Great train rides

Right now we're in a village called Kemaliye, located in a remote, isolated valley in eastern Turkey and there's not a foreigner in town besides us. Most of the Turkish "tourists" here are people in town to visit family. This is an amazing place. And we're not even supposed to be here! Our train ticket said "Final destination Erzurum", and Erzurum, near the Armenian, Georgian and Iranian borders, was where we were heading. But, when a really friendly 65-year old man named Hilmi invites you to get off the train 5 hours early and take an hour-long mini-bus ride over the mountains on a dirt and gravel road to visit his hometown with him, you simply do not say "no".

Leaving Secunderabad back in early-January on the train to Kochi (Cochin), we really had no idea what we were heading into. I mean, we had absolutely no reason to suspect we were about to experience the best 3.5 months of our entire time in India. We only planned to stay in Kochi, a city in Kerala State in the very south-west of the country, for a few days and our plan was to stay in Kerala for a month, at the most. But things, luckily and as always, didn't quite work out as planned.