Hiranandani Gardens

In the morning Cyrus was an absolute god send and picked us up, took us on a bit of another sightseeing tour around the suburbs of Mumbai and told us about how the whole area used to be Marsh land and jungle. We then saw his home area and then went to a shopping centre for lunch and to sort out our airtel Sim card. It was a full packed day, so much so that we were nearly late for the train! Luckily we arrived just in time, however we didn't have time to grab a quick dinner. The train that we booked was a 12 hour train to Gokarna, but as we booked so last minute the only seats we could get was SL class. This is the most basic sleeper class you can book... I must admit when I ran onto the train I was gutted that this was happening. The train was a thousand degrees, it smelt sweaty, it had no windows and so when passing dusty areas the train would just fill with dust, it had way too many people but to be honest once it got going it got much better and turned out to be a pretty nice journey. Everyone stopped chatting and got in beds by around 9pm which was just perfect. Unfortunately our stop wasn't the last stop so we had to get up and ready for its arrival at 3am. Even more unfortunately the train was an hour late and we ended up arriving after 4am eek...

When we arrived, after a bit of haggling, we jumped into a tuk tuk and soon arrived at our little hut on the beach. It was pretty spooky walking along the sandy beach at night.

As we didn't arrive till the early hours the next day we rested till about 12pm and then met Charlotte, from Kochi, at about 1pm. It was soo nice to be reunited!! Especially in such a beautiful, quiet, beach location. For the rest of the day we just chilled at the beach and caught up on the events from the past month. It was good fun, but not really worth taking up time on the blog! After dinner we Skyped my family for Christmas Eve and honestly it hit me how homesick I was. I ended up crying while talking to them. I was so upset!! Christmas is just such a nice time of year to be around family and friends and even though I know I have many many many years to do it properly it was sad to not be home and be part of it.Read more