I arrived in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram) after a four hour bus ride from Allapuzah. It was early afternoon and I was tired. I decided I needed to go somewhere and relax for a few days, and nearby Kovalam seemed just the ticket.

On leaving the bus an auto rickshaw driver tried to sell me a ride at an extortionate price. I completely ignored him but still he followed me as I made my way to the pre-pay auto stand. He jabbered in my ear constantly. "What country are you from? Where you want to go? I take you." I let him continue his conversation with himself until he had followed me out of the bus station, all the while shaking my head. He still wouldn't give up so I said, "No!" quite firmly twice. He continued to press the matter, but it was when he grabbed my arm that I swung round to him and said viciously, "I will not say no a third time, now fuck off." Finally he decided to acquiesce. Persistence is a wonderful thing, but harassment is not - and I mean that for both of us.

I walked across the road and grabbed my phone to see where I needed to go. As I stood there, out of the corner of my eye I saw a well dressed man stop, pause and turn back to me as if considering something. Then he walked up to me and put out his hand. Well, this was the smartest looking beggar I have ever seen; crisp shirt, immaculately clean, he looked better than most IT professionals I've seen. He had obviously just thought about it on the spot and was trying it on. I laughed and told him to get lost and he did, rather shame faced.

I didn't like Trivandrum from what I had seen so far, so I decided to leave straight away and I eventually found the pre-pay stand outside the nearby train station and journeyed five kilometres to the coast.

Kovalam is a small beach town with a relaxed atmosphere - except of course for the omnipresent hawkers. The main beach (there are others) is actually split into two parts; one sandy stretch encroached by a number of hotels and a smaller stretch of beach aligned by shops and bars. Each beach is separated by a rocky abutment.

I spent the early evening by doing something extremely important: cleaning out my backpack. I was becoming slightly obsessive with its weight - something everyone does when they're hauling it around for a year or so. I had loads of receipts on me which I promptly defaced and binned. Paper is heavy. I also got rid of some liquid goods such as body gel - vegetable soap is much lighter and liquids are surprisingly heavy. Satisfied, I washed all my clothes in the sink and crawled into bed to read and wind down. Such is the life of a world traveller - it ain't all glorious sights and meeting new people.

The next day I wandered into Kovalam town about a kilometre inland to size it out. It was pretty dull and sleepy. I bought some plasters from a chemist and he asked me if I also wanted to buy Viagra which made me laugh at his cheek.

I walked back to the beach and strolled along the promenade whilst the hawkers and store owners incessantly tried to grab my attention. I didn't mind it so much here as I was expecting it, and they were actually quite polite about it. When one restaurant hawker tried to get me to eat at his place, I said quite firmly, "No!" and he actually apologised to me. Most of the time I didn't even acknowledge the existence of the hawkers. By this stage I was getting pretty good at pretending to be deaf and dumb and avoiding all eye contact, though it's been said that's the way I am most of the time anyway.

In the evening I thought it would be a good idea to have a beer or two down by the beach, but all the bars and restaurants were sparsely populated with isolated couples. Instead, I plonked myself down in an empty hotel bar that faced the ocean and started drinking.

About an hour in, I had a crazy but exciting idea and began recording loads of notes about it. The idea itself isn't so important - I was just trying to imagine how sentient artificial intelligences would try to understand the universe around them based on the way they are designed (yeah, welcome to my exciting world).

I drank some more beer. It was good. I made more notes. New ideas spun off from others. I thought my best idea was to start ordering vodka and coke with my beer.

I'm a social drinker in that I never drink alone and here's why. When I was twenty or so, I had a Saturday night in, so I decided to get a six pack and a few videos. I drank the beer and watched the films. 

Lovely. A couple of weeks later I decided to do the same again. Right at the end of one of the films, I realised what was going to happen next. It wasn't a guess; I knew it all scene by scene. That's because I had watched it two weeks previously, and had forgotten the whole film except for the ending. I never drank alone at home again until twenty years later when I broke my leg and was incarcerated in my flat in Jersey for eight weeks - even then it took six weeks for me to relent.

