High speed travelling!

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Summary: After spending too much time on the beach and running out of time in India I hurtled through india sightseeing as I went and ended up landing in Hampi where I am now and have also spent too much time.

So much has happened in the last few days so i'm going to have to be brief as I don't have much time but I'll do the best I can.

After coming back from Chandrabaga I had a quick night in Puri where I met an English guy (tommy) who had his 50th birthday the day before so we celebrated with a few beers and got reasonably drunk (or at least I was - I don't know about him). He was another amazing character and although he works from the UK he always manages to get away for at least 3months every year for a holiday so has seen a lot of the world.

That night I came back to my hotel too late jumped the fence and after 4hrs sleep got up to make the journey to Bhubaneswar to catch my early morning train. The journey was 24hrs (average) and went pretty smoothly with all the usual interesting things going on.

Two things in particular:

I made friends with a nice kid called pem who is one of the very poor kids that comes on to trains sweeps the floor (indians make a lot of mess!!) and hopes to get a donation for his work. I showed him my repetoir of the three magic tricks I know which suprisingly he seemed really impressed with. He ended up hanging around for a while and soon a friend of his joined us and they played cards together for a while. I let them play with my digital camera for a while too, which they absolutely loved.

There also seems to be increasing numbers of men dressed up as women coming onto trains clapping and pinching mens cheeks etc to see if anyone will give them money - what the logic behind this is I don't know!!

My destination was Hydrebad and for the sake of keeping this blog from turning into another encyclopedic volume I'll start a new blog for that.

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Photos

Pem
This kid who sweeps train floors in the hope someone will give him money was really nice and didn't hassle me too much so when he came back past I gave him some money and we ended up making friends for a while - until he realised he had missed his stop and had to leg it off the train :)

Dinner on the train
another veg curry with all the trimmings served on a banana leaf and eaten with the hand - delicious