New Photos

We just got a new CD done so here are some photos, some of them from near the beginning of the trip cos we feel like uploading quite a few. Paul and the smallest Sikh in the world (our self appointed Golden Temple tour guide) , a fishing village in Orissa and me with my flowers in our hotel room and now we're giving up cos there have been a lot of problems uploading. never mind we will try again another day....

Happy Birthday to me!

We've been having an amazing time since we left Madurai, which was also cool. First we went to Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary in the Keralan hills, which is an amazingly beautiful area. We went on an early morning wildlife spotting trek which mainly involved spotting leeches, mainly attached to me as leeches appear to share the love all biting insects have for attaching themselves to me (seriously the rest of the trekkers nicknamed me the leech detector, it's not fair). We also saw this huge black and yellow spider in it's web. After we'd all taken photos of it, with our hands allmost touching it to show the size of the thing, our guide informed us that it was 'one of the few posinonous spiders found in Periyar'. Which was nice. Then we trekked to the top of a very steep hill and were rewarded with the sight of wild elephants on the neighbouring hill which made everyone very excited except for Paul, who stood there loudly making remarks like 'I've seen them much closer in the temples' while we all tried to ignore him. We also saw the Malabar giant squirrel and some Nilgiri monkeys and the scenery was very beautiful. Then we took a boat trip around the lake in the sanctuary, which we'd been told was not very good for wildlife spotting, only to see loads of sambar, wild boar and two more groups of elephants including a big herd with some babies drinking right by the waters edge which actually managed to impress Paul.
After a slightly eventful bus journey down to the backwaters, during which our driver and most of our fellow passengers kept having to get out and hide as he was technically breaking a strike (which was due to end in an hour), we caught the ferry through some beautiful little canals to Alleppey where the hotel we had booked for my birthday was located. We got picked up by a very nice boat which took us to our hotel, which consisted of 12 little wood cottages surrounded by palm trees on the edge of a lake. Our room was lovely with a big outdoor shower under the palms and the sun was shining for the first time in days and we had the pool to ourselves....all in all it was a perfect day. Paul also arranged for an amazing bouquet of flowers about the size of me to be delivered at dinner (they were meant to be in our room when we arrived but weren't so we also got a free sunset cruise. Which was nice). The manager had promised to do it 'subtly - she won't even know it's going to happen' which apparently meant assembling almost the entire staff and then coughing loudly until Paul realised what was going on. They all hovered behind a bookcase as if Paul was going to propose and to entertain them I asked Paul to sing 'Have I told you lately that I love you' and, due to our state of ludicrous overexcitement and some Keralan wine, he did so quite loudly which they seemed quite disturbed by. We were debating whether he should jump on a table to continue the performance or just give up and actually propose when some other guests turned up and we realised we should really just go to bed. The next morning I had a massage with sirodhara which is when they pour oil on your head - travel TV programmes can't seem to go near Asia without the presenter having it done - and, once I'd got over being naked in front of a complete stranger, and the urge to turn to the camera and say 'this is very relaxing and one of a number of treatments offered by the hotel', it was one of the most relaxing experiences of my life. Anyway I'll stop gloating about my birthday now and say thank you to everyone for their messages and thanks also to Paul for shoehorning the date into his last post so only a few people forgot (if you are one of those people I am no longer talking to you. I may be 24 but I'm not a grown up). And, apologies for being very soppy, but thanks to Paul for making it the best birthday ever xx.
Right before I actually make someone vomit, I'll go and find him.....
Sophie xx

Just been reading Toms story on the People website and offer my congrats again I don't know who tho woman involved is but its much better than the total non-story in the Sun, I mean who hasn't been groped by Dean Gaffney on a night out at some stage. After scouring the papers I see absolutely nothing has changed in Britain I do find myself mch more interested in the tabloid trash stories than the political news, it seems to be less full of shit. I was interested to hear about the 12 year old Muslim kids laying a game on-line where they shoot Tony Blair I wish they'd have released the website that would have released some pent up agression.
Anyway saw another Temple today there becoming a bit tiresome, same thing every time really, where off to a wildlife park tommorow to ride elephant through Tiger country then a boat trip and a night in a 5-star cottage resort facing a lake, with sunset boat rides and swimming pool for Sophies birthday (23rd).
Wish I was at home in the cold watching I am celebrity though (not really)
love Sri Paul

