After an exhausting and sometimes frustrating few days it's nice to be thinking and planning ahead. We're leaving our holiday replenishedto some degree and with some invaluable learning under our belts or, to coin a metaphor, weighing down our rucksacks.

Where to start? The sim card saga was preceded by the making of a 'phone call from a payphone fiasco. This is where you use up 1 rupee per thirty seconds and can only get five 1 Rupee coins at a time; so we got cut off after the first 'Hello, hold on I will have to put you through to someone else'. We definitely needed a mobile phone to make calls thus began the sim card story.

First FORGET WHAT ALL THE GUIDEBOOKS SAY ABOUT GETTING A LOCAL SIM CARD there's enough bureaucracy to make you want to sit inside and pull your teeth out with rusty pliers - and enjoy it. If you buy a card in one State you cannot register it in another. It's quicker and cheaper to buy a new one and therefore get a new number.

Now, astonishingly vodafone signs are everywhere lulling you into a false sense of security, you think this won't take long at all. The first 'outlet' was not able to registerour Mumbai sim card, because of course how stupid of us we were now in a different state so it was pretty much like being in a different country and required special help. Lovely but Useless Helper 1 sent us across town to find the vodafone store. We ended up in a carpet shop that sold vodafone top up cards.

In between, we caught on, and went to Remy Studios to have passport photographs taken (a bizarre but necessary step in getting a sim card). This was a person taking a photograph and then asking you to come back in half an hour whilst it was processed. Then the said photographs are taken what seems like miles down the road in the scorching mid day heat to an air conditioned oasis displaying the latest gadgets.

All seemed too good to be true.... and yes it was. We were asked for ID, but suddenly Lovely and more useful helper 2, stopped mid way, to explain that we needed to have photocopies of our passports in order to proceed. "Oh" we thought "that's something you can surely do here with all these super duper hi tech gadgets on display". A stern no-looking frown sent Col back into the midday heat in search of a Xerox place, whilst Sundeep set about on the tedious task of answering questions on her forefathers and yes, much to Col's consternation they do ask whose wife or daughter you are (In better circumstances, we may have explored with them how they were upholding the patriarchy and our queer feminist leanings which were of coursethe right way forward but no this was not that time or the place).

There followed pages of forms, signatures across mugshots, across photocopies of passports... half an hour after leaving the shop, and three hours after arriving in Mapusa to buy a sim card to make a 2 Rupee call, and 600 Rs worse off, we finally made the call.

We could grumble on about our learning that day...or you could simply accept that if you are making a foreign transfer to India it needs to be at least two weeks in advance. Otherwise you may have to compensate for their slowness by paying twice yourself, make what seems countless costly calls to your English bank only for the money to arrive as expected in the account and they were nagging you for payment for nothing.Normally we would have handled this well, except that the Hotel we were at dropped very nice but constant hints about not being paid.

So we had a stressful couple of days trundling through the treacle of bureaucracy. We were really well compensated for our stress though with the Hotel offering us a complimentary night to stay over to seeif the transfer went through the next day and arranging for us to visit a spice plantation and do some local sightseeing and tours. We finished off with Yoga this evening and learned that all our drinks were complementary during our stay.

So we felt sheepish for grumbling about it all but at least we're not leaving on a sour note.