Morgalogue

About a month ago, I realised that while India is ‘really big’, you can still get from one end to the other in a few days if you have to. At the same level of generalisation, it can also be said that culturally, India is divided into North and South. I decided to trade in my thorough exploration of the South for a scatter-gun tour of the North to get a feel for this contrast. (more…)

As I was nudged awake by the motion of my sleeper bus, my first glimpse of Bombay couldn’t have been more perfect. We were gunning along a brand new road, across a barren landscape that terminated in a hazy horizon, bleached by a harsh morning sun. The longer we rode towards towards it, the more this white hot haze grew, draining the colour from the sky and the earth in front of us. Vast, desolate salt plains, half filled with dirty water, like no-mans land battle scars, stretched into the void, relflecting the emptyness. The only clue that something was about to emerge from this bleak mirage were the colossal lanes of electricity pylons, galloping into the distance. (more…)

Before reaching Gokarna, I was about to write a post which would have had to have been filed under the new heading of ‘moans’. I’d been giving myself a bit of a hard time about what exactly I was ‘doing’ out here. I didn’t expect a beach and beer bottle to provide me with so much inspiration. (more…)

I’ve installed a spam filter on the blog so hopefully that will stop all the dribbling viagra salesmen from calling at my door. I had forgotten that anyone who signed up for a reply on the comments you left would be getting all that stuff in their inbox. Apologies for that. Cheers Rick for putting me on to the filter, much apprecieted.

Another catching up post. For the benifit of my Mum, who wants a map included (I’ll see), since leaving Madurai I’ve been to Kumbakonam and some small, very rural towns around there, Thanjavur, Tiruchirapalli, Coimbatore, Ooty (the British summer retreat), Mysore, Hampi and now the beautiful, surprisingly undeveloped, beaches of Gokarna. I’m relaxing in the sun doing absolutely nothing and loving it - but you don’t want to hear about that I’m sure. Rather than log all that lot, I just picked a few little snapshots I wanted to write about … and in my usual style, combed through them in minute detail. (more…)