Saturday 15 February

Delhi

Our last full day in Delhi – I’m feeling much better this morning, although Matthew is still coughing quite a bit and looking a bit drawn. We stocked up on cold and flu medication first thing and then strolled over to Lodhi Garden – it’s only a few hundred metres from our hotel and just beyond Kahn Market, so a shame to not see it. Lodhi Gardens contains fifteenth century tombs and remains of other structures that combine Hindu and Islamic architectural styles in a parkland setting. 

We both needed a trim and my beard was getting quite shaggy and grey … so we stopped off at a barber’s – was funny being sat next to each other. My barber asked if I would like a face massage, too – being British, of course I said no … but being Indian, he did it anyway!

Then we took the metro to see the Red Fort (Lal Qila) a Mughal fort constructed from 1639 – it was plundered in 1739 and then most of the marble structures were demolished by the British after the 1857 Indian rebellion. The Lahore gate of the fort was where the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, raised the flag of India on 15 August 1947 – India’s Independence Day. This ceremony that’s repeated every year by the prime minister on that day. 

Matthew was due back at the tailor’s for his jacket fitting.

I didn’t need to at the tailor for that, so I decided to stay on the metro to Kalkaji Madir to have a look at the Bahá’í Lotus House of Worship – a very notable. modern design built in 1986 that won lots of architectural awards. The Bahá’í faith is open to everyone, teaches unity of all people  and is based on the idea that all faith is a different interpretation of one god. The Lotus Temple is 72 metres / 240 ft wide and just over 34 metres / 115 ft high and is made of 27 free-standing marble-clad “petals” arranged in clusters of three to form nine sides, with nine doors opening onto a central hall that has a capacity of 2,500 people. The whole thing is reminiscent of the Sydney opera house with its white curving roof. I was glad that I was able to see it – and it was possible to go inside, too. 

I went back to the hotel and Matthew said Vaishakh had called to see how we were on our last day – what a sweetheart. 

We had a free evening meal with our Ambassador hotel booking and we considered taking advantage of that … but it was our last night in Delhi and Delhi has lots of vegan restaurants and cafes, so we didn’t want to miss out on that – so we headed to a nice/looking one called Greenr in Greater Kailash – full of young people and lovely food! 

Then back to hotel – that’s it – our trip to India is almost ended. We’re up at 07.00 (01.30 uk time) to head to the airport for our 10:50 flight home tomorrow morning (Sunday). The flight lasts 10 hours, but because of the time change we should be back in Bristol early Sunday evening.

Friday 14 February

Delhi

My cold is hanging around and very annoying, so I’m still not feeling well. The coughing has subsided somewhat, thankfully. When I woke, Matthew gave me a hand-drawn Valentine’s Day card – he’s been carrying it with him since we left home. What a sweetheart. 

Breakfast at the Ambassador ‘Yellow Brick Road’ restaurant is a little disappointing compared to some of the other hotels we’ve stayed at – but they had muesli and fruit. Coffee was good. They had lots of red balloons up for Valentine’s Day.

Matthew booked us to visit the gardens of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (president’s residence, formerly the viceroy’s house) which was designed by Edward Lutyens. The Rashtrapati Bhavan has 355 rooms and was largely completed by 1931. Getting in turned into a bit of a saga – we were misdirected three times and then had to get a tuk tuk to the rear entrance for the right way in.

The gardens were beautiful and there were lots of school children visiting – they made for a really nice atmosphere, but meant that it was very crowded.

Afterwards we took another tuk tuk to India Gate – a massive war memorial to the over 74,000 soldiers of the Indian army who died between 1914 and 1921 fighting with the British. Also designed by Lutyens, the foundation stone of what was then called the All India War Memorial, was laid on 10 February 1921 (Lutyens designed the cenotaph in Whitehall, London, too). 

Nearby there’s a statue of Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in a tall columned cupola – the cupola was was originally built in 1936 and a statue of British king George V was installed.

The statue was vandalised in 1943 by Indian independence activists then removed in 1968 (to Coronation Park in Delhi where apparently loads of British Raj-era statues have been taken) leaving the cupola empty for many years.

There were continued debates about what the do about the empty space – a statue of Ghandi was suggested, but the current Indian prime minister installed the statue of Subhas Chandra Bose,  in 2022 – a somewhat controversial decision since although he fought for independence he collaborated with Nazis and fascist Japan in the 1940s.

We wandered along the Kartavya Path past enormous canals and fountains towards the new very heavily fortified new India parliament building, opened in 2023.

We past the massive blocks still under construction of three ‘common central secretariat’ buildings where all ministerial departments will be housed and took a metro train to Rajiv Chowk to have lunch in Third Wave, Connaught Circle – a really nice trendy place with some nice vegan options – especially the lovely bananas and chocolate loaf – yum!

I needed a rest after that – so back to our hotel and another trip to Khan Market for light dinner at Bloom Cafe. We found a nice grocery store at Khan Market – with vegan chocolate and biscuits … then an iced cream store with vegan sorbet (dark chocolate for Matthew , blueberry for me) – all a nice Valentine’s Day treat!

Thursday 13 February

Shimla – Delhi

We’re both still feeling a bit rough with our coughs and colds, but we needed to be up early, packed and eaten breakfast in time for our driver to take us to Chandargar at 8:30 from where we took a fast train to New Delhi. 

The drive down to Chandigarh was even more spectacular than the train ride up to Shimla – fantastic views of mountains, hills, valleys and passing through small towns and villages.

We arrived in Chandigarh with plenty of time to board the train. We’d been slightly worried that the driver’s fee plus tolls and taxes might use up all our rupees cash reserves, but he charged less than we expected: ₹5500 – so we were fine. 

Delhi has an estimated population of over 28 million – that’s mind-boggling- almost half the entire UK population in one place! The main New Delhi railway station seemed like most of the population in the city were there!

We found our way to the metro and bought a three ticket to allow us to explore the city. The metro is really good and we were at our hotel, the Ambassador, near Khan Square by late afternoon.

The Ambassador hotel was apparently where military officers lodged during British rule; it’s a lovely art deco building with curved balconies, white walls and big windows.

Beside the hotel there’s a lovely garden centre – the first we’ve been able to see in India. Matthew thought that it was a bit old fashioned, but I thought that it was charming.

Matthew had made an appointment with a tailor in Khan Market called Grover’s, with a view to having a jacket and/or a shirt made. He was starting to worry that it might cost a lot, but I thought it’s bound to be less than in the UK and how often do we have anything made to measure? (Never, ever obviously!). 

So Matthew was measured for a linen blazer – was fun choosing fabric and lining … he made up his mind quite quickly, it would have taken me ages. 

There was a plantbased restaurant in the market too – Green Mantis – another win! 

We were pretty tired – I think we’re both a bit run down – we were tucked up in bed by 9.

Wednesday 12 February

Shimla

A quiet, restful day in Shimla. A few days ago I had an irritating cough that has now become a proper cold and I fear that I’ve passed it on to Matthew, who I’m pretty sure had a slight fever. Ugh!

We had a nice breakfast in the hotel and chatted with the Australian couple who were beside us in the train yesterday.

We wondered about taking a walk to Chadwick Falls – about 5km / 3 miles away, but reception staff advised against that as there’s very little water falling at this time and year. 

Instead of Chadwick Falls we went for a stroll into town. Shimla has many buildings in the Victorian gothic, Scottish baronial and Edwardian ‘Jacobethan’ or ‘Tudorbethan’ style … some have new bright red or green metal roofs. The buildings are stacked against the steep hillside.

Some of the signage on the shops is from the 1950s … or even earlier. The main street in Shimla, The Mall is traffic-free – so it’s a nice place to people watch and enjoy the sunshine. Just above the Mall is a plateaux called the Ridge – a high point in Shimla with with wonderful views in all directions. 

Lots of British built buildings in Shimla have been repurposed – the viceregal lodge (Rashtrapato Niwas – or presidential residence) was built in 1888. The Simla conference of 1945 to finalise the plan for Indian self-governance took place here. The decision to carve out Pakistan and East Pakistan from India was also taken here in 1947. The building now belongs to the Ministry of Education.

Near our hotel ‘The Retreat’ is the official summer residence of the president of India. 

The Ridge had a statue of Ghandi ‘the father of the nation’ and a plaque explaining that in Gandhi visited Shimla several times between 1921 and 1946 and that in 1931, Mahatma Gandhi addressed a huge rally on the Ridge. Christ church is also on the ridge – a very recognisable Anglican church with a square tower – although it’s painted yellow and gold.

It was amusing to notice so many locals wrapped up warm in puffa jackets and woolly hats – whereas we found it comfortably warm!

We headed back to our hotel for the afternoon – we’ve a lovely balcony view and it was good to recharge a bit before we make our way to Delhi tomorrow.

Tuesday 11 February

Chandigarh – Shimla

Breakfast in the Hyatt Centric in Chandigarh is lovely – and they definitely, and by a long way, have the best coffee we’ve drunk so far in India!

Our taxi to the station in Chandigarh arrived at 0930 to take us to get our train to Kalka where we changed to the narrow-gauge Kalka – Shimla train. 

The Kalka – Shimla railway opened in 1903 and the route goes up into the Himalayan foothills with many twists and turns for 100km / 60 miles. There are 103 tunnels and 864 bridges. The track climb from 656 meters / 2,152 ft to a peak elevation of 2,076 meters / 6,811 ft at Shimla.

Shimla is the state capital and the largest city of the state of Himachal Pradesh – it’s also the furthest north in India that we’ll get. In 1864, Shimla was made the British summer capital in India because of its cool temperatures in the high forested hills. After independence, Shimla became the state capital of East Punjab. During the British Raj Shimla was famous for summer parties, balls and sports. There are still lots of recognisably British buildings in the city.

The ride on the train was brilliant – beautiful views; but something that makes me very sad about India was also really evident today – there’s rubbish strewn everywhere and here we were in a beautiful precious landscape and everywhere we looked there were discarded cartons, cans, plastic bags, foil trays … it’s horrendous. Most of the cities we’ve been to have been the same (with a couple of good exceptions). People were chucking stuff out of the train windows and it’s maddening. 

There were a couple from near Perth, Australia behind us and Matthew overhead that they were staying in the same hotel as us. When we arrived in Shimla the Australian couple took a cab to the hotel, we walked and arrived before them – we all laughed about that.

The Oberoi is quite high end – a beautiful hotel in an old building.

we didn’t check-in at reception as would normally be expected, instead we were offered drinks and escorted to our room (actually three rooms – bed-sitting room, bathroom and walk-in wardrobe). Our bags were carried in and after a short questionnaire on an iPad we were handed the keycards. While this was going on, a monkey climbed down onto our balcony and stared through the window!

I’ve been feeling a bit unwell for a few days, with a developing cough (that at first I put down to pollution) and now o think that I have a cold. I needed to rest while Matthew went swimming and had dinner on his own.

Hopefully I’ll be much better tomorrow.

Monday 10 February

Chandigarh

We arrived early this morning in Chandigarh. It’s beautiful – a lovely city … green, clean, peaceful, with lots of open space, even cycle lanes! Demographically, Chandigarh feels different too – there seem to be more Sikhs here than other places that we’ve visited (although they make up only about 12% of the population).

We’d booked into our hotel last night, so that we could use our room as soon as we arrived this morning. We cleaned up and had breakfast then went off to explore the Rock Garden and some parks and the rose garden. We were intending to visit the Le Corbusier’s state parliament building, courthouse and ‘open hand’ monument, but that was only possible on a guided tour-fortunately, there was a guided tour available at 3 o’clock this afternoon that we could book onto.

Chandigarh has a really interesting history – the state capital of Punjab was historically Lahore, but following the partition of India in 1947 the western, mostly Muslim, part of Punjab was became part of Pakistan while they mostly seek and Hindu east remained in India. Lahore was in the west and so the India Punjab had no state capital. Another city could have been made into the state capital, but the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, wanted a new modernist planned city to be built. 

Last year we went to see an exhibition at the V&A called ’Tropical Modernism’, it was fascinating and explored the work of the British modernist architects who found it difficult to gain commissions in the more architecturally conservative UK during the 1930s, 40s and 50s, but who were able to adapt European modernist architecture to suit tropical climates, particularly in India and many colonial African countries – big overhangs and deep window recesses to provide shade and lots of ventilation for cooling. The master plan for Chandigarh and some of the important buildings in the city was developed by the Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier, but the British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were involved too.

