Heading South.

---

So, we left Mount Abu on our trusty steed. This bus slowly but surely took us to Ahmedabad (seven hours). We make a chai-stop in a town. In what appears to be a carpark there is a small celebration going on. It turns out that the people celebrating have walked sixty miles to this place for something to do with Shiva. There are people dancing to the tabla beat. The tabla player is lost in his rhythm. There is a van, which is all decorated, the front of which is covered in wreaths of marigolds. There is a deity of Shiva on the roof & as soon as see my camera, I am asked to photograph it, which I dutifully do. We are then invited-cum-dragged to join the celebration. So the temperature is scorching, Wee G is trying to balance a pot with a coconut on it on her head & I am getting down to the tabla beat in a carpark. A white cow charges into the proceedings and tries to devour the marigolds decorating the van. A man wrestles it by the horns as the revellers momentarily retreat from the cow. All this before lunch. When we leave, we are thanked, actually cheered, for accepting their invite. Surely it should be the other way round? The hospitality never ceases to amaze you.
We reach Ahmedabad in the early everning & wait for our sleeper train to Veraval. It is only ten minutes late in leaving,. Amazing! Actually, we've been lucky regarding punctual leaving times with the trains. This journey is ten hours. We pull into this Gujarati fishing town around 06.30. A quick cuppa & we're off again towards Diu by local bus. Two hours later we de-bus & hop on a rickshaw truck. This takes us over the causeway onto Diu (it's an island). We then need to grab a normal autorickshaw into Diu town itself. We find a hotel; the Super Silver Hotel. 250 rupees a night (about 3.20 quid). Before you all go "Shock horror", it is so clean as is the bathroom & it has a telly! So far we are impressed with Diu. As I stated on the previous entry, we came here to feast on fresh fish & lie on beaches. Things do not quite pan out as we had hoped. Diu is mainly marketed to a domestic tourist market. It is also one of only two wet towns in the state of Gujarat, so beer is hideously cheap. They actually have bars but remember, this is India, so these are not aimed at women. The bars except for Casa Luxo are very sleazy in appearance. You feel a little like Clint Eastwood in a Fistful of Dollars: You enter, all eyes are on you. You slowly narrow your eyes, scan the locals & get ready for the draw! Happily this does not happen. You sit down, they give a sheet of typed A4 with all their drinks & choose. In one bar they even have a vomiting charge listed! This would cost you 50 rupees. It is evident that the bars are aimed solely at men as Wee G is the only lady in the place. Furthermore my dear friends, there is only one shared urinal for three bars. One bar, however, does have it's own urinal, which is at the back of the bar. No door, no separate room, I mean at the back of the bar. As you wee, there is a guy rinsing out bottles behind you. There are also beaches which are relatively clean but nothing to rave about. Plenty to rant about as you sit there trying catch a few rays staring at the silty-brown Arabian Sea. Groups of "young" Indian men come along for a gawp at the female form. This can turn quite nasty at times especially if they are tanked up on cheap booze. We are lucky not to experience this, unlike others who we met. You seem to be just meat to look at or hassle, "I want to go to UK. You sponsor me!" The saddest part is that they cannot handle their drink at all. These guys are not teenagers either. It would be like a group of twenty-something lads from the UK going to Kos or Benidorm for the first time never having drunk alcohol before. Sort of like the toerags who come down to Saltburn beach in the summer & are a REAL PAIN. Twice a day there is the most foul smell. A mixture of rotting fish & rubbish. This is blown inland at low tide, apparently. It comes early in the morning & again in the early evening. WE CAN"T WAIT TO LEAVE HERE! The only reason we stay is due to the effort it took to get here & the fact that Mumbai is 24 hours away by bus (the plane is too expensive at this time of year). We are thankful for three small mercies: 1) O' Coqeiro, a Portuguese restaurant. This has become a haven in a heartless world. just a small outdoor place. Mud floor & great food. 2) Ram Vijay Ice-cream Parlour. Owned & operated by the same family since 1933. We indulge ourselves here a couple of times. Wee G loves the fig and almond while Big G favours the mango. 3) Our hotel room. Thank goodness for HBO & Star Movies. We would have gone bonkers in this godforsaken place if it had not been for these. I barely get my camera out. It does not deserve to be photographed. I dare say many people will disagree with what I have said regarding Diu but this was our impression. We book bus tickets to Mumbai. I am reminded of the song 24 Hours from Tulsa. I am most certainly not looking forward to this journey, but what the heck, I could be at work getting stressed out regarding coursework & Year 12 tutorials.
We leave Diu & Gujarat on the 1/11 at 11.30ish & pull up in Mumbai 23 & a half hours later! The journey was fine. Plenty of stops but we only do snacks. I must say that Gujarat has by far the worst toilets I have so far experienced. As a bloke you can at least look up & hold your breath. I will never eat another kidney in my life & I advise everyone to do the same. Wee G does not pee for over 24 hours. Quite frankly Mr Shankly I am utterly amazed. My wee wifie is surely going camel on me.
