James and Cat’s Jazz-tastic Journey!

Ok first off I’m going to explain the lats blog title… which I realised I hadn’t done as soon as I’d posted it, but was too lazy to rectify.  Basically, one evening in Hampi, Tim a Canadian guy we’d been jamming with took us up to some rocks to see some tiny little wild puppies he’d found and been feeding.  Me and the girls spent our time oohing and aahing over them.. picking them up, tickling their bellies, that sort of thing, whilst the boys spent a good half an hour throwing rocks at a sign that said ‘Please do not throw stones’ seeing who could hit it (none of them could!)  On the walk the back the usual smutty innuendo and double entendres were made about looking at puppies, playing with puppies, stroking puppies and so on and so forth… it was highly amusing.  When asked where we’d been and what we were doing we replied “Throwing rocks and looking ar puppies”.  So there you go.. that’s that cleared up!

As Cat mentioned we went to a big temple and the city was preparing for a big Hindu festival the following day. As with a lot of Hindu temples, you are not allowed to take your shoes in, and Cat being a girl couldn’t stand on the hot stone floor for too long, so she waited outside while me and the hardcore Canadians paid our 2 Rupees and went in, jumping from one shaded spot to the next. The temple had a temple elephant that was trained and sacred, which enabled it to bless people. You put some money in its trunk, and it passed it back to its keeper, then it put its trunk on your head, and you were blessed! I think this was more of a tourist attraction because the locals seems to pass up the oppurtunity to be blessed by an elephant. The keeper was a nice guy though, and he said he would give us a free tour of the temple. There were many old relics some dating back to the 800’s and many old statues of shiva; see the pictures.

So after some culture we retired to the one restaurant open on our side of the river and had a that well known indian dish for dinner, chicken schnitzel. Tasty! The next day was the start of the festival, but Cat was feeling unwell so she stayed in bed while the rest of us went to party with the locals.  There was a real lack of westerners present which was a nice change and the whole town was decked out in streamers and young children were decorating the streets by throwing handfuls of coloured paint at each other; a ritual which is a regular occurance at all Hindu festivals. Having wandered the strip a few times we came across a huge crowd of people heading down an alley and people pointing us in saying ‘Free Food’.  Now as a traveller, whenever you hear that something is free alarm bells start to ring and you have to ask, what’s the catch?  This time though we hit the jackpot! As we wandered down the alley we were aware we were entering into somebody’s house, and having followed suit we took off our shoes and were greeted by a big Indian man! He seemed so elated to see westerners he barged past all the locals to shake us all by the hand! He led us to an empty room and laid out mats on the floor for us to sit on.  We could smell some gorgeous food being cooked and we started to try to ask the guy what was going on, he didnt speak much english so he went and got his grand daughter.  It turns out it was a family home and every year for the festival they open their house and offer free food to everyone who comes in; they were farmers who grew rice, bananas, coconuts and sugar cane so all the produce was their own. After a quick lesson in how to eat properly using only your right hand we were give the best Indian food I have ever eaten, all served on a banana leaf plate. Starter of a rice pudding style dish, then pilau rice and a spicy pickle with curd! Brilliant!

We then had to hop back across the river to catch our bus up to Mumbai for the next leg of our adventure. 16 hours on a bus! Quite a trek but we arived in Mumbai and checked into a nice aircon hotel close to the airport. Early the next morn we were up and out and on a plane to kolkata, Formaly Calcutta, then onwards to Bangkok BKK airport!

So thats where we are now, back in BKK, and man do I love being back!  No one stares at us, or tries to touch me inappropriately… well only James, but I’m used to that!

We spent our first day in Bangkok in MBK, an enormous shopping centre with aircon that’s set to ‘Arctic’!  We wandered round, mentally spending every penny we have, but we did pick up a few bits and bobs.  Most importantly, a USB card reader so we can upload our photos.  However, irony of all ironies, when we got to a computer we discovered it doesn’t actually work… what a waste of a pound!  So instead, we burned our pics to CD and uploaded them that way, so please do check out our Flickr page to see some new photos!  You’ll be better off just looking through the main bulk of the photos though, rather than looking at our albums, as apparently as we only have the free package we’re only allowed three albums, so the rest are just floating around.  We’ve also used up our ‘upload allowance’ for this month, so you’ll have to wait until May until we’re able to uplaod more I’m afraid.  I hate Flickr… see this is what happens when James leaves me to do the technical internet stuff… I do it wrong!  So we may be finding ourselves a new photo page, but we’ll let you know.