The Rock Garden, is one of the most famous sites in India. The garden was started by the clearly rather eccentric Nek Chand Saini. Visiting it was one of the main reasons that Matthew wanted to come here. Nek Chand was a city engineer who collected materials from demolition sites around the city that he could recycle into a huge enchanted garden in a designated wooded valley that was a conservation zone close to the city centre. The garden is made up of interlocking courtyards and passages richly decorated with stones, concrete designs and stones. The garden was built covertly, unknown to the authorities and completely illegal. When the rich garden was discovered the some in the city wanted to demolish it, but after it became evident that there was huge public support Nek was employed by the city to further develop the garden with 50 staff! Nek Chand Saini died in 2015, but the garden continues to develop and is hugely pop. Matthew will no doubt want to write far more knowledgeably about the garden than I can.

When we’d done and found that we couldn’t just go to the Le Corbusier state buildings we walked back to our hotel through a series of beautiful interlocking parks  – beginning with the Chandigarh War Memorial – shocking and tragic how many have died since independence.

Then through Bougainvillier Park (we saw some women rehearse a dance – looked like lots of fun); Leisure Valley ( with a curious miniature leaning Eiffel Tower and some improvised cricket games); then the rose garden (the biggest in Asia). 

W didn’t have much time back at the hotel before we had to set off for the tour if the state buildings. That was brilliant – a really good guide and we were joined by a group of architecture students. 

We didn’t expect to see inside the state parliament – but in we went (no photography allowed there, unfortunately).

We rested up then went to see some performing fountains around the corner that played from 18:30. 

Dinner at AJA Chandigarh,

Then back to bed to ready ourselves for the Himalaya Queen (train) to Shimla tomorrow.

Sunday 09 February

Varanasi 

Our train from Agra to Varanasi Junction arrived two hours late at 0800 this morning, so we had less time in Varanasi than we planned. Our overnight train to Chandigarh is leaving at 14:47, so we only had a few hours. The station at Varanasi was really crowded – even though we thought that lots of the people on our train had got off a couple of stops earlier at Prayagraj – where the Kumbh Mela Hindu pilgrimage is taking place.

We left our bags at the cloakroom, admired the lovely station facade and headed into the city.

Varanasi (known as the‘city of light’ is situated on the West Bank of the sacred river Ganges, it’s one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. I was hoping to see the Kashi Vishwanath Temple and then to see the river. We asked a tuk tuk driver to take is to the temple but he explained that an area in the centre of the city was a pedestrian only and he could only get us about 1km from the temple. That seemed ok.

We were dropped off and walked through barriers towards the temple and the river – there were thousands of people doing the same, many dressed in orange or red – really looking happy and cheerful. The closer were to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple  the denser the crowds became until we were on the middle of a total scrum with police blowing whistles and trying to direct the crowd. The queues to go to the temple were enormous – so we abandoned that and made our way to the river. Even that was a challenge – we were jammed up so tight with others that it felt dangerous … a fall would have been fatal. We held on to each other tightly.

We came to the river at Prayag Ghat (steps leading down the steep river bank to the water—where pilgrims perform rituals). The scene was extraordinary – hundreds of boats, thousands of people, some bathing in the water, beautiful flowers and flames floating on the river. We walked along the river for a while, and there was a lovely atmosphere. 

We walked past some Hindu holy men and tried to take everything in.

According to Hindu belief, dying in Varanasi is auspicious and grants instant salvation and thousands are cremated on the banks of the river. I didn’t want to go to the cremation ghats – it felt prurient and disrespectful, so we turned back inland down some lovely narrow lanes filled with little stores selling garlands, flowers, beads, bangles and shawls.

We needed to get some supplies for the train so went in search of a supermarket then took another Tuk Tuk back to the railway station for our next train to Chandigarh.

Saturday 08 February

Agra

This morning was a big highlight – we were up at 0500 and out of our hotel by 0530 to walk to the Taj Mahal. The morning was dark still – the road to the east gate entrance of the Taj Mahal is wide and slopes gently down with perforated light columns every few metres. There were cows and dogs  wandering around (monkeys weren’t awake yet) and there were even some early morning runners. On one side of the road was the Taj protected forest by the river Yamuna and the stroll was a lovely, peaceful start to the day.

There was a small queue forming already to get in to the Taj Mahal  – so we were glad that we’d made the effort to arrive before the crowds. The number of people really swelled quickly. The security was super-serious, scanners (us and bags) and body searches and bag searches – all a bit chaotic, but we were in by 0700, just before sunrise. 

I don’t think I could ever do justice to the feeling of being in the Taj Mahal. It’s one of the seven wonders of the modern world (along with Colosseum in Rome, Petra in Jordan, Chichén Itzá in Mexico, Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Machu Picchu in Peru and The Great Wall of China). It’s breathtaking and being there felt very special and emotional. The changing light as the sun rose really changed how Taj Mahal looked and the atmosphere.

Commissioned in 1631 by the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, as a mausoleum for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal who died aged 38 while giving birth to their fourteenth child. Construction in phases took 22 years. 

Inside (no photographs allowed) are the likenesses of the tombs of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan with the actual burials in the basement.

The gardens are divided into four quadrants that were further subdivided into four and originally filled with flowers and fruit trees, in Muslim belief, heavenly paradise is a garden, but by the time that the British Raj began in 1858 the gardens had become overgrown and the were remodelled in the style of a 19th century London park, which is how they still appear today.

After our visit we walked quietly back to our hotel for breakfast and arranged a late checkout. I’d thought that we might go to the Agra (Red) Fort this afternoon (completed in 1573 and the main residence of the Mughal rulers until 1638, when they moved to Delhi. It’s vast – really a walled city). But after the Taj Mahal, I didn’t really want to see any more  sights – and I knew that the Agra Fort would be incredible. I just didn’t think I could – and wasn’t sure that I wanted – to take anything more in. Furthermore, we’d gone past the fort last night on our way to and from  Chand Baori and the Taj Mahal viewpoint and also we were going to be taking a train from Agra Fort station at 18:20, so I had seen the outside already and I imagined that there’d be some time to look at the outside of the Agra Fort later.

We rested up and headed out for some late lunch at the vegan restaurant that we visited last night. We used the very new and clean and largely empty Agra Metro – that was good fun.

We went back to our hotel to collect our bags and then back to the metro that would take us to Agra Fort station (and our last glimpse of the Taj Mahal) for our night train.

We didn’t really see much more of the Agra Fort, which was a shame – but sometimes something has to give and I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t get to see more.

At Agra station a couple of young men from the Netherlands asked us about the trains – lots of good chat followed about the vagaries of the trains and the website dnd the platform signs and the carriage signs and the platform alterations. While we taking we watched a monkey on the platform run up behind a man carrying a bag of biscuits and snatch it out of his hand then run away. The man was too sensible to give chase and the cheeky (or just very hungry) monkey sat on the ground, opened the bag and ate the lot!

The young men were interesting and interested – they were in India for two weeks and were also hoping to get to Mexico, New York and Quebec. One wanted to study medicine, the other was less certain – but perhaps criminology! I think that the young people we’ve met who are travelling around without much by way of money, in what to them must be very strange and difficult to navigate countries are an inspiration  – I rather wish that I’d had their wherewithal when I was their age.

We were all going to be boarding the same train  – they were going to Vatanesi, too – but we were changing to our sleeper train after two stops at Tundla Junction. We got off on a station that was absolutely heaving. I’d no idea how we’d all fit on our train – which was an hour late. Matthew was anxious that we might not be able to get on – the platform signs weren’t showing where each carriage would stop and if we were in the wrong place on the platform, what with the length of the train and the huge crowds, we’d be unlikely to get from one end of the train to the other before it left if the need arose. To add to the chaos there was a last-minute change of platform!

Thankfully a porter came to our rescue and led us to where our carriage was likely to be. Once the train arrived, Matthew made a dash for our allocated carriage door and boarded the train – I was stuck behind a barrow piled high with luggage and surrounded by dozens of people who were also trying to get on. A couple of train attendants were simultaneously pushing people away from the door to prevent them getting into a carriage and grabbed me and pulled me on! This was extraordinary – there’s no way I’d have made it on to the train otherwise. It doesn’t bear thinking about – Matthew on his way to Varanasi and me 600km / 400 miles away in Tundla Junction!

Friday 07 February

Agra

Today is Peter Major’s birthday – happy birthday Pete! Pete is looking after our dogs while we’re here – thanks Pete – we know they’re in good hands! And a big lick from Zoly as thanks, plus her bum in your face while you’re in bed from Jojo as thanks, too!

Our driver collected us at 0900 this morning in Jaipur to drive to Agra. There are trains between Jaipur and Agra, but Matthew really wanted to see the amazing 8th-9th century Chand Baori stepwell in the village of Abhaneri – it’s 30m /100ft deep with 13 stories and 3500 steps – it’s one of the largest stepwells in India. 

We didn’t stay long at Chand Baori because we didn’t want to be too late arriving in Agra – when we were in Mumbai Amruta recommended we visit the tomb of Itmad-ud-Daula, a Mughal mausoleum built in 1622, which is sometimes called the “Baby Taj”, as it is regarded as a precursor of the Taj Mahal. As soon as we checked in to our hotel at 1500 we booked a taxi to take us to the mausoleum. 

We drove through Agra past the fort and could just glimpse the top of the Taj Mahal dome – exciting. Our taxi driver was singing along to Indian songs on the radio – it was sweet. The white marble mausoleum is set in beautiful gardens on the left bank of the River Yamuna; it was truly lovely – it was the first Mughal building to be finished in white marble (hence its influence on the Taj Mahal) – a real tranquil haven from the noisy streets outside. Once again, it was a shame that the fountains and rills were empty.

I realised that we were on the opposite side of the river to the Taj Mahal and the viewing area from the opposite bank wasn’t far  away – so we decided to go there. What a sight … it hardly seemed real, a pinch ourselves moment to see the Taj Mahal – it’s so iconic and something I never imagined I’d see for myself until a year ago.

After sundown we wandered back to the main road to get a tuk tuk to a vegan restaurant that Matthew had found. We passed Agra fort again and the city looked lovely lit up.

At the restaurant Matthew asked if they accepted cards – they didn’t and because our driver today didn’t accept bank transfers or card payments we were virtually out of rupees. I asked if there was an ATM nearby … there were, but neither worked with my card. There was a Bank of India ATM showing as 9 minutes walk away, so I figured that’d probably work. It wasn’t where Google maps said it was – so I ended up walking further then when I found it, it was out of cash. Infuriating!

There were some other ATMs nearby, but they wouldn’t work either. Getting back to the restaurant was challenging – I was in narrow backstreets that didn’t appear on my map. Eventually I got back to the restaurant – Matthew had been given ₹500 by a young British couple so he could pay our bill. Hopefully we’ll see them tomorrow to pay them back.

After dinner we went to another ATM that worked – so all’s well. 

Taj Mahal at dawn tomorrow morning – so early night tonight.

Wednesday 05 February

Jaipur

Today is my sister’s birthday – happy birthday Lisa! 

We were up early and packed as we’re going to Jaipur today. It’s another longish train journey (six hours). There weren’t any tuk tuks outside the hotel, so we had a nice short walk through the quiet old town until we found one. Some of the shops were just opening and some people were sweeping the street in front of their shop. Lots of dogs were wandering about, probably enjoying this part of the day with no traffic on the streets.

At Uidapur station we couldn’t find our carriage and walked the length of the giant platform before someone told us that our train to Jaipur was on a different platform! Once on board our train was lovely – modern and comfortable with at table service in first class!

We arrived in Jaipur at 1400 – rather fatigued and as seems to be the norm we (mostly Matthew, it has to be said) were accosted by tuk tuk and taxi drivers. There’s a metro in Jaipur – there’s a stop by the railway station and our hotel is very near a metro station, too – so Matthew tried to make it clear that we didn’t need a tuk tuk. One particular driver wasn’t having it and promised to match the metro fare (very unlikely) and wouldn’t leave Matthew alone. Matthew was getting exasperated and used his assertive, firm-but-fair voice – but that made things worse … he was accused of not being polite and was lectured on the importance of civility in India. The only way we could escape was to retreat back into the station. Poor Matthew  – he’s the kindest, sweetest man – is never rude, so for him to be told that was horrible.

