Goa to Trivandrum, India

BEING SET ON FIRE
I left Georg and Jo in Goa on a sad note. The hotel owner and I got in a rather heated argument about how much money I owed for four nights accommodation. Actually the disagreement was over the fact that I left my stuff in the room with Georg without legally checking out. Initially I refused to pay for an extra night but the owner threatened to set me on fire, using my own gasoline that I purchased the day before for the motorbike, and later promised me a bamboo massage. Neither of these options sounded appealing so after exchanging some colourful language (read as we swore back and forth using words that my Mum would be ashamed of) I relented and paid the extra 100 rupees for a night I never used. I never used it because I left for Trivandrum that evening. I should have caught the bus to Mangalore but I came up with another plan that would give me a better chance of making Trivandrum in time to catch my flight to Sri Lanka. I passed on the bus and headed straight for the train station and bought a seat on the Mangala Express to Ernakulam a town about 5 hours north of Trivandrum. This was risky because it still didn't guarantee me passage all the way to Trivandrum and I could well of been kicked off the train because I had no intention of sitting on a hard seat for 16 hours. We ran into a snag as we left Thivim station where I boarded. A woman got caught in the door of the carriage I was in and was dragged along the platform and then a few hundred meters down the way before the train stopped. There was the usual farce of two million people crowded around to see what happened and basically I got pinned inside on one of the seats with my bag still on, unable to move for the next half an hour. The woman was okay, but it could have been so bad. After the path cleared I made straight for the sleeper carriages and walked up and down the isles until I got a lucky break. A woman told me that she was getting off in a few hours and I was welcome to have her bed once she left. I had a few hours to kill so I stood at the end of the carriage next to the toilet and read the paper twice. I fell asleep while doing the crossword and for the SECOND time in six months a mouse woke me up. The Nicaraguan mouse climbed into bed with me but the Indian one just scampered across my foot on route to the toilet. By this stage though the bed became available so I propped by bag up as a pillow and fell quickly to sleep along with the rest of India. When I woke up the train was virtually empty; I had a whole eight-berth section to myself as I studied the Keralan landscape out of the window.

Beach in Goa

After the Goan argument I had to compose myself again because I knew the trip to Trivandrum would be taxing. Thankfully I had one of those days when all the connections line up and things flow smoothly. Off the train in Ernakulam I walked to the bus station had jumped straight on a southern bus to Trivandrum. In the Keralan capital I walked off the bus into a cheap guesthouse with an even cheaper shower - known in the western world as a sink. Dinner was good, I called home, but the day ended with an Internet café whose server crashed not long after I arrived. Rather than push my luck I decided it was time for bed. After three weeks with Georg and Jo it was another contemplative evening on my own but I knew it wouldn't last long. My old pal Phil Harrison was waiting for me in Sri Lanka.