So while we were sitting in the lovely air conditioned interweb cafe discovering all this rubbishness, we heard a loud crack of thunder and BAM torrential rain descended!  And I mean TORRENTIAL!  We got the full works.. Thunder, lighting… and the flooding of the entire Khao San Road… we had to walk back to our hotel in water up to our calves!  Lovely! 

Tonight, we’re jumping on a sleeper bus up to Chiang Mai, to do some exploring of the North (again).  We’ll let you kow how that goes.

Much love and hugs to you all

xxxxx

So we finally left Palolem after what seemed like endless days of lazing and reading and eating and sleeping.  We had to; the languidness would have eventually killed us!

So we braved the overnight bus to Hampi.  When we arrived at the bus stand at 9:00pm, like our ticket told us to, to catch the bus at 9:30pm we met four people already waiting.  One guy travelling alone, who had been there since 8:00pm, he’d been told the bus was at 8:30, and three girls travelling together who’d been there since 8:30, they’d been told the bus was and 9:00! 

After a long wait the bus finally materialised at 10:30pm!!!!!  As per, it was bumpy and loud and very little sleep was had but my god was it worth it…

Hampi is beautiful!  The town itself, which consists of two streets is nothing special.. just like the rest of India it’s dirty and smelly.  But the landscape is spectacular.  I’ve had many converstaions with fellow travellers where we’ve tried desperately to describe it’s beauty, the essence of which I’ll try to capture here.

Imagine a rolling landscape, littered with boulders!  It’s as if some one spent an age perfectly positioning them… sort of like lego for giants.  But it looks so unreal; I was talking to a girl last night who completely summed it up for me… she said it looked like a really obviously fake film set for something like Jurassic Park, and thats just it, it looks fake! And scattered in amongst the rocks are these beautiful ruined temples, covered in scampering monkeys. I don’t know if my description has been much good so try looking here, here and here.

Anyway we decided to stay across the river, as the town of Hampi itself is so BORING! Being low season though there like three hotels and one restaurant open… but it does mean we’re getting a really cool circualar cottage with it’s own bathroom for one pound a night, and as there’s only one place to eat all the travellers congregate there and we’ve met some really nice people.

There’s a lot to see here but the trouble we’re having is being bothered to do anything in the heat.  It’s 37 degrees as I type but it gets up to 40 at midday.  Just up the road from our hotel there’s a huge fresh water lake so yesterday a group of us went up for a swim and it was gorgeous.. just laying around in the cool of the water.  I do have slightly pink shoulders now though!

Today we went and had a mosey round the main Temple in town, which was packed as they’re preparing for a big festival next week and the whole town is decked out in colours and paint. 

It’s our last night in Hampi tonight so we will probably spend tomorrow mentally preparing ourselves for the 16 hour bus journey to Mumbai!

I never thought I’d think this, but I’m looking forward to going to Thailand because it’s not so hot there!! Strange, isn’t it?

Oh yeah, both James and myself would like to apologise for the lack of photos we’ve put up.. this is what happens when you buy a cheap camera off a shopping channel, none of the computers recognise the USB connector thing. So we plan to buy a card reader in Bangkok.  Expect a flood of photos after that! 

Hope all is well back in blighty

Much Love

xxx

When we decided to come travelling we wanted it to be a completely spontaneous adventure. We had the plan to fly into Mumbai, head south from there, down in to Kerala and then back north and go into Nepal and Tibet before flying out of Delhi; a simple idea allowing us to pick and choose which cities we visited and linger in the places we enjoyed, keeping an air of spontaneity about our journey. This lack of planning however has been both our downfall and saviour.

From talking with fellow travellers and keeping up with the news we have found out that south of Goa is suffering from early monsoon and extraordinary heat; the train lines have been put out of use by torrential rain and it’s too hot to even think about leaving the room between 11 and 3. With regards to Nepal and Tibet and the current political climate, we feel it is not the right time to be heading that way. The risks are far too great, we would much rather save that part of the world for another adventure when we can experience the Himalayas in some politcal calm, without having to worry about being caught up in one of their all to frequent bloody riots.

