Our next stop was Mysore, we arrived by train in the mid afternoon and took a taxi to our hotel. The hotel was the Grand Mercure …… We had lapsed back into a better class hotel, complete with roof-top pool and fine dining restaurant ……. We must recover our backpacking roots. Mysore is famed for it's Royal Heritage and especially it's world heritage-listed palace which was a truly amazing building - and also the first place we had visited where the en...

Our flight to Bangalore landed about midnight and we quickly found a cab but as we approached the city, we became less and less sure that the driver knew where he was going ….. However, with the aid of phone calls and locals pointing we finally found our "hotel" …… Little wonder the driver didn't recognise the address, it was down an alley, off a back street linked to a small side street - The alley was so narrow that we needed to align the car door with ...

27th July - Left at 7.00am for Delhi airport and our flight to Varanasi - it was a choice between a 13.5 hour train journey or a 1.5 hour flight with the price about the same, so this time the plane won. We took a taxi from the airport after landing for the 30km drive which took us over 2 hours - the traffic was terrible. Arriving at the river front (the famous Holy Ganges) our hotel met us by boat to take us 10 minutes upstream to our accommodation - a refur...

25th July - We changed our method of transport this afternoon and took an Ola (the Indian version of an Uber) to the train station bound for Delhi. The train was bang on time and we took our seats in the best train so far. Apparently, it's the fastest train in India and we got a litre bottle of water, a carton of juice, a small meal and a cup of chai! Not bad service at all. We arrived in to one of the Delhi stations to pouring rain and as usual, "attacked"...

23 June - Our next train journey was a short 1.5 hours to Agra on Dan's Birthday - what better place to celebrate than in the city of the beautiful Taj Mahal. We checked in to the very nice 5* Trident Hotel making the most of the Monsoon Specials that abound everywhere - this deal included happy hour between 6.00pm and 7.00pm which was buy one get one free - Heather loves a bargain! So, our first steps in to Agra was a visit to the "Baby Taj", which is a tomb...