Coast Potatos

I can't dress this up - the last few days have been terrible. After being ill for several days, all I wanted to do was sleep. But that was not to be - Kochi did it's level best to stop me from achieving this, with the result that I have not slept more than 2 hours per night in over a week. Friday was spent tooling around trying to find someway out of the festering pustule of Kochi, without much success. All buses and trains were fully booked, and I was beginning to get seriously wound up with the whole thing. Saturday we spent a pleasant day fooling around on Cherai beach and swimming in the Arabian Sea. The Keralan sun was pretty unforgiving - cue some admiring hoots from the lobsters on the way back. We got talking to some local oddballs in a restaurant, who took a shine to Jasmine and sat at our table for most of the meal - one of them bashfully told her she was "bit nice". How lovely it is to see romance blossom ! The bus ride back was broken up nicely with the bus making some diabolical noises and then giving up on life.

The real fun came in the evening though - we had booked ourselves into Hotel Hakoba (described by The Rough Guide To Being Wrong as "dowdy but with cable TV"). I had forked out extra to have a room to myself with air conditioning, as I was desperate to get a decent night's sleep. This didn't happen - by 2am the air was so close and suffocating that I realised I was going to have to stay awake until dawn. The experience that followed knocked the Mumbai train ride off the top spot for most traumatic event so far. The 'con didn't work at all, having an outlet vent that faced a brick wall, and a load of ants and lice waged a war of attrition in my bed while I slowly marinated in my own sweat. The ceiling fans looked like they would come off the ceiling at any moment and my plan to go for a walk was scuppered by there not being any light in the corridors, and no way of telling where the treacherous flight of stairs was. The only good thing that happened is that a huge lizard came in and eat some of the mosquitos. So I waited it out for 8 hours until the sun came up and booked myself into the posh hotel up the road (giving Hokaba the V sign on the way out). I don't think I've ever been so happy.

Now we're in Gokarna, an idyllic hangout for ageing hippies - first impressions were not good, but during the day it's extremely relaxed and has got a reasonably nice market place (which was overrun by the Full Moon festival on our first night). Om beach is awesome.