The vehicle that keeps appearing on Kerala’s roads looks, at first glance, like something that rolled off an American assembly line in 1953 and somehow ended up here. The flat bonnet, the round headlights, the boxy upright body. It is…
The hotel room had a refrigerator. That is a detail that starts to matter around mid-afternoon, when you have been in a car for six hours and the thought of a cold beer on the balcony becomes specific and insistent.…
Fort Kochi is on a peninsula and the bus station is on the mainland, but I had a plan. Get up early, walk 500 meters to the car ferry and walk onboard, ride over to the mainland, walk or hail…
Seeing “Ashok Leyland” on the front of the bus that pulled into Kochi bus station this morning, I had a small flash of recognition. Leyland. I knew that name. Growing up, Leyland buses were a fixture of public transport back…
They’re in the thousands. They are everywhere in the big cities in Southeast Asia. Hanoi, Bangkok, Saigon, Colombo are full of them. I’m talking about scooters. Small, automatic, practical: Honda Click, Yamaha NMAX, TVS Ntorq. You see the occasional larger…
The departure point for the tour was two hundred meters from my homestay. That was not coincidence, I had done my research before pick a place to stay. Being in the right spot in a new city makes all the…
Got up at 6 AM for my morning flight to Kochi via Chennai with IndiGo. I had intended to just take a tuktuk to the airport, they wanted about 1500-2500 LKR for the ride. On a whim just before walking…
Negombo sits about 30 kilometers north of Colombo and 8 kilometers from the international airport, which is exactly why I was going there: flight out the following morning. There are only two express buses from Galle each day, the 6.30…
The hostess at Teshi Safari Villa had been up before me. At 5:15 AM she came over with a breakfast box, packed and ready: wraps with coconut filling, bananas, bread, and a muffin. The breakfast was included in the $15…
Breakfast was coffee, toast, and coconut wraps on the balcony. Then I packed, said goodbye to the room and the monkeys, and headed down to wait for the taxi. I had booked a shared minivan to Udawalawe for 9.30. I…