With all this in mind we have formulated a new plan; we are leaving Palolem and Goa in a few days to head to small towm with World Heritage status called Hampi. It’s just inland and north of Goa. From there we will be heading back to Mumbai then flying over to Thailand to visit some of the places we didn’t get to visit last time and some places we would love to see again. We will also be heading to Malaysia to check out the sights. Around the beginning of June we will be flying back to India and heading for the then cool and dry areas of the north, around Rajhastan and Delhi, where we will depart for Budapest on the 3rd of july.

We have now been in Palolem over a week and now we are both fully healthy we are really starting to enjoy the laid back atmosphere, and gorgeous scenery. It’s a hard life getting up and doing nothing for a whole day. We have both enjoyed getting lost in books, and a copy of Lord of the Rings as just being bought, which I’m sure will cause much merriment to us both.
I hope all is well at home and you are enjoying the varied weather.

Much love
James and Cat

Well hello, hello and how are you all?

Since we last wrote much has happened… well when I say ‘much’ I mean we’ve changed location.  That’s right we left Anjuna and headed for Palolem in search of the idyillic setting we craved.  Well, we almost found it; Palolem is a huge bay… the beach is a beautiful palm tree strewn stretch of sand, with clear waters lapping at the shore.  This is all marred, however, by the fact the beach is lined with identical crappy beach shacks, all with exactly the same decor and menu.  James takes a slightly more optimistic view, believing that each place will have it’s own redeeming feature which sets it apart from the rest but I can’t bring myself to take that view… for me this place seems to have lost any charm it may have once had when it opened the door to hoardes of two week tourists with their tits out!

So we found the ‘famous’ Fernandes, recommended to us by Neve and Mimzi and got ourselves a beach hut with a gorgeous view of the sea.  Unfortunately I have seen more of the hut than I would have like, it now being my turn to be afflicted with a tummy bug.

So we haven’t really done much since we’ve been here, just chilled out, read books and spent an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom!  We still don’t really have any plans… we’re going to continue lazing here until I’m completely better, then maybe head north.. or maybe south…. we just don’t know.

This was just a short one, to let you know where we are and how we’re doing… but we haven’t really been doing anything, so no thrilling tales as yet.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I got my dreads done and, though I say so myself, they look rather good.  We were going to post photos to go with this blog, but once again the Indian computers have failed us and our camera isn’t recognised, so you’ll have to wait until next time I’m afraid.

Much Love

Cat and James

xxxx

Yes, we have actually taken some photos this time, and better than that, we’ve actually put them up on the interweb!

As you can see in the post below, James worked some technical wizardry and put a picture on the blog itself… but it would take far too long to put them all here so if you look down the right hand side of the page you’ll find the link to our Flickr page, where we’ve put up all the pics we’ve taken so far (there might be some more soon though, as I’m getting my dreads tomorrow!)

Enjoy…

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After a slow start things are finally starting to look up.  As you know I have been quite ill and we were held up in Panaji until I was better (it was green and coming out of both ends) Lonley Planet guide book diagnosed me with having travellers diahorrea, which apparently 30 to 70 % of travellers get with in the first 2 weeks… 30 to 70!!! I hope some one in the statistics department got fired for that one.

Im glad I got that out of my system!  So we’ve moved north to a beach called Anjuna, still in Goa.  Its renowned for being the party spot, but we’re right at the end of the high season, and so it’s pretty dead, and we’re not in too much of a mood to party.  So we checked in to a swanky hotel for a few days of R n R! Unfortunately it turned out to be a bit hippy-dippy, and having not eaten in 3 days I was in need of some good old fashioned home cooking, NOT a cashew nut burger with a rainforest for a side salad! Unfortunately we still didn’t have lady luck on our side. I still have Cat though… swings and roundabouts…

They did however do an amazing wheat free chocolate brownie! mmm…

After 2 days of veggie crap and Indian TV we felt fully revitalised and ready to start again, head out in to the world and start exploring. So we took a taxi 500 metres down the road and checked in to a cheaper hotel.  An adventure starts with just a step.  We checked into a room just off the beach with the view of spending a few days on the beach and relaxing even more! We found a really nice resturant that does amazing curries, and a few nice bars which show films in the evenings and have pretty decent pool tables.  So we’re filling the days well. Haven’t brought myself to get on the cheap beer yet though. Dont want to relapse and be ill again. A few more days I think and I should be there.

