Week 35, Goa, India

Dear Ethel, Family and Friends

Well it’s been a quiet week on the beach in Goa, literally as the hordes of tourists seem to have cancelled their holidays to Goa in light of the Mumbai attacks. Many of the restaurants and beach accommodations are empty.

One highlight of our extra week stay here was watching a short but very fruitful fishing trip off the beach. Huge schools of fish swarmed in toward the shore at about sunset, as we are having an afternoon walk. Energetic fisherman (you don’t normally see this) push their boat into the surf and go out about 500 metres and drop their net. They trawl along for a bit and then come back in. The net is about 1 km long and they have 2 teams of 12 men hauling the net back up onto the beach. It probably took an hour to pull the net in. The fish were frantic and making the sea boil with their movement. Kids both Indian and visitors were having a whale of a time, some of the hippies were trying to catch some of the fish by hand and set them free and it was a real festival atmosphere among the usual band of jugglers, acrobats, yogi’s and guitar playing hippies that you find on the beach at that time of day anyway. By the way I bought a flute, but don’t call me a hippie. When they eventually got the haul ashore, there were mountains of fish. It was a great afternoons entertainment.

In light of having to stay an extra week in Goa, we have now managed to reschedule our north India trip. We are leaving on Tuesday 9th on a train to Delhi, we could only get the 1st class sleeper which cost us $20 more I think. We are usually happy with the 2nd class but you need 2 weeks’ notice to book the trains online successfully, so we paid for the upgrade. 15th we travel to Jaipur, the 20th we travel to Agra and 25th we travel to Varanasi (merry Christmas to us) and then the 30th we travel back to Mumbai for a few days and then on to Poona on the 3rd January.

We will be staying in Poona for a month or maybe more to do some volunteer teaching. We have been put in touch with an Australian couple who run a school there. We look forward to cementing our TESOL qualifications now that we have a chance to do so. They tell us there is also a chance to travel around the region near Poona to do some teaching in remote areas as well, so we look forward to the challenge.

So we will be at the Taj Mahal on Christmas day and Mumbai on New Year’s eve (I think that one will be a quiet one for us!). So we would love to hear what you’re up to over Christmas and New Year.
All the best Ric & Louise