The Fantastic World of India

Hi All

Just wanted to quickly say that we arrived in sunny India safely and happily. We arrived in Goa and managed to find ourselves an ok guesthouse on the beach. Its was beautiful there and everyone was so nice to us we smiled the whole time and just knew as annie puts in, 'we're gonna like it here!' We had our first taste of indian food for breakfast, Puri its called, small like popodums/naan things with a sauce so good and to top it all off we found real, english marmite in a random charity shop in Colva, Goa!! We are loving it!!

We decided to leave Goa, as its mostly for the beach goers and having spent over a month on the beach in Thailand the past few weeks we decided we need some real culture and we wanted to see the real india and so we did. We decided to take the 'local bus' to Hampi, central Karanctra which was a 12 hour overnight journey. We paid a sixth of the price of the tourist bus, we were the only westerners on it and had a crazy uncomfortable night of small roads, seriously fast driving, engine repairs and pit stops every 5 minutes. Hilarious (the day after). Once we arrived in the town Hospet, everyone was waving at us and smiling to see us, it was like we were celebrities..we jumped on another local bus for 12 rupees (15p) to the village of Hampi. The journey was amazing, cattle everywhere pulling bricks and sugarcane, people in the streets with beautiful coloured sari's and green scenery everywhere. We have a nice (indian style, basic) guesthouse here and we just found out that its a very special day here today, everyone is fasting and celebrating a God tonight in the local temple, which we visited today and is breathtaking. This town is amazing and already we are loving India.

Plan is to travel to Kochi..very south and then fly up to Mumbai cheaply to meet our tour group for North India. We changed our Sri Lankan flight unfortunately as there is alot of violence there at the moment and we do not want to risk a suicide bomber....so after our tour we are going to trek the himalayas for a week..camping with the locals..!!! Will get some photos up soon, this is by far the best country to photograph.