The end is nigh, the only part of our year long trip left is the flight home. Having had a couple more days relaxing on the beaches of Goa we have spent a day here in Bombay shopping, eating and generally refelecting on what has been an incredible year. We have really enjopyed our time In india, it is a fascinating country. There are things which make travelling here quite tiring, the poverty is oppressing, the dirt is everywhere, the sexism and antiquated class ...

So this is our penultimate Indian blog, we arrived in Goa from Hampi having spent our most enjoyable train journey so far as we shared a compartment with an Indian couple and their very cute daughter who kept us entertained. We decided that after such a stressful year what we really needed was a bit of beach time to round of our trip. Having read the guide book and spoken to people the advice was to head to south Goa for the best beaches. We grabbed a lift to Pal...

We've broken the rules a little with this blog as we actually stayed in Hospet for 2 nights and Hampi for only one but all the activities were in Hampi so only one blog. Hampi is a slightly surreal place, there are miles and miles of ancient monuments, temples and other ruins that you could spend weeks looking round and still not see them all. In Greece or Rome they'd be fenced off and you'd probably pay for the privilege but here some are used as shops, others p...

One of the best books we've both read on this trip, White Tiger is part set in Bangalore, the IT capital of India. Apparently it´s all high rise plushness in some parts of the city. We only got to hang out by the bus station though as we stayed only long enough to break up our journey to Hampi. Horrible hotel, lovely dinner, and that was pretty much our Bangalore experience. We took two trains from Bangalore changing in Guntakal headed for Hospet. We were onl...

We had had mixed reviews from people who had visited Mysore but it was on our way to Hampi so we stopped here for a couple of nights and enjoyed it thoroughly. It´s a pretty modern feeling city although there are still all the Indian idiosyncracies that we have got used to we ate well here and we also shopped well, having a great time wandering through the bustling market and picking up some spices including some masala tea which we´ve become quite partial too....