goan to the land of mangs and nangs.

After our sojourn in Mumbai we spent a day on the train to reach Goa, a tiny coastal state of Catholics and Portuguese heritage. The train took a long time- almost 14 hours if I recall- but it's actually not so bad. All you do is laze about reading and every few minutes the chai/treat/lunch/water man walks by and all you have to do is hand over your money. No momvement involved! A brilliant system.
We spent our first morning in Goa in the capital, Panjim, trying to find the old Portuguese quarter. It took at least 3 hours and more bus rides but find it we did and then spent an hour wandering around looking at the quaint European style houses. We had a beer followed by a delicious seafood lunch and hopped on yet another bus to head to the beach. It was incredibly hot- finding the sea was all we cared about.
The closest beach was one geared toward (and full of) Russian and domestic tourists. It turned out it wasn't really our scene so we swam, stayed one night and went south the next morning (Goa is tiny- look it up on a map- so all this travel put together took less than 10 hours I'm sure).
We arrived in Colva and it was much quieter, we liked it immediately. We were led to a lovely secluded guesthouse, right on the beach and surrounded by palm trees instead of other hotels. We were very lucky- this is a very rare thing in India. The house had been built before the government restricted all building on the beachside so it's quite special.
We had an incredibly relaxing week at Colva...eating fruit for breakfast (fresh mangoes and bananas everyday!), having a swim followed by some lunch and a nap, then an afternoon swim and then we would cook our dinner of fish or vegetables at the guesthouse in the evening. Ahhh, Colva. Seriously, that was all we did. Sometimes we went to Cafe Coffee Day, it had air-conditioning and alright coffee. Good times.
After a week of lazing about we probably felt we had to be a bit useful so we hopped on an overnight bus down to Kerala, where our eventual destination was Our Home Community, up in the hills of the state.
P.s. Mangs and nangs are mangoes and bananas.

not india.

So as Isabelle keeps saying, I have been slack and not been keeping you all adequately updated with our goings-on. I just realised it's been nearly a month since I wrote on here! We left Agra and shot down to Mumbai, the home of India's rich and famous. We, of course, are not the rich and famous so we found the cheapest hotel we could (thankfully our room was bed-bug free- others in the hotel weren't so lucky) and had an explore of the city.
It was very hot but an interesting place to walk around- there are so many old English buildings...there was a Big Ben style clock, the university was all towers and spires and the biggest train station was incredible. An enormous building coverd in spires and intricate stone work (I'm sure there were gargoyles about the place) with two stone lions guarding the front gate. Not India at all.
Apart from sitting in a very hipster cafe in some back street and drinking good coffee we didn't do too much in Mumbai. We caught a train out to a suburb which has the honour of being in the Guinness Book of Records for 'most people washing simultaneously in one place'. It's around 400 people I think. It's called the Dobi Wahing Ghats and the rooves are like a patchwork quilt of different coloured washing drying in the breeze while hundreds of people sit underneath, washing and smashing clothes on concrete blocks.
The only other touristy thing we did in Mumbai was catch a very slow boat to a place called Elephenta Island in the Harbour and have a look at some stone carvings. It was very hot that day though, so we halfheartedly wandered around a bit, trying to avoid being chased by monkeys then caught the very slow boat back to the city.
My main memories of the city are of the delicious French pastries we had for breakfast one day, th huge, juicy (and very expensive- for India) burgers we had for dinner one night and the good coffee we had most days. So not India really. But very delicious.