We found another route to the metro station by walking down the (very long) platform and made our way to our hotel – not really a hotel as such, a small palatial house – a bit like an Airbnb (without the breakfast!). It’s extraordinary – right by the (absolutely enormous) bazaar and very extravagantly decorated.

On one we’d settled in we went to explore around – our guidebook has a suggested walk around Jaipur, we are staying on the route so we thought we should do it. The guidebook shows the the lovely pink buildings that Jaipur is famed for and wide streets. The guidebook doesn’t show the crazy traffic or give any sense of incessant deafening noise of vehicle horns. It’s quite overwhelming – add in the hundreds of little shops spilling out into the street, thousands of people, almost every other shopkeeper inviting us to look at their wares, stray dogs and street monkey – it was all becoming too much. 

We really needed some peace and quiet. We were by the Hawa Mahal palace and decided to go in. The palace – built in 1799 on the orders of Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh- is famous for the five-floor (it’s very high!) rear elevation has 953 small windows and latticework openings (called Jharokhas) there to enable the women to look out without being seen and to keep the space cool.

It was lovely inside – much, much quieter than the street, with a big fountain in a square and lots of places to sit and relax – just what we needed. A couple of people asked us to be on their photographs! There was an arts festival taking place with musicians and puppeteers giving performances. All lovely.

From the top we could see the Amber Fort and the Jantar Mantar observatory – one of the oldest astronomical observatories built in 1734, it includes the world’s largest stone sundial – accurate to within 2 seconds – that’s absolutely incredible! I’m hoping to visit the observatory tomorrow.

We stayed in the Hawa Mahal palace to watch the sunset over the city and then headed back into the crazy streets outside.

A man in the street admired Matthew’s moustache (he gets this a lot!); he was an artist and with his younger friend were visiting temples to make copies of the wall art there – that they then sold. They accompanied us to a small Hindu temple on Gangori Bazaar Road, near the Choti Chaupar metro station – I can’t find its name on the map – it had two beautiful carved elephants up some steps at the entrance. We had a look around and they showed us some of their work – it was beautiful, but we weren’t in the market for religious paintings at that (or indeed any) moment. I’ve been quite disturbed by the contrast between the apparent spiritualism, and righteousness and animal-friendly tenets of Hindu faiths and the viciousness of Hindu nationalist politics in India.

So back to our own ‘palace’ and on our way we were accosted by a man who’d given us directions earlier – he has a jewellery workshop and store that he wanted us to see – we accompanied him, admired the fine  workmanship, but gently insisted that we didn’t want to buy anything ‘for our wives’!

Tuesday 04 February

Uidapur

We’re staying in a Heritage Hotel in Uidapur – it’s the Amet Haveli, stunning rooms with views over glorious Lake Pichola (although we had a cheaper one with an internal courtyard view).

Our hotel in Uidapur is beautiful – a converted palace by the lake. The doors are a quite small with a lovely decorative door arch – poor Matthew cut his head on our first morning – there was blood everywhere!

At breakfast there was no dairy-free milk, but they asked us to wait for 10 minutes while they sent someone to fetch some. That’s my kind of place!

After breakfast we explored around the hotel and then walked through the old city to the Uidapur City Palace. Begun in 1559 and built over the next 400 years, the City Palace is enormous – and half of it is closed to visitors! Many parts of India were princely states in the British empire – but after independence in 1947 they merged with the newly independent state. 

From the City Palace we took  boat trip to Jagmandir Island Palace. Being in the boat was sublime – cool by the water and quiet. The gardens were lovely, although it was a shame that the fountains weren’t running.

After we led the City Palace we were heading to lunch at a place on Matthew’s spreadsheet – but we’d not walked very far when we saw a sign for a restaurant that offered vegan options! We thought we should give it a try and we weren’t disappointed: it was called Millets – thalli for Mike and lemon millet for Matthew. 

We walked back to our hotel for a snooze then went up to the roof for a nice view of the sunset over Pichola Lake.

In the evening we wandered around the old town – winding streets full of brightly lit shops, cafes, restaurants, temples stray dogs, cows and people. There was a cafe listed in Happy Cow (our vegan app) that we wanted to try. After a little bit of doubling back on ourselves, we eventually found it in the roof of an apartment building. It was lovely – with fantastic views. 

Uidapur was worth the long journey to get here.

Monday 03 February

Mumbai – Jaipur

Today was the day of almost continuous long train journeys – I reckon that we travelled around 1,000 miles in 26 hours, so not a lot else to report.

We left Mumbai at 23:10 on the overnight sleeper to Jaipur. Our first journey was around 1200km / 750 miles. Taking 18 hours. We had a double cabin and were served breakfast, a mid morning snack and lunch on the train. All welcome (we’d brought supplies, too, so we weren’t going to be hungry!). 

At Jaipur we had about half an hour to change for the 14:10 Uidapur train – a further 400 km / 250 miles. Taking 8 hours. No cabin this time – just comfortable reclining seats. Lots of food sellers walking briskly through the train – selling coffee, chai, ice cream, chocolate and sandwiches. 

The trains were comfortable and we caught up with the Archers, listened to some music and podcasts, read, I watched some Severance while Matthew watched a documentary about Dolly Parton (!). We both watched a drama based on life of Hattie Jacques – a British comedian in the 1960s and 1970s. 

We passed through beautiful landscapes and saw our first camels out of the window.

Sunday 02 February

Mumbai

Our second day in Mumbai – and the city has really delivered! We both went out running at 07:30 – after 2.5 miles, Matthew headed back into the hotel, I wanted to push up my miles from my last run if I could, so I aimed for 8 miles … and pleased that I managed 9, although my foot was really sore towards the end. While I was running I noticed a man with Quayside written on his shirt – I caught him up and asked him which quayside his shirt referred to – he said “There is only one!” Ha, ha – he was from Newcastle – my home town! He lives in Gosforth, went to Leeds University, his son lives in Tynemouth. Small world. I asked him what he was doing running about in Mumbai … he was with the English cricket squad – for the fifth and final Twenty20 international match England v India this evening. Also, the whole squad is staying in the same hotel as we are! Extraordinary!

When I got back to hotel I joined Matthew for breakfast and told him about my meeting. A few minutes later he said “There are tickets available. Shall we go?” Of course!! (Apologies, Vaishakh – not a test match, but that wasn’t available today!).

At 12:00 we met with Amrutha at Mumbai railway station. Amrutha is a friend of Bharath and Shubhi and is a museologist and academic curator particularly interested in documents. She also loves cats.

Amrutha has a deep knowledge and wonderful way of explaining the development and architecture in Mumbai. We walked around the old fort area and drank a lot of juice to keep cool! We spent quite a while in a lovely bookshop, too and the David Sassoon library.

We have some very long train journeys ahead, so we went to a little supermarket (part of Tesco!) and a whole food store for provisions.

When we arrived back in the hotel, we were a little surprised to see a cordon running from the entrance to the lifts – lots of people waiting with their phone cameras primed and security staff keeping everyone back. The England cricket team were about to walk out to the bus that was waiting outside to take them to tonight’s game. That was fun – a really nice atmosphere and a fairly pessimistic view among the assembled crowd of England’s prospects this evening.

Our match tickets had been couriered to the hotel – Matthew was sent backwards and forwards between different places to get them and rather typically they turned out to have been at the first place he’d gone to all along!

We walked to the Wankhede Stadium – the crowds were getting bigger and bigger and excitement was building. We could see the enormous floodlights lighting up the sky. We had some trouble getting in – some of the people in the hotel lobby who were going to the game told us that we wouldn’t be allowed in with any bags. So I left my bag at the hotel, taking only my wallet, small binoculars, my phone and the powerbank charger. I hadn’t spotted that Matthew had a small bag with him with his wallet, our passports, a small tube of sunscreen and a packet of wet-wipes (he rarely goes anywhere without them!). At the gates there were security searchers and I wasn’t allowed my binoculars or phone charger. The sunscreen and Matthew’s bag were also forbidden. Sigh. Arguing that I’d had my binoculars in UK cricket matches wasn’t impressing anyone. My ankle was pretty sore by now after a long day on my feet, so Matthew decided to run back and leave the banned items at our hotel then come back while I went in. Our hotel wasn’t too far, so he was back before the start of play.

The atmosphere in the stadium was brilliant – exciting. India have already won the five match series 3-1 … it would be nice if England could avoid a 4-1 defeat. There was some amazing cricket on display … unfortunately not much of that from the England side! England won the toss and chose to bowl first, India’s young batting superstar Abhishek Sharma played brilliantly, scoring 135 off 54 balls that included 13 sixes – the most by an India batter in T20s (no one else came anywhere close to Sharma’s score). It was both beautiful and painful to watch as an Englishman – and there was some fun, friendly banter from the Indian supporters around us as we celebrated the Indian fall of wickets then watched ours fall so quickly in dismay!

The scorecard is here and the match report is here (if you can bear it!).

The final indignity was our taxi to the Mumbai Central station. We came out of the stadium and started walking hurriedly back to our hotel to collect our bags – we were conscious that we we didn’t have a lot of time to get our 11:10 evening departures so we hailed a taxi. We said that we wanted to go to our hotel – it was about 1km to the hotel and then 6.5 km to the station – about 4½ miles altogether. The taxi driver said that it would cost ₹2,000 – that’s £20! I baulked and said “Whaaat? You’re joking right?” I said that we shouldn’t go – we could keep walking to the hotel (it wasn’t far, we could see it) and pick up a taxi to the station from there. Matthew was already putting our bags in the back of the taxi and the road was crowded with people coming out of the stadium – I think Matthew was worried that we might not get another taxi and that missing the train would be disastrous. I got in, but I was fuming. The taxi driver drove like a maniac through the heavy traffic, too, which didn’t help. When we arrived at Mumbai central Matthew dived out of the taxi leaving me to pay – the driver then even asked for another ₹500! I said absolutely not and climbed out!

We walked into the station both a little stressed and tense. I said I wish you’d listened to me back then. ‘Let’s not have a row about it’ was the reply. 

Mumbai Central was lovely – airy with big departure boards. On the train, there were people in our cabin who insisted that they were in the right room – we went to find inspector who looked up our reservation and told us we were in a different cabin to the one printed on our ticket – go figure! The train is newer and really nice. We also get breakfast and lunch tomorrow!

Saturday 01 February

Mumbai

Our train from Hosapete arrived in Mumbai later than expected, Matthew had booked last night in the Trident hotel, Mumbai even though we were going to be on the train so that we could check in as soon as we arrived. 

We had a quick look around the station – CSMT (Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminal), formerly Victoria – completed in 1887.

We headed to our hotel to freshen up, sort out laundry for hotel to wash and then go down for breakfast.

After breakfast we wandered along Marine Drive then headed to the museum. We passed through Oval park – where lots of people were playing cricket … I was settling in to watch (I love cricket),  but Matthew was becoming impatient. 

We passed a big art festival near the university and learned that today was Mumbai Pride! And the annual march was this afternoon at 3! We decided that we had to go to that!

The museum was lovely and we particularly liked the textile gallery where we were able to do a little bit of fabric printing.

We took a cab to near the start of the pride march and started looking for it – luckily we found it quite quickly – small but rather wonderful. Matthew wrote a separate blog about that. 

While we were planning our trip, Matthew said that he wanted to see if we could make a reservation at Mumbai’s poshest 5-star luxury hotel – the Taj Mahal Palace, which is beside the Gateway of India. The ‘Taj’ opened in 1903. The hotel was commissioned by  the industrialist Jamshedji Tata – who founded the Tata company. It is said that he decided to build a luxury hotel in Bombay after he was refused entry to Watson’s Hotel in the grounds of his ethnicity. The Taj Mahal was also one of a number of hotels attacked in November 2008 by a terrorist group – 167 people were killed, 31 at the Taj. There was significant damage to the hotel too – the roof was destroyed by fire. The Taj has been restored and is now a desirable destination. 

