Three days in a “coco house” on the beach in Goa wouldn’t have been my choice for wrapping up the trip most years, but after Hampi I felt like some time by the coast again. A train from Hampi took me to Margao, my previous launchpad for stays in south Goa. Panjim was only two hours away, and it would have been easy to get to Morjim/Aswem that same evening, but I felt like seeing the Portuguese quarter of Fontainhas in Panjim again (after a gap of twenty years), and anyway, Panjim has some good riceplate restaurants.

The new Siolim bridge makes access to beaches across the Chapora river (Morjim, Aswem, Mandrem) rather easier than before. Of course, this cuts both ways; change is happening rapidly in this part of Goa (it seems driven by Russian property speculators), rather like the beachfront cluttering I’ve witnessed in south Goa since the late eighties. Nonetheless, Morjim made a pleasant and uncrowded change from beaches such as Agonda and Patnem in the south, and I found the Goan Cafe (one of the original two accommodation options on this beach) a friendly and peaceful spot.

Here’s a view from my balcony in the early morning:

By chance, my visit coincided with the full moon and the period of low tide was bang in the middle of the day. This meant that walking beyond Aswem and Mandrem to Arambol was straightforward on the wide stretches of sand and low inflowing streams. Most of my time was in fact continuing the passion for walking that had begun in the nipping chills of Uttarakhand three months before, and gone on through Rathambhore and Hampi.

The heaped riceplates I’d devoured in Karnataka were now only a memory, and soon the baking sunshine and gentle swooshing of waves on white sands would also be alive as mere memories and virtual stacks of digital photographs.

The sacred site of Hampi was somewhere I went prepared to be come away from with disappointment. Well, how many travel recommendations have you followed and found them to be everything you were promised? That’s right, most likely about two. In my case the Taj Mahal and Uttarakhand would be those two. Now I have another to put on the list - Hampi.

Continue reading – `What’s Hampi like, then?´

‘Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more ’twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.’

As You Like It, William Shakespeare

I wasn’t exactly rotting from hour to hour while waiting in Hospet, but it was a tedious time to be on hold. The President of India was visiting Hampi and I’d timed my visit to coincide exactly with hers. No tourists allowed to stay overnight in Hampi. Well, how to use up the time I had to stay? The town itself (”charmless” according to my Rough Guide to India) can be explored in half a day, and there’s only so much time I could spend in restaurants eating the admittedly excellent riceplate meals. Some context for the situation of the Tungabhada river came through my Sunday cycle outing to the Tungabhada reservoir and dam. By Monday, the decks were clear for visitors to stay in Hampi.

Continue reading – `Thereby hangs a tale…´

When the president of India looks in on Hampi, most of Hampi’s residents are removed. This includes rhesus monkeys, famous for scampering around the rocky monuments, stray cows and all of the tourists staying in Hampi’s sixty or so lodges. Shipped out, in the case of the monkeys, to large holding cages in nearby Hospet. Tourists had an only marginally less gruelling exclusion, as the evacuation of Hampi led to great pressure on hotels in Hospet.

Continue reading – `Hey, Pratibha, your shoes are unlaced!´

It’s interesting to take a look in the warehouses scattered around Station Road in Margao, the main city in south Goa. Amongst the charcoal collection yards and spice houses are buildings dedicated to receiving the large numbers of bananas which are sold each day. I went in one and talked to the men working there. They showed me the large “arms” (my word, there must be a proper term for the long stems of hundreds of bananas), which weigh a good twenty kilos each:

Continue reading – `Banana barrow boys in Margao´

My title, coming as it does from British TV’s 1994 The Day Today, could hardly go wrong. Those watching the unfolding story of British PM Gordon Brown’s China visit will have been struck by the absolute lack of any critical words from him on human rights abuses in the country, the Tibet issue, or of the throttling of voices of dissent on the Internet and elsewhere. Brown’s plans for ID cards in four years will move British democracy closer to the Chinese model, anyway. The appropriacy of the quote shone out at me when seeing the story as carried by BBC World TV. They dwelt lovingly and lengthily on the trade delegation travelling with sag-jawed Brown, foremost being the poster child of 80s and 90s Thatcherism, Richard Branson.

Continue reading – `Branson’s clockwork dog crosses Atlantic floor´

Indian Railway station signage has its own unique grip on the use of English, of course, and my current favourite is Foot Over Bridge (FOB). This sounds to my ears less like a pedestrian footbridge than a unique way of using the feet. The bridge itself appears from the name to take on a slightly specialised function. Who ever heard of a “rail over bridge” or a “canal over bridge”? Most likely there are none, not even in Indian Railways gazetteers.

Continue reading – `The “foot holiday” has begun!´

The name of Edmund Hillary first came to my ears during a community relations visit by the police to my school, when I was about nine years old. They showed a grainy, black-and-white film of his expedition with Vivian Fuchs (and how we all giggled at that name) across Antarctica to the South Pole. Even though we couldn’t imagine what the ice continent would be like, the pictures of Snowcats crossing crevasses was inspirational.

