Bollywood loves the gays.

So, Cooper left this morning for a week of weird temples and jungle in Tamil Nadu, and then back to jolly olde England, where I hear it is snowing (SNOWING!), and I am all on my lonesome, and will remain so for 6 more weeks. Not only that, but for the first time I am without an itinerary, dates when I have to be in certain places, etc etc. In short, I am making it up as I go along. Kind of scary and exhilarating at the same time. Have been away for 6 weeks now, which is triple the amount of time I have ever been on holiday before, let alone out of England, and veer wildly back and forth between thinking that the next and final six weeks either seems like a vast vista of time to fill, or a ridiculously short time in which to do everything I want to do, and which will fly past. In the last few days, I think partially 'cause I know Cooper will be home soon (and also because we've both been ill), I've been thinking nostaglically of autumnal weather in England, and curling up in a soft bed and watching a film, and generally having someone look after me a bit, but at the same time if I went home now I don't think I could say at all that I'd 'seen' India, despite having been here so long, and 'stage 3' of the trip, i.e. this northern bit into the Himalayas which I'm starting today, is the part that I've been most looking forward to. Additionally, I know that going home would mean bliss for approximately 2 days, and then it would be back to the soulless grind of finding another job and earning money, which I do not feel quite ready for! Am missing people though, and just hearing about small anecdotes from everyone's lives is great, so keep up the good work please :O)

So for all my fears about travelling with another person, and there were quite a few, I had a great time with Cooper these two weeks. We're both pretty low maintenance travelling partners, and knew each other so well anyway, that its all gone swimmingly. Plus, small annoyances and disappointments (like the theyyam in Kannur etc) are so much more manageable if you are with someone else, and actually take on a tinge of hilarity. Could have totally done it for a couple more weeks, even if she does have a taste for posh restaurants and swish bars! (I kid, it was great to swank it up for once) Anyways, a brief summary.

Well, after Udupi, which is where I believe I left you last, we headed north to a small village called Gokhana, which is a mecca for Hindus due to the sacred lingham that resides there, and a mecca for backpackers cause of its beautiful beaches. A lingham, by the way, is a representation of Shiva's phallus. I repeat: Hindus actually worship these huge giant stone penis'. I think its brilliant personally - if you're gonna worship anything it makes far more sense that most in a whole fertility deity way. Anyway, it was really strange to both of us to come into Gokhana and actually see other white people, although the number of backpackers was still extraordinarily few compared to the native population. Unfortunately Gokhana was slightly overshadowed by the fact that we thought Cooper might have contracted malaria (the last night in Udupi she was vomiting, had an insane fever, the shakes and aching bones, all of which spelt m. a. l. a. r. i. a. to me) so the four days we spent there (14th-17th November, for those keeping track) involved a certain amount of worrying on my part, a lot of feeling quite ill on Ann's part, and a few blood tests and the like. Thankfully, there was an excellent English-speaking doctor in the village who was able to send the blood tests off to hospital and confirm that she was malaria-free (though in need of antibiotics), although he did deprive me of the chance to show off my prowess and heroism by carrying an unconscious Cooper single-handedly over my shoulder to a hospital and thus saving her life. On the whole though, I'm willing to forgive his efficiency and competence.

Gokhana was great, and one of my favourite places in India I've been to thus far. We stayed outside the village on Om beach, in a charming beach shack right on the sea. The sand was white, the Arabian sea is incredibly warm, and you could wear a bikini without feeling that you'd just done the equivalent of stripping naked at Buckingham Palace and propositioning the Queen. Very chillout, very beautiful, and with a great bar on the beach that served yummy food (indeed, WESTERN food, which was a massive treat) and copious quantities of beer.

On the 17th we moved on, catching a 9 hour night coach to Hampi specifically catering for western travellers doing a weekend trip from Goa. We'll gloss over the horrendous nature of this bus (very long, VERY uncomfortable) and move onto the freak-town that is Hampi. Freak town in that the landscape and associated ruins look like a weird mixture of scenes from 'Walking With Dinosaurs', 'Indiana Jones', the jungle part of 'The Mummy Returns', those weird planets they land on in the original 'Star Trek' series and god knows what else. Just these crazy mountains of boulders everywhere, interspersed with jungle and thousands, and I mean THOUSANDS of old temples. My beautiful beautiful camera refuses to take pictures anymore (Mum- I didn't leave the charger at home, there's actually a problem with it and it needs to be repaired on the warranty, grrr), so I have no photos to show you, but Cooper took an obscene amount, so harass her to put them up on facebook and I'll nab them from there for you. Or just google image it. At any rate, it was just incredible. Hampi was the capital of a major empire that reached its peak in the 15th century, but was completely deserted after it fell in a protracted siege conducted by the Mughals. Now its a ghost town of temples and palaces stretched over 26km, which we proceeded to explore by foot, bike and coracle over the next two days. (We tried to hire scooters, but proceeded to have a couple of epic failures in the way of managing to ride them without crashing immediately into the nearest wall, incidents which are so mortifying that I am trying to repress them, and after which the company very firmly took the scooters away from us and gave us ordinary push bikes.) Known as the Angkor Wat of India, perhaps the strangest thing about it was that you were looking at this broken monolithic statue of Nandi or whatever, that seemed contemporaneous with ancient Egypt, and then you realised that it was actually built 200-300 years AFTER the college in which I've been living for the past three years. A mind-trip.