Matthew emailed the hotel a few months ago to ask if vegan afternoon tea was available. Slightly to our surprise we had an immediate response – less surprising was the answer … they were passing our question on to the chef! I thought bloody hell – if you’re a chef, then you say of course I can prepare a vegan afternoon tea. Anyway, we didn’t get a further response until just before we left – an email with a vegan afternoon tea menu attached. Excellent, we could book that.

Well, the best laid plans often go awry… when we arrived at the Trident Hotel this morning we needed to send some of our clothes to be laundered. I chatted with Matthew about including my trousers, which needed washing and wearing my shorts today, which were clean. He thought that would be ok and so I wore my shorts. After the pride march we hailed a cab to take us to Taj Mahal. We had a look at India Gate and then went in to the hotel.

A sign outside the dining room door said ‘formal attire only’ and Matthew asked a waiter if I could go in wearing shorts. I could not! So that was that.

All was not lost, however, Matthew is his father’s son and is often very well organised and has backup plans for these sorts of eventualities (just like his dad used to do with a notepad). There exists an epic spreadsheet with several tabs – rows are days on our trip and columns include things like where we’re staying, if it’s booked, how booked, booking reference number, if it’s paid or to pay, hotel website, sites to visit in that place, any potential gardens or horticultural highlights nearby and additional optional things to do in that place. If we’re travelling, which train, is it booked, is it paid for, which carriage, which seat … you get the idea ! He’s been poring over this spreadsheet most evenings for weeks.

One of the columns in Matthew’s contains the fruits of his searches for vegan food providers in every place – so in Mumbai the closest one to where we were at the Taj was called Earth Cafe – we headed there and they had a lovely menu … I could hardly believe that it was all vegan – and I kept asking the staff to reassure me. For some reason, Matthew has been wanting pizza for the last few days – so pizza it was. Yum! 

We walked back to the hotel for tea and biscuits. Yum yum!

Friday 31 January

Hampi

It’s curious looking back on today – our visit to Hampi almost didn’t happen. We weren’t initially planning to go to Hampi, but when I realised that our route from Bengaluru to Mumbai would take us fairly close, I pushed for Hampi’s inclusion. It required quite a bit of rejigging of Matthew’s planned schedule, but I’m very glad that we went – it’s an extraordinary, enormous set of ruins from a great  Hindu civilisation. 

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Extensive remains of a fortified city that was the grand capital of the Vijayanagara empire from 1336. The city was the world’s second largest after Beijing at the time and it had religious, royal and commercial areas. The Vijayanagara empire was defeated by a coalition of Muslim armies in 1565 after which Hampi was ruined and abandoned. 

Hampi is about 13 kilometres (8.1 miles) from Hosapete. The train arrived at 07:00 and our onward train to Mumbai was scheduled to leave Hosapete at 13:40 taking us overnight to arrive in Mumbai at 6am. I knew that just a morning in Hampi wouldn’t do it justice and I knew that we’d only get to see a fraction of the place, but that would be better than nothing.

Our overnight journey to Hosapete was tiring – it was our first sleeper train in India and we had a shared cabin with two others. Our travel companions were getting off in the middle of the night. Neither of us slept well, and we arrived in Hosapete feeling very tired. 

We didn’t want to be burdened with our bags on our visit to Hampi, so we had to search (quite hard) for the left luggage room that we knew from guidebook was at the station in Hosapete. Once found, inevitable forms and passports and payments needed to be made.

Outside Hosapete a tuktuk driver was keen to take us to Hampi and he also wanted to drive us around some of the major sites (which are spread over 16 square miles), but neither of us were really in the mood for tearing about in a tuktuk and trying to take too much in, so I asked him to just take us to the site and we’d make our own decisions about what to see.

We were dropped off by the Virupaksha Hindu temple, which predates the rest of the city includes a monastery and remained an active Hindu pilgrimage site after the city was destroyed and abandoned. It was beautiful and we could hear constant singing from the temple complex as we walked up an adjacent granite hill and explored the ruins.

It was still early and there was hardly anyone else around – just some young pilgrims, all dressed in deep red and a small group of French tourists. 

We found some benches at Sunset Pont at the top of hill and ate some breakfast – that was magical – we had wonderful views of surrounding mountains, the soft singing from the temple, the exciting chatter of the young pilgrims … and a troop of monkeys realised that we were eating and came to see what they could scavenge!

We made a plan to walk along the river Tungabhadra to the royal quarter  – I really wanted to see the unique chariot temple – carved in stone and made even more famous because it appears on the 50 rupees banknote.

On our way we say an interesting photographic exhibition – some prints from the mid 1850s when much of the site was overgrown compared with now.

We went to the Nandi – an enormous stone statue of the god in the form of a bull. We rested in the shade there and tried to take everything in. I feel some affection towards Nandi – ever since Vaishakh took us to the Bull temple in Bangaluru – Nandi always seems to me to be rather stately, patient and peaceful.

The walk along the river was lovely- with more and more extensive ruins and the Sri Yantrodharaka Hanuman temple – with beautiful carved elephants guarding the entrance. 

The Shri Achyutaraaya Swami temple with an enormous, but empty, theertham (tank near temple that is filled with holy water for priest to bathe in). 

Then on to see the thing I really came to see: the Shree Vijaya Vitthala temple and the surrounding structures. On our we met a young British man from Cambridge, called Tom. He was a sweet guy – on a three month sabbatical and travelling along – heading to Vietnam after India… what a great trip!

The Shree Vijaya Vitthala was more than I could hope for – it’s extraordinary that it was abandoned since so much remains. It was strange to think of this place – now so beautiful and quiet and think of how it might have been in its heyday crowded and full of noise and the colour. 

The tranquility was shattered by a couple of very loud Australian tourists – they had a guide and were asking him some really silly questions … it was obvious that they had no idea where they were or what they were seeing. I felt a little embarrassed to also be a White westerner near them. Time for us to move on. 

We had about an hour left and I talked to Matthew about what we could do next – we agreed that the Zanana enclosure – about 6km away with the Lotus Mahal, watch towers, guardhouse and elephant stables would be possible if we walked back to main road and tried to get a tuktuk. We found a driver who agreed to take us to the enclosure – wait for us and then drive us back to Hosapete railway station.

The Zanana enclosure was more extraordinary – I feel like I run out of superlatives when trying to describe Hampi. The photos don’t do it justice – the warm air, bright sunshine, cool breeze, sounds of the birds, sweet smells, friendly people … a place to spend time, but unfortunately we had to go.

Our tuktuk driver was crazy fast, weaving around cars, bikes, cattle-drawn carts and pedestrians- and often on the wrong side of the road – on our return journey. Matthew had to close his eyes. I hung on (no seatbelts!). The train was an hour late and there was a last minute change of platform that meant hundreds of people trudging over a bridge (no walking across the tracks here!). The train was enormous. Bars on the windows are to prevent monkeys climbing in by the way , nothing to do with crime … unless we count monkey business as a crime!

Our cabin to Mumbai was a two-berth. All felt very 1950s style, but perfectly comfortable. We’d brought plenty of supplies – so picnic dinner, watching some Monty Don garden tv on the iPad and then dig in for the rest of our 16 hours journey to Mumbai

Thursday 30 January

Bengaluru

Our second day exploring Bengaluru . We had the suite on the seventh floor of the the Radisson – just like last time. It’s a lovely room – with a coffee machine and an amazing view (and remote control curtains!), so we had coffee and watched the sun come up. The gym is on the same floor as our room and Matthew went over there to do his RED run (we don’t know how he’ll get to run tomorrow as we’re going to be on trains heading north for a lot of the time with a break of a few hours in Hampi). 

The Radisson in Bengaluru is opposite Lake Ulsoor and I could see from our window that there was a path alongside the lake. I thought that running by the lake would be nice and tried to persuade Matthew to join me, but he wasn’t having it (he says that he doesn’t really like running with me – which is a bit sad). I’m still recovering from a sprained foot and it aches from time to time but last time I ran was on the beach in Kerala and I managed 3 miles on one day then 4 miles the next – in the heat and on the sand); it’s much cooler here in Bangaluru and it’d be flat, so I wanted to try for 10k/6 miles. Finding my way onto the path was tricky but once I was beside the water it was a wonderful run. Quite a few others were out running – and it’s always nice to wave, nod, smile, give a thumbs-up as we pass each other. There were also lots of speed walkers and people doing yoga. It was a shame that the path didn’t go all the way around the lake, though- I had to run back and forth around half of it a few times to get the miles in – 6.7 miles to be exact.

I could see our hotel room from across the lake.

After breakfast we lazed about a bit, read up on Hampi and decided what to do with our day in Bengaluru. Matthew wanted to try a vegan cafe that he’d found out about, I wanted to get a haircut and beard shave, and Matthew wanted to explore the city centre a bit.

I found a barber nearby and Matthew decided to have a trip too. It’s very nice feeling less like a shaggy old grey dog! Then we took the metro to Indiranagar from where it was a short walk to Copper + Cloves … a wonderful vegan cafe in a lovely old house with a pretty garden.

It was so nice to have a choice from an entirely vegan menu!

After lunch we headed to Cubbon/Sri Chamarajendra Park in the centre of the city – it’s huge! The park was originally laid out in 1870 and has been extended so that it now covers 1.2km ².

There are formal gardens, rocky outcrops, fountains, wooded areas, naturalistic planting, a bandstand, a fern house and shrines. The central library is in the park as is the archeological museum.

Nearby were the Courthouse and the magnificent legislative assembly of Karnatika building (known as the Vidhana Soudha) that was completed in 1956.

We’ve some long train journeys coming up, so we needed to get some food supplies in and collect our bags from the hotel. We took the metro to the train station, but got off a stop too early! Thankfully we had plenty of time and took the next Metro. My token wouldn’t let me out at the railway station because I’d not paid enough – it took a bit of explaining that Google had told us to go to the previous stop for the railway station.

While we sat on the platform at Bengaluru, I was wondering where my jacket was. I asked Matthew if he’d packed it in his bag. He realised that he’d hung his jacket and my jacket in the wardrobe in the Radisson and forgotten to take them out and pack them. Oh no! We’ve emailed the hotel to see if they can post them on for us. Fingers crossed!

Wednesday 29 January

Mysuru – Bengaluru

A much quieter day today than yesterday. And our last scheduled day with Vaishakh. We decided to wear the new shirts that Vaishakh had given us yesterday – they’re lovely and cool.

Matthew did a short run … he’s almost at the end of RED January and he’s really stuck at it, even though finding suitable places to run here in India has been challenging. I’m very proud of him. 

We had breakfast with Stephen and met his lovely cat, Billet-Doux, who seems to be a little lost and confused about the absence of her housemate, Lucie.

Vaishakh had originally proposed that we leave at 05.00 – but his next passengers were delayed, so we didn’t need to leave until 08.00. The drive to Bengaluru was uneventful and we arrived at the Radisson at 11:30.

Sad to be saying farewell to Vaishakh, his advice and help was far above and beyond what we could have ever imagined. He went off to collect his laundry and see his mum before meeting his next passengers.

A couple of days ago Matthew was engrossed on his phone (as is often the case, I think). When I asked him what he was doing, he became quite cagey and told me to mind my own business! Turns out he’d found a vegan bakery in Bengaluru and they could deliver to our hotel. We’d not found any deserts other than fruit that were vegan so far in India, so he ordered a little raspberry and mango cake and it was waiting for us at the Radisson hotel. The cake was in a little cardboard box and as we were checking in one of the reception staff brought it over to us, saying “Here is your cake.” Obviously I had no idea what was going on and I imagined that maybe this something that they do here … bring people cake when they check in! So I told them no thank you! She looked a bit confused and Matthew had to insist that it was ok – and took the box from her. Up in our room (the exact same one we stayed in last time we were here!) he explained what he’d done. We had some tea and cake – very civilised!

We’re taking our first overnight train tomorrow and Matthew has signed up to a train food ordering app … but we’re not confident that there’ll be much available that we could eat – I think it depends on what’s close to the  intermediate stations. Vaishakh told us about the Fresh Pick store in the 1MG – Lido Mall, which is very near our hotel, that he thought would have vegan food, so we went to check that out. In the mall Matthew was a little distracted by the Gap store – he used to work for Gap in Bristol in his student days, but Gap pulled out of the UK several years ago – so it was a curious trip down memory lane for him. There was also an M&S in the mall, too – we had a look around there, too. It’s very good value here – but I’m trying to dissuade Matthew from buying stuff that we’ll have to carry for the rest of the holiday. We saw another likely vegan store opposite, Nature’s Basket Artisan Pantry  – they had loads of nice vegan stuff, too, and a nice restaurant on the top floor with plenty of vegan options – I went for more dosa, Matthew didn’t want dosa three days in a row, so he went for the pasta arrabbiata – not very Indian!