When you're a single traveller, one of the easiest ways to meet others is to go to bars on your own and hope you'll bump into some like minded people, whether they are travellers or indigenous. India doesn't really have a bar scene (except for Bangalore and Mumbai) so not only was I drinking alone in Kovalam, but I hadn't had this much to drink in five or six weeks.

After six bottles of beer and a vodka or three I stumbled back to my hotel room and decided it would be a great idea to phone my friends and family and tell them all about my wonderful new ideas. Of course, they were absolutely thrilled to have me call them, as drunk as Oliver Reed bathing in a vat of port, whilst I waffled on about the perception of robots, obscure experiments in quantum theory and the reality of free choice.

Before I went to bed, I was convinced some strange creature was running around the walls of the room, and I had a crazy dream that something was jumping around inside the fridge.

The next day I awoke with a cat clawing at my brain whilst a dog chased its tail in my thoughts and a woodpecker tried to make a nest out of my skull. I had forgotten all about hangovers. They're not very nice really.

I went to the fridge to get some water and there staring up at me with cold accusatory eyes was a small salamander. It had been running around the room the previous evening and must have run into the fridge when I pulled out some water before going to sleep. Being cold blooded, it had died in the low temperature. I reverently lifted it onto a piece of paper and headed out to the balcony to throw it into the bushes below. However in my badly hungover state, I somehow managed to flick it onto one of the balconies below me. The horrible slapping sound it made as it hit the cement will stay with me for a long time. It also made me giggle at my own ineptitude.

I couldn't do much that day as not only was my brain slopping around in my skull cavity like an oiled up Susan Boyle on a waterbed, but I developed diarrhoea. Now the drinking wouldn't have helped but I'm convinced that the hotel restaurant was to blame. They were a great bunch in there, very chatty and friendly, but someone somewhere wasn't washing their hands properly before handling food. Needless to say, after slopping out the poop deck my toilet contained nothing but a few fibrous lumps swirling in a moonshine sea of brown.

Effectively I lost a day. I'd rather lose a million pounds - you can live a lifetime in a day. If this was your last day, would you rather have a million pounds or another day? I try to ask myself that every day as if it's my last. On this occasion however, I opted for the million pounds. It was a particularly bad day.

Next afternoon, after a long lie in, I made sure I still had a pulse and then spent time strolling on the beach and going to a really out of the way vegetarian restaurant called Lonely Planet. This was well worth it as the food was great (their ginger and lime soda was amazing) and it was situated in the jungle well back from the shore. However, the walk back around the rear of the shops and hotels lining the beach showed me exactly what was happening to all the rubbish in the town. Quite shameful really.

Back at the hotel, I sat on the balcony watching the stars growing warm in the firmament above me. There was a blinding flash. I closed my eyes reactively. I could feel the hairs on my arms standing on end. 

A sudden crashing sound like rocks tumbling battered my ears. It felt like an explosion - my whole body was reverberating. I was on my feet preparing to react. I looked around. All was still. People rushed into the hotel courtyard below me looking around scratching their heads. 

Then another flash of light and roar of thunder - a bit further away this time. Lightening had struck mere feet away from me. It was quite an experience. This was about as exciting as Kovalam could get and I knew it was time to move on.

Trivandrum hadn't been kind to me when I first arrived but nevertheless I decided to head back there and explore. I checked in at a reasonably priced hotel and was upgraded to their executive room which was huge and extremely comfortable.

I walked the roads around the town. The shops and bazaars were excellent - good value and most importantly they weren't trying to coerce me into buying anything.

As I walked, I noticed that although this was Kerala's state capital and main business hub, life here wasn't fast. People walked slowly from place to place, chatting idly with each other, or best of all, singing aloud for their own pleasure. People smiled a lot in Trivandrum. After a shaky start, I was really beginning to like the place.

I walked down the MG Road, finding some great bookshops and a couple of good tech stores. I actually bought a few things - I had only really spent money on essentials until now but the lack of any kind of pressure selling made it more conducive for me to look around. The only thing I hated were the pavements; when they existed they were in a terrible state of repair, and then they usually had bikes or cars parked all over them.

