December, 2009

After a night spent defending ourselves against pissed off mosquitoes we grabbed some breakfast in advance of our journey to Chennai. While I drank my tea and browsed the newspaper I watched three men collecting coconuts across the road – one at the top of the tree throwing them down, and two at the bottom [...]

After a decent sleep in and a lazy coffee we walked down the road to the Five Rathas – one of two World Heritage sites in Mamallapuram. The Five Rathas are a set of carved stone monoliths just to the south of the city. There’s a temple, an elephant, and all the other sorts of [...]

Spykey woke up still feeling a bit tired but much improved on yesterday. While she was packing her bag I ducked out for a sly masala chai on the side of the road. Standing in the morning sun amongst a group of men – office workers, rickshaw drivers, street vendors – holding my scalding hot [...]

Poor Spykey was up frequently during the night with the effects of gastro so she was exhausted all of today, despite the gastro easing off significantly before midday. I ducked out early to get some baguettes for her delicate stomach, grabbing a lovely onion dosa and a sweet, scalded-milk street coffee for myself on the [...]

From India – Pondicherry

Merry Christmas, everyone! Our Indian Christmas conformed perfectly to the stereotype, with Spykey spending the day between bed and toilet suffering from gastro. The scorecard now reads: GASTRO SCORECARD Scott: 1 Spykey: 2 Spykey has two points because her gastro had the works, while mine only had the spews. Because I was looking after Lisa [...]

Woke up after a terrible gastro sleep feeling extremely tender and light-headed. We left the hotel at about 10:00am and procured breakfast of dry baguette (me) and street food (Spykey). I spent the day munching on nothing more than baguette. Next we went to the train station to find out about services to Chennai, discovering [...]

Awake at 5:45am for our 6:30am train to Pondicherry. A pre-dawn walk through the streets of Trichy with our backpacks allowed us to watch the city come slowly to life. Street vendors were opening for business, sweeping the ground immediately in front of their shops to produce small squares of clean in a sea of [...]

Slept like a bearded baby all night, woken briefly only by a massive fight between a pack of dogs somewhere nearby, and the Muslim call to prayer just before dawn. At 6:45am the room’s doorbell rung and we were both shocked by the sudden realisation that we even had a doorbell. Outside, one of the [...]

After a hell overnight flight from Australia to Malaysia (Air Asia will apparently be upgrading every seat in its fleet during 2010 due to overwhelming customer feedback — no shit) we arrived into Kuala Lumpur Airport at 4.30am, severely sleep deprived and a bit grumpy. A coffee and some noodles later we boarded another Air [...]