Hi ! Right, we've left Goa. Caught a train from Margao which cost only 80Rs each (about 1pound) for a 400km train trip. Buying the tickets was an experience - I see why people like to queue up the day before and wait in an orderly line for hours before they are guaranteed to get their ticket. On the day of departure you can still buy your ticket at the station but you enter a mosh pit of frenzied elbowing and shoving... I am ashamed to say I resorted to ...

Itching to start our week of chilling-out on the reportedly beautiful beach of Pololem, we left Panaji, stopping off briefly in Margao, the main town in south Goa, to pick up Lisa (a friend of my sister’s), who is joining us to do some traveling for a few weeks. Lisa is living in India at the moment, working with her aunty who is setting up a community project a few hours south of Bangalore. Our backpacks piled in the front cabin with the bus driver,...

From Mahabaleshwar, we booked a double berth on a sleeper-bus to Panaji (or Panjim) in Goa. We’re starting to figure out that getting to a place in India is usually an adventure all of it’s own! We headed off down the mountain for the hotel which served as the sleeper-bus pickup point at about 7pm in a huge shared 4x4 with 2 other couples and their children. They were our age and one couple had been married for 8 years, the other for 13! As they we...

Had a bit of a panic leaving Pune when an enterprising autorickshaw driver almost convinced us that our bus was leaving from another town and not from Pune station…luckily we’ve been here long enough now that we decided to check first… Only about 1 hour late (not bad for Indian transport by all accounts!), the bus was a ‘luxury’ coach with TV! We experienced our first Bollywood movie, which was surprisingly easy to follow consid...

Our first India Rail journey (from Mumbai to Pune) went pretty smoothly, even taking into account a small incident with a porter demanding 150 rupees (about 2 quid) for ‘helping’ (he was about 5 foot tall) Nige to lift his backpack onto the luggage rack… it was actually good it happened though, as the other passengers then explained how much to tip (10 rupees per bag – so it turned out that the 5 rupees we offered him was perhaps a little ...