Today was the world famous Anjuna flea market.  I didnt see a single flea though; Cat assured me that this was a good thing but I still feel a bit disappointed. It was a huge market selling mostly tourist stuff but had some very nice clothes and jewllery.  Cat has also decided to get her dreads done by a nice hippy. Charged a small fortune but it’s well worth it to get them done nicely and know she’s happy with them; she may have them for some time. The hippy lady (name still unknown to us) lives on the next beach up so she’s going to come and get us Friday morning and spend the day doing Cat’s hair.  I may have to start the drinking..

So that’s us for now.  After friday we will be heading south to Palolem, still in Goa, which comes highly recommended by Neve (a good friend of ours) Hopefully even more relaxing by the beach. We’re not sure where we will head after that. It’s all part of the experience, meeting people and talking with them and finding out where’s good to go.

I hope all is well at home.  And thanks for all the comments. I hope I answered any questions, if not keep them coming and we’ll answer them in our next blog

 Also, we’ve added a link on the right hand side of the page to the BBC site  so you can check what the weather’s like out here… we’ll keep it updated to the specific place we are at the time… cool huh?

Peace and love

Hello eveyone, just a quick status update.

We’re still in Panaji after staying longer than intended; James was a wee bit poorly (it was coming out of both ends), but he’s much better now, so tomorrow we’re headed to Anjuna (finally) to relax by the beach for a while.

Love to you all

Cat and James

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Hello, all. Well we’ve arrived in Goa and are now happily ensconced in the capital Panaji.  It’s a quaint little place with a definite European flare; Goa didn’t gain it’s independence from Portugal until 1961 and it shows!  There’s lots of little Portugese restaurants and an enormous Christian church (which looks beautiful during the day, but at night they light it up and the blue neon cross on top and the fairy lights round jesus’s halo just make it look gaudy!) and the whole place has a very laid back feel.  After the madness of Mumbai this is much appreciated!  We spent four days there in total and it was more than enough.  The main thing that hit me about the city is the huge gianormous gap between rich and poor; people are either really rich (ie living in houses made from gold) or so poor that they sleep in middle of the road and oncoming traffic has to swerve to avoid them! It’s a loud, smelly, dirty city but it has SO much character!  We took a boat over to Elephanta Island on Saturday, which coincidentally was Holi Day, so many Indian families were making the pilgrimage also (aswell as throwing copious amounts of brightly coloured paint over each other, which didn’t seem to come out too easily!)  The island was amazing; huge caves that had been carved out of the mountain, with enormous carvings of various Hindu Deities… it was truly awe inspiring.
The one thing I personally am having a hard time with, is the attitude of the Indian men. They stare CONSTANTLY! I’ve been really good about not wearing anything too tight or revealing but it doesn’t deter them.. it’s not a pleasant feeling at all, and I find myself instantly suspicious of any man who talks to me, which again doesn’t make me feel good, as I’m sure there are plenty of genuinely nice guys out there. Oh well, I think it’s just something I’ll have to learn to live with.
So there was my rambling… we’re heading to the beaches in a couple of days.. probably Anjuna next (I want to get my dreads done there!) where we plan to do… nothing.
We’ll keep you posted (And I’ll try not to waffle quite so much next time!)
Oh yeah, keep you’re eyes peeled for photos, as we plan to upload some next time we post, only this computer’s rubbish and doesn’t recognise the camera!

Much love
Cat and James

Hello all.

This is just going to be a quickie, we have been in mumbai for 6 hours and theres not much to report, the airport is undergoing a hugh facelift, as is much of the downtown area. 
We have found a cheap little hostel and went for a traditional curry, CHICKEN TIKA MASSALA!!! it was munch. We’re suffering from jetlag as couldnt catch too much sleep on the no frill flight, going to go and have a bit of a wander around town then maybe a cat nap. I might nap too.

 Peace and Love 

Because I’m a little bit sad…

 So there you go… that’s how long we have left until our flight out…