Auroville and the temple towns

Firstly wishing everyone whose had there birthday's a happy birthday.
Gutted I missed Ryan and Tom's and Minnies 'Celebrations'.
Thanks for the latest "news" from back home, well done Tom for getting the front page on such a prestigious paper as the People, I can wait for the pun headline on Jessy Wallace's Crunchy incident.
Anyway Auroville worked its magic on me and I was up during the night after the last blog puking up and being attacked by a million mosquitoes in what I described to sophie as 'my worst shit ever'. So we missed a days gardening, which we were suprisingly gutted about, the people where thoroughly entertaining, there was Wayne and Stacey fresh out of drug rehab, Wayne kept telling me it was great to meet someone from London even though he'd been in India three days, he also insisted on speaking really bad Spanish to all the Indian lads for reasons known only to himself. Katlin the serial optimist from America somewhere who says everything is ausome, probably even if you told her you wanted to chop her head off and bury it in the whole you were digging, which I may have thought about once or twice.
Any way we would have loved to have stayed in Auroville for longer but all our clothes were damp, and I couldn't stand going for another mosquito nightmare poo, so much for the revelution.
Since Auroville we have been to Thiruvunamalai, Thirichipalli, Thanjuvur and where now in Madurai, I hope your looking all these up in the atlas and encyclopedias.
All these town have enormous temples which we have been in awe of, one morning at 5.30 I was woken by singing from the huge temple next to our hotel, I told sophie trying not to wake her up that I was going down to check it out and would be back in ten minutes, as I entered the temple there was an elephant blessing people who gave it money, also a holy cow(couldn't see the difference) with a crowd round it and lots of people lighting fire. I looked a complete fish out of water trying to peer into the 'inner sanctum' that only hindu's are allowed into really when some bloke ask me something about an ashram and I just nodded, so I ended up going through the whole ceremony which involved praying to about twenty statues all called shiva or shakti (I joined in out of respect and didn't look stupid at all) then I put so ash stuff on my head and red dye on my forehead walked around another statue ten times chanting something very badly and when he put his hands in the fire I explained i'd just had my nails done.
Anyway with all the incense and dizzy darkness I felt most peculiar for 6.30 and it was now light outside I started to reflect on what i'd just done and came to the conclusion that I was now blessed and the only decent thing to do is descend into the hills and become a saddu.
My new name is Sri Paul Enfield and I bless you all.

We're very spiritual people

Well, we're staying in a community called Auroville which is designed to be an ideal city dedicated to promoting human unity anyway. For us this involves staying in a tree hut with no electricity and a toilet 100 mts away through the long grass. Well obviously I had to tell Paul that we were doing well on the whole illness front with just three really bad days between us which meant that my stomach problems occurred the night we moved into the hut (without a torch!) - a manic dash through the darkness to an equally pitch black toilet with a soundtrack of howling dogs and the large book on 'Common Snakes of Auroville' I'd seen earlier in the day running through my mind wasn't exactly the ideal introduction to the place but since then it's been great. It has a fantastic swimming pool, a nice beach, really nice food....yeah I guess I'm missing the whole spiritual side! Well, we did do some work on one of the farming projects here today and it was wicked, will be doing some more tomorrow. And we did visit the giant meditation building which looks more like a giant golden golfball than anything else - they were doing some building work which meant we couldn't go inside. So Auroville - a great place but maybe not 'Auroville - the city the Earth needs' as the leaflets somewhat grandiosely claim.
Before we got here,we went to Chennai which was a cool city - the highlight was definitely going to see a Tamil film which was just as ludicrously overdramatic as you could hope with loads of random dancing and singing, ridiculous fight scenes and a scene in which the evil woman of the piece was electrocuted in a comedy (well we thought so) style and then spent a few hours dying dramatically. It was really entertaining and it was surprising how much we understood. Then we went to Mamallapuram which was a pretty, sleepy little seaside town. We loved the Crocodile Breeding Centre just outside where me and Paul paid about 50p to feed the crocs, which were in very crowded pens with not very high walls, and then kept running away screaming like little girls when they jumped with their jaws open to get the food. We felt particularly stupid when we noticed some local women doing maintenance work in one of the pens, barefoot and with only a large stick for protection. We also had a kinda weird evening with some fellow travellers including a relic called Mickey who had been coming to India for 18 years and seemed quite nice until he revealed his rabid hatred of Muslims, claiming the tornado that hit Birmingham deliberately targetted Muslim areas (?!). Time for me and Paul to take him to task....oh no we just stared at the floor and muttered (we are actually getting a lot of practise at this as a lot of Hindu Indians do tend to assume we hate all Muslims as they do). Then onto Pondicherry where I had a baguette with loads of butter for the first time in two months (very important for me) but which was a bit depressing due to the very rich Westerners everywhere and the equal number of drunk/destitute Indians, which we haven't really seen that much elsewhere. And then to here, where we are developing our spiritual sides by joining the Om choir and the spiritual healing dance sessions which I'll let Paul tell you about next time.