Tuesday 28 January

Mysuru

Today was a truly wonderful day – Vaishakh lives in Mysuru and is very rightly proud of his home city.  Vaishakh showed us many important sights in and around the city and we talked a lot about the city, his friends and our families. He’s a truly good man who works hard and is very kind. We were fortunate to meet him and it’s thanks to Bharath and Shubhi who we first met in Bristol last summer and who suggested that that Vaishakh could be our driver.

We began the day with breakfast at our homestay (Mysore Bed and Breakfast). There were 9 around the table: a British couple from Warsash, (near Southampton), a young French couple from Paris, a German and Indian couple with their small boy, Stephen the proprietor and Sowbaghaya who cooked breakfast. It was nice chatting about India and Indian trains. Most of the other guests were leaving on the Hampi Express later today.

Vaishakh arrived at 10 to collect us. We’d sent him home last night with a gift for his one-year old son, Dhairya. Dhairya had some stuffed animal toys and Sindhoo said that Dhairya was a bit obsessed with dogs – he referred to his stuffed animal toys as dogs, but we noticed that he didn’t have a dog – there was an elephant, a unicorn and a cat …so we had fun choosing a cute dog soft toy for him. Vaishakh said that Dhairya loved it and showed us a lovely picture of him with the dog – so cute! We drove into the city centre and parked near the Devaraja market, so we could explore the market itself and the centre on foot. The market is fantastic – really big and with stalls piled high with all manner of fruit and vegetables and spices and flowers – it was heaven. We saw some couples who were getting married and having parties of their wedding videos made there – it was nice to see them. We tried a lovely sweet fruit that’s in season – Vaishakh bought some for us to eat on our train journey to Hampi in a couple of days.

After visiting the market, we headed to Mysore Palace.

Vaishakh told us that his neighbour worked in the palace … we thought that this might give us privileged access … but unfortunately she wasn’t working today. Then he thought that he might know someone else who worked at the palace and went to see if he could find them. I had spotted a sign to the restroom, so I used the opportunity to go in search of the toilet … I followed the signs around the corner where the path forked, but there were no more signs that I could see – I walked in one direction past a green and a temple and was at a big gate with guards on it … I didn’t see and more restroom signs, so I went back to the other road that went in the other direction but I was walking further than seemed plausible and wondered if I’d walked past the toilet without noticing, so I turned around again and slowly retraced my steps. Still no restroom! Eventually I found them at the end of the second path and near the entrance – it would have been much quicker if I’d walked in the opposite direction to the signs. I’d just settled in when I heard Vaishakh calling my name – he realised that I was probably lost and had come to find me!

Vaishakh did know someone who was working and they did arrange for us to visit some closed off rooms. She was lovely – was an accountant (I think) and said that her brother studied in Leeds! She arranged for us to have our own guide, who was really knowledgeable and explained what we were looking at. First of all we went into an army room and then a room full of stuffed animal hunting trophies (this second room was quite an unwelcome place for me to be!). Our guide even pointed out where the bullets had gone into the tigers, which was really quite upsetting. Matthew did point out that there wasn’t much we could do about that now! Vaishakh was super sensitive and realised that we didn’t want to be there, he explained to the guide that we were vegans – it sounded like it took quite a lot of explaining! We were allowed to take photos in these rooms that were not normally available to visit. We then toured the rest of the palace – it’s magnificent.

There are seven palaces in Mysuru – (the city is often called the ‘City of the Palaces’), this was the main palace as it was the official residence of the Wadiyars until Indian independence. The first palace inside the Old Fort was built in the 14th century. The previous palace burned down during the wedding of Jayalakshammani, the eldest daughter of Chamaraja Wodeyar in 1896. The new palace was designed by Henry Irwin, a British architect and built quickly between 1897 and 1912. Mysore Palace has over three million visitors every year and is the second most visited tourist attraction in India – only the Taj Mahal has more.

After the palace we went to the bus station for the 201 to Chamundi Hill. While waiting for the bus, one of Bharath’s and Vaishakh’s friends, Suprith, arrived – just to say hello (and to have a picture taken with us for Barath I suspect!).

We’ll see Suprith later – he used to work for an NGO with Vaishakh and Bharath. Suprith is an amazing guy … and a man after my own heart, he’s walked over three thousand miles along a river and is planning to walk from the west coast to the east coast of India; that sounds fantastic!

Chamundi Hill is a sacred place – we alighted from the bus by a big statue of Mahishasura – who was killed by the goddess Durga and Mahishasura is the origin of the city’s name – Mysuru.

Alongside the Mahishasura statue is the beautiful high Chamundeshwari Temple – named after the goddess Chamundi.

There were wonderful panoramic views of the city and the temple can be seen from many parts of the city. We descended from the top of the hill using the Chamundi Hill steps – constructed in 1659 with 1,000 steps. Halfway down we passed a huge and beautiful granite carved Nandi (god in form of a bull) – carved from a single piece of granite. Vaishakh had ordered a tuktuk to take us back to his car in the city.

Vaishakh drove us across to the area where our friend Bharath grew up – we also saw Vaishakh’s old house, then Bharath’s father’s old shop. We stopped at Grape Juice Corner – the chilled red grape juice, was sweet and delicious.

We changed some more sterling to rupees – the exchange rate seems to be pretty good for us at the moment then went to the Mahesh Prasad Hotel for bonda soup, and dosas (two kinds – rava onion dosa made with semolina, which made it very crisp and crunchy, and also Masala dosa with a potato and onion filling). All delicious. Our dosas have usually been served with small pots of daal and coconut chutney … sometimes with additional chutney that are usually too spicy hot for my tastes. Matthew has a go with them though!

After dinner we headed over to Kukkarahalli Lake near the university to watch the sunset. The park was lovely and the lake has a path all around it – we’ve not seen so many runners in India . The sunset was beautiful.

Then back to Mysore Palace for the evening light show. Pret extraordinary!

Vaishakh bought us gifts – handmade cotton shirts – what an unexpected and lovely surprise! Thank you.

Back at our homestay we chatted with Stephen before bed – nice to learn more about India and his situation. After his wife died, he lost the right to live in India indefinitely – which seems horribly cruel. He’s exploring ways of staying on in the house that he and his wife made into the business that it is is today.

Monday 27 January

Marari Beach – Mysuru

We packed our bags after dinner last night and went to bed early ready for our early start today. Matthew decided to get up and go running on the beach at 2:30! Crazy – he’s taking his run every day (RED) January very seriously – he said that there were some people still on the beach, a couple who’d made a fire and some people fishing … they would have been quite bemused to see a White European running about on the shore. 

The reception staff came to collect our bags in a little electric buggy at 3:30am I had some coffee in our room and Vaishakh was waiting for us at 3:45.

While Matthew was settling the (quite sizeable) bill, I chatted with a couple of British women who were sat outside surrounded with their luggage and waiting for a taxi to take them to the airport in Kochi. They said that they were getting a flight to Muscat … I thought Wow! And I asked them if they were on a round the world trip … turns out that they weren’t, they were catching a flight from Muscat back to Heathrow! They were from Lancaster and I told them that we’d been there to cycle coast-to-coast from Morecambe to Bridlington (in the years before dogs!).

We set off in the dark and as expected, the roads were very quiet. As the sun rose on our right it illuminated the beautiful Western Ghat mountain range between Kochi and Madukkari on our left.

The vegan breakfast boxes from Marari Beach were beyond underwhelming – two apples, a small banana and a small carton of mango juice.

We were making good progress and stopped for breakfast at Sri Annapoorna (Veg) at Odandurai, Nagapattinam – yum! potatoes and onion dosa, an onion pancake, a savoury donut (Vaishakh will know what these were really called, so I may be able to update this later).

A short time later while we were stopped at a toll point there a tap on the front passenger side window of Vaishakh’s car – it was a traffic policeman. Uh oh. Vaishakh lowered the window and he asked if we were going to Ooty – we are. He wanted a lift there! Phew! Vaishakh seemed uncertain and asked us what we thought I was all for it, I used to hitch-hike a lot in my late teens and early twenties. Hardly anyone hitch-hikes these days but it’s always nice to be able to help someone who has to get somewhere. Plus, there had to be some advantage to having a traffic policeman in the vehicle – you never know! He was 59, smart in his uniform with two stars and some bars on his epaulettes. In India people normally retire at 60 and he was planning to farm some land when he retired.

As the road climbs up to Coonoor there are dozens of hairpin bends and some wonderful views.

Vaishakh dropped us off at Coonoor railway station and offered to wait with us until the train arrived – that would have meant that the traffic policeman would have needed to find another lift. We had booked tickets, so we were confident that we would be able to get to Ooty, so we suggested that Vaishakh carry on and meet us in Ooty.

There was over an hour to wait for the train … that gave us plenty of time to explore the station – and the adjacent marshalling yard. Just like in Ooty, the station was being renovated. There were some chalk decorations on the floor left from Republic Day.

The marshalling yard was brilliant – lots of trains, including steam trains being cleaned and serviced.

There was a neat little railway police office at the end of our platform that had a lovely small garden and a big green wall just outside the station.

Our train arrived and station staff opened every door before we could get on. Each set of seats facing each other have their own door and there was no corridor inside the carriage – this maximises seating space. We met a couple of Brits from Milton Keynes and a lovely Indian couple with their daughter. We all chatted a lot throughout our journey about work and travel and marriage and India.

Vaishakh was waiting for us on the platform in Ooty – he filmed the train coming in. 

The last part of our loooong journey today to Mysuru went back through the Nagarahole Tiger Reserve. We saw more elephants, some of them in captivity – chained and working, which I found upsetting. They’re magnificent, sensitive and sociable creatures that should never be in captivity, treated cruelly or taken away from their own. 

We also saw some baboons and some giant Indian squirrels for the first time; more monkeys, peacocks and deer. 

We’re in a homestay in Mysuru – like a bed a breakfast. Stephen is the owner and he’s a lovely, sociable person – originally from Sheffield, but here in India for 15 years now. Our friends Ann and Dave in Bristol recommended that we stay here. Stephen likes to cycle, which is a plus. I was looking forward to meeting Lucie, Stephen’s dog. When we arrived, Stephen told us that Lucie had died yesterday. That was dreadful news – I don’t know how he was holding things together – I guess he was working and trying to get on. Lucie was old and had been struggling a bit recently, so her death wasn’t unexpected. 

We went out for something to eat – our first auto rickshaw ride! And then back to bed and a good nights sleep.

Saturday 25 January

Marari Beach

It’s our second full day at the Colonial Club Marari Beach Resort. Matthew was up an out early as usual – an early run and then yoga followed by  breakfast then a trip to the Butterfly Garden – a really lovely area on the edge of the compound where plants are grown to specifically attract butterflies and insects. 

We had a nice, well-informed guide who explained the development of the garden and how they work to maximise different local species of butterfly. There were many butterflies and our guide advised us to return later in the day to see even more.

There’s a family from the USA on site – parents and four kids. They were at the Butterfly Garden too. The woman and the kids are quite chatty – they’re from Utah, just moved to Kochi for two years for dad’s work in computing. He seems to be rather studiously not speaking to us … I can’t imagine why!

Then some more time in and by the pool. And then at 1800 time for the ‘Farm Kitchen’ experience – the main reason why Matthew wanted to come here – a guided tour of their large vegetable gardens, selection of vegetables with the chef and then they’re cooked and served up for us.

It was wonderful – Ajo was our chef, he was sweet and I interesting – said that there are 60 chefs on site! He thought he’d be an engineer, but his brother is and advised him against it. Ajo came into being a chef through a hotel management course. He made us some wonderful food – Matthew has already written about that. It was really nice to sit down together and eat, talk and be quiet. A lovely evening.

Finally, after dinner a wander back to our cottage for a drink. A lovely day.

