First-class

ISO Internet, Panjim (Goa)

We spent a couple more days in Bundi of which a highlight was hiring bicycles for a jaunt into the surrounding countryside, giving me, as expected, a better impression of the city to take to our next stop - Kota. This was not a pleasant place as far as I could tell, seemingly a town with a chip on its shoulder over the fact that everyone uses it as a portal (the train station is a major intersection) to somewhere else. Anyway, we stayed one fairly uneventful night in a disgusting hotel and caught the train in the morning.

This was a significant train - 25 hours and 1024 miles - taking us from northern India (Rajasthan) into the south of the country (Goa). As a treat, and because we wondered what it would be like, we decided to take this journey in first-class. This was a wise investment (the price was comparable to a London-Winchester open return) as it afforded us air conditioning and comfortable bunk beds, as well as an excellent window view of the changing landscapes as we traversed the subcontinent.

Stepping off the train in Goa immediately confirmed that if one travels one thousand miles towards the equator one will probably get hotter. With this in mind we headed straight to a resort called Anjuna and hit the beach for a couple of days. Welcome changes abounded - beer more readily available, meat and fish that looked edible (the fish is particularly excellent) and locals more accustomed to the sight of white faces. Our hotel had a big beachfront screen that showed movies in the evening - we saw Pulp Fiction and Casino Royale during our stay. The Bond was a particular treat since I had read the book on the afore-mentioned train trip and I enjoyed both versions immensely.

Other notes from Anjuna - our hotel room was so hot and humid that when I hand-washed some clothes and hung them in the bathroom to dry they were wetter when I got back from the beach than they had been when I hung them up. This made for a particularly unpleasant couple of sleeps, so we cut short our stay in Anjuna after two nights and came to Panjim, basically a Mediterranean enclave carved into the Goan coast.

This has made for an enjoyanle change of pace. Last night we took a boat cruise up the River Mandovi for an hour, with something approximating a bar mitzvah going on around us. It seems the Indians who holiday in Goa like to be entertained with loud music, a dancefloor, and an enthusiastic but humourless MC whose main line is to encourage everyone to "get up on the dancefloor" (I did not comply) at every available opportunity.

Today we took a bus to Ponda (about an hour) and visited a spice plantation. This was enjoyable, but not quite on the farm scale I had imagined - it was basically a bit of woodland with some herbs growing sporadically. The free lunch was good though, and enhanced the view that Goa has worked out the idea of creating tourist-friendly experiences like this and the cruise much more quickly than anywhere we saw in north India.

We've been here a month now, and I'm about to begin my sixth book of the trip. If I'd thought of doing this when I was at university I might have done more than scraped a 2.1.

Dinner time.

Over.