Our final log in India :-( .............

Our last week in India has been pretty random, starting with our journey from Munnar to Cochin. We caught the bus at 6.30am, after about 20mins it stopped due to an apparent 'road block' just outside of Munnar, we then caught a rickshaw with some random guy who told us that we could catch a bus on past the 'road block'. We arrived at the 'road block' to see a huge boulder/asteroid thing that had fallen out of nowhere into the middle of the road smashing the concrete leaving just enough room for rickshaws to squeeze past. There were loads of people there taking photos in amazement, we're convinced it was an asteroid!! After a few minutes of us wondering how the hell we were going to get to Cochin a random tourist coach turned up so we were ushered on this saying that it was going to Cochin. We got on thinking that it was a private coach going to Cochin and that we would have to pay, when in fact it was actually a coach load of marketing students on a uni trip. After about 10mins the driver put on this crazy Indian music at full volume and all the students were up dancing in the aisle for the enmtire 4 hour journey to the same song on repeat!!! They even dragged us up to dance at one point.. more sober dancing!! Its pretty hard to do when the coach is swerving round corners high up in the mountains! Its probably one of those had to be there moments but it was pretty surreal!!

When we finally reached Cochin we couldn't get space on the train to Goa so had to spend a night here before getting the train the following day. We eventually got to Palolem on Thursday after having to kip in the train station for a few hours in the morning. We'd been looking forward to going to Palolem for ages and whizzed through Kerala so that we could have a week there to relax, soak up the sun and party! Palolem was beautiful, the beach was lovely and the sea was really clear and warm. We stayed in a pretty basic beach hut in a prime position right on the edge of the beach so we had a lovely sea view. Palolem is very much a backpacker place so it was really nice to get to meet lots of people, mostly British! There was a good group of us that hung out together for most of the week - we hired sea kayaks one day where we kayaked to a small island just off the coast and we also hired a boat to take us to a secluded beach for the day which was really good fun. The evenings were mostly centred around going out for dinner, drinking copious amounts of alcohol in Cafe Del Mar, late night dips in the sea and eventually finding our beds at 5am!! And of course lots of cricket-watching! We're number 1 fans of freddie flintoff!! All in all we had a fab time in Palolem and were pretty sad to leave but we do have shocking white bits as souvenirs!!!

We left Palolem on the Thursday to catch our final sleeper train to Mumbai. Our stay in Mumbai was very short and sweet but what we saw of it we really liked. On the Friday we wondered along Colaba Causeway and visited Gateway to India along the harbour front, we then did a very traditional thing of going to the cinema to watch The Pursuit of Happyness! It was only 80 pence so we couldn't resist! A full day of shopping was planned for our final day starting with breakfast at the famous Leopold's Cafe... this plan went slightly awol due to being 'talent spotted' by a casting agent from Bollywood! Our lifelong ambition is now complete as within a few hours we were transformed into women prisoners in jail on Mandovi Island! For 10 hours hard work we were paid 500 rupees!! It was such a long day and not as glamorous as we had hoped but really good fun and we can't wait to see - 'For whom I'm living'!!!!

The next morning we headed for the airport to catch our plane to our next destiantion, Singapore. We're really sad to leave India, in the last few weeks we have really grown to love it despite its many flaws, our number 1 pet hate is the amount of litter there is. We wish we had longer in India as there is still so much to see and do but now we're ready for a new place... bring on super clean and super modern Singapore!!

Lots of love

Charlotte and Becky xxxx