It's been a while since we last sat and wrote. Thanks for the encouraging messages. We left Goa for Mangalore on the express coastal train taking a short 8 hours to travel *** kms. Onthe train we met someone who was travelling to Coimbatore in the next state. We had some interesting discussionswith him about globalisation and the Indian economy. His perspective was that the left of centre Congress party had not moved the country forwards since independence and ...

We've been trying to elicit people's views on colonisation in Goa. One perspective from a personwho identified as a Christian was that if it wasn't for the Portuguese, Indians would still be eating off the floor, eating with their hands, and 'you know, backward'. This seemed like a very Westernor Occidental narrative of the Orient. Whilst it appeared around us that there was a lot of tolerance in Goa (for example a small street stall showed one poster with ...

Today we've spent a wonderful day at a spice plantation where everything was grown organically. The excitement of learning that peppercorns grow on a creeping, almost ivy-looking plant, in little bunches, is indescribable. Look at the pictures and see! Vanilla is hand pollinated, making it the second most expensive 'spice' in the world after saffron, which grows in Jammu and Kashmir and other cold climates. Vanilla is also a creeper but has to be grown on non org...

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 ...

Well, the etiquette of walking on or near a beach, here in India is slightly different to what we have known elsewhere, as we discovered on Saturday. The mad trip from Assagao to Anjuna beach on the"No Spitting, No smoking, No easy ride" bus brought us to the sleepy junction of the flea market. We dodged the cows, autorickshaws and tourist coaches. As we climbed down to the beach we saw the potential for a bit of walk. The hills looked inviting and gr...