Today turned out to be somewhat special. After I did a longer run of 50 minutes around the neighborhood I returned to our hut only to be told that dolphins were roaming by the beach - as it turned out there were plenty of them and they appeared to be fishing/feeding, just like a local fisherman who was standing in the water and catching crabs with his net. We watched the dolphins for more than an hour and I tried continuously to take pictures of them - but they did not appear particularly interested in being photogenic as they were otherwise engaged and I only managed to catch the fin - about 100 times - much to my frustration; patience is a virtue when taking pictures ;-)
After our usual breakfast in the German bakery we agreed to go booking our onwards journey to Bangalore, which apperantly was a Pensioner's Paradise right up until the city grew considererably due to the inflow of I.T. businesses and personnel - the Silicon Valley of India.
To our annoyance Shanti doesn't (currently) have Internet despite promises so we ended up going to a cyber cafe. We quickly realised that booking trains to Bangalore from Goa even with two weeks notice is a futile exercise - waiting lists all over; the earliest would be at least a week after our originally scheduled departure date, i.e. the 9th of February.
So instead we started asking around and looking for alternatives - it would seem that air conditioned overnight buses is the done thing. And crucially they're not booked weeks or months in advance. We therefore managed to find a bus for our originally scheduled departure date of the 2nd of February, which departs from Chawdi/Chaudi (a few km down the road) at 22:00 in the evening and is scheduled to arrive 11 hours later (3 hours quicker than train - and we don't have to drive 40km to Madgao either) - so we decided to try this out and booked through MakeMyTrip.com. The same website promised that we could get a nice discount on a hotel stay as well when booking a bus with them so after much searching and discussion while using a combination of TripAdvisor.in, ClearTrip.com and MakeMyTrip.com to look for hotels in Bangalore, we came across an actual B&B called Laika's Boutique Stay, which comes highly rated and won a Traveller's Choice award in 2012 - so we are naturally intrigued... ;-)
After a few hours on the beach we returned to the Cyber Cafe to have a look at the onwards journey from Bangalore - but after reading about Mysore (and the fact that buses leave from Bangalore to Mysore every 5 minutes) and Bandipur National Park we quickly came to the conclusion that we would be better off not booking any onwards journeys - there is more to be seen in Karnataka than we originally thought; before we move on to Kerala, which is actually also on the border of Bandipur National Park.
We ended up eating in Madhu and this time went "all out" with grilled fresh fish (Kingfish and Red Snapper) and chips/rice/vegetables on the side - with starters of Pakora and Munchow soup - as well as a couple of beers. Afterwards we ended up in Sandy Feet for a Tuborg but it turned out to be a mad house of variously intoxicated party goers and we quickly retreated and ended up in Shanti again for a last beer - Claire ended up with an Irish Coffee and was thoroughly impressed with the bartender's grasp of making stuff not on the menu - I suspect she will return there in the very near future ;-)
After our usual breakfast in the German bakery we agreed to go booking our onwards journey to Bangalore, which apperantly was a Pensioner's Paradise right up until the city grew considererably due to the inflow of I.T. businesses and personnel - the Silicon Valley of India.
To our annoyance Shanti doesn't (currently) have Internet despite promises so we ended up going to a cyber cafe. We quickly realised that booking trains to Bangalore from Goa even with two weeks notice is a futile exercise - waiting lists all over; the earliest would be at least a week after our originally scheduled departure date, i.e. the 9th of February.
So instead we started asking around and looking for alternatives - it would seem that air conditioned overnight buses is the done thing. And crucially they're not booked weeks or months in advance. We therefore managed to find a bus for our originally scheduled departure date of the 2nd of February, which departs from Chawdi/Chaudi (a few km down the road) at 22:00 in the evening and is scheduled to arrive 11 hours later (3 hours quicker than train - and we don't have to drive 40km to Madgao either) - so we decided to try this out and booked through MakeMyTrip.com. The same website promised that we could get a nice discount on a hotel stay as well when booking a bus with them so after much searching and discussion while using a combination of TripAdvisor.in, ClearTrip.com and MakeMyTrip.com to look for hotels in Bangalore, we came across an actual B&B called Laika's Boutique Stay, which comes highly rated and won a Traveller's Choice award in 2012 - so we are naturally intrigued... ;-)
After a few hours on the beach we returned to the Cyber Cafe to have a look at the onwards journey from Bangalore - but after reading about Mysore (and the fact that buses leave from Bangalore to Mysore every 5 minutes) and Bandipur National Park we quickly came to the conclusion that we would be better off not booking any onwards journeys - there is more to be seen in Karnataka than we originally thought; before we move on to Kerala, which is actually also on the border of Bandipur National Park.
We ended up eating in Madhu and this time went "all out" with grilled fresh fish (Kingfish and Red Snapper) and chips/rice/vegetables on the side - with starters of Pakora and Munchow soup - as well as a couple of beers. Afterwards we ended up in Sandy Feet for a Tuborg but it turned out to be a mad house of variously intoxicated party goers and we quickly retreated and ended up in Shanti again for a last beer - Claire ended up with an Irish Coffee and was thoroughly impressed with the bartender's grasp of making stuff not on the menu - I suspect she will return there in the very near future ;-)
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| The fin of a dolphin sticking out of the water |
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| A local fisherman catching crabs |
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