A Touch of Portugal

8th June
The rains have started. The night before we left Madikeri we were treated to a ferocious storm that took out the power, soaked the bacony but luckily the amount of rain didn't affect the clay driveway out of the place. I thought for a while I would finally appreciate the AWD of the vehicle.
We wanted to get to the coast and north of Mangalore if we could. That would make the drive to Goa a 6-7 hour drive the next day. It was an uneventful drive apart from a queue of traffic about 2km long at one stage. We expected an accident or roadworks to be the cause, but no, all it was was an intersection where major roads met and the resulting mess not overseen by traffic lights or a cop. The Indians take this type of thing in their stride and we have to as well. The humid heat had come back once we hit the Malabar Coast negating any thought of sleeping in the van. Joan had been sick the night before and was suffering as we drove due to a crook gut and diarrhoea, luckily it didn't last and is much better now .
With the rains came a spate of accidents, we saw three the next day heading to Goa. The first amused us: a truck was on its side with its load of fish sprawlen over the road. They weren't in poly boxes or anything, just loose in the back. Imagine the smell in a few days time. See photo. One of the others was a truck hitting a power pole with the third a motor bike hitting a truck that had manoeuvred to be 90 degree to the road to tip off a load of sand, completely blocking the road. These are the things you have to look out for while you drive. In fact we saw more accidents in that one day than we have all the time we have been here so far.
Goa is great. The Portugese were here centuries before the British and didn't become part of India until the mid 5'0s I think it was. The buildings have that European touch to them and the food is a pleasant change to the Indian fare. Portugese is still spoken and they have at least one TV station broadcast in that language.
We spent yesterday wandering the shops, buying a new memory stick then driving out to Old Goa to visit the myriad churches there and pay our respects to St Francis Xavier's mummified body. They bring it down for public inspection every couple of years but in the mean time you can see it in a glass sided sarcophagus. The Portugese moved from old Goa some time ago to Panjin which is 9kms down river. It's not really a ghost town but doesn't have many houses in the area. I think the churches outnumber the houses and gees, they are massive.
Thirty years ago, whenever we stopped,our van we used to be surrounded by children and villagers who would form a semi circle around us and just stare. That was okay but on the odd occasion, just as we were eating a meal or something you would have one of them summonsing up a dirty big hoick from the bottom of his TB ridden lungs and spitting it out nearby. I remember a hot and harassed pregnant Joan grabbing our shovel at one stop and scattering them in all directions. This time, when we stop, we have now an amused group of adult onlookers wanting to see the van and asking all about it. The windows are usually filthy by peering faces and hands. We went to Miramar beach last night to see the sun set and got talking to a couple of older gentlemen, it came up in the conversation that he had gone to Massey University in Palmerston North, our home town in NZ and had a 'Mother' there, a Mrs Collinson of Collinson & Cunningham, a shop we used to frequent regularly in our childhood where a lunch used to be a special treat. He visited the 93 year old a year or 2 back.
Today we head inland to Hampi, I think about 250kms away.