Friday 24 January

Marari Beach

A quiet day at Marari Beach for us today with no travelling. Beginning with Matthew heading off to the yoga centre for an hour – we’ve both done yoga in the past and enjoyed it (sort of) and definitely felt that it did us good, but I’m nervous about damaging my already painful foot that I sprained about 6 weeks ago. I might risk it tomorrow. 

We also sent off some of our first week’s clothes to be laundered. After breakfast we went for a tour of the ‘compound’ that showed us some of the wildlife. The event was called ‘Owl Parliament’ (there are many species of owl on site), but we looked at butterflies and turtles, too. There were about 10 others in the Earth Lab building where the tour started.

Our guide was fantastic – I’ve no idea how he did it, but he could see all sorts of birds in the trees …. And even when he painstakingly described exactly where to look and what to look for I usually couldn’t see what he was pointing out. Fortunately, he had a super-powerful monocular on a tripod, which he’d set up and train on a particular bird and we could all take turns to look.

What we saw was truly astonishing and his next phenomenal skill was that he could focus our phone through the monocular and adjust light levels to produce some fantastic photographs … we are not responsible for these at all – but this is some what we looked at.

We chatted to some of the others – some from Manchester, some Yorkshire and also Plymouth. We all talked about missing our dogs! Some people are flying home tomorrow and there’s a storm hitting the UK – Storm Éowyn – thousands of flights have been cancelled … mostly in Northern Ireland and Scotland as far as we can tell – but it could move south I suppose and they might be delayed.

After the ‘Owl Parliament’ we went to reception to book some activities over the coming days. We wanted to spend some time on a houseboat – but there was no availability between now and when we leave (I’m starting to sense a theme emerging now). Instead we’re going a shorter boat tour, which is available the day after tomorrow. Also, Matthew wanted to tour the organic garden here and then the chef will cook us dinner using the produce that we harvest – so that’s booked for tomorrow, evening.

We spent a couple of hours in/by the pool and then went for a 5k run along the beach. Matthew has set himself a challenge to run every day (RED) in January  – he’s mostly done that in hotel gyms, or in their grounds while we’ve been in India. Today was my first run in India and it was lovely to run together – and by the Arabian Sea! There were a few stray dogs on the beach and I was a bit nervous that we might alarm them and be chased -,there were no major dog-incidents, although one did woof at Matthew. I wanted keep as far away as possible and ended up too close to the sea – a wave went over both of our  feet and we had to squelch along for 4.5k! Next time we’ll go barefoot.

Last night’s dinner was ordered from the a la carte menu … it was enormous and I could only eat about a quarter of it … a terrible waste of food and I felt guilty about it. So tonight we used the buffet so we could have smaller portions. They have a drummer and string player entertaining us with traditional Indian music while we dine – which is lovely. We were almost finished dinner when all the waiting staff paraded in with a cake and were clapping – the young couple at the next but one table were on their honeymoon – sweet – they seemed a little embarrassed.

After dinner we walked down to the beach bar for another drink (tonic for Matthew and a Mocktail for Mike). It was lovely sitting in the warm, the sound of the waves and pretty lights all around the bar. A nice end to another lovely day.

Thursday 23 January

Wellington – Marari Beach

We were at Ooty station to buy our toy train tickets at 07:30 – the station building is lovely – but covered in scaffolding as it’s being restored.

The ticket office opened at 0800 … already there was a long queue of people waiting.

I feared that we might not get a ticket. So while Mathew and Vaishakh queued, I explored the station – they have an old Swiss Railways steam locomotive on display – and it’s possible to walk across the railway lines to get close to it.

The Nilgiri Mountain Railway was opened in 1908  – it took almost 60 years to complete. It’s 46km in length and since we’re so high up, it includes some of the steepest track in Asia – a maximum gradient of 8.33%. The railway is narrow gauge, with a rack and pinion system on the steepest sections between Mettupalayam and Coonoor; it still uses steam locomotives. In its early days, the railway used locomotives built by the Avonside Engine Company that’s based in St Philip’s in our home city of Bristol! In 1994 the railway was given UNESCO world heritage status. The scenic mountain views from the train are spectacular – and there’s a possibility of seeing lots of wildlife, including elephants, monkeys, bisons and leopards. 

When I returned to the ticket hall, the queue wasn’t much shorter – it can takes ages to buy a railway ticket! Not long after, and as I’d feared, it was announced that the train was sold out. Vaishakh said that the maximum number of tickets that anyone could buy was four and that lots of people were buying four tickets. It was also obvious that coach loads of tourists were arriving having bought packages that included transport, accommodation and a ride on the toy train. No wonder it sold out!

I had considered telling Vaishakh that he could just leave us at the railway station and head off to meet us at the other end in Mettupalayam – he wouldn’t have agreed to that, I know, and thankfully I hadn’t suggested it – or we’d have had to ask him to come back to Ooty to collect us! Without the train, we were all going by car to Marari Beach – near Kochi, on the west coast in Kerala. A journey of nine hours! Vaishakh seems to take these sorts of drives in his stride – but it horrifies me!

All is not lost on the Toy Train front – we may be able to reserve seats in the opposite direction – from Mettupalayam to Ooty when we return to Mysuru in four days time.

The drive brought us down from the mountains – lots of tight hairpin bends, dense mist, monkeys and waterfalls. In fact, lots of what we would have seen if we’d been on the train! As usual Vaishakh drove with enormous skill.

We passed through the Coimbatore – a huge textile centre, known as the ‘Manchester of South India’! Palakkad, which has an enormous 18th century fort. Thrissur, which has a very large number of temples and other religious buildings – it’s thought that Christianity, Islam and Judaism came into India through Thrissur. The Catholic basilica in Thrissur is an enormous bright white edifice and it’s the largest Christian church in India.

We stopped for breakfast in a busy ‘family restaurant’ – really nice and being with Vaishakh meant that we didn’t need to struggle to order vegan food – It’ll be a nightmare when we part company with him next week! 

On to Kochi, which is the most populated area in Kerala – a beautiful city bordering the coast and an ancient and historically an important centre of spice trading with the Romans, Persians, Arabs, and Chinese. From the early 1500s Kochi was colonised by the Portuguese who built a fort here. Dutch colonists took over (!) in the 1660s and the British arrived after the French revolutionary wars/British victory over Napoleon that enabled Britain to return land that the French had taken from the Dutch to the Netherlands in return for Dutch handing over land that the British wanted – including South Africa and here in Kerala.

Vaishakh told us that Kochi is the only city in India to have a water metro – electric boats connecting Kochi’s 10 islands with the metro system – it looks great!

Also, Cochin International Airport is the first in the world to operate entirely on solar power. We also saw the Chinese fishing nets along the waterfront that are a symbol of the city.

I noticed on our journey that there seemed to be far fewer stray dogs in the road – when I commented on this, Vaishakh said that the local authorities rescued them and had shelters/re-homed them. I hope that’s the case – I was reading about some animal welfare charities in India … one boasted about how many stray dogs they had sterilised (a good thing to do) but then said that they returned them back to the streets (not a good thing to do!). I sense that there is a very troubling indifference among many people here to animal and human suffering – it’s unexpected and bothers me … but I don’t live here and I’m very aware that what tourists glimpse from their air conditioned cars and hotels does’t really give us the ability to come to meaningful conclusions.

We arrived in Marari Beach around 5:30 (having left Ooty at about 8:30. Our ‘hotel’ is really a gated resort – we have a little bungalow to ourselves with an adjoining bathroom open to the sky. It’s lovely and warm here in the south. It’s also very White here in Marari Beach Resort, which we didn’t expect. It’s luxurious, artificial and there’s some discomfort about feeling the echoes of the colonial past.

We walked through the ‘compound’ in the dusk – a beautiful sky and nice to see the stars – then on to the beach. The beach was almost deserted and there was the Arabian Sea – it was breathtaking … in less than a week we’ve travelled from the Bay of Bengal to Arabian Sea  – that’s 700km/450 miles.

We paused for a drink at the outdoor bar (pineapple juice for Mike, tonic water for Matthew) before heading to the restaurant for dinner

Wednesday 22 January

Wellington/Ooty

A much shorter day today with much less driving. 

Breakfast at the Sleeping Beauty by Nature Hotel was a little underwhelming – no non-dairy milk available … and when I asked if it would be possible to have some for tomorrow morning, they said no! So dry toast and jam and some fruit it had to be! It’s occurred to me that it’s actually been more challenging than I expected to be vegan – in this part of India at least (and Kerala where we are heading to is likely to be even worse – they eat a lot of dead fish there). Here at Sleeping Beauty, after we told them we were vegan and explained what that meant, they asked us if we would like an omelette for breakfast! Matthew had been wondering whether we should stay here for an additional night – it is a stunning location in the hills and among the tea plantations, I’ll admit – but on the strength of the breakfasts, I said no thanks!

The plan for today was to visit a tea factory and the botanical gardens in Ooty. Vaishakh collected us at 8:30 and we drove through Ooty and up to the Benchmark tea factory (they also made chocolate there). The drive on the road up the hill was amazing – terraces of tea bushes – with lots of different shades of green looked wonderful.

At the tea factory a young man explained to us how white tea and green tea and black tea all come from the same bush – the white tea comes from the bottom of the leaf which is handpicked. Green tea comes from newest, tender leaves that are steamed before processing. Black tea comes from the darker/older leaves that are dried and ground. It was interesting and we could see the machinery operating through windows, but we were out fairly quickly.

We were given some tea to drink and had opportunities to buy tea and chocolate! Matthew was considering buying some chocolate, but we were not allowed to taste any of it, which I thought was a little odd-and I was reluctant to buy something that I wasn’t sure whether I’d like it or not (I don’t really have much of a sweet tooth). Vaishakh wanted to buy some chocolate for his wife – he bought some for us too, which was very kind of him! It tasted good too!! Thanks Vaishakh!

The drive back to Ooty to the botanical gardens was nice and we discussed how tea might be made in smaller, more traditional business businesses. Vaishakh asked us if we would be interested in visiting a more traditional tea making business, and after the rather commercial and noisy tea factory we thought that would be a really good idea. He said he would try to arrange something while we were in the botanical gardens.

The botanical gardens were more like a Victorian British park – lawns, glasshouse, formal bedding, cascades and tree-lined paths. Not unpleasant, but it didn’t feel particularly Indian. We had to pay to get in and while Matthew was doing that, I looked ruefully at all the signs and notices at the entrance – there are a lot of signs telling people how to behave and what to do everywhere we’ve been – and they’re often ignored by the people that they’re directed at and I wonder if everyone else, like me, just finds them really oppressive?

Matthew will write separately about the Botanical Gardens – he knew all the plant names and can describe it better than I can. 

Before leaving Ooty we went to the railway station – I’m very excited about tomorrow because we’re taking the Ooty Toy Train (or Nilgiri Mountain Railway to give it it’s proper name) we’ll be on a three hour ride to Mettupalayam. We went to the railway station in Ooty to book our tickets.

I was disappointed to find that all the bookable availability was sold out! However, we can buy walk-on tickets in the morning, so we’ll be back at Ooty station at eight tomorrow morning!

We walked back to the car and Vaishakh had found a small tea plantation and factory that we could visit – the Glendale estate. We drove there past the huge Wellington Cordite factory, it looked pretty forbidding – surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. Someone who working our hotel told us that they make munitions for the Indian military at the site here.

The Glendale tea plantation was beautiful – an 85 year old factory and surrounding fields of tea buses being worked (mostly by women workers). The factory was closed for a holiday, but we were allowed to look around – the machines looked very dangerous with unguarded mechanisms. It was fascinating to get so close to the process and the people working there – the previous factory was interesting but more commercial.

After the second tea factory of the day, we headed back to our hotel. One of the staff offered to walk us further up the hill to see the sunset – he was a sweet local man … he asked us about our relationship and while I was contemplating whether or not to tell him that we’re married, he said “You’re soulmates.” I happily agreed with that.

It was becoming more misty in the valley and so there wouldn’t be a good sunset to see. We could see lots of sold plots on the hillside – with tea bushes still growing on them. It’s likely that these plots will be built on and it was really sad to think that this beautiful natural landscape and space for wild buffalo and leopards will disappear forever.

