We found a few little tourist things in Fort Cochin (not an actual fort just a suburb) and some bars and restaurants. The Chinese fishing nets were interesting and there were a series of churches etc. It is still hot here and we were hiking in the heat of the day towards the basilica. Now having grown up with private schools I have been to my fair share of religious institutions and know that in terms of rankings they go: chapel, church, cathedral, basilica. Having climbed St Peters basilica in Rome, I had an idea of what to expect…oh was I wrong.

Clearly the rankings do not count here in India. After hiking like idiots in the heat we arrived at the basilica which was smaller than and about as impressive as a local scout hall in a small country town. Needless to say I had an opinion, as sweat poured down my beleaguered brow standing outside the footy dressing shed that was the basilica. While walking away we passed about 6 more churches…all of which were significantly better than the basilica.

The choice for lunch was written up in the lonely planet as the pick and was called the Dal Roti. It’s good write up was well earned and well deserved. We were introduced to a new thing which was the “Kati Roll”. This was in essence a kebab (the type that you drunkenly order at 3am on your way home) made with buttery Indian bread rather than the normal burrito/lavash style bread…and it was magnificent. I had the chicken, Jill had the curried prawns and we shared. A table of yank girls, at the next table, were expertly guided through the menu by the very personable and helpful owner and all the food that appeared looked sensational and seemed to be fully appreciated.

The main reason for heading down here was the fact that Jill had booked a houseboat to cruise the Kerala backwaters for three days before heading for the southernmost tip of India (Kanyakumari) via Thiruvananthapuram. The houseboat was a thing we saw while watching the pilots guide to India and we thought it was a must do. It involves the two of us and three staff with all the food and drink (non alcoholic) that you can handle. It also involved stops through the day to buy essentials like beer and fresh seafood.

You jump off the boat with chef in tow and select live prawns and crabs while asking him what he could do with that…if he suggested something good you bought it…if not you made him either come up with a better option or walked away from the prawns etc.. We walked away from the first one as they were asking more for their prawns (per kilo) than you would pay for top Aussie tiger prawns. As we were about to leave the captain said we could get beer here too…so I ordered the 3 cold ones that they had (Bavarian beer) only to find that they were non alcoholic beer. Upon noticing this we returned them quickly and drove the boat away.

Kerala is clearly the rice bowl of India with each side of the River spilling out into mammoth rice paddies for hectare after hectare. The land level is lower than the River and at the appropriate times they open gates and flood the fields. All transport around the region is by water, with the exception of a 4 foot wide gravel path along the bank. This has seen the accumulation of many new photos for addition to Jill’s planes, trains section of the blog. Particularly as brick barge, construction canoe, de-weeding dredge, farmer’s flock, fishing fleet, grocer’s galleon, holidayer’s houseboats, kelp ketch, laundry launch, and school sloop (see what I did there with the alliteration…it is in alphabetic order too… And some of you think I just spew forth random garbage…a lot of work goes into these ramblings) all compete for the same stretch of water. (Now be honest…how many of you went back to check if my alphabetising was correct).

Possibly the greatest thing that we saw in our three days of lazing was the trip past the duck farm. A solitary man in a dug out canoe was herding a flock of baby ducks as they swam up the River. We were heading in the opposite direction as we ploughed towards this mass of organised quackery. To give perspective to this, the flock was swimming about 20 ducks abreast to form a 2-4 meter wide strip. This was repeated row after row forming a ribbon of ducklings that stretched over 70 meters long and 3 meters wide and meandered its way upstream. All of this controlled by alone man in a canoe at the back, slapping his paddle on the water. I have no idea of how many ducklings there were, but it was many thousands.

Once again there is not too much tourism-wise to be seen here but from a culinary perspective this place is heaven. Mangalore is one of the main southern port cities on the Indian west coast on the Arabian Sea. It is a seaside city and is far from the dirt and filth of the north and as such the waters are clean and the seafood is good. It is one of the few places where non-vegetarian is common and the options available for us carnivores are spectacular.

It is still incredibly hot with mid 30’s temperatures daily but we are in a nice air conditioned room and we can time our excursions to miss the heat of the day. Rajasthan in the north was full of tourist sites like palaces and forts etc however the south seems to be more of an unspoiled natural place. The skies are clearer, the air is beautifully breathable, the water is cleaner, the streets are neat and everything just seems better…except there is nothing really touristy to see.

Our first foray into the food of mangalore was the Lalith bar and restaurant where we had a great lunch of pomfret (a local fish) and a ghee roast chicken. I am not exactly sure that this fits within my post heart attack diet but it was magnificent.

