Rooted Wanderings

Our next stop after Kerala was the state of Gujarat in western India. We didn’t have any particular reason for going there, it just sort of became the plan after we found a couple cool activities we wanted to do. To get there from Kerala we spent 36 hours on the train rolling northward, and finally disembarked in Ahmedabad. And wow - for the first time in India, the air temperature was actually comfortable. It had even been downright chilly as Julia stood near the open train door and watched the landscape go by just before dawn. Little fires speckled the roadsides with people gathered around them for warmth, and some demonic looking industrial orange flares shone in the distance. Ahmedabad itself was a rather uncharming and smoggy city. We spent most of the morning in our hotel room sleeping off the train ride exhaustion, listening to an endless cascade of muffled honks from the street below. Ahmedabad definitely had a more run down feel than Chennai, and especially more so than...

Go to Kerala...Go to Kerala… this message seemed to echo among almost everyone we talked with. From the Indian restaurant owner in Scotland, friends from home, and our Chennai hosts, the message was clear. So we went to Kerala, eager to discover why everyone loves this state so much! While Tamil Nadu is on the east side of South India, Kerala is on the west. That meant it was time for our first train ride, 15 hours rolling across South India. Although wandering around the Chennai station at 3 am trying to figure out where our late train would be arriving was not the most fun, the train ride itself was surprisingly great. It was actually better than a number of our train rides in Europe. Trains are definitely the way to travel! It helped that we were in the relatively expensive AC2 class (by default, since the tickets we luckily found were almost the only ones still available on the whole train!). AC2 is a curtained compartment with bunk beds on either side of a narrow aisle. M...