Holidays are over...

Long time ago since I posted the last message… And so much has happened!

Trivandrum, my current home-town

In Goa, we had such horrible weather that both our moods were affected... We decided to take a look on the internet and see whether the weather would be better soon, and if not, where we could go to otherwise. The latter seemed to be the case, no improvement of the weather in Goa soon – in fact all India seemed to be covered with rain – so after long doubting, we decided to take a train to anywhere in the southeast of the country, where it seemed to be least rainy. Chennai was the preferred destination, just almost 1000km away from Goa – but with an easy connection to Mumbai.

So this is what monsoon must be like

I guess we were lucky with the weather we had until now - except for Ooty maybe, but that was not abnormal either. Mostly warm and very few rain. If it rained, it was only for 10minutes or so. Today, that was different - all morning it was raining and raining and raining. Everywhere the landscape was wet to flooded, even the houses were often flooded. We sat in the train, both thinking that in this weather wasn't ideal for exploring Mangalore, nor for our good mood... Besides, we needed to fit in another laundry day and our schedule was already very tight. So we decided to skip Mangalore and go straight to Gokarna, where we are right now.

Not too sure whether Gokarna was such a good idea either

Waiting for the train again

... So that's an excellent opportunity to update our site! However, limited time again since I've got only half an hour left. Was chatting with mommy and that felt so nice!

We're sitting in an internetcafe at Ernakulam, that's the mainland part of Cochin in Kerala. It's amazing how far we've traveled already, we've been in five states since arrival: Maharashtra, a short stop in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and now Kerala. Soon we'll also visit Goa, so then we'll have visited all the southern states!

Cochin Chinese fishing nets

... But it can be very hot too :)

After Ooty, we were really fed up with the cold. Especially since I got wet and so did my stuff. So we were wishing for some WARM place, and so we got! We took the train through the beautiful mountains - although they were sometimes invisible because of the many smoke of the train. At the end, when we came through a more densely inhabitated area, there were loads of children waving at the train, that was really very touching. After an in-between-stop we arrived in Coimbatore in the evening, to leave it again the next morning. Our destination was Thanjavur, a rather small city according to Indian standards or at least according to the other cities we visited already (pop. 215 000). We had a really nice and cosy hotel there, with very friendly staff (did the washing there, and bought lots of fruit, which we ate at the hotel restaurant where they were so kind to give us plates).

Thanjavur