We got back to our hotel where we have a restaurant that specialises in Kebabs. It is essentially a buffet however in addition, each table has a hole in the centre which they fill with a square box filled with coals upon which all sorts of goodies are placed and grilled. Needless to say I picked the non-veg option and we feasted upon prawns, mutton, fish, chicken…all washed down with kingfisher beer. The buffet had a range of options to be grazed upon and the meat on a stick man kept turning up asking which go the above list we wanted more of. While I am a huge thali fan… I remain a carnivore and charred meat on a stick is the best.

Another restaurant that we have in our hotel is the seafood one. This serves a lunchtime thali we discussed this and Jill chose the crab and I chose the prawn thali and we were to share. Until….We found something better…We headed to the Gajalee seafood restaurant high on the hill in mangalore. It is safe to say that by Indian standards that this place is expensive. By Australian standards however…our first point of order, after swilling half of an incredibly cold beer (did I mention it is hot here), was to head to the row boat at the front of the restaurant to choose which of the live crabs that we intended to eat. I asked the type of crab and was told it was a rock crab however it looked like one of Australia’s best muddies.

Crab chosen it was down to examining the menu proper. I must mention the crab was not compulsory…but it was for us. You could order any type of meat, fish or veg dish that you would like. We chose the garlic/pepper crab and accompanied it with chilli prawns with some naan and a roti and we were in bliss. To date mangalore has had the best range and quality of food since hitting India. Each region has its specialty but mangalore seems to do it all.

I don’t know what country we are in but we have certainly left India entirely. This is the beach holiday destination for India and quite frankly it is like entering an totally different world. There is nothing to see here other than beaches and other tourists. The state of Goa is exempt from taxes and therefore everything is cheap. Despite this it is the richest region in India with average wages 2.5 times higher than elsewhere and the infrastructure like roads and bridges etc are far better than anywhere we have been so far. I don’t know how this is achieved but it is working. We hit the most bizarre bridge experience on our way to our accommodation but I will leave it for Jill in her planes trains section.

It is hot. We are here in winter and it is seriously hot and it will continue to get hotter as we head south. At the moment it is only possible to walk for about 15 minutes before being soaked in sweat and seeking a shady respite. The daily highs are well into the mid 30’s and it is winter. I have no idea what or how bad the  summer gets but the winter is more than enough for my Canberra acclimatised bones.

Goa stretches for 100 kilometres but in reality it is a few big towns and a series of pockets of businesses spread across the region. Every 2 kilometres or so you pop up onto a different pocket which generally contain about 3-6 hotels/hostels, 6 bars and 5 restaurants along with 3 motorbike hire joints and 12 tourist stalls. This is added to every third pocket or so with a “juice bar” which are the busiest businesses in town. They openly advertise as juice and more. The bikes are a choice of scooters or some beautiful classically styled Enfield motorcycles (just for KAT).

Goa is fantastic if you can handle it and embrace it for what it offers, without buying in and checking out. The place is full of people who entered a juice bar and are still here 2-40 years later. Old hippies abound and the younger generation is full of Jonny Depp wannabes who got their first taste of hash, checked out, and are still here 5 years on. The most common activity is to drink and get baked every night and then to zone out on the beach, sleeping it off, in the afternoons. This would be ok if everyone had not hired scooters or motorbikes to get between the various pockets and were riding either stoned or drunk.

That said, if you can handle the atmosphere and not buy into the hippie garbage the place is great. The pockets are set amidst green leafy hillsides, each one being a short walk to the beach. The beaches are as clean as India can offer, and most of us would be willing to enter the water, while still having the uniquely Indian traits (cows between the flags). If you were bored of laying on the beach I am certain that you could find a 3 day old frisbee (they are a bit moist if you get them any earlier). The food is cheap and diverse, with an effort needing to be made to find a curry. The beer is VERY cheap and plentiful and the hotels are clean and cheap. There are top of the line options but they tend to be fake, expensive and full of Russians. In a land of bikinis and sarongs, the Russians pack the little black dress and stripper heels.

Jill and I were discussing this place and came to the conclusion that there are certain people in our lives that would absolutely love it and would know the balance to keep, while there are others that we know who if they turned up here we may never see them again. I will not name names but will allow each of you to determine your likely path. For those of you able to cope it would be a great joint holiday destination whereby about 10 people all turn up to the same area and have joint but separate holidays. However if you were in any way impressionable there is a real possibility that you could find yourself in a bar, a decade on, with dreadlocks, fewer brain cells and no real idea of how you got here.

Merry Christmas to friends and family alike. Know that we are missing you all and would love to have been able to spend this time with you.

