This morning the tour leaves Willingdon Island for the touristy but interesting area of Fort Cochin. It's interesting, and therefore touristy, due to the presence of a number of very old buildings, including the church of St Francis which is India's oldest Eurpean-built church dating from 1503. Vasco de Gama was the first European reach India and was buried here until his remains were transferred to Portugal in 1517. Well, now that you've had the history lesson, no doubt you'd like to know what we did there.

Rather than do the religious building sightseeing thing we decide to browse some interesting furniture shops. There are some lovely items of furniture to be seen, typically made from rosewood or jackfruit wood to traditional designs. We think we'd like to furnish our house with some of this stuff, but we're not quite ready to buy anything just yet. Also there are large ornaments including some quarter-size wooden elephants - you'd need plenty of space in your home to accommodate one of these!

At lunchtime we're released into an area of fish vendors and told to hunt down lunch. The idea is that you choose your fish, which is lying on a slab surrounded by flies, buy it by haggling over the price, then take it along to a nearby outdoor caf with resident cats, crows, and other assorted vermin where they will cook it to a suspect recipe. You can then eat it sitting on plastic chairs at plastic tables whilst being harrassed by touts, beggars, hawkers and itinerant musicians. Truly an Indian experience! But the fish was good.

We're on the train again for the last leg of our journey today, from Ernakulam Junction to Coimbatore North Junction to be exact, a journey of about four hours. Our hotel at Coimbatore is very plush, with a doorman who has a very scary moustache and a top hat which looks like something out of a Dickens story. There's an altercation between the hotel manager and our party organiser because most of our rooms aren't ready, as a result of which we all get a Rs300 voucher for dinner tonight. This is not exchangeable for beer however. This doesn't stop us drinking some anyway.