At the end of MG Road was an amazing market. Everything from watches to wallets to fruit and veg were being traded in the simmering heat.

Even the flies were lackadaisical. The market was in a square surrounded by the wrecks of abandoned buildings and it was shaded by innumerable blue plastic canopies. Women sat by their fruit and veg laid out across the floor or on wooden stalls. Men sat idly around makeshift bazaars, casually eyeing me, wondering if I was going to make a purchase. The occasional light-hearted, "Hello!" rang out from a stallholder as I walked past. The dim murmur of easy going chatter rolled around the aisles between the stalls. The smell of fish, fresh fruit and the pungent aroma of spices intermixed with leather and plastic and the ever present diesel fumes. This to me was a taste of the real India. I was in a non-tourist town and nobody gave a damn that I was a foreigner. It was great!

I looped around the back of the market and saw a Catholic Church, a Hindu Temple and a Mosque all within sight of each other. This spoke volumes to me about Trivandrum. Here were a gentle race of people living in a comfortable town all acknowledging each other’s faiths. I don't remember seeing police or any kind of trouble in the four days I was here. Although it had the usual problems that Indian cities have - overcrowding, lack of maintenance of public amenities etc. it had something that few places in the world have - soul. There was a real sense of community here, of acceptance and belonging. Everyone I spoke to was unassuming and chirpy, as if they knew they had a good thing going in this town. I would go as far to say that aside from Bangalore, Trivandrum is the only Indian city where I really felt at home.

I took a day trip to the southernmost point of India before I left Trivandrum (which will be the subject of my next blog), but when finally I did leave town I felt genuinely sad to be going. Trivandrum turned out to be a great place to visit in order to get a real appreciation of an Indian city. Unpretentious and unmotivated by tourism, Trivandrum reverberates with the sights, sounds and smells of everyday life. Populated by polite and unassuming people, it has a warmth and charm that makes it feel like a living, breathing entity with a personality and character all of its own.

I truly loved it.

At the Mysore State Bus Stand, the station director stood at his table like a general, writing notes against all of the arrivals and departures. People walked up to him to ask questions and he swished them away like a bad smell. On occasion, if he was feeling generous, he would redirect them to another employee.

India is full of taciturn government employees who want to tie everyone's feet in red tape in order that they move at the same speed as their own incompetence. Having said that, they are often in thankless jobs, but the void of their public admiration is equally compensated by the size of their egos.

I stood at his table and waited for him to look up from his note taking. Briefly, I wondered if he would dismiss me as quickly as he had the others. I decided to be patient.

He was a dark skinned man in his late forties with a large moustache tapering at the ends. He wore a crisp green shirt with shoulder straps and a black cap - although I may have imagined the last as virtually no one wears a hat in India.

The director flipped through his pages officiously, cross checking, making notes and occasionally grunting. He knew I was standing before him, but said nothing. Finally, after perusing his beloved notebook for about five minutes, he looked up.

"Excuse me, could you tell me which bus I need to take to Kalpetta?"

He looked me up and down as if from a distance, then said, "Yes, come."

He walked me over to the bus and motioned for me to get on. I thanked him. It seems that giving him that little bit of patience and respect to finish his work was all it needed for him to be helpful.

I asked the bus conductor if the bus was going to Kalpetta. He smiled shyly and said no. I had seen that smile before. One of my Indian colleagues had once told me the biggest fib going and had smiled in exactly the same way. It's a smile of slight embarrassment at having to lie, though why the conductor didn't want me on the bus I can only surmise.

I double checked with the driver. It was the right bus.

Half smiling myself, I jumped on the bus and said, "It is going to Kalpetta you liar."

It was a five hour journey, so not learning from the previous lesson that my bum cheeks still bore the marks of, I jumped into the back seat, mainly because there was room for my backpack.

It was a bumpy ride.

The bus thundered through lazy villages where people sat and watched the day go by. It roared through farmland that stretched off to the horizon. Gradually, open fields gave way to woodland. It tore through foliage that was constantly increasing in density as we made our way slowly up the hills.