We are spending Christmas in Udaipur, India and have been hunting furiously for a venue that will offer something like our idea of what a Christmas should be. We have failed but we came across a special Christmas Eve function at some of the flash hotels. The flashiest of these is in the middle of town, atop the hill, in the palace. For a small fee (and a limb) we got ourselves an invitation. Now my mother, as she always does, sent me a sum of money to be spent spoiling myself for Christmas. This year it did just that so thanks mum. We got the tickets to the Christmas Eve ball, on the pool deck, at the Shiv Niwas Palace.

Needless to say our backpacking attire did not exactly include formal wear. So we went shopping. This was possibly a good thing as some of our original items were getting a touch aromatic and were in need of replacement. We settled on neat casual…Indian style. Safe to say that for the cost of our splurge tickets we could have stayed at our dodgy little hotel for almost a month. Instead we opted for the all you can eat, all you can drink Christmas Eve gala ball at the palace.

The place was spectacular…as was the food. We ate, drank, chatted and generally had a fantastic night. So much so that Jill claims it to have been her best Christmas ever. We got to have our turkey…along with almost anything else that you can imagine. We steered clear of the Indian food as we have eaten nothing else for about a month now. While I like eating Indian food I also love the variety of being able to have different things.

A couple of things that you need to know about Udaipur to give context to our evening…the James Bond movie Octopussy was filmed here with the evil baddie having her hideout/headquarters in the middle of the lake (images to follow in the Udaipur post). Prior to finding the evil baddie…James Bond, as he does, seduced a Bond girl by a pool. This was the pool that we sat beside having our Christmas feast. As this movie is the big claim to fame of Udaipur, almost every rooftop restaurant plays this movie nightly between 7-9 pm. We will be heading to one of these tonight to refresh ourselves on the movie and to see the sights of the city that we are bouncing around in. For those that own the movie there is an oval shaped pool with a fountain on one side. We had the table directly adjacent to the fountain.

The evening was all about excesses with a list of experiences too long to list (but included floating ice sculptures and flower petals on almost every unattended surface) suffice to say we had a great time. One of the attendees at the function was actually the Maharana (local king) and his family, there was also a lesser Bollywood star who had apparently made it big in the UK and had come back and bought up most of Udaipur.

Missing you all…thinking of you… Hope that you all have a great Christmas.

Arrived in Udaipur and settled in to a fantastic guest house right on the lake overlooking people washing themselves and their clothes in the lake. We could see the palace, the temples, the water, the gates all from our balcony.

The coffee is great and we got into a chat with the manager who was trying to upsell us to another room or another hotel (that he happens to also own). We hit our first lost in translation…the man was telling us his other hotel has cows and mangoes. Now Jill loves a mango daiquiri so we showed interest and described how her Christmas tradition was to drink mango daiquiris. He gave us a very strange look…we talked in opposite directions for a few minutes before he showed me a photo of a mongoose. We quickly clarified that Jill does not in fact drink mongoose. The man was full of character and asked if we knew what India stood for. Which we did not. The answer was…

I’ll
Never
Do
It
Again.

From this time on…all was good…the other gem he pulled out was that “in India everything is possible…but nothing is available”. We did the Christmas run around to find a suitable venue and after that did the tourist thing hitting the main sights. The palace and museum were great but were massively overcrowded (it is peak season) which detracted from the overall experience. The lake palace is now a 5 star hotel that you cannot go to unless you pay the $1000 per night…given that we can see it from our rooftop and we are paying under $10 per night…we are fine not going in…we saw the insides the night we watched Octopussy anyway.

We watched the movie (Octopussy) and apart from some general filth and dodgy wiring the rest of the town looks pretty much as it did in the movie…ignore the fact that the movie showed the Taj Mahal which is so far away it is not funny (650+ Kms). We wandered up to sunset point near the cable car and the boat cruise set off point. When we worked out that the boat cruise was at a 1000% markup for tourists for the 20 minute ride that goes around the lake palace and past our joint we decided not to bother.

We did the 90 km each way day trip out from Udaipur to see the Kumbhalgarh Fort and then across to the Ranakpur Jain temple. It was a full day but a great one. The fort (as they tend to be) was pretty amazing with many a happy snap taken and the Jain temple was incredible with over 1400 marble columns all individually carved. The one at Ranakpur is (arguably) the best of them all but either way it was pretty darn good.

We jumped in and split the costs with a Dutch lady and her French husband. He was a mad keen photographer who was hellbent to get photos of the oxen drawn water wheels. For those of us who grew up in the either the 20th century or civilisation it is a bunch of paint tins on a chain dipping into a well and emptying into a trough all being powered by a couple of oxen getting dizzy. We found a few of these and he got his photos. For a small fee I managed to get Jill driving the oxen around in circles.

