Slumdog Millionaire Another train journey with general tickets...another stress over seats. This time we went straight for the 'Second Class' carriage, created for those with General Tickets, but which tourists are often warned away from for being notoriously dirty, with common bag theft and with very few women ever being in the carriage. However, we decided it couldn't be any worse than other general train journeys we had done, or battling cockroaches, so ...

Exploding Cockroaches We arrived in Goa on the 17th November and planned to spend a week or so relaxing near the end of our trip through India. The trip to Goa itself was by far our worst experience on Indian trains thus far, where we had to resort to sitting on the floor next to the toilets for 17 hours as we couldn't get a seat and had no luck trying to convince the ticket inspector to find us some; he infact threatened to fine us as we were on the wrong coa...

Backwaters of Kerala After a good nights' sleep under our mosquito net we woke to see the location of our home-stay for the first time; the canal on one side of us and flooded rice paddies on the other. During breakfast on the veranda area we were able to watch the infamous Keralan houseboats chugging up and down the canal, ferrying tourists through the backwaters of Kerala. On our first day in Kerala we got a small ferry for the 10 minute journey along the ca...

Planes, Trains & Automobiles! From Chitwan we took what was again sold to us as a 4 hour 'private direct bus' to the Sinauli border into India, but was infact a local bus that stopped every 5 minutes to pick up people and randomly blared out extremely loud trance type music, at 10am! The bus didn't actually drop us at the border so we had to get an even more cramped bus for the last 4km, so tightly crammed in that there would certainly be no escape in the ...

In your face Varanasi On arrival at the train station in Varanasi we were once again mobbed by rickshaw drivers. Eventually we managed to scrape a deal with one driver who was intent on piling as many locals as possible into the front of the rickshaw (5 people including the driver) while we refused to have anyone else sitting in the back with us (we probably did pay for their fare also)! It turned out that he wasn't licensed to take us into the centre of the cit...