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Published: March 3rd 2006
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I didn't get a great night's sleep, due to there being no happy medium temperature available between the excessive stickiness of the air and the cold if I put the fan on - even with the soothing sounds of the surf rumbling in the background. A stroll along the beach at sunrise seemed like a good way of getting something useful out of the proceedings, so 6AM found me on the sand with an assortment of early-morning joggers, swimmers, laughing yoga practitioners, and fighting dogs. I stuck a toe in the water and was surprised to discover that the Arabian Sea and the North Sea have more in common than people perhaps realise, i.e. you don't want to swim in either of them early in the morning. Even with the beach relatively empty, it didn't really grab me in the same way that a Caribbean one might.
The hotel had had its plumbing installed by the same people who did the Shanti Guest House in Varanasi, so after waiting for half an hour for a non-existent handyman to generate some hot water, I was shown to another room to have a shower. By the end of the day, the problem
still hadn't been fixed - though as no-one came into my room the entire time, I'm tempted to think that no-one even bothered trying to fix it.
I wanted to give the Johnny Cool cafe a try for breakfast, as the name had some appeal (though it certainly doesn't describe me - in this heat and humidity, I'm anything but). I ordered a fry-up, which the waiter accepted without question. 10 minutes later he came back to say it would take a while, maybe half an hour, which I agreed to. 20 minutes later he came back to say that it really would take a long time and would I rather have something like an omelette instead. I took this sequence of events to mean that a fry-up would not be appearing before the 12th of Never, so a tomato omelette was my breakfast. The spinach and carrot in it added colour but maybe weren't the taste I was looking for.
After noticing that there was a gnarly right point break reminiscent of Bells Beach, I put away my surfing dictionary and spent the vast majority of the day rereading "The Secret History", in sessions split between my
bed, my terrace, and a couple of cafes (finally finishing it at 1AM - great book). At lunch, I was pleased to see that the cocktail menu contained a Bledy Marry, as well as Yorkshire Pudding being listed in the desserts.
The sunset was nothing special, however there was a large gathering on the beach which turned out to be some sort of wake for an old fisherman who'd had a heart attack and died in the morning. There are definitely worse places to die. The wake was still continuing when I went to bed.
For dinner, most of the restaurants have a table on the clifftop path with the various catches of the day proudly displayed in order to tempt you in. As the evening goes by, and people choose bits of whichever fish they like, the carcasses gradually lose steak-sized parts until there's nothing left except inedible remains. I saw a small shark outside one place as I was choosing my dining venue, which was reduced to merely its head by the end of the evening.
At dinner, just to illustrate the humidity here, there were a few drops of rain as I was making
agonising progress through an overly spicy fish curry. I suppose that shouldn't be too much of a surprise in a state that has not 1 but 2 monsoons each year.
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