First it was the Swedes, Daniel and Sara who we'd met last year in the Philippines turning up in Mamallapuram. Then on the Andaman Islands we chanced upon Radoslav and Alzbeta, a couple from a tiny town in Slovakia, where Elenka'a mother was born. Yesterday, I was sitting on our porch at the Blue Corner when I heard this hello two cabinas away. It was a woman we'd met 6 weeks ago and over 2000 kilometres away on the Andamans . It should have been no...

   I don't really like dogs that much. They just sit there looking at you. Waiting. If you dare look back they think they belong to you. When we moved into our cabina at the Blue Corner we found a mother and six puppies living under our floor boards. Two days later people complained about the whimpering. Next thing you know the front of our porch was taken apart by the Blue Corner wrecking crew and the puppies were taken away. That night, Elenka sat on ou...

 Elenka and I came out of our cabina moments after a school of dolphins swam by yesterday. Elenka saw Biru, our waiter, walking up from the shore and rushed over to speak with him as I ordered a milk Nescafe. Moments later she came back with an ear-to-ear smile:"Biru swam with the dolphins," she said, proud of our favourite waiter.I took a sip of my just delivered hot brew and smiled at Elenka. In the two times that we've been to India neither of us have ev...

  A frog sleeps in our sink. A gecko guards the other half of our bathroom from its station under the rim of the toilet. At night, the biggest, blackest rat in Goa prowls the Blue Corner. But that's okay because five, one-week old puppies, along with their mother live under our cabina. And just to make sure we're able to have a rodent-free, cockroach-free cabina, each night I place little bits of food in the cracks of the walls in the cabinas adjacent o...

The sign in the waiting room read, 'Don't Dirty The Walls'. The walls were once white and the sign was new, but these walls hadn't been painted or cleaned in 30 years. Suddenly the voice of Dolly Parton came blasting through from the inner-office and the door was flung open.My first clue should have been the man's name, not the wall sign. He looked like Jerry Lewis' Nutty Professor and talked like Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes. His ...