In some of the larger towns I noticed some posters that looked like bad adverts for the latest Bollywood movie. I had first noticed them when leaving Pondicherry and had realised that they were in fact adverts for local politicians. Beaming visages surrounded by halos of light looked beneficently down upon their flock as if they were incarnations of Hindu gods. The adverts were stomach churning and reeked of corruption. At the same time, I couldn't help but chuckle at their gall.

In Pondicherry, ex-Bollywood actors had actually turned their hand to politics, so it was unsurprising that these posters appeared film-like. However in Wayanad it was a different story.

If you invited this chap around for dinner he looks like he would eat your children.

Finally, we neared Kalpetta and a group of monkeys greeted us at a bus stand.

A state bus and three of its drivers.

I noticed how tidy some of the little towns out in the hills were. 

Rubbish disposal seems almost nonexistent in India. It is piled high in the streets of the bigger cities where cows, dogs and the poorest of people pick through it for scraps. But here, there seemed to be more of a civic duty. There was rubbish in the streets, yes, but it was not nearly as apparent. It is a real conundrum to me that Indian people who are fastidiously clean when it comes to personal hygiene step outside their doors after washing to be confronted by piles of rotting garbage. I think after a while, you just stop seeing it – like a stain on a fridge door that you only notice when you have guests, only in this case, it’s more like the fridge is covered by rubbish and there is shit and fucking great potholes all over the kitchen floor.

In Kalpetta I met Jain and his brother Anil just as rain began to pour in sheets from the skies. Kerala has another period of rain after the monsoon which isn't torrential but is still very wet.

We drove through the hills to Anil's home which he built in a truly remarkable location in the rainforests of Wayanad. He had also built a souped up replica of a tribal hut on his property made from natural resources. This is where I was to stay for the next three days.

It had been a long day, so after meeting Anil's family and having dinner, I headed off to my hut for a long sleep.

By sunrise, the rain had dissipated and I walked out of the hut to be greeted by a fine, fresh morning. I breathed the air in deeply and sighed contentedly. I looked up and froze. My bollocks hitched up so far into my body that I had to swallow them back down again. Strung beneath the forest canopy were a number of webs with huge black and yellow spiders waiting patiently at their centres. These spiders were bigger than my hand (ok - bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hand) at around six inches in diameter.

I was later to learn that these bad boys (or girls in fact - the males are tiny) are Golden Orb Weaver spiders, and by coincidence I had read an article about them in the paper just before coming to India on how they are being farmed for their silk, which is one of the most tensile materials known to man. In fact, their webs are so strong that they don't bother re-spinning them each day, they just patch them up. A single web has been known to last as long as six months. Apparently, the spiders grow to a greater size in the rainforest as the largest I saw had a body of two and a half inches and a leg span of seven - a third larger than average size. They have on occasion been known to eat small birds.

After breakfast we drove into the Bandipur National Park. The road winds up around the mountains, through forests and past lakes, reminding me of the highlands of Scotland. Clumps of bamboo arranged like inverted tepees grow so quickly here you can hear it crack and stretch. Bats hang from trees wrapped in their leathery wings, waiting for the hunter's night. Monkeys gather in groups to eat fruit and chastise passing humans.

Bats too lazy to find a cave.

As I waved goodbye to this troop of monkeys, one of them flashed its eyebrows at me and squealed in either surprise or delight. We all laughed cruelly at it!

Tribal people still live here, hunting and fishing in the woods and lakes. They craft simple structures for their hunting and farming grounds but live in more elaborate homes in small communities.

Deep in the forest you can find elephants, tigers and other endangered species. They are understandably very shy and rarely venture out especially at this time of the year when the watering holes are full and there's no need to risk going anywhere near the most dangerous predator of all - us.

We stopped for some rich, sweet Indian coffee in a dark shack in the middle of the forest, and sampled the specialty - a deep fried sweet containing coconut, banana and spices.

Feeling refreshed, we headed for the fourteenth century Gopal Swamy Temple. Perched on a mountain, the misty old temple is associated with a nearby stream where people's ashes are poured into the sacred waters. It was a very beautiful spot.

