Tuesday 11th February

5:30 am: Beep beep beep BEEP BEEP beep beep beep. The mind’s response: Goooood morning! You have served your time in the cottage, my friend. It’s time to leave Ooty. Pack your things and let’s get out of here! Yipeee! The body’s: I am very tired. It is five degrees outside and pitch black. And despite those suspicious-looking stains, this blanket feels rather cosy, doesn’t it? You don’t really care about the stains, do you? You’re disgusting. But you’re also comfortable. So very comfortable. So shut the hell up and go back to sleep. When you do, that annoyingly chirpy mind of yours will take you wherever you want to go: a spring meadow with bunny rabbits; a chocolate factory without Oompa-Loompas; maybe even somewhere less innocent like, um, Carol Vorderman’s cockpit.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Carol is one fine piece of pilot, but that last image was all it took for my mind to conquer the slumbering mass of flesh and bones it lives in, something I immediately regretted on the rickshaw ride to Ooty’s bus station. The wind-chill factor made it feel freezing, a deeply unpleasant sensation worsened by the donning of flip-flops and a wafer-thin hoody. But that didn’t really matter: in 13 hours I’d be in Fort Cochin sipping beer from a teapot by the sea, underneath a palm tree or beside a Chinese fishing net. Which at this point felt comparable to bridging the gap between Blackburn and Barbados.

The bus to Coimbatore, from where I would be boarding a train to Cochin, had already departed by the time we reached the station, but my driver had no trouble catching up and persuading Mr Conductor Man to let me clamber aboard. He looked concerned at the amount of baggage I was carrying and told me in Tamil that I could spend the journey’s duration in his seat at the front. It was just as well my language skills are so fantastic because within half an hour it was standing room only, which didn't look much fun on the precarious mountain roads. For the princely sum of 55 rupees, it was an absolute steal.

It took approximately three hours to wind down the Nilgiris (during which the temperature had risen to the low 30s) and another two to reach non-descript Coimbatore. Shortly after midday, I boarded my train compartment to find an item of unattended baggage in my seat. If this was England all hell would have broken loose, and I would have almost certainly wet myself in the ensuing panic. But this was India, so I had to man the hell up. Squinting my eyes and gritting my teeth, I placed the bag’s strap between by thumb and index finger, which undoubtedly looked super-duper camp, and pulled it slowly towards me (which in hindsight is absolutely not what a bomb disposal expert would do. Had I learned nothing from day one?). Nothing happened. THANK GOD. Feeling rather smug I sat down in my rightful place, but no sooner had I started surveying the scene from my window did the bag owner interrupt. “Sir, I placed my bag on that seat.” I won’t bore you with the minutiae of our conversation, but it ended with him condescendingly “allowing” me to sit there, despite the fact I had reserved this specific spot. Another man opposite felt my frustration and offered me an Oreo, which seemed a fitting empathic gesture, but by accepting I was actually granting him permission to rest his bare feet on the end of my seat for the next few hours. Such are the unwritten rules of Indian train travel.

I checked into my Fort Cochin hotel at 8pm and then I had a nice dinner and then I experienced an overwhelming sense of relief and then I fell asleep and dreamed of puppies and at no point did Carol Vorderman enter my subconscious.

 

Wednesday 12th - Thursday 13th February

I essentially tortured myself by arriving in Fort Cochin when I did. A place I know and love, this morning I had to prise myself away for a hot date with a temple town by the name of Guruvayur. 58 km north of Cochin (which I should really start spelling Kochi), the big draw here is the Hindu-only Shri Krishna Temple, particularly during Pooram season, which it happens to be. It seemed I was the only Westerner in town, which was rather exciting, and while I was able to soak up the atmosphere from a respectful distance, I wasn’t able to throw myself into proceedings, not being a Hindu and all. Which was a little disappointing. So, after another wonderful night’s sleep (this time of dreams unremembered), I boarded a local passenger train back to Cochin and engrossed myself in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, because I'm like, so well read. About two hours in I realised my arm, dangling from the window in direct sunlight, was essentially on fire. It's now as pink as Peppa the Pig’s facial blemish, and I'm in so much pain that typing this paragraph has taken the best part of a day, which means Friday 14th’s entry will really be something to look forward to.

Friday 14th February

I had a really nice day in Cochin. I am going to Varkala tomorrow. Which should also be nice.

