Goodbye to "Incredible India"

After Palolem we planned on spending a few days in Hampi, but the train there was cancelled due to lack of demand! We were gutted. We’ll just have to visit there in the future; we do need a very good reason to go back to India. Instead we remained where we were for a few more days, hanging out and also managed to arrange mum’s flights to travel with us to KL and Bali for nearly three weeks next month- can’t wait!! Everybody is welcome to travel with us for a few weeks, jump on baord!

From Palolem we took a sleeper train (AC this time and thankfully I didn’t see one cockroach) to Mumbai. We found a decent clean looking room in a centrally located guesthouse but at an over inflated price, however we checked in. We then checked out Chowpatti beach. It was pretty much like the beach in Chennai, except busier- not very nice. Mumbai was really polluted and smoggie on this visit.

We walked around a different area of the city to when we were previously in Mumbai, did some shopping (did you know that they pirate books? Whole novels and guidebooks complete with colour covers! You can buy them on the street for under $1.50 -all the latest titles! The publishing student in me was outraged, but the poor traveller who loves to read won out, we stocked up!) and watched Slumdog Millionaire in a lovely cinema. What a great film, if you think we’ve been exaggerating in our account of India so far, watch the film and you’ll see exactly

what we are talking about.

The taxi to the airport drives you past slums where 55% of the population live, a horrendous image to leave India on, confirming to us that we were very ready to leave.

Turns out the decent looking room we had the night before must have been infested with bed bugs, Malachy was covered in bites. I usually sleep with my sleeping bag zipped up to my neck, Mal likes the spread eagled approach and the bugs liked him. They were the same ones as in Pondicherry (where he was savaged before) and a google search confirmed they were bed bugs. Sick, sick, sick and this was in one of the most expensive rooms we had stayed in! They left him feeling like crap and totally drained. We were really happy to get on that plane to Bangkok!