Tuesday 21 January

Bengaluru – Wellington

Today we continue our journey from the east coast to the south west, from Bengaluru through Mysuru, to stay for two nights in a nature reserve (hopefully to see monkeys, elephants and even leopards and tigers!) in Wellington, (between Ooty and Coonoor). It’s about 180 miles and that’s 6 hours driving here!  But first, Matthew wanted to see the garden festival in Bengaluru.

Breakfast at the Raddisson Blue was served from 0730 and we were up, packed and ready to eat so we could get away early. Our room was lovely and included a pod coffee machine – we had some soya milk in little pots, so we could have coffee as soon as we were awake.

After breakfast Vaishakh was waiting for us and we drove to Lalbagh Botanical Garden, on the way we passed the extraordinary local legislative assembly building.

The flower show in the botanical gardens was in a glasshouse (which really reminded me of a miniature Covent Garden market building). The park itself is lovely – very obviously designed by the British colonialists with fountains, big lake, statues and formal flower beds with winding paths.

The garden show was nice – not too busy and as well as the formal displays there were stalls selling food, gardening paraphernalia and food. 

Vaishakh had been on his phone quite a bit and he said that he had a surprise for us – I thought that he might set up a video call with  our friends Bharath and Shubhi back in the UK. Anyway, while I was preoccupied reading about some of the mythical stories that inspired the flower display, Vaishakh tapped me on the shoulder and said “I want you to meet someone.” I turned around and there was Shubhi! I was amazed!! I knew that Shubhi’s family lived in Bengaluru and I knew that she was coming to to India, but we were talking a few weeks ago she’d said she was returning to the UK from India on 15 January, so we thought that we’d miss each other. Last night when we were driving to the market and Bugle Rock Park, Vaishakh had said that we were in the area that it was where Shubhi lived – I asked him if he’d seen her when she was here in India a few weeks ago. He said “No, I didn’t know that she was here.” I was a little mystified by this, but didn’t pursue it. I just told him that she had been here, but that I thought that she’d gone back to the UK last week. Now we know that this was all a big fib and that Shubhi had decided to stay on in India and they’d been plotting for this moment all along – the pair of scamps!

It was such a wonderful surprise to see Shubhi – she looked so beautiful in her blue Sari and we talked about Bengaluru and the flower show and what she’d been doing in India. We had some delicious street food: fresh mango with salt and a little curry powder, some popped rice with onion and tomatoes; we also tried gooseberry tea (yuk). We talked about Barath and his work. We visited some of the stalls. We saw some more monkeys in the park and we watched some of the park rangers capturing a big snake that was in the grass and putting it in a white bag. Shubhi assured me that the rangers would take the snake to the woods, away from people and release it  – not kill it. This was such a wonderful, lovely surprise – I didn’t want this part of the day to end. However, we had a long drive ahead – so we said our goodbyes and set off to Mysuru.

Vaishakh lives in Mysuru with his wife Sindoo and one-year old son. We’d been very kindly invited to his house for lunch and we were also going to leave the fabric that Matthew bought for Janet’s kurti with Vaishakh’s cousin who’s a tailor and will sew it for us.

Shortly after leaving Bengaluru we were on much quieter roads and surrounded by palm trees, forests and fields full of sugar cane. We passed lots of trucks piled high with sugar cane and we stopped to buy coconut from a stall.  

Lunch in Vaishakh’s house was delicious – lovely crisp rice flour pancakes, coconut chutney and salad. I picked up a child’s book to help teach them English words – I thought that it was extraordinary that it was published in India yet all the photos of people showed White people – but as I looked through there were some even more alarming things:

We met Vaishakh’s cousin and Matthew gave her Janet’s measurements along with a photo of Janet to work from … should be ready for collection at the end of the week.

The final leg of today’s journey was breathtaking, bringing us on a very quiet road through the Niligri Biosphere – a UNESCO environment programme. Mudumalai National Park and Tiger Reserve was the first wildlife sanctuary in India. We passed through a Eucalyptus tree forest and travelled high up to the Nilgiris mountains through the hill station of Ooty to Wellington. The views were spectacular and the setting sun and we had fantastic views of the misty mountains and the river valley as the road twisted and turned uphill. Vaishakh’s driving was superb – some very tight bends and steep turns to negotiate! 

At the start of our drive through the wildlife sanctuary we saw a mother elephants with her calf. Amazing – I’ve never seen an elephant in the wild before. There were more elephants as we drove … and monkeys and deer, wild boars, peacocks and a buffalo. It was utterly amazing. 

Vaishakh was relieved that we had seen some elephants – he didn’t want Bharath ribbing him for not being able to show us one!

We’re here in Wellington for two or three days (we’ve not decided yet) and we’ll be exploring around. We know that the views from our hotel will be spectacular … it’s dark at the moment, so we’ll post pictures of the views tomorrow.

Monday 20 January

Chennai – Bengaluru

Today we continue our journey from the east coast to the south west, from Bengaluru through Mysuru to stay for two nights in a nature reserve (hopefully to see monkeys, elephants and even tigers!) in Wellington, between Ooty and Coonoor. About 180 miles/4 hours driving. But first, Matthew wanted to see the garden festival in Bengaluru.

After breakfast Vaishakh was waiting for us and we drove to Lalbagh Botanical Garden to look at the flower show in the glasshouse (which really reminded me of a miniature Covent Garden market building). The park was lovely – very obviously designed by the British colonialists. The garden show was nice – not too busy and as well as the formal displays there were stall selling food, gardening paraphernalia and food.

Breakfast at the Raddisson Blue was served from 0730 and we were up, packed and ready to eat so we could get away early. Our room was lovely and included a pod coffee machine – we had some soya milk in little pots, so we could have coffee as soon as we were awake.

Vaishakh had been on his phone quite a bit and he said that he had a surprise for us – I thought that he’d set up a video call with Bharath and Shubhi back in the UK. Anyway, while I was preoccupied reading about some of the mythical stories that inspired the flower display, Vaishakh tapped me on the shoulder and said “I want you to meet someone.” I turned around and there was Shubhi! I was amazed!! I knew that Shubhi’s family lived in Bengaluru and I knew that she was coming to to India, but we were talking she’d said she was returning to the UK on 15 January, so we thought that we’d miss each other. Last night when we were driving to the market and Bugle Rock Park, Vaishakh had said that we were in the area that it was where Shubhi lived – I asked him if he’d seen her when she was here in India a few weeks ago. He said “No, I didn’t know that she was here.“ I was a little mystified by this, but didn’t pursue it. I just him that she had been here, but that I thought that she’d gone back to the UK last week. Now we know that this was all a big fib and that Shubhi had decided to stay on in India and they’d been plotting for this moment all along – the pair of scamps!

It was such a wonderful surprise to see Shubhi – she looked so beautiful in her blue Sari and we talked about Bengaluru and the flower show and what she’d been doing in India. We had some delicious street food: fresh mango with salt and a little curry powder, some popped rice with onion and tomatoes; we also tried gooseberry tea (yuk). We talked about Barath and his work. We visited some of the stalls. We saw some more monkeys in the park and we watched some of the park rangers capturing a big snake that was in the grass and putting it in a white bag. Shubhi assured me that the rangers would take the snake to the woods, away from people and release it – not kill it. This was such a wonderful, lovely surprise – I didn’t want this part of the day to end. However, we had a long drive ahead – so we said our goodbyes and set off to Mysuru.

Vaishakh lives in Mysuru with his wife Sindoo and one-year old son. We’d been very kindly invited to his house for lunch and we were also going to leave the fabric that Matthew bought for Janet’s kurti with Vaishakh’s cousin who’s a tailor and will sew it for us.

Shortly after leaving Bengaluru we were on much quieter roads and surrounded by palm trees, forests and fields full of sugar cane. We passed lots of trucks piled high with sugar cane and we stopped to buy coconut from a stall.

Summary day 03
Monday 20 January

We left Chennai today and headed west to Bengaluru – about 200 mile drive. Vaishakh’s mother lives in Bengaluru. One of our friends, Shubhi, who has helped us enormously with the plan for this trip is also from Bengaluru (but she’s back in the UK now).

We set off at 07:00 after a poor night’s sleep – we’ve not yet adjusted to the time change/jet lag I think. First stop Kanchipuram – the town is one of the most visited inland tourist destinations in southern India – famed for its ‘thousand’- very numerous at least, ancient Hindu temples – some with spectacularly high towers. Vaishakh took us on a tour of a Hindu temple – our first ever – the Sri Kanchi Kamakshi Amman temple – enormous and beautiful. We had to leave our shoes outside walk through a trough of flowing water to cleanse our feet and then could see the vast step well and walk around the stone columned halls. I wasn’t comfortable taking pictures around the devotees. The place was crowded with worshipers and garlanded monuments – a wonderful sight. As we left some women asked us for help – Vaishakh said they were transvestites … I thought about how incredibly tough their lives are all over the world – it’s absolutely awful how harmless differences are magnified and problematised by so many people.

Kanchipuram is a traditional centre of silk and handloom weaving and so we went to an enormous and famous fabric store called Prakash. Prakash is arranged over 4 massive floors with walls lined with thousands of bolts of fabric, saris, shirts and scarfs. The lights are bright – and there’s hundreds of them, and there are huge mirrors everywhere. The store employs over 800 people and shoppers come from miles around to choose the finest cloths and outfits. Matthew’s aunt Janet would like an Indian long tunic, it’s called a kurta, I think, so Matthew bought some fabric and we’ll look for a tailor to make it up into a kurta. Again it was shoes off time and we were escorted upstairs to sit on chairs in front of an army of sales assistants (who sat cross-legged on the floor or stood to one side) and who brought more and more packets of beautiful scarfs and fabrics for us to look at. It took a long time to choose – there was so much beauty there. Elsewhere in the store, it was very busy as wedding season ramps up and there were women with family and friends choosing incredibly beautiful saris.

Then we visited another temple – Ekambareswarar Temple – dedicated to the god Shiva. Ekambareswarar Temple is the largest temple in the city with three enormous towers – or gopurams – stepped, tall, pyramid towers with statues on a series of levels. The tallest tower has 11 stories and is almost 60m high. The towers are among the tallest temple towers in India and are currently being renovated. Building the temple began in the ninth century. We were able to walk around and talk to Vaishakh about the various gods on display and religious practices. We were privileged to get very close to the Sacred Mango Tree in the centre of the temple complex (it’s said to be the oldest mango tree in India). We saw part of a wedding ceremony and we took a moment to congratulated the groom and the bride – inevitably, we were dragged into some of their wedding photos! Outside some young men also wanted to be photographed with us for some reason!

As we left Kanchipuram we saw a group of men outside a house beating large drums – the drumming was loud and Vaishakh said that it was someone’s funeral. As we drove past I could see a body wrapped in a white shroud in a glass case on a stand in front of the house. It was somewhat strange – a wedding and a funeral in the space of a few minutes.

Then on to Bengaluru for dinner with Vaishakh’s Amma. She made a fantastic spread for us, rice with tamarind and spices, chutney, freshly prepared vegetables, preserved lemon, and a French bean curry followed by jageree – with a mix of puffed rice, mango pieces and split peas – lovely.

We’d wondered about taking a gift and I regretted not bringing anything She very kindly gave us a present of a stainless steel cup.

After dinner we detoured to the lively street market in Bengaluru and on to Bugle Rock Park where Matthew and Vaishakh discussed the trees.

We saw some big bats (big like the size of a cat!) hanging upside down from the trees – some were waking up and preening themselves and some were even flying about … it was beginning of dusk, so I wonder if they were waking up.

In the south west corner of the park on a hill was Bull Temple, our third Hindu temple of the day, and in many respects the best – it was so quiet and peaceful and we were able to get up close to the shrine – a huge black granite bull. It’s wonderful how many gods take animal form and that therefore there is a respect and value for many animals.

On our way back to the car, we passed a lovely old music shop full of stringed instruments – I think called a veena – and neat little house, one of the few original houses left in Bengaluru.

We went to wrong Raddisson Blue – there are two in Bengaluru. Our room on the seventh floor has amazing views over lake Ulsoor and the Gurudwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha – the largest Sikh shrine in Bengaluru all lit up.

Next morning we could see the lake as well as the Gurudwara from out hotel room.

Sunday 19 January

Chennai – Mahabaliipuram

We met out driver today! He’s called Vaishakh and he lives in Mysore. Vaishakh is married and has a young son. He’ll be our driver for the next 10 days. 

