First post time - against all the odds we made it in one piece to Goa. The flight to Mumbai/Goa from Heathrow Terminal 5 was painless, we even got our bags back once we landed which was nice. We had a very brief view of one of the massive shanty cities as the plane landed, but that was our only glimpse of India proper. A brief trip between airport terminals was all it took to get us onto our connecting flight to Goa - I was hoping the plane would be old school and have propellers and everything but sadly I'm living back in time and everything is amazingly modern here.

It only took 45 minutes to make it to Goa, where we had to face our first minor challenge of getting to the place we planned to stay. They'd not returned our emails but the guide books seemed pretty sure the place would be empty in the monsoon season. Anyway, we ended up in a crazy retro taxi completely lined with leopard skin (I have photos on my iphone, but haven't found any wifi yet.) The monsoon was kicking off full blast and the taxi wasn't exactly water tight, but we made it to our accommodation pretty easily.

The guesthouse we were heading for is called the Afonso in the old Portuguese area of Goa's capital, Panajim. They must have seen us pasty white tourists coming a mile off, as we were thoroughly counter-haggled into the "last" room they had free, but still its so cheap you can't really complain. I've not done a great job of taking photos for half this stuff (we were jetlagged!)

We made it out for our first real curry that night, in absolutely pouring rain, and it was really really tasty - either the whole spiciness thing isn't as bad as people say or they've doctored our tourist curries perfectly.

Day 2 - it was still tipping it down in the morning, but around 11am the rains stopped and we headed out on our first sight seeing mission to Old Goa. This is the old capital city and has a lot of old Christian churches and colonial buildings left over from the Portuguese. One the way home we had our first auto rickshaw ride, which was an experience =)

Day 3 - Full day of adventure today, and our last day in Panajim. We had our first experience of the Indian bus service, which was completely overwhelming in most parts but we managed to pull it off without too many problems! We ended up in somewhere called Ponda, where we ended up doing a 7 temple marathon via auto rickshaw. The Hindu temples were amazing but all exactly the same in terms of layout, but with different colours and decorations inside.

From Alex and James RTW Trip

We are thinking of heading south tomorrow - the weather has definitely picked up today so the beach may not be totally out of the question. Touch wood. It'll probably get ten times worse as soon as we can see the sea, but whatever. That's about it for now... as ever we'll only update this a few more times before we forget about it completely, but you never know :p