Love Sophie xx

True Pilgrims

Well our 22 hour trip to Tirupati turned into a 29 hour one. As always me and Paul got to sit next to the noisiest party on the whole train, in this case six fifty-sixty year olds from Delhi on a big tour of India. They were incredible mainly for their food consumption, which involved bringing a huge amoutn of food with them and then stopping anyone selling anything edible to consume yet more (someone went buy about every twenty minutes except for a two hour period wehre for some reason no-one came by at which point two of the chubsters held long loud conversations about how hungry they were) and also for the farting which went on continuously and which they found endlessly hilarious and got quite upset if we didn't join in the laughter (well after twenty hours it just didn't seem that funny anymore)
Tirumala is a big pilgrimage centre (the biggest in the world apparently) and is situated at the top of a hill 11km from the nearest town. Paul insisted we went the whole way by foot like all the other true Hindu pilgrims...we joined the hundreds of other people setting off happily but within ten minutes had joined the hundreds of people collapsing at the side of the ludicrously steep steps (well mainly I had, Paul was loudly announcing that he could run up them easily, which wasn't at all irritating) After the first half hour of moaning continuously, I actually got really into it, helped by the encouragement everyone was giving each other although there were quite a few people clearly wondering why non-Hindus would torture themselves this way. By the time we got to the top 4 hours, 4000 steps and 9km later, the rains (yes, it's monsoon in this part of India at the mo which we'd conveniently ignored when embarking on this journey) had really set in and the last hour was spent walking in the pissing rain unable to see more than a few feet in front of us, not quite the breathtaking views we had hoped for. Still there was the temple to see..... After discovering that getting a paying ticket was a labrynthine process so complex that no-one could even explain how it could be acheived, we joined the free entry queue, glad that we were really experiencing the whole pilgramage thing...right up unitl we found out that the queue entered something called the Q complex and involved being locked in a barn until you would be allowed in at 11.30 pm (8 1/2 hours later!) It was at this point that our dedication to being fake Hindus ran out (although we did resist the temptation to indulge in some small scale bribery to get in quickly deciding this was quite insulting to real Hindus, who were willing to walk all day in the rain and then spend 8 hours in a barn to get in. The nutters) Despite the farcical aspect of the whole day it was actually pretty fantastic, what with the atmosphere and the sense of acheivment (well for me - although Paul who claimed the whole thing was easy is still having naps the following day due to his 'exhaustion' whereas I am quite normal) .
Incidentally thanks to Szymon for the comment - we thought no-one was reading anymore but we have become strangely addicted to writing this so carried on anyway (V - we understand now). Come on Latch you can't tell me that you are now so involved in celebrity mum trivia that you no longer have the average two hour office time to play around on the Internet and leave us witty little messages.......we miss them!