Gokarna

---

Well now Gokarna. It was an interesting place to get to and I met some great people! The overnight 'delux' sleeper bus was supposed to be a special treat really for the journey from hampi to Gokarna. Getting to Hampi on the hard plastic chair of the standard public bus for 10hrs had not been comfortable in any way so i thought it was an investment to get a nights sleep on the trip back to the coast...

What I had not counted on was the 'delux' bus being full of cockroaches! And the part where they dumped all the people not headed to Goa (to Gokarna) in the middle of nowhere by the road at 2am to wait for an uncomfortable minibus to come collect us. Of course of the said minibus, the driver was fast asleep at that hour and failed to turn up... After 2 hours of waiting and making a fuss with a local hotel owner who seemed to know the driver, the hotel owner drove to the minibus driver's house to wake him up. So we were on the road again. With a whole lot of new mozzy bites.

We got to Gokarna and then had the task of making it to the final destination: Om beach. Although it went against every mental calculation I made we actually managed to fit 6 women (and all their rucksacks and daysacks) onto 1 auto-rickshaw for the journey. Sure we were sitting on top of eachother and the girl sitting with the driver had to get out and push it to make it start going but eventually te tuk tuk moved! And it made it all the way (at about 5 miles an hour!). We got there about an hour before sunrise and we sat on Om beach watching it go up before finding a place to stay. Had an early morning swim too, was brilliant.

Then spent two whole days on Om beach, which is pretty deserted, just enjoying the company of the girls we met on the bus, playing cards, drinking beer and all-round chilling out. Was great.

On the second day we did have a bit of a scare. Swimming in the sea, me and a Brazilian woman I met, Carolina, were discussing our childhood fear of sharks after watching Jaws (ok for me this fear is still quite real!). We were the only people in the water and suddenly we notice we are being frantically waved back to shore by this policeman. PANIC set in- we both grabbed eachother expecting to see a shark fin circling us! Actually the truth was worse, when we (suprisingly shortly!) got to shore he told us we should get out of the water because there might be a tsunami! Apparently there had been some bad earthquakes in Indonesia and the whole coast was preparing for a possible tsunami. Crazy. We slept so so well after that...!

---