This morning after breakfast Vaishakh drove us to to the UNESCO world heritage site at Mahabalipuram – the remains of an unfinished group of royal Hindu monuments and temple complex. The buildings were carved out of granite  – some in situ – in the seventh and eighth century!

The ancient name of the place is Thirukadalmallai. The drive south took us about 2 hours. The carving on the stones were extraordinary – many depicting scenes from the the Mahabharata. We began at the Shore Temple, by the sea on the Bay of Bengal, a beautiful tall temple with some charming stone lions keeping guard.

Then we walked along the beach for a while – amazing to be near the sea again and lots of people enjoying being by the sea too.

We drove to the  Five Chariots – each one carved from a single piece of stone.

There was a glorious life-size elephant carved out of a single piece of stone.

Time for a snack then / we had a coconut each from a stall. Then on to the lighthouse (along with a modern British built lighthouse constructed in 1904) with India’s oldest lighthouse close by that was built around 640 by the Pallava king Mahendravarman. Here we met our first monkeys!

We left Vaishakh with the car and wandered through the ancient site – stone baths cut out of the rock, temples, and the largest open-air carved stone relief in the world – called Descent of the Ganges, depicting the giving of the sacred river – when it rains water flows down a channel in the rock face The relief has life-size figures of an elephant family, monkeys, a deer, lions, rams, snakes, the god Shiva, Vishnu in a temple the sun and moon – it’s vast, around 15 by 30 metres (49 ft × 98 ft).

Next we saw Krishna’s Butter Ball, a giant rock balanced precariously on a stone incline. 

It was quite a bit of walking and clambering over stone steps – wonderful to see, though. We headed back to the car and drove back to our hotel in Chennai. 

After a snooze (Mike) and swim in the hotel pool (Matthew) we headed out for dinner and to pick up some supplies from a store in a mall up the road.

We came to the Express Avenue shopping centre – it has an H&M,  ASICS, Adidas and Pima stores, a Bodyshop and even an M&S! We were truly home from home! There was also a giant food court – we managed to establish that the dosas had ghee in them, so they were off – we ended up with some plain noodles with veggies, which was quite tasty.

Matthew couldn’t help himself and had already gone wild in the aisles – he went in to a Simon Carter store, bought a shirt, the sales assistant said he could have a second shirt for free … so he chose another shirt; then the sales assistant said that he could have a third shirt at half price… which of course he did. I told him that they’d seen him coming! I caught the sun today and hadn’t packed a hat (I needed the air in my bag), so I went to H&M to buy a cap … I’m at the checkout and Matthew sidles up with a jacket “Can you just add that?” He asked. Sigh. I did point out that his bag as full – apparently he knows that he hasn’t used all his luggage allowance!

Saturday 18 January

Chennai

Our flight arrived in Chennai on time – we landed at 05:30, which was around 12:30 at night in the UK. Getting through security took quite a while though, long queues and as well as checking passports and visas, foreign visitors needed their photo taken from a neat little camera on the desk and we also had to press our fingers and thumbs on a glass fingerprint scanner (someone at the next desk seemed very unhappy about that!). By the time we’d gone through security our bags were on the carousel at baggage reclaim – so getting out from there was quick. Chennai airport is huge and there were statues of gods and deities all over – some brightly painted. We think that harvest festival has been celebrated recently and there were some lovely displays around. Once out in the road outside the terminal building we were hit with the warm air – we’re expecting 28°C later. It was a short walk to the metro station – dodging dozens of men asking us if we wanted a taxi. 

At the Metro station we hit a problem when we tried to buy our tickets – the card machine rejected my payment … fortunately we have a backup international card … that was refused too! Argh!! Panic and fury – I’d contacted all our banks before we left to tell them that we’re going to be in India, so they should make any payments here. Fortunately we also had some pounds and there was a bureau de change nearby so we bought IRR10,500 for £100 and purchased our metro tickets. When the train arrived and the doors opened Matthew was about to step I when I noticed that we were by a women only carriage – I managed to grab him and steer him along the platform! 

We arrived at our hotel at about 06:30. We’re staying in the Hyatt Regency in Chennai – it’s huge and much posher than anywhere that we’d normally choose stay at. We’re staying for two nights  – but we paid for an additional night so that we had somewhere to sleep when we arrived this morning. I saw from Matthew’s spreadsheet that the rooms + breakfast cost almost £400 … eek, that B&Q Garden of the Year prize money isn’t going to last long at this rate! We’ve noticed that there were bag scanners to get onto the platform at the Metro station, which seemed slightly odd … there was one for our bags to allow us into the hotel too. Maybe it’s the future everywhere. 

Once our bags were out of the hotel scanner they were grabbed by a porter who told us that they’d be brought to our room for us. I’m not at all comfortable with people carrying our bags for us, but perhaps that’s something else that we’re going to have to get used to – I quickly googled how much to tip hotel porters in India (30 rupees per bag, apparently!) I was utterly mystified about how he would know which room to bring our bags to when we’d not yet checked in! We did check in though and our bags arrived shortly after  – he was sweet and very welcoming and told us that we could ask him anything at all about Chennai. 

It was about 07.30 now and we wondered about going to sleep, but buffet breakfast is included in the hotel cost and they’d just opened. We weren’t confident that they’d still be open by the time we woke up, so we decided to have breakfast and then go to bed for the rest of the morning.

Any vegan will tell you that navigating menus is a nightmare, at least with a buffet breakfast we could make sure that just about everything we eat was okay. But there was way to service and they were wonderfully helpful  – they brought dosas – lovely crispy pancakes filled with spice potato and told us that this was a traditional Indian breakfast. Delicious!

When we had got up and showered Matthew said that he wanted to go to Semmozhi Poonga botanical garden and Kalaignar Centenary Park which is opposite the botanical gardens – both about a 20 minute walk away. We headed off on foot and quickly regretted that – pavements around here are in a terrible state – very uneven and non-existent in many place, so it’s necessary to walk on the road, but traffic is crazy – lots of people on scooters and lots of little yellow tuk tuks! When we arrived at the botanical garden Matthew was surprised and delighted that they were holding a flower show there at the moment! The whole place was full of families wandering around enjoying the flower show and having picnics and watching the performers in a little arena, (including a magic show). We did notice that lots of women were dressed exquisitely in gorgeous saris and looked fantastic, whereas lots of men didn’t look like they’d made much of an effort at all! 

The flower show had fountains, lots of plants in pots and included some big structures: a peacock, a crocodile, two swans, three tall women in big dresses made of flowers, a car, a boat, a steam train – all constructed from flowers in little pots.

We did a couple of laps then went to look at Kalaignar Centenary Park on the other side of a main road.

Getting into Kalaignar Centenary Park park opposite was tricky – entry tickets were only available online by scanning a QR code and completing a form. The form wouldn’t accept Matthew’s UK phone number, so we had to ask someone to help us – they bought the tickets on their phone and we reimbursed them. The park was very nice, quieter than the botanical gardens, and was home to several lovely stray dogs.

The big draw in Kalaignar Centenary Park is the musical fountain, but that wasn’t playing until 6:30 – we  decided that we couldn’t wait that long, so made our way to look at a famous Christian  cathedral nearby.

St George’s cathedral in Chennai was built in 1815 mainly to serve British colonists in what was then Madras. The design makes St George’s look very like St Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square in London.

The cathedral was extraordinary – filled with some huge marble statues and memorial plaques for (almost all) British men who had died in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The whole place is a bit dilapidated now and seems very incongruous in the fast-paced surroundings of modern Chennai.

We needed to get ready for a concert that started at 7, so we walked back to the hotel to rest up. There was a little light rain as we walked back to our hotel, so we arranged for a taxi to take us to the Kamarajar Arangam hall – a big auditorium not far away. The taxi took ages and arrive and we were worried that we’d be late, but we needn’t have been concerned, it didn’t start until almost 8. We were expecting some Indian classical music being played by an ensemble of musicians with some dancing – the event was billed ‘Agre Pashyami- divine dance drama’ – but what was presented was a series of extraordinary traditional Indian dances in gorgeous costumes and makeup with narration about Hindu gods and some associated stories. We couldn’t follow the narrative very well, but the dancing was spectacular and the music (off-stage) was brilliant. 

After the concert a late dinner back at the hotel. Matthew hadn’t done a RED (run every day) January run, so he went to the hotel gym to do that.

It’s the eve of our big trip to India and as anyone who knows us well will be aware, Matthew began packing his bags about a month ago and I’ve only just started!

Whenever we travel by bicycle, or on foot, I always try and persuade Matthew to pack as much ‘air’ as possible  – in other words, travel light! The problem with travelling light of course is that we invariably wish  that we had something with us when we’re away, which we hadn’t packed. It’s also the case that my version of packing air and Matthew’s are substantially different!

When we started planning this trip, we needed to get a rucksack for Matthew, which necessitated a visit to my favourite camping store: Taunton Leisure in Bedminster. Matthew was a bit put out in the shop when I told him that I thought he’d need a bigger rucksack than I have … he accused me of wanting him to carry some of my stuff  (which of course I do) to which I replied: “What do you think the point of you is?!”).

I have been making my packing list for a while, though, but now it’s time to make some tough decisions. Do we really need to take an iPad each?! My binoculars are quite heavy, even though they are small, but I’m fairly certain that I’d regret not bringing them with us. Matthew is packing five of each: socks, pants, t-shirts and shirts … but I’m going with only three, because I think the hotels were staying in will have a laundry service – so one on, one drying and one in the wash makes sense to me (plus I’m taking some swimming trunks that would do in an emergency!). (I may regret this decision in the heat of India!).

Fortunately, it’s the night before we go and I’ve started packing with the help of the ever-faithful Jojo. This may take me some time!

Here we go again! We’re off on another mega journey – our longest yet, but this time without our bicycles, unfortunately. In just five days we shall be landing in Chennai, India, ready to embark on a month-long trip cris-crossing this extraordinary country. To say we’re excited is an understatement, we can’t wait to for the sights, colours, scents and sounds of the sub-continent to overwhelm us (as everyone who’s visited tells us they will). The origins of this epic trip have a somewhat more mundane origin, though.

A few years ago, me and Mike decided to each write down a list of the places we’d like to visit or things we’d like to do – a sort of bucket list, (although we didn’t call it that). Then over a meal out, we shared each other’s lists. To each of our surprise, we’d both put ‘visit India’ on the list. That was several years ago now, and although we’ve marked off quite a few things on the lists, a big trip to India seemed far off (at least until we’d paid the mortgage and could afford to save for big trips). Then a visit to B&Q changed all that!

On a visit to our local B&Q in early 2023 Mike noticed a posters adverting their ‘Gardener of the Year’ competition. Mike said ‘Have you thought about entering that?’ I had seen it before, and told him that I already had! I didn’t really think that my garden (lovely as it is) and which would barely be called a garden by some I affectionately call it a ‘yarden’, as it is little more than a yard in size, but it is filled with a lot of plants, would have a chance. However, the competition categories included one for ‘imaginative use of space’, and I thought that was good description of my garden! So I had filled in ann application form, given a description of my garden and sent in some photos. That was that, and I didn’t think much more about it. 

Fast-forward to June 2023 and I was at work in a management team meeting in Birmingham. My phone rang with a number I didn’t recognise – not unusual as I often get unannounced calls from boaters. I try to answer as many as possible, as they are usually calls when someone is in difficulty or needs help. I nipped out of the meeting room to answer. A very polite lady on the other end asked if I was Matthew, I confirmed I was. She then proceeded to tell me that she was calling from B&Q to tell me that I’d won the ‘most imaginative use of space’ category in the B&Q Garden of the Year category, and what’s more, I had won the overall competition. Gobsmacked was an understatement!

Winning the competition was amazing, but even better was the prize: £10,000! For a moment I thought ‘I can get a lot of plants with that’- but even I had to accept that I might not fit them all into my yarden, so what to do with the winnings? It didn’t take long to decide that the prize money could get us to India and give me a chance to visit gardens in a completely different environment to anywhere I’ve ever visited before. So after a year of researching and planning our trip – the departure date is almost here. We’ll be blogging our way across the sub-continent, so we hope you’ll enjoy our posts.

Here’s what our trip to India looks like:

We land on the south-east coast in Chennai then head south west and then north.