Saturday 15th - Sunday 16th February

I’m becoming rather partial to travelling alone on Indian local buses, primarily because it puts me in point-blank proximity with people and situations I fundamentally do not understand. It’s essentially like being three-years-old, when everything is new and entertaining but you’ve got no real idea what’s going on or what people are saying. And then you fall asleep. This morning’s journey from Cochin to Kollam followed this exact pattern - half-an-hour in an elderly lady boards and sits herself down (that’s right readers, we’re rolling in the present tense; hold on to your hats). Seconds later, she stands up and starts shouting in Malayalam at a seemingly random man a few seats across. He ignores her and retains a nonchalant expression. Frustrated by his lack of response, the orthodontically-challenged woman starts gesticulating and upping the decibel levels. It’s becoming a little awkward - maybe this man has done something unspeakable? He quite rightly makes the decision to stand up and move to another seat a few rows back, at which point the woman directs her attention at someone else. Her anger is making me claustrophobic. She catches a whiff of my fear and she likes it; another trapped victim lies helplessly in wait, somewhere in front of these cataracts. Like Chucky off of Child’s Play, her neck turns mechanically until her eyes meet mine (she thinks - thank you cataracts #LOLLE), at which point I realise her diatribe is arbitrarily directed towards me. Resisting the need to hold the hand of the man next to me, I instead turn to offer him a nervous smile, which he interprets as: “Oh, you find this funny too! I thought you were about to shit yourself. But your facial expression now suggests otherwise! Ha ha ha!” Or words to that effect. In Malayalam. He proceeds to slap the back of the man next to him, repeating his assertion that I think the whole thing is hilarious, at which point they both start belly-laughing before five others join in for good measure. Feeling left out despite unwittingly initiating the hilarity, I half-heartedly laugh along with them, seemingly prompting angry woman to sit down and shut up, which makes me comfortable enough to fall asleep. I have no idea what just happened.

I didn’t really know how to get to Varkala, today’s final destination, from Kollam. I thought a train might be cheaper, faster and less witchy than another bus, so I caught a rickshaw, auto or tuk-tuk to the station and shared my hopes and dreams with the man at the ticket counter. He sold me a general compartment ticket for a measly 10 rupees, and I didn’t say thank you when he handed it to me. Not because I wasn’t brought up proper, but because I’m trying to blend in and shed the blithering Englishman perception I’m lumbered with (sporting a pony tail is also helping, I’m discovering). To keep up appearances, I coughed up a ball of spittle on the walk to the platform and rather majestically gobbed it onto the tracks. No one batted an eyelid. Then I burped really loudly and some teenagers started laughing at me and my pony tail. One step too far. Perhaps two, come to think of it.

Before I knew it, I was watching the Varkala sunset while sipping a vanilla latte, which pretty much set a precedent for the day to follow: a blissful 24 hours spent mainly on the beach chatting to stray dogs. I can only presume the waves had swallowed their boyfriends and husbands, but my goodness there were lots of them. On the steps back up to North Cliff, where most hotels, guesthouses and restaurants are located, I was unfortunate enough to be walking right behind one wearing a thong, which was inappropriate and disgusting in equal measure. To show my disdain I coughed up a ball of spittle and rather majestically gobbed it into the adjacent undergrowth. She didn’t bat an eyelid - clearly she had been desensitised. Which is ironic, because she thought nothing of walking around a town famous for its 2,000-year-old temple with nothing more than a piece of string between her lobster-pink arse cheeks.

 

Monday 17th February

It looked so easy: a two-and-a-half train ride north to Alleppey, gateway to Kerala’s face-slappingly beautiful backwaters. I was hoping to ride another local passenger train, but the 16346 Netravati Express (a name worthy of inclusion in any self-respecting train spotter’s wet dream) that rolled in was rammed to the point of inducing a sweat-riddled panic attack. Anyone familiar with Indian trains will know that carriages have upper and lower berths, with the former acting as luggage racks during daytime journeys. Which is absolutely fascinating. Upon boarding I persuaded a disinterested couple occupying an LB (if you’ll permit me to casually adopt Indian Railways’ terminology) to let me have the window-less bench above them, which resembled a high street household goods stores. God, I sound like such a racist. Soon after jerking myself (excuse me) into a borderline-comfortable position I felt a disconcerting tickle on my upper arm. It was a cockroach, and in the ensuing frenzy I beat the six-legged scuttlebucket with that copy of 100 Years of Solitude I was boasting about in my previous post. Until it was dead. Which wasn’t easy, considering cockroaches are the honey badgers of the invertebrate world. Afterwards, I noticed the whites of approximately 50 people’s eyes on mine; their blank expressions beyond interpretation. I like to think they were impressed, but on reflection it’s more likely that my aggression repulsed them and that they were quietly maintaining their dignity after I had so violently lost mine, which made me feel smaller than the pathetic pile of bent kindling that poor, innocent cockroach, whose only crime was to find itself a new playground, had become.

