Well, we left Varkala eventually and took the train up to Kollam. Very nice train journey – they’re not afraid here to throw caution to the wind, open up the train doors and lean out smoking a fag at 100km/hour and good for them I say. The scenery was beautiful and we raced through leafy suburbs densely populated with (of course) coconut trees and beautiful open lakes.

We were staying in a government run hotel situated on the far side of the lake attached to the town – while it was nice and secluded this meant that the waiters in the restaurant always went to great pains to explain how little they earned as they hovered with the bill. But we at least we had a nice surprise in the form of a television in the room which meant we could spend Sunday night watching Arsenal v Chelsea and United v Liverpool. G’an United….

On the 17th we went on a boat tour in a little canoe with 3 other nice tourists, a guide and a boatman punting us along the backwaters. It was fabulous, like taking a trip through the Vietnamese jungle to take out Colonel Kurz with palm trees, suspicious villagers and low-hanging plants all around. Along the way, we stopped to see boat building, coconut harvesting, rope-making and spent a nice half hour drifting in the middle of an enormous beautifully still lake.

On our final night we ran into a charming London couple in their mid 20s who spent the evening in the restaurant telling each other to fuck off, to stop fucking kicking their fucking feet under the table and for one of them to “not just fuck off” from the dinner table before the other had finished their fucking beer.

They saved their best behaviour for breakfast the next morning. The guy wanted his eggs ‘alf boiled which the waiter heard as hard boiled. When the waiter repeated it back there was an amusing (for us) back and forth conversation to clarify things. As it turned out, when they arrived the eggs were too runny for the poor little lamb and after stropping with the waiter at the rear of the restaurant for a few minutes like an 8 year old who’d asked for chocolate ice-cream and got vanilla, he threw the bowl on a nearby table and stormed off with a “Well, I don’t fucking want it anyway.”

It was just a shame really as we’d had a few nice chats with the staff there about Kerala and England – always embarassing to see people from your own country acting like that but, hey ho, what can you do?

I bet they were Arsenal supporters…