Mumbai is BOOM!!! What a city. Vibrant, brash, sophisticated, in your face, alive, huge (official population 17 million, unofficially 22 million), smoggy, fishy at times too. It takes over two hours to get into the centre. A collision! Modernity, colonialism, unimaginable wealth & grinding poverty all shaken together like a bag of second hand clothes at a jumble sale. Just dip your hand in & have a rummage & see what you come up with. We check into Maria Lodge. The Lonely Planet says the staff are incredibly helpful & it is kept ridiculously clean. LIES! DAMNED LIES! It is entirely the opposite. Looks like a knocking shop. You enter from the street & go up a single flight of stairs where the "helpful" man on reception, tells you that, "The room you booked is still occupied but I have a special room. Let me show you." He barks at some other chappie who shows us the special room. Yes it is special as it is an absolute dump. It's like sleeping in sauna. Yes we have a shower-room (it has no ceiling), the hot water comes in a bucket but that's fine. We do not have a toilet. They are at the end of the corridor. We do have a tv but there are no English language channels. The AC looks like it was rigged up by Homer Simpson. We do not use it, so use the fan instead.
We escape our sweatbox prison & head out into Colaba. Grab some food at Churchill's Cafe & a beer at Cafe Leopold's. Up to the Maidans to find the a bus ticket to Goa. We find, we buy, we are leaving tomorrow night. We do not want our enthusiasm for this city dampened by another night in our attractive abode. So down to the Gateway to India. A basalt archway that faces the Arabian Sea. We try to sleep. Next day we are up sharpish, get some brekkie, pack, store the luggage (he charges us for this too!!) & head on out. Our bus is not until 7.30pm. We take a 3-4 hour tour in an AC car, which is welcome as it is sweltering. We go to the Dhobi Ghats (where your laundry gets done). Thousands of people who have flocked to Mumbai from Uttar Pradesh work & live here. Everyone has their laundry done here from 5 * hotels to you & me. Everything is handwashed here & dried & pressed. They even have a school here. You do feel a little voyeuristic but get over that quickly. Onto the Kholi area. The Kholi are fisherfolk who are native to Mumbai. This is where fish is brought ashore, sorted, sold & taken to market. So, yes fishy. On the edge of a metroplis not a stone's throw from some prime real estate fish are drying on racks. These people can only fish for eight months of the year due to the monsoon season. then they go on holiday basically to Northern India (so our guide Raju told us. We have really warmed to this guy. He has an incredibly infectious laugh.) We go along Marine Drive, home to really expensive hotels ( our hotel is a complete dump as you now know & we were overcharged) and then on to Chowpatty Beach. You don't go in the sea here or you glow for the rest of your life & bits fall off. Apparently it's quite toxic. On to Malabar Hill. This is the most exclusive area of Mumbai. You couldn't tell that really as anywhere in India gets dead dirty very quickly. Full of decaying splendour. We see the Hanging Gardens and are shown the Tower of Silence. You can't actually see it as it is respectfully hidden in forest. This is important to the Parsis as it is their burial ground. The body is brought here & laid out. The body is then picked clean by buzzards/vultures. You can see them riding the thermals above. To ensure that the buzzards stay, mutton & beef are left when there are no bodies. It's a very solemn place & I feel profoundly affected by this. We then move on to the Mani Bhavan. This is now a museum, library cum visitor centre dedicated to Ghandi, who spent 17 years here. lots of photos of Ghandi & copies of letters he wrote to other people including Adolf Hitler. His spinning wheel is also on display. It's excellent. We then experience a Mumbai traffic jam. What a traffic jam this is. Everyone is back to back or side to side or front to side. Everyone jostles for position but there is nowhere to move to. It's great really as you get to enjoy the theatre that Mumbai is. We finally get moving again & Raju takes us by CST, Mumbai's main train station & other buildings all designed by British architects. very strange seeing a Big Ben like clock tower between two palm trees & people playing cricket in front of it. This is one city we will definitely come back to as we have only had around forty hours here.
On to Goa We go for our bus, unfortunately it's an hour and a bit late. On we get. We have front seats & are right below a speaker. We get a film on this journey, a Bollywood smash called Partner. A big brash musical comedy. Although there is limited English you get the gist of the story. But whoa there boy! Big G despairs of musicals. He's converted. The song and dance routines are fantastic. You want to get up and shake yer booty there & then & I don't think the other passengers would mind a bit. It is hellishly loud though. We both wear ear plugs & it is still really loud. They don't do quiet here. There is always a noise of some kind. Sleep comes fitfully. They start to show the film again in the morning but switch it off when we get to the first of the stops in Goa. Shame really as we really wanted to watch it again. I get excited just thinking about it.
