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I am writing this in Wetherspoons at the South terminal Gatwick airport, where I am ingesting a rather unpleasant plate of gooey pasta and a glass of chardonnay, which is fine as it has alcohol in. We didn’t mean to stay here the night before our flights to Thailand, but when snow started to fall… Read more

We arrived at Howrah station filled with trepidation about our 24 hour train ride to Delhi. It was an early start – our train was due to leave just after eight, so to be sure of locating the platform, train and carriage in time we aimed to be there by seven. We had got used… Read more

We were happy to return to the comfort of the Hotel Cecil in Kolkata. Despite our colds we managed to get some sightseeing in before the time came for us to catch the train to Delhi. We spent a few hours at the family home of the famous Indian poet Rabrindranath Tagore. It Was worth… Read more

It only takes a couple of hours on the train from Bhubaneswar to Puri. The journey was on a local train so it was crowded with no air conditioning, but we did at least have our own reserved seats. We met some Indian students who we chatted to on the journey which made the time… Read more

We had a limited amount of time before we needed to catch the train from Kolkata to Delhi to get our Air India flight back home on 16th December. There were some interesting looking towns between Siliguri and Delhi that we could have visited. An Indian couple we met suggested visiting Varanasi. We considered that,… Read more

After a good night’s sleep and breakfast in our room at The Cecil Hotel (omelette toast with chai) we set off to continue our exploration of Kolkata. The sky was dark and overcast and the air was humid. We handed our laundry in. The hotel manager said it might take a bit longer than usual… Read more

We faced a long day and night of travelling to get to Kolkata. First we caught the local bus to Siliguri which took us around four hours. This retraced some of our original journey up to Gangtok. The road was treacherous, but after the journeys we’d taken in Sikkim in the last few weeks, it… Read more

The same tour agency that organised our taxi to Yuksom provided our taxi down to Kalimpong. We could have travelled by shared jeep but we would have had to make three changes and it would have been a bone shaking journey. As it was we had to travel along a number of hazardous roads. Our… Read more

Our taxi was waiting to take us from Pelling to Yuksom at 9am. We called in at the SBI cash machine before leaving, as we had heard that there are no ATMs in Yuksom. Our cards seem to work best in SBI (State Bank of India) ATMs and they don’t charge a fee. I have… Read more