We're in Chaudi for the afternoon: 3 km from our hotel - a proper Indian town again, with real, delicious, cheap thali and a photogenic market to stroll around. Don't forget to keep scrolling down for all the other photos we put up recently!
- and all this up on the web the same day, thanks to ISDN, USB and a handy little image resizing program ...
Lots more photos on the blog now! Make sure to scroll down for photos of Munnar (including a circus!), Kochi, Bangalore, Pallolem and Patnem. Sati is here, and we're all very pleased, and she'll blog for herself in a couple of days.
Goa's beaches are home to maybe one lakh or more mostly stray dogs - a motley mongrelly crew, but most with tail held high and a sweet nature. Rabies fears struggle with general soft-heartedness: the soppy cute ones who are no bother have a significant evolutionary advantage here (reinforced by the 20 rupees the dog catcher gets for each dead collarless dog at the end of the season). This little fellow has a more woolly coat than most, so he's figured out how to find somewhere cool to lie ...
We watched him for a while, hiding from the sun ourselves on Patnem beach in the shaded garden of "Home": beautiful surroundings, great food, nutella milkshakes (oh yes), friendly Swiss German owners/staff, good company and breakers just big enough for an exhilarating bodysurf every so often.
Well what do you know? Only 2 and a half weeks left in India before it's off to Kenya! Seems like we've only been here a couple of weeks, so now we're eager for tomorrow morning (melissa especially!) when Sati arrives at the airport 2 hours away (I swear everything seems to be 2 hours away in Goa!) She arrives at 7 am (or something like that) and melissa and mark are goin 2 collect her from the airport in a taxi!
Me and Mo are also eagerly awaiting the arrival of our phones! They may be covered by Virgin Mobile (a crappy network that doesn't work out here without an international pakage and a contract) but at least they will have all our numbers in which means that we can phone our friends from one of the abundant ISD phones.
That is also important because we have been banned from MSNing for a while (hoping it will only be until the weekend!) so we are kinda out of contact! Terrible as this is we are managing with only email, and the few numbers that we have been able to get and write down! So expect calls at wednesday lunch time, Stringer people!
luv yas all!
roza xxxWell finally I am well again and everything is looking up. We got up early this morning and I did a yoga class for the family - then we went for a walk to the beach for breakfast (fresh fruit juice and muesli), had a swim and came back up to our rooms before it got too hot. We relaxed in our rooms, Mark played guitar, I slept and sang, kids did some emailing, then we had lunch (Greek salad). Life's hard hey?!
Anyway Goa - not at all sure what I think of Goa - its the first place that we've been that I'm not sure if I like or not. Sure it's beautiful, the sea is warm and inviting, the landscape gorgeous, palms, hills, the Goans are friendly and the living (for us) is easy but the downsides are: Brits everywhere! Palolem, where we were first, felt a bit like an 18-30 resort - the girls were gawked at the whole time; lots of booze (really noticeable after being in Kerala which is a dry state and though there is alcohol for sale in the tourist bars it's not obtrusive and we didn't see drunk people around all the time like here); loud music, oh yes and even the Goan dogs are noisier - in Kerala they never barked, here they bark a lot!.
Anyway - we have moved slightly down the coast to a small beach which is quieter and much less populated, the sunsets are amazing and we have seen a snake and starfish. We are staying in a really nice guest house, with really nice clean rooms, bathrooms and balconies. We have 3 double rooms (one for Sati who arrives tomorrow) and we are paying 1050 rupees a night (about 13 pounds) altogether. The guest house is run by a nice Christian Goan family who also have an internet cafe - which is where I am now. They have rented out the restaurant next door to an Anglo-Goan family, who have their English friends staying with them for a couple of months - they have two 9 year old girls between them and this area feels family friendly at least.
Maybe we will explore more of Goa over the next week or two and find other places that don't feel quite so Benidorm or Ibiza ish - I'm sure there must be nice places, but I guess by now we are less interested in a holiday resort - we don't need that - and I feel a little frustrated that we are in India with a bunch of Brits (not all of whom are behaving badly but enough of them are).
We are all really excited that Sati is on her way to us - she is on the plane now and will be arriving early tomorrow morning - me and Melissa are getting up really early - 4.30am to go in a taxi to meet her at the airport. It will be nice for all of us to have someone else we know well to be with us - we can all talk to someone different for a change! We do chat to other people of course but its not the same level of conversation that you have with people you have just met. Mark and I are also looking forward to having a little break from parenting now and again - no pressure Sati!!!
Just started to practise a few Swahili words and getting excited about Africa now - the experience there will be quite different I'm sure and as we go on we all become clearer about what we want and don't want to do. I'm looking forward to Christmas without the hype and materialism, the girls (especially Melissa) are not! they tried to convince us that they should have money for Diwali, Eid and any other festival that we happened to come across in compensation for not having 'proper' Christmas - I have promised them that they can go to church on Christmas day if they really want a proper Christmas! They weren't amused!
Miss you all - please keep in touch - its really nice to hear from people and some of you could ring us too - details here.
lots of love
- HeatherPallolem, we have decided, is too crowded, too 18-30, too full of staring blokes, and too busy for us to get to know people very easily - although we did enjoy the people we did begin to get to know, the Tibetan-Israeli restaurant over the road from our rooms (more on Judeo-Buddhism here!), swimming in warm sea, being offered a genuine flying rickshaw (only two hours to London, apparently) for 20 lakhs (2000 GBP), and more brown bread.
So we've moved to the Hotel Sea View in nearby, relatively undiscovered Patnem - beach equally beautiful and pretty empty, lots of restaurants but not loads of customers until December, really nice clean rooms, more Indians than Europeans/Israelis/US-ers/Australasians, older adult tourists and some children about - we'll let you know how it goes.
We're in Palolem, a beach resort in Goa. It's quite like Varkala except much bigger, more tourists and shops and the sea is calm and we're not on a cliff. Mark finally managed to persuade us to come here, after I initially resisted the idea strongly as its the most southerly beach in Goa and therefore furthest away from the airport - where we need to pick up Sati next week. I'm glad that we came though as its fairly laid back and as the season hasn't properly started yet, relatively quiet, but with plenty going on to keep the children happy. Unfortunately I'm ill again - whilst I love India it doesn't seem to be agreeing with me physically and I had a fever again last night and was shivering under a fleece and quilt whilst everyone else was roasting!
There is a vast selection of food to choose from but again probably the Indian food will be the worst - with it adapted to suit Western tastes and not like the food that real Indians eat - we will see if we can find any proper Indian eating places, otherwise its nicer in touristy places to eat Western food and I had a lovely ratatouille and mashed potato last night. We went for a lovely night time walk along the beach before I had to rush home to be very poorly again.
I'll blog more later but now I think I need to go back and lie down for a while
HeatherBangalore has a similar population to London, and we stayed not too far from the equivalent of Oxford Street - which might not quite match up, but would certainly give Coventry city centre a good run for its money. It's a great place for technology and commerce: we liked the botanical gardens and the city market area, as well as all the flash shopping streets and hi-tech internet cafes.
