Pics.. then another day

There is Sam's lunch I wrote about.

The river, note our favourite breakfast joint on the right.

(Lesley) Well tonight or this morning, depending on whose perspective you are coming from, John and I tried some new things. We tried using Skype from the laptop in India to his parents' landline in England. Sam and I could hear John clearly but he had trouble hearing us. So we switched to simultaneous e-mail using the same account (our g-mail account). It felt slightly frantic because I wanted to be quick so as not too cause great delays or lags, but wanted to provide lots of info and details too. What was neat was that even if John hadn't sent the email yet, I could access what he was writing by pressing the refresh button. It was great to hear from them. Sounds like all is well in England and that John and Mhari are looking forward to joining us.

In internet cafes, I have seen headsets that include a mic. I think that would have been handy for the Skyping. Perhaps we will look into getting one of those or using them at the cafes to Skype to landlines it may make it easier and clearer.

The hotels here don't have Wifi like they did in France. Sam and I were lucky to find a restaurant that had it. Well, I'm sure the good ones do but the cheap hotels don't. There seem to be internet cafes around. They aren't hard to find and they vary in price from 20 rupees-40 rupees an hour.

Oh yes, Sam and I moved on north from Trivandrum. We took a train for an hour and it was great fun. It was nice to see the countryside from the train window. We bought the wrong class of tickets though so we had a bit of a last minute worry about whether we would get on. We ended up buying second class tickets, the really cheap ones, when we meant to buy sleeper tickets. So when we realized we were suppose to cram ourselves into the last three carriages with the other thousand people waiting to pile in, we asked if upgrading was possible once on the train. It is apparently, so into the sleeper car we went, no problems. In the end the ticket collector never made it round so no one collected our upgrade money.

We have been swimming in the Arabian Sea. It was lovely. Excellent waves! Quite big ones. We were very careful as there is quite a current and we don't have a lot of big wave bathing experience. We will enjoy some more swimming tomorrow I'm sure.

Sam got rid of his jeans today. We gave them to the hotel boy at our place in Trivandrum. It is too hot here for jeans and they are heavy to carry so he ditched them. I left a navy shirt too. One doesn't need more than one or two dark shirts in this heat. Frankly I'd leave my brown trousers somewhere too if they didn't have such good pockets. I have six excellent pickpocket proof pockets on those pants which might come in handy later along the way.