Elsien's Traveblogue

After a rather "different" Christmas, my New Year's Eve was really quiet: I was in Aurangabad to see the caves of Ellora and Ajanta - absolutely beautiful, but so exhausting that on New Year's Eve I actually fell asleep at around 9.30pm and did not wake up for midnight as I had intended, but slept until 12.09 when I was woken by firecrackers going off outside and I was still too tired and sleepy to move, so I went back to sleep.I am now in gorgeous Goa, on the coast in a village called Anjuna, with a lovely sandy beach. The village is nice too, small, in a palmtree grove, with sandy paths. There are souvenir shops but not many and the tourist restaurants are very low key as well. The houses are low and local - I am staying in a simple local guesthouse, clean, with a nice family of Catholics and am enjoying real Goan coffee and seafood as well as the odd beer at sunset, overlooking the Arabian Sea. I booked a flight from Mumbai to Hong Kong this morning for 5th February, so I have another fortnight until Chinese New Year to sort out my Visa for China and registration at Yunnan University. As soon as that's done, I'll move on to Kunming in China via Guangzhou. This gives me another month in India and I will decide in the next few days where I will spend those last four weeks - I am thinking of moving as far south as Cochin where I want to have a look at Keralan theatre, one of my passions in life (theatre, I mean, I know little about kathakali, the Keralan speciality).
I'll have to get back up to Mumbai, but that shouldn't be a problem - public transport in India is as good as that in China (some irony in this sentence - the two have many things in common, good and bad! I've been on another awful boneshaking busride and I've done an unreserved class overnight trainjurney now as well - interesting, but hardly comfortable!)