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After Kochi we decided to head inland to Mysore. The main claims to fame are the famouse sandalwood soaps and incense. We visited the factory where the oil and incense is made, which was pretty cool. The other awesome thing is the palace. It dominates a large chunk of the city and is pretty magestic. Mysore is pretty cool as its not as crazy busy as some other Indian cities and has a slightly laid back feel about it. The markets are also awesome and where all the local flower sellers go, so its a spectacular sight and smell of flowers. women sit in rows and weave the flowers onto string, forming large bundles of woven flowers. I bought a jasmine flower peice to put around my neck and it smelt amazing! i hung it in our hotel room and it just gave off the scent for about 2 days. Aside from that we just chilled quite a bit in Mysore. Our hotel was an old school english style hotel which you can see had its hey-dey as a place to go back during british rule, but now it mainly caters for tourists and indian business men. They had an onsite astrologer in room 55, which was a bit strange, and a great vege restaurant on the ground floor, well we thought it was great until pauls dad got sick! he was out for a day. we decided to get a taxi back to the coastline (mangalore) for a train to GOA. we imagined it would take 4 hours, but it ended up taking 8 hours. the roads were hideously potholed, and way too narrow for 2 cars to pass. in saying that the scenery was lovely and we passed many coffee, tea and rubber plantations on the way. we finally made it to mangalore, only to realise that we'd just missed the train to GOA, so waited around the train station for 6 hours until the next train. woe. it actually went pretty fast and the tiny railway restaurant made some lovely homemade curries. so that was OK. when we finally did make it onto the train, we had to try and steal some spare sleepers, as we only had general tickets. halfway through the journey we got kicked off our beds for ticket holders (1am). anyway, we finally made it margao station about 40km north of Palolem beach where we wanted to be. so we took a rickshaw down there and well, what can i say? it was worth the 24 hour journey to arrive in a beach paradise! (see next blog)
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