This place is a must see for any travellers coming to India. Met a lovely couple (living in Sweden) and teamed up to tour the local forts and a few other sites around the place. The hotel had arranged 2 tuk tuks and drivers for our exclusive use for the whole day for the princely sum of 800 rupees ($14.28). This turned into another one of those silly number of photos days as there was no way to take it all in.

We started at the monkey temple (Galwar Bagh) which was “surprisingly” a temple on a hill with lots of monkeys. The temple was unimpressive but there were many monkeys and a pretty good view over Jaipur. The next stop was a photo opportunity at the floating or water palace (Jal Mahal). You cannot get out to the island but it is pretty spectacular either way and is a 5 min stop on the way to or from the three forts of Jaipur which are relatively close to each other and set along the ridge of the mountain. In addition to this is the 27 kilometre defensive wall that was constructed. The Indians love to tell gullible tourists that it is the Great Wall of China and by all accounts the French and yanks are the ones that tend to buy into this.

The fort run is huge and exhausting to do all in one day and by the end you are suffering from attraction overload so the third of the forts gets a fairly cursory glance. The first thing you hit is the lake at the bottom of the ridge where you look up to the amber fort and palace then across the ridge to the Jaigarh Fort and along the zig zag of walls. This place is truly impressive. The first introduction to this was the snake charmer with his cobra in a basket which evolved into the elephant ride option to climb the hill to the amber fort and palace.

Once at the Amber fort and palace you find yourself in a building that is more of a maze than a palace. You get awesome views all around and keep popping into random rooms and terraces in this maze of a building. There is no natural flow and everything is sectioned off and the biggest challenge is finding the exit when you are finished. When you get to the side of the fort there is a tunnel offering protected passage between the amber for and the Jaigarh fort which goes for about a kilometre up the hill. Upon exiting the tunnel you have about another kilometre hike up the hill to the entrance to the next fort.

The Nahargarh fort is the last of the three and is on the opposite side of the same ridge from the others and is the fort that can be seen from down town Jaipur.

Finally… The India I was hoping for and expecting. Agra shook off the New Delhi blues but Jaipur has made them a distant memory. Had a fantastic 5.5 hr train ride from Agra to Jaipur got to relax and enjoy some really beautiful countryside in a comfortable and hassle free ride. Got off the train and was dreading the usual assault by hawkers, taxi and tuk tuk drivers…and it never came. Got offered a lift to the hotel…asked how much… Got quoted an obvious 100% markup…rejected it and offered the right amount…he added 20…I said the right amount…he agreed.

Got in tuk tuk and he took me directly where I wanted with no round trips and no offers of friends shops or tourist bureaus. Settled in and went for our usual orientation walk. Ran into about 50 tuk tuks offering to take us somewhere. Unlike Delhi and Agra a smile and a wave of the hand was sufficient enough to indicate a lack of interest. We did not get followed down the road for 1-200 meters being asked the usual barrage of questions and statements like…where are you going, where you from, you want bazaar, shopping this way, nothing to see this way, 20 rupees one hour.

Came across a phone store and entered to try and fix the SIM card debacle that was New Delhi. The guy at the shop was awesome and spent 30 mins fixing the problems created by the guy in Delhi. I tried to offer him money for his great service and his response was ” I want one thing…I want a good blessing”. I wished him many blessings and departed fully cashed up and fully connected to the Indian telecommunications network.

Stopped at a rooftop bar for a couple of kingfishers (did watch the rats scurrying along the beams for a while) then back to the hotel for possibly the best meal that I have ever had in my life. Believe it or not, it was 100% vegetarian. For the foodies amongst you it was…mushroom palak (mushrooms in a spinach sauce), aloo mattar paneer (potato, peas and cottage cheese in a vegetable gravy, Dahl makhani (black lentils and kidney beans cooked with cream and butter) and my body weight in a range of Indian breads including naans, roti, chapati and paratha. The mushroom palak was the pick of the bunch but you could not find fault with a single element of this meal and we were in hog heaven.

After a couple of days of doing nothing due to the inevitable gastro hit (Jill) we got back into the swing of things. Hit the City Palace and the Hawa Mahal. The city palace is the home of the maharajah of Rajasthan and is actually in use most of the time (including while we were there). In addition it is regularly used as a set for Bollywood films (including while we were there) so it looked more like a construction site than a palace. There was a weapons museum included as part of the admission that was quite frankly incredible. The range of old weapons and firearms would go close to being unrivalled. Alas there was no photography allowed but Mike H would have been in hog heaven in the museum.