South India ~ Original India

“I don’t speak Hindi”, my guide at the Sri Ranga temple announced – with more than a slight sense of pride. Yes I’m in Tamil Nadu, in the deep south of India, where Tamil has been the language for nearly 4,000 years. Little wonder they feel the Taj Mahal is a very recent usurper of […]

The Road to Mandalay

Back in 1890, a young 24 year-old named Rudyard Kipling was making his way back to England from India when his ship made an unscheduled stop in Moulmein, the previous capital of British Burma. He was reportedly so impressed by the looks and confidence of the Burmese women he saw that he was motivated to […]

Bengal & Benares

Calcutta, or Kolkata as it is now known, is a huge city and once the seat of British India. You would have to say that they made a pretty good job of constructing such a giant edifice that nobody would doubt their divinely-ordained power. And out the front is a huge open space which has […]

Vini Pu and other Montenegran oddities

I think it is high time I published some thoughts (and photos) on Montenegro. Now I find myself on my last day in Ulcinj in the far south, with the call to prayer at the mosque on Friday the first I have heard since I was in Morocco. The owner of my guesthouse described himself […]

Paradise in a warzone

I found my golden beach in Trincomalee in the northeast of Sri Lanka.   This place should be paradise, but it’s suffered a rough couple  of decades. The north of Sri Lanka is about as close to the south of India as Tasmania is to Australia. So going back centuries, the Tamils in south India […]

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