The Adventure Begins..........

This is the 1^st of many blog entries chronicling my 2007 travels around India & Nepal. All types of bizarre encounters, surreal moments & insights will be shared from a personal perspective & recollected from memories & notes taken during this rollercoaster of a trip!

Prelude

India is somewhere that has never really featured too high on my list of places to visit, however it is place that has a pivotal role in my existence and a country member’s of my family have traveled to frequently. My Mum & dad met on Anjuna beach Goa back in the 70s, low and behold a few years later I bust forth from the womb! Leading up to my departure I was thirsting for an adventure as I had caught the travel bug from an early age, took into my adult life & was in need of a prolonged break from the concrete jungle. Exploring or at least getting a glimpse of the Himalayas was something that I would have loved to do, however as I arrived in early January and had only planned to stay for two months maximum – these chances were pretty slim at best as April/May are the months when spring gets going & the mountains are at least visible.

Flying long haul on a hangover is not to be done, found this out the hard way. As my flight was on new years day, I decided to go my friend’s house for some new years drinks. Long story short, we started playing Poker that doubled as a drinking game. I took a couple of loses and had to do my shots. A bottle of Vietnamese liquor was produced with a dead cobra inside; the bottle had been in my friend’s possession for a quite a few months and had no doubt “matured” quite a bit. So I took a couple of shots & low & behold, something didn’t feel right in my stomach come the morning. Luckily had done pretty much all my packing the day before and had enough time to try and sleep it off prior to the evening flight.

However still felt like I had bypassed purgatory & had gone straight to alcohol induced hell on the flight, drifted in and out of sleep throughout the flight – I’m not looking for sympathy here as this was definitely a case of a self inflicted wound. I vaguely remember watching Snakes on a Plane and noting the irony of having dead snake juice swimming around my stomach whilst a whole bunch of live snakes run amok on a plane with Samuel L Jackson trying in vain to save the film…sorry I mean the day!

Arrival

Arrived at Mumbai airport feeling jet lagged hung over and sleep deprived from a freezing & wet English winter was not the triumphant arrival I had in mind. Walking out of Mumbai airport to get the airport shuttle bus for our domestic flight to Goa was an authentic welcome to India experience. Horns from a zillion cars were blaring at a volume that was shaking my fragile state. The stifling heat & humidity made it feel like I was stepping into an oven cranked up to gas mark 11. There were huge swarms of people milling around for whatever reason, be it selling goods, waiting for arrivals or taxi wallahs trying to entice you into their awaiting cabs – this was something I was going to have to get accustomed to.

I recall getting handed my boarding pass for the domestic flight just after leaving the international terminal & at some point between getting dropped off at the wrong domestic terminal & arriving at the right one – my boarding pass somehow disappeared.