The Adventures of Paul, Sadie and Daisy Moo too!

The last blog from India, sorry it’s a month late but not much to report so it will be a short one! With my dental treatment for this visit over, we had planned our last couple of weeks in Goa back in our favourite places in the South. We were also being joined by our very good friends from Nottingham, who were visiting India for the first time, and we were looking forward to showing them Goa. We got the train down from Thivim to Madgaon and then got a taxi to take us back to Mistral Holidays in Benaulim, where we spent my birthday back in January. This was only for 2 nights before our friends got there, so we could get the keys for the villa we had booked for the 6 days we had booked and get settled in before they arrived. To allow us to nip to the shop, off-licence etc we hired a scooter for the week which would help us to do this. On the day we moved into the apartment, Sadie got some basics in, and I got a taxi up to the airport to meet them. The villa we had rented was l

We’ve decided we quite like an overnight train, yes getting up and down from the top bunk is slightly awkward for someone of my size and clumsiness but it’s doable and I slept for almost all of the train journey to Mangalore.  We arrived mid-morning but we didn’t have anything planned to do here and our next onward train was in 6hrs, so we paid to store our backpacks in the left luggage at the station (think it was about 50rps for 24hrs) and went off to find breakfast, have a look about that then hole up somewhere cooler until our train. Fortunately for us we found an AC pub in a shopping mall which suited our needs exactly. I feel a bit bad that we didn't explore much at all, but on the surface it looks like any other busy city and I wasn't feeling 100% so wasn't up for a frantic tour to see the sights. Gorkana was our next stop for a few days as we’d heard the nearby Om Beach was a bit like old Goa before it became popular, we also had a friend staying there that we’d met

Sorry for the slow updates on the blog, we're not really doing much to write about so will try keep this one brief, but makes me realise that the last 4 weeks have flown by. Plus I have been doing weekly updated on Facebook, most of you reading this will be able to access those anyway! Benaulim was our next destination and we were looking forward to returning there, as it was one of our first stops we did on our big SE Asia trip back in 2017/18. We initially had 10 days booked here, although we did then go on to extend that by another 7 days, more on that later.  Our first accommodation was at Mistral Holidays, we had wanted an apartment as we were in the area a little longer than usual, but couldn't book it for the full period. So the first 2 days we were in a studio room, then we moved into one of their 1 bedroom apartments for 8 days. It was lovely to have a big space with a proper kitchen, living room area and seperate bedroom and a lovely balcony, so we made the most of i

Bombay – so just like last time we were going to be visiting my childhood friend Caroline (Cotton) but this time she had moved to the much more central location of Bandra West. It reminded me a bit of hipster London as we travelled past craft beer places and small arty cafes, her apartment is a lovely old building with multiple balconies, 3 bedrooms and a large open plan kitchen, 3 crazy cats, a hamster with 1 ball, her husband Anshuman and daughter Saira. We didn’t really do much whilst we were there as we were still recovering from Soundstorm but we managed to get some work stuff organised on the laptops, get used to the constant sound of honking car / tuk horns, adapt a bit to the stifling heat and got SIM cards from the Vodafone shop – Got a family deal so 2 physical SIMs and 2 virtual SIMs with about 260gb of data across them each month, texts, calls etc for only £10 a month – this is a post-paid account so needs a residential Indian address. We also hung out with their friends