Bye bye Delhi + the North...Hello Kochi + the beautiful South!

We woke early for our taxi to the airport and had a fight with my backpack which wouldn’t close, as I’d exploded into 4 bags during the trip and had to get it back down to just the two! Sylvia came down to wave us off bless her. During the trip to the airport we got told to get out of the car while the driver filled up on petrol, I don’t know why but that seems to be the case in India, you can’t fill up unless everyone is out of the car!

Got to the airport and realised we hadn’t printed off our flight confirmations and in India you can’t get into an airport unless you show both that and your passport. So off we went to the printing centre, where we had a fight on our hands to stop people from pushing in front of us – the Indians just don’t know how to queue for anything!

We then went through and were starving so went to Pizza Hut for breakfast – great food for a bad stomach, cured it right away. Our flight was via Mumbai, and the weird thing in India is their national flights are like buses, instead of getting out at Mumbai like a connection, you just sat on the plane while people got off and then others got on again, it really was quite weird. The flight was around 5hrs in total and once we got to Kochi, mine and Laura’s bags were literally first off the plane – woop! We waited for Paul’s bag to arrive...and waited...and waited...had a good laugh at how stressed he was getting...then the last bag came around the conveyor belt...and it wasn’t Paul’s!!! Now we felt guilty about laughing, as it turns out his bag hadn’t been tagged for the flight and had been left in Delhi lol. So he had to sort everything out so that his bag could be flown over on the next flight the next day.

We got a prepaid taxi to Fort Kochin, which we knew was a long way, but this seriously WAS a long way! Took us about an hour and a half to reach our homestay, which was nice, but SO SO hot, as being travellers we couldn’t afford aircon, plus the beds were rock solid, but we had started to realise that that was just India’s beds as everywhere was uncomfortable. We planned to meet Paul but we were so tired, all we could manage was a quick walk to the shops around the corner. Then we had the first of our many daily power cuts which I’d heard the south had a lot of so sat in candlelight for half an hour, then we literally just conked out!