And finally.........India in a (cashew) nutshell! It's hard to find the words to define the essence of India -it's beyond a statement and is so spectacularly diverse in every aspect of its being it's challenging, to say the least, to capture it in words. It's all the extremes and for anything you say about the culture, the people or the country, the opposite it also true. As well as extremes it's also a land of contradictions. From the landscape - sand blasted d...

Day 55 - Mumbai - Saturday 10th December 2011 Dada - we're here!! 5.20am and we're outside Dada station trying to work out how to get to our hotel in Juhu. After several haggling sessions with different drivers, we picked one out and got in our yellow and black hunk of rust and sped off at a shattering pace towards our pad. We're being spoilt for accommodation in Mumbai as Alpesh booked and paid for us to spend the night in the 5 star Novatel on Juhu beach for o...

Day 50, 51, 52, 53, 54 - Panaji to Mandrem - Monday 5th, Tuesday 6th, Wednesday 7th, Thursday 8th, Friday 9th December 2011 We waved goodbye to Panaji and boarded the bus for the 30 min drive to Mapusa, here we would change buses for an hour further to Mandrem. So far the trains have been great and our experience of them has been far, far better than we imagined before we came to India. The buses on the other hand are awful!! They are crowded, smelly, and incred...

Day 48 -Palolem beach to Panaji - Saturday 3rd December 2011 Up and checked out by 11am, we said goodbye to Palolem and jumped on the bus to Panaji - the capital of Goa. Today was the feast of St Francis Xavier which takes place once a year on this very day! The festival is to commemorate the death of St Francis Xavier, who is the patron saint of Goa, and in honour of this a big festival takes place in Old Goa. Once in Panaji, we made our way over to the Mayfai...

Day 44 - Mangalore to Palolem beach, Goa - Tuesday 29th November 2011 For once we arrived early, an hour early to be precise. The problem with this was that the station we arrived at was not very touristy or a busy station for locals, in fact it was dead. Plus it was in the middle of nowhere with no buses and there were only a few rickshaw drivers so we were a bit stuck for haggling. We ended up (what we think) paying double what we should have to get us acros...