Because my berth was window-less, I had no idea when we reached Alleppey. And because the gentle chugging of Indian trains is the most soporific sensation known to man, I happened to be semi-conscious by the time we arrived. Fortunately, screams of “Is this Alappuzha?” from a middle-aged German couple a couple of berths back awoke me from my slumber. We disembarked together, skipping along the platform hand-in-hand to begin the next chapter of our respective holidays. Alles klar.

Tuesday 18th - Wednesday 19th February

A brief deviation: cast your mind back to when your parents picked you up from school and asked how your day had been. Chances are you shrugged your shoulders while sorting your football sticker swaps (David Batty AGAIN, Jesus Christ), mumbling something along the lines of “Fine” or “OK”, because you couldn’t be arsed to go into further detail. And your day was fine - you grew some water cress, sang a couple of songs from Bugsy Malone and learned your seven times table. In a few years you’d look back at these being among the most pleasant and carefree days of your life. Which is precisely how I feel about the nicer, incident-free parts of this trip; like, for example, Alleppey and the backwaters. I rode on a houseboat, ate some delicious Keralan food and basked in the serenity of one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited. The same goes for the next chapter, in which I travelled up to Munnar, whose surrounding hills are decorated with tea plantations and more cardamom and pepper than you can shake a cinnamon stick at.

Rest assured that things will spice up in the next post, in which I meet a man with a penchant for inserting nails into his oesophagus and… no, that’ll do for now.

And the wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. And the wheels on the bus go round and round, all day long. As apt and profound as these lyrics are, they only describe 75% of the journey from Munnar to Madurai, for the wheels also jerked up and down, up and down, all day long, such are the potholes on the thrilling-but-Jesus-Christ-that’s-a-steep-drop Western Ghats roads. And as uncomfortable and terrifying as this was, the jerkiness massaged my back better than any Ayurveda specialist could. The moral of this incredible story, then, is to save your hard-earned rupees by shunning the spa in favour of travelling on local rattletraps, which will (eventually) refresh and rejuvenate with the added bonus of getting you somewhere you need to be. The downside is that you’ll be contributing to the decline and subsequent extinction of a traditional millennia-old medicinal practice; a reason to visit south India in itself. Still, swings and roundabouts.

Hill folk, a term that sounds patronising but isn’t meant to, warned me that Madurai would be a cramped sweatbox of ubiquitous fumes, spittle and decrepitude. Or broken English words to that effect. But it gives me huge pleasure to independently and unbiasedly report that the city is nothing of the sort - steeped in Hindu mythology and boasting one of India’s finest temples, Madurai is absolutely a city worth visiting, if only for a couple of nights. The Meenakshi Amman complex is spellbinding, the craft shops aren’t the type owned by your rickshaw driver’s friend or brother, and to my surprise the city wasn’t that busy, at least by Indian standards. But the best thing in Madurai is a magician by the name of Sardar Hussain, whose repertoire of card tricks and making things disappear culminates with him coughing up a kilogram of nine-inch iron nails.

While I would go so far to say that I quite enjoyed my time in Madurai, I wouldn’t want to settle down there, marry a local and start a family, so I decided to proceed north-east to sunny Tanjore, a city that promises visitors the spectacle of a temple 600 years older than the one in Madurai. Yeah, screw you Madurai! Brihadeeswarar Temple is so old, in fact, that it pre-dates the invention of colour. Back in 1010, construction workers only had brown stone to work with, but they were clever enough to polish each and every block to reflect the morning and evening sun, which is rather pretty. Sadly, my experience was ruined when my flip-flops were stolen by a gaggle of teenaged boys in shiny black and pink shirts (essentially anthropomorphised Liquorice Allsorts), who mercilessly pointed and laughed at my hair before eventually tossing back my disgusting footwear. When I returned to my hotel room I realised they had been absolutely entitled to rib my salt-and-pepper locks, which have started to resemble the nether regions of Bodger’s badly-behaved best mate. It felt only right to punish myself, so I purchased a red snapper and repeatedly slapped it across my face until I got too hungry and ate it, starting with its fishy little eyeballs.

