Vancouver at last

Finally we're home. I've unpacked, and most of my things are put away for the next trip. :)

Here's a finished map that shows our crazy wanderings. The really long, straight lines are flights we took, the fat squiggly lines are trains, and the skinny lines are on cars, buses or motorcycle.

Dubai and Abu Dhabi

We arrived in Dubai in the afternoon after a 3 hour flight from Mumbai. As soon as we stepped out of the airport we were stricken with the realization that we had no idea what to do, or where to go. Our plan consisted of this:

• spend 5 hours in Dubai
• take bus to Abhu Dhabi
• visit Leah's friends Farhad and Leila
• stay overnight in Abhu Dhabi
• take bus back to Dubai
• catch flight to Mumbai

This is a solid plan. But there's no meat. What do we do in Dubai? What do we want to see? Neither of us had any idea what might be in the least interesting to see or do in Dubai, let alone how to get to those places. These thoughts run through our minds as we stand outside the airport, our sunburns fresh from Goa.

Thank goodness for tourist offices, and we managed to get into the markets where we explored the sprawling trading areas of Dubai where every store - no matter what else is advertised - sells watches. Men constantly approached us trying to get us to buy these watches, and I wondered more than once, who buys all those watches? There must be millions of watches on display at any given moment in Dubai, so somebody is buying them.

We met up with Leila on her way back to Abu Dhabi from Syria, and we met with Farhad when we arrived. They took us out for a huge feast, of which I don't think we ate even half of it. That night, they had arranged for us to stay with a friend of a friend who was renting a spare-room, we were so thankful to have a nice place to lay our heads that night after a very shaky sleep on the night-train the evening before.

Abu Dhabi

The next day Leila took us around town and showed us the Emirates Palace, a hotel of such opulence and beauty that we just walked around with our jaws open. We also visited a historical village, where artisans worked on glass blowing, sword making and a couple other things. That evening we hung out with Farhad and Leila, and then at around 2am we caught the bus to Dubai - so we could make our 8.30am flight home.

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.