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...

We headed to Trichy, as it is helpfully know, for a bit more temple action as we make our way further south. We took a couple of buses to make our way here and it almost cost us a whole pound, our hotel owner in Pondy thought we were a little razy to be braving the public bus service but it was fine. Although Alison did have to keep an eye on the driver who we were convinced might fall asleep, especially as we were on a motorway so there were only horns going ver...

Pondicherry or Puducherry (everywhere seems to have two names as they try to move away from Anglo names) is a small part of India that was once part of the vast Fench empire, we went to the other little town in New Zealand. Given this heritage there are lots of Rues and probably some fromage curry. The town itself, while fairly pleasant doesn't have a great deal going on and as we had ended up in a slightly nicer hotel we had a lazy afternoon after getting here....

Having got up at 3am to make sure we got to the airport in time (as advised by the hotel owner not just Steve's usual punctuality) we arrived in Chennai at 8.30ish and decided that we'd seen enough of the city in Mumbai and we would head straight down the coast to Mamallapuram or Mahabalipuram or mabalabababram as we have been pronouncing it. Coming out of the airport we first had to negotiate all the taxi drivers who told us the only way to reach our destination...