We really had no plans about where we were heading in India, other than to have approximately three weeks in the South before heading to Rajasthan in the North for another three weeks.  Where exactly in the south we had no idea, nor had had any time to plan before arriving.  Hence it got rather confusing and exasperating due in part to the transport options – train or bus, distances and time taken to get there and also looking ahead to get an internal flight up to Rajasthan, not to mention the numerous unfamiliar names and multiple names for the same place.  Do we head north, south or east?

After the heat and humidity of the coast we looked at going inland to the highland areas without having to backtrack to a coastal city to get the flight, thus this became the reason to head via the highlands of Wayanad towards Mysore and then Bangalore to fly north.

India is made up of ­29 States which are also divided into various districts. Some people sometimes refer to the districts and some poeple refer to the states when talking about an area, not to mention that due to the name changes many cities two names are often used interchangeably.  The renaming and respelling of cities started after British Imperial period in 1947 and still continues today.

Some more obscure places changed in the late ‘40’s and ‘50’s.  The more well-known are Mumbai (formally Bombay),   Chennai (Madras) and Kochi (Cochin) that changed in the mid ‘90’s, and Kolkata (Calcutta). However the airport codes still stick to the original names eg. BOM and CCU.

Our last two visited places – Mysore and Bangalore were only officially changed in 2007 to Mysooru and Bengaluru but still referred to as the former – even the Universities refuse to revert to the original names. We only saw one street sign referring to Bengaluru rather than Bangalore. when heading along the highway.  It certainly makes for confusing times when looking at maps to work out where we are – when some maps have the original name and we are looking for the new name and vice versa especially when the names weren’t so obviously similar.

We flew into Kochi (still called the Cochin International airport), our beach stay was Kannur (formally Cannanore) via the city of Kozhikode (formally Calicut).  We were thinking of going to the town of Udhagamandalam (formally Ootacamund or still referred to the shortened version of this name Ooty) but instead headed to Wayanad the district in northern Kerala just outside a little town called Manathavady, so we could also visit the reserve half of which is in the neighbouring state of Karnataka.

Is it any wonder we sometimes don’t have a clue where we actually are or where we’re headed!

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I intended to be. Douglas Adams