So we arrive in Margao in south Goa. We are heading to Colva, which is only 6 km away. Onto a local bus. They fill them up to the gills. No time for health & safety here mate! We pull in to Colva. Yeuch!!! There is no Goan dream. Like Redcar crossed with Whitby but no charm. We scarper 2 km along the beach to Benaulim. A quieter & cleaner village. Our home for the next 11 days is Jacinta Moraes' Guest House. Big double room. Hot water (solar heated), chickens everywhere & a friendly dog named Jimmy (for some strange reason it's also called Pussy). The damned cockerel does not stop cock-a-doodle-doin'. There are cars here with sounds that tell you they are reversing. The sounds are not like those of Securicor though. No, the reverse sounds these cars have is Jingle Bells. So cockerels every morning, dogs barking every night & Jingle bells whenever a car reverses. Lots of development happening here, which will be its downfall. We stay here for nearly a fortnight. Very quiet & the beach is quite clean. The water is sooo warm even at 7.00am & clean. So in a nutshell:
1) We both get badly sunburned especially Wee G.
2) We make friends with three girls who work the beach selling sarongs.
3) We rent a scooter to check out Palolem, which is 40 km south. It was recommended by a Yankee fellow we met, who stayed there for 3 months. A crescent shaped bay with a clean beach but there are lots of people staying in lots of beach shacks - too much for such a small place. We are discouraged by this & need to head back to Benaulim as the heavens have unleashed war in the nature of a tropical storm. Thunder had been rumbling earlier & the sky was getting darker when we arrived. So off we go a different way than we came as the national highway is a horrible road. We are going via the back roads. Goa is not flat. It's up & down for the next 25km, which takes an hour and a half. The map is next to useless & is soaking wet. (We are in T-shirts). Rain is heavy, the wind is high & in your face, hair and wherever it can get (as is the rain), thunder is rumbling & there is both horizontal & vertical forked lightening. This is seriously freaky, funny & adrenalising (to use a Bushism). We can speed up going up hills but creep down them. the brakes are rubbish & I only hope we don't slide out (I feel like Steve McQueen but I am only on a 150cc automatic scooter). It gets dark but we are only a couple of km from the ferry. Safety. We watch night turn to day when the horizontal lightening cracks followed by deep rumbles, which are neither our stomachs or bowels. My hands look like when you have been in the bath for too long. The journey is not yet over, still another 15km to go. Off we go, can barely see anything. Indians don't really believe in dipped headights. We are so close to Benaulim when we are diverted due to something or other. Now it's follow the vehicle in front. We get back safely but freezing and there is no power for the rest of of evening. We thank the gods for solar heated water. The next day Wee G has a huge coldsore & I've got a temperature of 39.5 & the biggest headache in the world.
4). We relax.
5) Meet a guy called Pete. He was wearing an SAS t-shirt so got talking about waves. he's 54 & has been coming to India since the seventies.
6) Arrange our train tickets to Hubli in Karnataka.
7) Rent a scooter again and go down to Patnem, 2km south of Palolem. really sunny this time. This is much better. Far fewer people, a good beach & a more relaxed atmosphere. We make arrangements to come here after we have been to Karnataka.
8) We have a nature walk with Shiva, who is very interesting. He knows that Darlington was, "Formerly in Richmondshire." He likes phrases such as, "It is said..." :They say that ..." & :It is proposed ..." He is incredibly knowledgeable regarding local plant life but especially bird life. He takes us through paddy fields, where Wee G manages to sort of fall in. When he sees a bird he says in a loud whisper, "Oh my God. Grahammm, Gaynorr. Come quicklee. It's a ....." It's brilliant. We see kingfishers, egrets, two types of heron, bee eaters, shrikes, marsh harriers, fish eagles, black kites, nightingales and much much more.
9) Pack & leave.
Well folks I know that wasn't really a nutshell. Our next episode will take you through Karnataka; specifically, Hubli, Badami, Hampi, Mysore & Nagarhole National Park.
Till then we send you all our love & wish you well.

---

Photos

Gateway to India - Mumbai
Lots of balloon sellers about here. Very big balloons too.

Dhobi Ghats Mumbai
Tonnes of hardwork goes on here. Your clothes are battered silly until they are sparklingly clean.

Eye of the Elephant
Elephant figurehead in front of Jain temple in Mumbai

Fish drying in Mumbai
The Kholi fisher-folk area of Mumbai. The fish is brought in sorted, sold & some dried.

Mumbai Taxi
Modelled on an old Fiat. These are so dinky.

Chowpatty Beach Mumbai
A grand place for a promenade.

Old & new in Mumbai
So much new development. stands alongside old colonial architecture.

Big Ben or not Big Ben
Clocktower, palm trees & cricket. Mumbai.

Slurpy-slurpy
Coos slaking their thirst in Agonda - Goa

Trash Trash Trash
No respect for authority at all. Colva-Goa. You could also see this on the beach in Colva. To be avoided.

Might need some help when goin' fishin'
Benaulim beach at evening.

Goan Abstract
from the train towards Hubli in Karnataka.

Bathing Beauties.
Buffalo bathing on the way to Patnem - Goa

Comments

[dot]

Happy Christmas
Love at Christmas time to you both . Dot ,John and all the family xxxxx