We arrived in Kollam broken, with the sole mission of renting a houseboat to explore the famous backwaters of Kerala. The city was dirty, crowded, not-so-tourist friendly. After a disappointing meal of flavored liquid on rice we headed towards the docks in search of a...
We found a nicer beach about an hour away. Though the weather was cloudy and many places were closing up. This is what you get for visiting resort towns during the off season. I've never before been so self-conscious wearing a bathing suit at the beach. Men stare at...
Early in the morning they came out to the beach. Dozens of men tugging at the ropes to pull in the day's catch. In the end there were only a handful of fish caught in the giant net. Almost as many fish as fishermen. A lot of...
We expected paradise. We got dirty sand and too high waves. And then it rained. Oh, India. ...
Jaime and I have been traveling in India for two months now. Two long months. We've seen everything from the Taj Mahal to random exposed penises, from the adorable kids at our volunteer assignment in Setrawa to garbage being burned int he streets. Indian immigration...
Quite frankly, two weeks of nothing but (delicious but) similar vegetables served up with nothing but the same slices of bread makes you tiresome fast. The food we ate at our homestay in Setrawa was "tasty," but when we left we needed a bit of...
Sometimes you just need a break from it all. To escape the city. To escape the heat. And so Jaime and I decided that we would spend one day in Kolkata at the movies, creating our own double feature, seeing something from Bollywood and something...
Our guidebook made Kolkata seem like it would be some sort of cesspool where we could only find expensive yet run-down hotels, where we'd be accosted by touts and beggars, where we'd pay too much for too little. We were dreading leaving our beautiful little Darjeeling,...
Darjeeling ended up being a nice little vacation from India. It was surprising how different it seemed from everywhere else we'd been so far. Up in the mountains, it was colder. The people were friendlier. There were no cows or rickshaws. No one stared at...
On our way out of Varanasi we were mobbed by rickshaw drivers, each shouting numbers without really even listening to where we were going. We chose one who gave us a reasonable price when we said which train station we were heading to and ignored...