Kanniyakumari and Goa

We were going to take a bus from Kumily to Madurai, so we could catch a train down to Kanniyakumari, but as we waited for the bus we were approached by a taxi driver who was returning a car back to Madurai as some tourist had paid for the 4 hour trip. So we jumped at the chance to have a stop-free, private ride - it cost 100 rupees each instead of 40 but that's okay - 100 rupees is about $2.50. The ride was comfy, and when we got to Madurai, we found out that trains are not very frequent to Kanniyakumari so we decided to take a bus; we didn't realize this would be a 6 hour bus ride.

Butts-aching, we arrived in Kanniyakumari only to find that all the hotels listed in our out-of-date guidebook were full so the bus driver just dropped us off at a crappy hotel. We resolved to stay there and move in the morning to a better place.

Kanniyakumari

The next morning we did move, to the Lakshmi tourist hotel and we had a great room, with a view of the ocean and the monuments out on the water. We relaxed that day, lazily wandering around in the knowledge that we had another day in town to do the normal tourist stuff. Unfortunately when we booked our train to Kochi we found out we were wrong, and had mixed up our dates...instead of leaving in a day, we were leaving at 5am the next morning.

That meant we had to get as much into the evening as possible, so we rushed to get the train ticketing resolved, and then headed out to the sunset point to watch the sun go down. Sadly, it wasn't a great night for this and the sun gave a lackluster performance, but we had fun eating ice-cream and playing in the water.

The next day we caught that 5am train to Kochi, and from there flew to Goa. At the airport, we realized how big Goa is, and decided that it wouldn't be possible to visit Leah's friend Kimberley again - who had settled herself in Palolem - it being about 65km away. So we settled on Benaulim, a little town about 10km from Margao where we were to catch the night train to Mumbai the next evening.

We stayed at a little guest house called Caroline, and just walked around on the beach the next day. It was quite interesting to be in this place, a weird mix of western culture and indian culture. It is definitely India-lite - this would be a very easy place to visit, although I think tourists might find themselves wondering if there was more India somewhere else. The few street-touts that we encountered had fantastically inflated prices, which makes sense if most of the tourists have no idea what things really cost in India. We had lots of fun knocking vendors down to less than a tenth of the original price.

We grabbed the night train from Goa to Mumbai, and then got straight on the plane to Dubai.