Trivandrum, Kerala - After the highly relaxing 3 days on the beach Kev, Lori and I headed on an 18 hour train ride further south. Chris has gone separate ways, so it is just the 3 of us now. Our train ride went fairly well. It arrived at the station late, so we didn't board until after midnight. We had to kick people out of our bunks first, but eventually got to sleep. The chai guy only woke us up at 7am (much better than the previous 5am wakeups). We got into a compartment that had one of the fans broken, so by the afternoon we were sweating beasts. We tried the trick of sticking a card into the fan to get it going (which Kev and Lori learned from some guy earlier in the trip) and it worked so we were slightly cooler, but by that point our stench was keeping people at a distance. Trying to take naps in the afternoon on a train in southern India is like asking to wake up cranky. You end up in a bath of sweat and to the realization that you still have another 5 hours on the train. We met up with a guy from Toronto and had ourselves a long game of Euker (I don't know if that is spelt right?) Lori and I won 4 games to 1. The greatest part was not winning, but finishing and being almost at the station, having killed the most painful part of the journey. I finally found my happy place with the train food. After starving myself for a few journeys and subsisting on biscuits and lays chips I decided that I would eat the food that the hawkers sell on the platforms and nothing bad resulted, so the trick is not to eat the food that the train staff offer. We had mystery rice for lunch that wasn't too bad, so we'll see how the rest of my journeys go. Once in Kollam we checked into our hotel and did some walking around. The restaurant we decided on was a bit dicey, but the Indo-Chinese dinner we got was adequate and no one woke up in the middle of the night needing to get rid of it (sorry for the details about the tummy, but it is a daily concern here!) Lori and Kev arranged a backwater trip for the morning. It turned out to be a quiet ride on a boat for 3 hours in the morning that ended in seeing locals make rope out of coconut fibres. It was neat to see, but it took a while for my brain to process how it was done. I won't try to describe it as it wouldn't make sense, but it was interesting none the less. We also got to see tapioca trees, pepper trees and clove trees. The cloves are out of season, but you could smell the leaves. Kev and Lori tried the pepper (suprise, suprise, it was hot!) I then took the afternoon to relax while they went to look at the spice warehouses. We hopped on a bus to Trivandrum and here we are. We weren't sure if we were going to get here in one piece. The driver thought he was in a race or something, taking way too many risks for our liking, but that isn't different than many of the other buses we have taken. So now we are just waiting here for our flight to Columbo on the 13th.