Perhaps not so far from home

We're in Kochi, India, having recovered from our first bout of serious food poisoning. Unpleasant, yes, but not enough to change our rather adventurous eating habits, much less spoil our excitement about our time in Kerala, our upcoming stop in Goa or the fun we had last night at the Bollywood cinema! (To its credit, The Three Idiots loses very little entertainment value despite the language barrier. Seeing it with an enthusiastic Indian audience certainly can't hurt, either. I can only imagine that when watching mainstream Hollywood cinema these audiences feel positively robbed that each film doesn't include the same masala of genres, boy-meets-girl-meets-coming-of-age-tale, all wrapped in a buddy-pic-cum-road-trip. With song and dance numbers, of course!)

Here's a quick flashback to the end of December: We were greeted by a surprise in a roadside bookstore in Penang, Malaysia, when browsing their travel selections. Just above their Lonely Planet collection, a sign that perhaps we're not so far from home after all.