A hotel room in the Australian Snowy Mountains’ village of Adaminaby was the unlikely setting for my catching the film of Hillary’s Ocean to Sky expedition. It was aptly timed; I was travelling to Asia and had a fascination for the sacred sites along the Ganges.

I keenly felt Sir Ed’s comments about the “ecological slum” that the Khumbu valley had turned into since his first visit in 1951; I could only mourn the loss of “the dense forest around Tengboche, alive with colourful birds and nervous musk deer” on my 1980s and 90s treks to the region.

Now the great man is gone; he is sorely missed. Those who value mountainous places, the Sherpa people of Nepal, sustainable development and straightforward talking have lost someone who felt like a personal friend.

That delay mention in the previous post led to the Golden Temple mail - taking me from Sawai Madhopur to the city of Mumbai - being four hours late arriving in Mumbai’s Dadar station, where my connecting train to Goa had left over two hours earlier It was a gamble I played, as regular travellers to these parts will know that trains are often delayed at this time of year by thick fog hanging over the N Indian plains until midday. Nonetheless, I’d previously made the same connection without drama in January, 2006.

Continue reading – `What’s this fogging delay all about?´

Ranthambhore is Rajasthan’s most popular destination for tiger watchers. Yet following my dawn patrol around the track in a 20-seater truck looking for large striped cats, it was renewing my relationship with the surrounding countryside the next day by bicycle and on foot that gave me more of the feel of the place. From Ranthambhore Fort, a vista of two lakes was tempting enough for a closer look.

Continue reading – `The tiger Sanctuary of Ranthambhore´

People kept telling me, “You should stay here for the Mela!” By this they meant the Uttaraini Mela, which would see lines of wetted bodies snaking down to the confluence of the river, probably humans numbering lakhs (hundreds of thousands). No, I’m just not that much into melas these days. Give me a high and whispering forest at midday in the warm wind, and you can keep your mass ablutions and Giardiasis.

Continue reading – `It’s a blast in Bageshwar´

Ralph had arrived from a grey December in Wales for what I consider an unusual winter holiday. His time was to be a sandwich, in total just over two weeks. Around the filling was a thick crust which consisted of sitting around, getting stoned in the hills above Almora. The filling was three days in the high village of Munsyari, and a trek in the direction of Milam glacier.

Continue reading – `Ridge barbers and rare barbarity´

(Surely not the first time that title has been so punned…)

None of the biotic variety of bedbugs encountered yet, thankfully, but time in India so far has given me plenty of exposure to bed problems. Although not yet inflicted with a collapsing bed like gentle giant Jamie, noisy beds have followed me around Uttaranchal like a reputation for bad credit. The construction of the typical budget hotel bed fairly encourages noises, noises which the word creak doesn’t begin to express. Thinnish plywood laid over as few as three cross-lattices, which flexes in the frame, rubbing stubby scratch-squeak edges on varnished frame wood.

Continue reading – `Some bugs about beds´

While oranges and lemons still cling to trees, the flat banana palms are wilted and yellowed at the edges. You see frost on the ground in this part of Uttarakhand most mornings now - thin dustings of cake-ice that stay until ten in shaded areas in woodland and in people’s gardens. Yet fickle conditions from the sun’s strength mean that locally-grown green peas and rock melons are in the markets next to pumpkins and oranges. The ground is dry since the last monsoon rains, but a few seasonal rainshowers keep it lightly sprinkled. There were two of those a week ago.

Continue reading – `From the midst of a golden winter´

One year of packing to leave on this trip is pretty much like the last one. It has become fairly automatic, selecting what to include in my rucsac for a brief saunter around the northern hills followed by some time in the south during my three months in India. Such that packing is just about the final item on my “to do” list. But I will pass on some hints for anyone facing the packing process for the first time. These are in no way intended to supplant what’s already in the ComPAQt FAQs elsewhere on this site - they are more like a sprinkling of afterthoughts to what I included on that page.

Continue reading – `You lucky packers - the easy guide.´

As the autumn sunlight of Europe turns each pane of glass into metal flashed golden, some part of my amygdala wakes and urges my body to begin a search for winter quarters. I’m slightly restless, reflective on the days of the past summer and feeling that the strength and buoyancy I had from warmer months has changed into a steady gaze to the horizon, where the sun skims lower and lower.

Continue reading – `Something to do with the sunshine´

above: Rice Plate Ready - an Indian restaurant sign
below: a rice plate in Karnataka, south India - price Rs.25

If you are a regular blog reader, probably the only less-than-obvious thing I can tell you is about the photos here. For load-time reasons, I limited the sizes of photos on this page to around 500 pixels maximum dimension. You can view larger versions of all the posted photos - and many which never made it to the pages of this blog, but were taken on the current trip - in the “First Showing” gallery using the photos link at the top of the page. In that gallery, click once on the thumbnail view to get a larger picture, then once again to see it maximum size. You can also rate the photos in this “First Showing“ gallery.

Older photos from previous India trips are in the earlier trip blogs. You’ll see a selection of some of those photos in photo e-cards, which you can send as email photo cards, with or without a choice of music. All other, archived, photographs are in the regular gallery zone (left menu).
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