We had fun with our new friends in Bangalore. The kids loved charging about with fellow English speakers. Kannada, the local language was strangely their second language. Bangalore is one of the fastest growing cities in India and is being choked by traffic and the road works caused by an ambitious new metro system, so our usually enjoyable rickshaw rides became exhaust and fume breathing purgatory

We then went onto stay with Pragati’s father and mother Viswanath & Prema, who our lovely friend Hazel met on a British train.  They live at Sakleshpur, north west of Mysore in beautiful coffee country.  He has his own coffee plantation as well as various other businesses.  We enjoyed wandering around his estate, being shown something about coffee production and the huge variety of other crops grown.  We counted 14 different ones growing among the coffee bushes – including pepper, vanilla, coconut, oranges and bananas. I have been amazed at how intensively land is farmed here and usually all done by the hand. Viswanath really showed us around.  He took us to a local wedding feast for which I dressed in a sari. How women wear them all the time I don’t know!  There were hundreds of people eating delicious vegetarian food on great long lines of tables and all served on banana leaves.  The poor wedding couple had to stand for hours to be photographed with every guest and have rice thrown at them.  The hall was an explosion of colour and the noise of chatting locals.  Aberfeldy will seem very quite compared to the continual noise of this country.  We were also taken to the local vanilla drying yard, which happened to be next to a coffee curing works. If only I could bottle the smell I would bring it back as gifts for everybody!

We spent a day visiting extraordinary ancient temples on the way to Mysore. The most famous one being at Sravanabelgola which has a huge Jain statue on top of a hill.  Lily climbed the 700 steps all the way to the top without stopping.  The statue carved out of solid rock is 18 metres high and is quite breathtaking in its simplicity compared to all the extravagances of the Hindi work. We are now in Mysore, the city of fairy tale Maharajas palaces and silk.  Tonight we leave for a massive overnight train journey back to Cochin in the south for the last few days so this will probably be my last blog – its been fun sharing.  Fi.