We looked into the backwater cruises north of Trivandrum and decided they were too much hassle and not worth the effort. As such, it made sense to change our travel slightly and head to Bangalore a day early.

To this end, we booked a bus ticket up there departing at 13:30 tomorrow, and cancelled our existing train ticket. Both procedures were a doddle, and the cancellation charge for the train negligible. The bus is actually more expensive than the train, but slightly quicker and likely to be more comfortable. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

We popped into a hotel on MG Road (there are a lot of MG Roads in India – I’ll let you work out what MG stands for) for a thali. This was only 90Rp and neither of us managed to finish it due to the copious amounts of rice provided. Rather nice, though.

Afterwards, we found a hotel bar and had a quick drink and a natter before checking emails and the like. I’m heartened to hear that another friend back home’s been a mum for 6 months, and another is due her second in a couple of weeks! You lot certainly aren’t wasting time while I’m away.

There’s very little else to do around here, so we grabbed some snacks and headed back to the room to read and mess about on laptops until dinner.

For that meal we popped back to MG Road and up to a rooftop restaurant. Fresh pineapple juice and chicken fried rice cost less than a pound.

The internet still wasn’t working back in the hotel so the challenge was to finish the books we were reading before falling asleep.