We rushed to get the train, as we hadn't bought a ticket and we were running late from breakfast. But no need to panic - it was delayed. (I don't know why we bothered rushing to be honest - we really should have known). So we sat and watched the men and women wander across the tracks, picking up rubbish and trying to avoid a mad woman that kept following us and singing to herself.

Arrived in Trivandrum which instantly reminded me of the big cities - and I remembered how much I didn't like them - can you believe I had started to forget about a lot of things that we did only 3-4 weeks ago!! We got a tuk tuk out to the beach - where Andi had a fight with the driver about the money and not taking us straight to our hotel. It wasn't very pleasant but in the end we had to pay him his money as there was a crowd of locals now gathering around him. We didn't however, stay in the hotel we were going to - for fear that they'd all come back to find us, ha ha! So we went with a guy from one of the restaurants who showed us his place, which were little brick bungalows and a steal at 300 rupees a night (80 rupees is 1 pound). It was ok so we agreed - saved us looking around for somewhere else cause we were only staying one night.

Kovalum is not the best place we've been to. The beach isn't very nice, the people don't seem all that friendly and it's quite dirty. There seems to be a few middle aged white tourists about, German I think - who will be from the couple of hotels that do package deals. There are a few travellers by the looks of things, but doesn't look to be very busy. We're at Lighthouse Beach so maybe the main Kovalum beach is busier as that's where the majority of package hotels are based. This area seems to have more locals about - mainly teenage boys who come down to play in the sea after school.

The place actually looks better at night with all the restaurants lit up, but other than that there's not much else to do. We had breakfast at the beach and watched the men pull in the fishing nets. We watched for nearly 2 hours as they pulled and pulled and pulled. However, it was somewhat of an anti-climax as when the nets finally came in there wasn't much fish at all. Hardly worth all that effort if you ask me. I respect the fact that they still do it by the old traditional ways, but once again it just seems so inefficient. A really hard job for those guys, especially in the heat. Oh well, no doubt we'll still eat it tonight and thank them for their efforts in our prays!