barred description of the English rule. It was very moving and interesting and embarrassingly taught me a lot of things that I feel...