Finally, we meandered home through the park over terribly worn and bumpy roads.

That night, I went for dinner at Jain's parents home a little further into the jungle. It was great to sit down with the family and eat a home cooked meal.

Back at my hut, I heard a strange padding sound. I thought there must have been a bird on the roof, but I caught sight of movement above me. 

I froze. A different type of giant spider was crawling around the roof. It looked like an Indian Tarantula (they have striped legs).

Jain heard me swearing and popped down to help get it out, but it disappeared behind the walls somewhere. After he had left, I quickly prepared the mosquito net so that not even Michael Jackson's ghost could get into bed with me. Outside, above the noise of the crickets, there was a really loud chirruping sound. I opened the door to investigate and found this giant cricket with a body around six inches long. I didn't even know these things existed. I fell asleep to the sound of it rasping its wings together (not its legs as is commonly thought).

The next day we travelled towards Meppadi. We passed through huge tea plantations where countless rows of bushes are cultivated for our drinking pleasure. Many tribal female workers with brightly coloured saris and sun worn features roam the hills tending the tea bushes.

Near Meppadi we left the car and made our way through the jungle to Soochipara Falls. You can hear the water thundering in the distance all the way down the two kilometre trek to the falls. A thick mist permeates the atmosphere as you near the water and it clings to your skin. At the bottom of the falls, groups of young lads dive in to the pool as a dare and have their photos taken, but when we first arrived there was nobody else there. The force of the water as it flows over the edge of the cliff is surprisingly violent for a waterfall of its size.

We wound our way back through the mountains past some stunning vistas around Chembra Peak, the highest point in Wayanad.

As we drove home, Jain sang some of his favourite songs. In fact, Jain sang a lot on the whole journey and it's no wonder - he's got a great voice. However I was to learn later that it is typical of Keralans to sing a lot, even just walking down the street. Fortunately most, like Jain, are blessed with a good voice, but some are so bad they sound like Paris Hilton with a tracheotomy.

In the afternoon, Jain had to head back to Bangalore, so we said our farewells and Anil and I went to the cinema to see Pazhassi Raja - a rollicking true story of a tribal king who fought against the British East India Company in the 18th Century. The story was fairly faithful to the truth, and even though I couldn't understand a lot of the dialog for the three and a half hours running time, it still had me shouting my support for the tribals as they cut down the annoying British actors hamming it up as the villains.

Back at the hut, an old friend came to visit. Yes - the spider from last night had come to pay his respects, and perhaps taste my flesh. I asked Anil if he could somehow remove it from the hut and to my horror, he whacked it with a massive brush. I must admit, I couldn't help but laugh at the matter of fact way he dealt with it, and I asked to borrow the brush for the night - just in case. Before I went to bed, I went to the toilet and saw a third spider - even bigger than the last, but brown and hairy. However, this fucker was so quick that as soon as it saw me, it almost popped out of existence as it sped over the wall and through a crack in the roof. Being a semi-reformed arachnophobe (I can handle smaller spiders) I should have deposited various excreta in my undercrackers at that point, but instead I just laughed. It had been terrified by the sight of me and I felt we were kindred spirits in our mutual fear of each other's species.

In bed I noticed that something had bitten me in the cinema, as there was a hole in my foot with a river of crusted blood flowing from it. I still don't know what it was - and still have the bite mark!

In the morning, I was awoken by a neighbour playing Hindi music really loudly, accompanied by dogs howling and a distant mosque’s calls to prayer. It was a strange cacophony of noise, almost haunting in my dreamy state, but as I’ve already said - those Keralans love their music and play it loud day or night.

It was time to leave. I had fallen in love with Wayanad, its majestic, sweeping landscapes, its mountains, forests and lakes, its huge variety of wildlife and its gentle, musical people. Most of all, I was thankful to Jain for bringing me here to meet his fols, and Anil's gracious and welcoming hospitality. He had made me feel part of the family at his homestay and provided me with an experience I'll never forget.

Jain, Myself and Anil.

If anybody fancies a stay in the Wayanad rainforest, I can’t recommend Anil’s homestay enough. He can be contacted via email here.