...on our trip around the world. The Invaluable Diary has already got quite a round belly. Our return is imminent. We are currently enjoying the last few days in one of the marvellous hotel resorts in Hurghada, trying to empty the buffet, which extends over five rooms, and reach the perfect tan. However, when half my leg skin peeled off on the second morning, I gave up relatively quickly. All-inclusive in Hurghada, another real culture shock - this time in sunburnt red and a Russian accent. Nevertheless, the beguiling boredom and the prospect of sunburn are exactly what we need at the end of the trip to...

Most of the people we met on the first half of our trip around the world. Since we have been travelling more in the Global South, we have found it noticeably more difficult to have sincere conversations with strangers. Here and there, an extremely open-minded and interested taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur surprised us with critical questions about National Socialism or Mohammed, the selfless Egyptian who found us via couchsurfing and showed us around his Cairo for 10 hours the whole day until he actually got us so tired of walking that we had to wave goodbye - he, on the other hand, seemed to have had the night ahead of him...

[Wait until the text loads...] [Further waiting for unspecified reasons] Hello, here we g... [Wait again] ...go! Welcome to Kenya. Everything takes a little longer in Africa. We were completely unprepared as we associated Kenya primarily with the dense mass of world-class marathon runners, whose times are definitely not the same as those of the local bus network. Our first day in Africa was devoted to arrival and acclimatisation. This went surprisingly well in certain respects. After India, we praised the modernity of the cars, roads and shops (which shows that we had probably spent far too long in India). Payment is mainly digital...

With a slight delay, our train stopped in Varanasi the day before the Holi festival. Our German friends Michelle and Bastian had also arrived at the hostel five minutes before, and we wanted to team up with them to survive the following day. Holi - a colourful festival where society comes together and respectfully throws colours into the air for some lesser-known cultural reason with peace, joy and happiness. Peace, joy and happiness? Fiddlesticks. That's perhaps how the uninitiated would describe the German New Year's Eve - until you stand on the cathedral square in Cologne and run the gauntlet of firecrackers and rockets. We were aware that Holi in India doesn't have the best...