Our alarms were set for seven a.m. to get our seven thirty breakfast to get out for eight o' clock. Somehow or other, we slept through them and only woke up when Saj's nephew knocked our door at quarter to eight. Not a good start! One of the best things about travelling is meeting other travellers and sharing experiences. Squashed into the back seats of the minibus, we talked to two young travellers, one who worked as a sports journalist and the other for Offcom...

Arriving early morning at Kochi airport following the long flight from Manchester via Dubai, we were weary and quite wary of the many new experiences that we knew we would face during our two weeks in Kerala. We quickly found our taxi driver standing at the arrivals area with our name written on his poster ready to whisk us off to Fort Kochi some three quarters of an hour or so away from the airport. We had booked our first two nights weeks earlier at Sajhome i...