Wednesday night (19th) we proceeded to get the same coach back to the coast, but this time added an additional 3 hours on, in order to take us to Goa. Awful, utterly awful. I mean, we had a narrow bed to share between us and all, but the highways agency or equivalent in India seem to be obsessed with speedbumps, and everytime we hit a speedbump everyone hit the ceiling (no, literally), and landed with a bone-crunching crash back down onto the bunk. My back had already been suffering with the hard beds (95% of the beds in India have no mattresses, but just something kind of like a 3inch thick, very solid thing like you'd put on a deckchair) and this journey seems to have jarred it again, because I'm not feeling the love from my body much recently. Anyway, it was with pathetic whimpers that we finally reached Goa at about 8 in the morning.

Now, Goa was an area of India that I wasn't quite sure what to expect. The LP and most 'serious' travellers regarded it with somewhat of a curled lip, seeing it as the Costa del Sol of India, Papi had compiled an epic pangyeric of fantastic clubs, amazing food and beautiful people. We found it somewhere in between. It was certainly *incredibly* strange to see so many Brits around (even in Gokhana and Hampi it had been mostly French, Israelis and Germans), although the majority were about 30 years older and 4 stone fatter than we'd expected them to be. Also, we had a great time in the clubs, and very much enjoyed hearing some dance music again, but it wasn't so 'banging' or wild as we expected. On the other hand, we did eat the first night at this unbelievable restaurant (the memory of the pizza I had there still makes me salivate), had some great seafood, found a fit cafe on the beach and a great cocktail bar called Nine Bar, and spent a couple of days on a great beach. We also had a cool day where we took the bus to nearby Panjim, the capital of Goa and disturbingly like walking through an old Portuguese town but with saris; and Old Goa, a Portuguese-colonial era town that had been devastated by malaria outbreaks, and of which only a large number of huge cathedrals remained. I'd like to go back to Goa, for we only spent two nights there, but I think I'd possibly go in December time, when its meant to be truly buzzing. In the mean time, me and moved moved onwards to Mumbai.

Now, Mumbai is seriously swish. Home of Bollywood and its glamorous stars, it is the hangout of the young and the beautiful with money to burn. Its again strangely European as well - clean, wide boulevards that look eerily akin to London's Mayfair or Hyde Park Corner. Really beautiful and nothing in the slightest like Delhi, which is what I was expecting more. We spent Sunday taking a boat trip out to Elephanta Island, where there are these amazing cave temples with these huge 15ft high statues of Shiva (and another lingham - yay!), and wandering around the designer boutiques and less posh street markets that litter central Mumbai. We had been told that we had to dress to impress to get in anywhere here, so high heel shopping was a must, though Cooper had managed to pack a ridiculous number of miniskirts, dresses and even hair straighteners which I had formerly teased her a lot about, but for which I was now profoundly grateful. We were pleased to see it worked though, for when we sayashed down past the Taj Palace and Tower (THE most exclusive restaurant and hotel in Mumbai) the doorwardens held the door open for us and just assumed that we were going there. (You have to let me have a tiny bit of ego here, I hope you'll understand if I tell you that otherwise I've been wearing the same two t-shirts and two pairs of trousers for the entirety of the past 6 weeks) We spent the evening sipping ridiculously priced cocktails and dancing in posh bars, although sad to say that having felt a bit iffy for the last couple of days, I felt quite substantially ill through most of it, and had to go home and throw up about 1ish, with Ann following me on the projectile vomiting front for the remainder of the night (no, it wasn't the alcohol, you cynics, we don't know what it was). Bit of a sleepless night in all.

Yesterday though, in a stern effort to make the most of our last day travelling together, we got a guided tour of Mumbai city by private AC cab, which was pretty nice, and, in time honoured tradition, saw a Bollywood film, Dostana, the premise being two guys who pretend to be gay in order to get an apartment (couples having priority) and who both fall in love with their beautiful housemate. A Bollywood film with gay men and a fair amount of sex, you say? This is the new Mumbai, darling. Glamour, amazing clothes and even a very very faked out gay kiss (they were clearly like 5 inches apart). Bollywood loves the gays.

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Part of trip: Backpacking around India and Nepal

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