A weekend of temples....

At the beginning of November (having been home for two weekends) we decided to explore further afield and take a trip to see the Halebid and Belur temples and the Jain statue at Shravanabelagola.

We left early on Saturday morning and drove to our hotel, the Hoysala Village Resort, stopping only for a 14 rupee masala dosa breakfast at a roadside cafe.

When we reached the resort, about a three and a half hour drive from Bangalore, we had a lovely lunch (all part of the package) and set off to Halabid.

The temple itself is in beautiful park like grounds and surrounded by lawns. We had a guide who explained the history and told us about the thousands of carvings that adorn the wall. Apparently it took over a hundred years to build and looking at the amazingly intricate work, it is not hard to imagine why.

After we'd spent a couple of hours at Halebid we drove on to Belur, a temple with a very different feel to it, enclosed in an enormous couryard. We didn't have a guide for this one because it was quite late and also both temples were from very similar eras and we thought that there would be a fair amount of overlap.

We had a wander round then returned to our hotel for our evening meal.

Halloween

I am so thankful that we bought over Bethan's pirate costume! She wore it five times over about eight days. She went to a Hallowe'en party on the Saturday before Hallowe'en, there was a fancy dress parade at her school on Hallowe'en, a Cagla's (pronounced Charla - it's Turkish) 10th birthday party later that evening, Phoebe's fancy dress birthday party on Saturday afternoon and the riding stables Hallowe'en party on the Sunday.

The costume was made by her Granny for the Otford Village Fete Parade in May 2005. The theme was "nautical" and the rainstorms added to the off-shore atmosphere. Bethan won second prize in the fancy dress show then and won second prize again at the riding stables - not bad for one costume!

The coat was made of felt and sadly, after so many outings, literally fell to peices!

Meetings with old friends

This is largely copied from John's blog - he's kindly allowed me to infringe his copyright.

Despite the fact we hadn't visited in nearly a decade we were hoping to meet up with some of the people we'd met in our previous visits.

Mr Amoncar from the bookshop recognised John straight away, "Mr Hill!" he shouted. Wrong name but right family!

It took us a single conversation with a rickshaw driver to find Manuel and his family despite us getting his surname wrong. He took us to his apartment but he wasn't in. We wandered round to the parade of shops at the front of the block and we found Sunja, his wife, working in their immaculate general store. Two evenings later we went to Sea Pearl with Manuel, Peter and Lucia and then back to the apartment for belated Diwali fireworks.

It took us about two conversations to discover the whereabouts of Annesha. We started asking in Betalbatim, about a kilometre south of Colva and were told by the beach sellers that they thought she was up towards Majorda, about three kms north of Colva. Another beach seller up by Majorda confirmed that she around and she was the first person we met on the beach the next day.

Salu is a taxi driver and used to take us around Goa when we last visited. Back then he had an Ambassador, then he bought a Maruti and now he's got a Toyota Qualis. We had asked for him at the taxi rank a few times but we were always told that he was working. As it was Diwali, trade was quite brisk and, he told us, you could get nine or ten passengers in a Qualis. We have a Qualis in Bangalore and whilst it can seat seven including the driver, eleven would be pretty cramped. We questioned this and he replied patiently, "that's ten Indians..."

We now have Salu's phone number and look forward to going to Anjuna next year in his taxi!

Mumbai Bhelpuris

We had been telling Bethan about Mumbai Bhelpuris for years and in Goa she finally got to taste one.

The Bhelpuri men had been moved from their pride of place position on the main street to a miserable, fly blown, rubbish strewn area just to the left of the public toilets and there were far fewer of them but the bhelpuris were every bit as delicious as we remembered. And an absolute bargain at only 10 rupees each!

A day on the beach

On the Sunday after we had moved into the Majorda Beach Resort we Majorda beach we decided to spend a lazy, relaxing day on the beach. Ignoring the signs warning us that sea bathing was dangerous as we left the hotels grounds (a cunning ploy to keep the punters in the hotel spending money as opposed to lying on beach shack sunbeds, drinking the same beer at a quarter of the price) we launched ourselves into the Arabian Sea.

The beaches in Goa were as fabulous as we remembered. Broad, clean, empty and fringed with palm trees. The epitome of a tropical paradise.

It was the first time that Bethan had been in a sea with proper waves in it . John and I tend to avoid going in the sea in the UK. She loved it, especially when she realised that the best way to avoid the waves was to swim under them.

A dead body and some very BIG spiders!

We had a taxi for a day and visited Old Goa in the morning and Shakari Spice Farm in the afternoon.

Bethan found the churches in Old Goa "spooky" probably because of the presence of St Francis Xavier in Bom Jesus. St Francis died near China in December 1552 and legend says that his servant emptied four sacks of quicklime into his coffin to consume his flesh. Despite the quicklime the body failed to rot and was returned to Goa. In 1556 the viceroy's physician examined the body and confirmed that all the vital organs were intact. St Francis was canonised in 1622. As you can see from the photo, the miraculous preservation did not last and he lies, in a severely dessicated state, in a glass coffin.

The Spice farm was very interesting although rendered, for Bethan, almost as spooky by the presence of the enormous banana spiders. She walked into one which ran down her leg but was fairly calm about the whole experience.

Shopping on the beach

We spent an enjoyable first morning in Goa wandering along the broad sandy beach from Colva to Betalbatim.

We were pleased to see that Furtado's, a little beach bar we used to visit was still there and we had a quick drink. When we visited ten years ago they were having some rooms built which are now featured in the 'Lonely Planet Guide to South India'.



Whilst walking back we were accosted by beach sellers who persuaded me to have a look at some of their jewellery. No sooner had I sat down with one, than all her friends arrived!

As you can see it provided John with an excellent opportunity to try out his new camera!

More on accommodation....

The Bollywood Sea Queen, whilst sporting an impressive sea front location, also left a little to be desired. We were having a heatwave and the air-conditioning unit was intermittent at best. However, judging by the noise it made it we should heve been experiencing arctic conditions! It was also full of Russian tourists, a number of whom chose to wear thongs down to breakfast.

On our third day we walked toMajorda Beach. Out of sheer nosiness we wandered into the Majorda Beach Resort and, impressed by the peace and quiet, I asked to see one of their rooms. I was so impressed by the performance of their air-conditioning units that I decided that it was time to change hotels. For the price of a room we were given a suite and, because I requested it, a further 10% discount. If you don't ask.......

Welcome to Goa!

We chose Goa as our first big trip away in India. We had been there three times before, our last visit being January 1997, just a couple of weeks before we left to live in California. The flight took just an hour, we barely had time to eat lunch before we were due to land.

We had a few accommodation problems when we arrived. The Silver Sands Resort, apparently newly renovated, was in fact in the throes of renovation - very noisy throes of renovation. The room, they claimed, was ready. Sadly, we had to travel through a building site (without hard hats) in order to reach it!

The pictures show the area just by the door to our room and the area immediately outside our room!

The management did seem to accept that this was unacceptable and booked us into the Bollywood Sea Queen which was about half a mile down the road.