Advertisement
Published: March 5th 2009
Edit Blog Post
19th December 2008
This morning Pili woke up feeling a little off colour, we put it down to a few too many beers the night before. She spent a quiet day sunbathing and drinking water.
Ranjit and I decided to hire a jet-ski, it seemed like a good idea after we’d sank a couple of beers. I agreed to let Ranjit drive first and then we could swap later. Ranjit took off like a mad man and I hung on for dear life. The inevitable happened, Rangit turned the bike to hard into on coming waves and we were dumped in the water at high speed. As I came off my sunglasses also went airborne. My first swimming stroke caught them as they were starting to sink below the waves, it looked all very cool but it was a sheer fluke. When we got back to shore we were both killing ourselves laughing. The moral of this story has to be ‘Don’t Drink and Drive’ especially on water and don’t wear posy sunglasses.
20th December 2008
We spent all day in the apartment just chilling, reading and doing some washing. At about 5pm we decided to take
a walk down the Baga Rd to see what birds we could find. When we arrived we find a guy with a basket with two Cobras’ inside. Pili screamed and acted like a girl, obviously I headed straight for them. I gave the guy a few rupees and placed a gorgeous snake around my neck and got up close and personal with the other Cobra. Pili stayed her distance and took photos. Normally I wouldn’t recommend supporting these snake charmers because they de-fang these poor animals so they don’t kill the tourists. This is a barbaric practise which is dying out thankfully. The only reason I spent time with the guy is because with the population of Cobra at a critically low level, the chances of me finding one to photograph is remote to say the least. To justify myself I will be telling everyone not to support this practise and educate them to the reasons why. Unfortunately the ancient prejudice against snakes is as strong as ever, when the locals find any kind of snake they just kill it whether it’s dangerous or not. The truth is that 99% of the World snakes are only dangerous if provoked. They
try to keep away from humans as much as possible. Also a very good reason to leave the snakes alone is that they keep the rat population down, and God knows India needs all the help it can get with this especially when you see the amount of garbage everywhere.
We had planned to go and eat with the locals and have a Tahli. A Tahli is a selection of small dishes on one plate, usually consisting of a vegetable or meat curry, a lentil Dahl, Tandoori vegetables, a couple of popodoms and a nan bread, all for about 60 rupees (90p). Our plans were changed at the last minute when we received a call from Sam and Neil asking if we wanted to join them for a meal. We meet them on the Calangute Rd and ended up in the ‘Indian Spice’ Resturaunt. Neil was very excited about the place as he’d eaten there before and he highly recommended it. Neil gets very passionate about food, he really knows his stuff and Sam tells us he’s a stunning cook.
Our meal was as good as promised even if it was a little pricy for our budget. We
had a couple of drinks afterwards at Bobbies Sports Bar and then headed for our beds to sleep like the dead.
21st December 2008
This morning we’d arranged to meet Sam and Neil at the beach early, this didn’t happen as I was up most of the night with a bad case of the Ghandi shuffle, not fun!!!
Pili was very sympathetic but I told her not hang about waiting for me and that if things improved for me I’d meet her later. With that agreed she headed to the beach while I felt sorry for myself while being scared to be more than ten feet from the bathroom, NICE!
After a couple of hours and some dehydration fluids I ventured down to the beach to find Pili. I was greeted with some very insincere concerns, bastards!!
I went and sat with French cut John and took some amazing photos of John feeding the crows cashew nuts. I had the birds flying directly at me within ten feet of my camera; I was really chuffed to capture these greatly overlooked birds doing what they do best, which is to take every opportunity that is presented
to them, something we should all do with our lives.
After leaving the beach we finally go and eat our first Indian Tahli, fantastic is all I can say. The only downer was we got hammered by mosquitoes.
In the evening Pili asked to look at my last few weeks photos. We sit on the bed and Pili was very impressed with my pictures, I have to say I was pretty impressed myself.
Then the World stopped turning for me. As I get off the bed my sandal catches the cable from my portable hard drive and throws it to the floor with a bang. It turns out that hard drives don’t appreciate this!
After several unsuccessful attempts to access my files I give up. I have to admit I almost cry. All our travel photos and my archive of amazing wildlife photos are contained in this now dead black box. I try to calm down and decide I need a walk to think how to resolve this nightmare. I need to find an engineer, where’s Paul Hims when I need him?
22nd December 2008
Needles to say I didn’t sleep a wink. I
get up to go and see a guy called Neal who runs a resort and travel agent just around the corner from us. He calls his engineer friend called Stanley and we arrange to meet at 3:30pm. The day goes very slowly for me and Stanley is an hour and a half late which seems to be the way things are in India. He examines and takes apart the hard drive but comes to no further conclusion and needs to take it away for more testing. I am not completely happy with this but I have no other option available to me. I also instruct him to find me a replacement hard drive. It’s going to be a long Christmas for me as I don’t expect to hear anything until after the holidays.
Completely crest fallen I head for the beach to find Pili. Everybody seems to know what has happened and everyone is sincerely concerned for me, I was very touched.
THE REASON I HAVEN’T UPLOADED MORE PHOTOS, ESPECIALLY THE FANTASTIC WILDLIFE SHOTS I’VE TAKEN IS BECAUSE OF THE DISASTER WITH MY HARDRIVE AS I’VE EXPLAINED ABOVE. THE PHOTOS USED FOR THE LAST 10 DAYS ENTRIES ARE
90% PILI’S. WHEN MY DATA RETRIEVAL IS COMPLETED BACK IN ENGLAND I WILL ADD MANY MORE PHOTOS.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.108s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 12; qc: 65; dbt: 0.0731s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.2mb