Suitably humiliated, I decided I had consumed enough fish and quite fancied some steak and a glass of red wine. And as luck would have it, the coastal down of Pondicherry, once administered by our chums across the Channel (or, in the interests of geopolitical unbiasedness, mates across La Manche), was the next place on my to-see list. Provencal it is not, but in Pondy couples walk hand-in-hand along the promenade, men play boules in front of the church, and croissants and coffee are consumed for breakfast. But the most entertaining thing here is awarding yourself 100 rupees of spending money every time ‘Life of Pi’ is mentioned. By the time I was due to proceed north for Mahabalipuram, a name that took me approximately three days to memorise and pronounce correctly, I had enough notes to run myself a money bath; a bit like that one in Slumdog Millionaire, minus the being murdered by gangsters bit.

As it happened, I bloody loved Mahabalipuram, whose name was recently changed to Mamallapuram but is often more conveniently referred to as Mahabs. In case you were wondering, which you weren’t. It reminded me of a scaled-down version of Hampi with a fishing village and arguably Tamil Nadu’s best beach thrown in for good measure. After checking into my hotel I took a stroll along the beach and noticed a string of seafood restaurants facing out to sea, the first of which I vaguely recognised. On closer inspection I noticed a sign outside: “BBC TV Telecast by Rick Stein England”. I bloody knew it. My belly rumbling in anticipation, I walked into the restaurant and asked for whatever Rick had wolfed. “White fish and gravy, sir”. “That’ll do squire, that’ll do.” “Sorry sir?” “Yes please, white fish and gravy.” And very nice it tasted too, with the added bonus of me not being confined to bed and writing in agony for 48 hours hence. Little did I know that such a scenario would be waiting for me in Rajasthan a few weeks later.

I didn’t really want to leave Mahabs, but I had a hot date with Delhi and most of north India to attend. My taxi to Chennai Airport was driven by 19-year-old Vetri, a man so impossibly gentle that I wanted to take him home and wrap him in cotton wool approximately 15 seconds after meeting him. Vetri had effectively been forced to take his cab driver job three months previously in order to support himself and his mother - something his councillor father could no longer do after a recent local election defeat led to his suicide. With zero inheritance, Vetri was forced to drop out of his college journalism course, get a driving licence and start working for a boss who pays him 10 per cent of each fare. “How much do you earn in a week?” I asked. “On average, 1,000 rupees only.” Which equates to roughly a tenner.

This wasn’t your classic sob story aimed at rupee-wielding tourists, chiefly because shy, modest Vetri was reluctant to tell me anything about his life, presumably out of modesty and for fear of becoming upset. I told him it was OK and that he could stop, but I was curious to find out more. “You know,” he said, “everything I do, I do it for my mother. But she very sick.” So sick, in fact, that she won’t be around for too much longer - and if the tragedy of impending orphanship wasn’t bad enough, Vetri also has to pay for his mother’s ever-increasing medical bills, because the pair aren’t entitled to any help from the government.

Correctly sensing that my mood had become a little sombre, Vetri changed the subject by introducing “a very interesting story” about how a cigarette saved his life. I was all ears. “I was in Hyderabad a few years back with my best friend and some others,” he explained. “We were entering the Mecca Masjid and I needed a cigarette, so my friends went in before me and I started walking to the shop. Then a big blast happen. My best friend, he died. And the others they die also. But I survived because I wanted cigarette.” But Vetri only just survived: his story explained the presence of a large scar on the left side of his face, while a glance at his bare arms revealed numerous shrapnel wounds.

What this young man has been through, is going through and will have to go through.

I’m so excited about Sunday’s final that I’ve taken to Photoshop to make a World Cup quiz. The premise is thus: scroll down and look at the 23 pretty pictures. Each one represents a nation that qualified for Brazil. The first person to correctly identify them all wins a Mini Milk and a holiday from Indigo East. Come on England!