Bangkok - Yangon - Mandalay - Bagan - Kalaw - Lake Inle - Yangon - Bangkok Indian buses, Indian roads - all is forgiven! We spent a total of around 53 bottom-numbing, bone-crunching hours on Burmese buses, all old Japaneses coaches and minibuses more suited for the school run in suburban Tokyo than a 12-hour trip along pot-holed and monsoon-eaten roads and rather hairy hairpin bends, with people and bags of onions crammed down the aisle on plastic stools and on ...

Alapuzzha - Cochin - Gokarna - Agonda - Mumbai - Bangkok We are in Bangkok and the sun has just come out after a downpour. It rained at the same time yesterday, as we made our way by taxi from the airport to the Khao San Road, a shock after the round-the-clock sunshine in India, but the heat is just as oppressive. For anyone who has ever been to the Khao San Road, it's sort of the same as it was, but a lot bigger and louder. Alongside Boots, which was here when...

Benaulim - Agonda - Hampi - Mysore - Ooty - Madurai - Kumily - Alappuzha Someone has turned the heat up. I am sitting under a fan in a little computer cubicle, still hot and sticky, but it's a relief after the beating sun and humidity outdoors here in Alappuzha, town on the backwaters in Kerala. We arrived yesterday afternoon after a three and a half hours on a bus and three and a half hours on a little ferry from Kumily, high in the Western Ghats. It was anothe...

Delhi - Agra - Jaipur - Jodhpur - Jaiselmer - Mumbai - Benaulim Well, after a hectic couple of weeks in the north, we have now installed ourselves in rooms a few hundred yards from the beach in Benaulim, Goa. Bliss and - at last - beer! India has been everything I expected and more: cows in the street, people everywhere and poverty like I've never before seen. It's both beautiful and shocklingly polluted in places, and we have met some wonderful people. One thi...