Namaste from The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, where we are trying our hand at diving!

Like a corny American soap opera, let’s recap on where we were last time – in Hampi, with the boulders, the Hindu temples and the conservative dress codes for women. Men could walk around in Speedos, but for women anything below the ankle or wrist was deemed far too provocative. Despite its conservative outlook, Hampi was spectacularly beautiful and one of our favorite places so far, so it was with a heavy heart that we said farewell and caught the train to Bangalore.

Banglaore is famous for being the IT capital of India and as a result of its wealth feels like a relatively modern city. There is still the chaos, which we have come to know and love, but amidst it are skyscrapers, hotels and coffee bars which offer little oasis’s of tranquility. After six weeks on the road it was nice to go shopping in a mall, stock up on toiletries from Boots and drink real frothy coffee. We even ate steak, a rare treat in a country where cows are sacred and given more respect than many of the human population.

Alas, woe is me, for ironically it was in Bangalore that I succumbed to the inevitable Delhi Belly. Feeling invincible after surviving six weeks of Indian food without so much as a belch I cockily bought some sliced water melon from a street seller. Big mistake. It tasted wrong while I was eating it, and four hours later and my digestive system went into meltdown, rendering me weak and pathetic for three days. We have heard that some of the more unscrupulous fruit sellers inject their produce with water to increase the weight, and this water is not of the bottled, mineral variety, so it may have been this which took down my digestive system.

After Bangalore it was to Mysore- sandalwood and essential oil capital of India. It was here that a brave and charismatic auto
rickshaw driver who called himself ‘Masterblaster’ allowed me to pilot his three-wheeler taxi through the crazy city streets. Then, after we had all changed our underwear, he took us to what can only be described as a backstreet oil-den. This illegal operation was run by three Indian tough guys who gave us the hard-sell, while rubbing various oils into our arms and wafting them around our noses. There is something very bizarre about receiving a massage from the Grant Mitchell of India while he stares provocatively into your eyes and talks to you about oils. We politely declined his wares and left quickly, but we had a great time with Masterblaster as he drove us around town, showing us the sites and blasting out Akon through the soundsystem in his customised rickshaw.

When we returned to our hotel an Indian wedding was taking place in one of the conference rooms, and on seeing us curiously peeking through the door, the father of the bride generously invited us to join in the celebrations. As we entered the room all 200 guests turned to stare at us, and from that moment onwards their eyes never left us. Within three minutes we were stood in front of the crowd being filmed and photographed like one of the family. The women rounded on Pip to give her a bhindi and asked her about her toe rings, while the men surrounded me, firing direct questions about my job, my father’s job and our marital status. We were then told it was customary for guests to make a large cash donation to the bride, to which we responded to by laughing nervously, to which they said,’ No really’ to which we said, ‘we are very poor’ and then quickly left.

On the Mysore tourist trail is the Maharajah’s Palace, a grand building which gets illuminated by thousands of light bulbs once a week. While walking around the grounds we decided to have a nose around in the back garden and came across the elephant stables. On seeing us the keepers ushered us over and enthusiastically encouraged us to clamber on the backs of the elephants via the beast’s knee. The activity was definitely not on the official tour, and we rode them bareback without saddles, which was pretty hairy in both senses of the word.

Next on our tour across South Central India was Ooty, an old British hill station, in an idyllic setting high in the mountains surrounded by eucalyptus forests and tea plantations. The air is cool and fresh and it gets so cold at night that we had a log fire in our room, a bit of a change to the 35 degree heat we’ve become accustomed to, and really refreshing! Back in its heyday Ooty would have been a beautiful town with large colonial wooden houses where the plantation managers lived, and a boating lake where they whiled away their free time. Call me an Old Rajaphile (many people do) but bring those days back! Glimpses of the old Ooty can still be seen if you squint hard enough, but much of it has been plastered over and rebranded to attract Indian tourists. The best example of this is Jolly World, a theme park that looks like it has just been through a nuclear explosion and then reopened the next day. Another classic was the Thread Museum; a huge indoor garden of flowers made of nothing but silk thread, weaved together over several years by someone with a lot of time (and silk) on their hands.

The surrounding area was beautiful though and we had a good day’s trek around the plantations and eucalyptus forests; and rode a horse around the boating lake which was lovely, even if our guide did repeatedly punch the horses in the face for being
disobedient. The train journey out of Ooty, down the mountains was spectacular. It’s the same steam engine that used to transport tea from the plantations, and it clunks and whistles its way down through valleys and mountains, arriving at the bottom four hours later. Many people go to Ooty just for this experience and it definitely made the trip.

From the bottom of the mountains we moved onto Kerala, to see the backwaters, but we will save that for the next blog. As you may have noticed we are behind, and just to reassure you, it’s not that we don’t love you, but we have started to up the pace of our travels a bit and we haven’t been anywhere long enough to write it.

Hope all is well back home, lots of love, Michael and Pip xxx