Uttar Kannada

I probably got about 30 minutes sleep on the night bus. Nothing to do with sharing a very thin bench like bed, but the fact that these buses are rough...really rough. They bump around, they’re noisy, and for some reason the Indian road network has speed bumps every couple of kilometres on the highways, so lying down you constantly get tossed up in the air. We arrived at where they announced was Gokarna. I quickly checked the map and saw we were at least 20km from Gokarna. With sleepy heads, we got off and we’re told that another little mini van would take us the final leg. We had to get our backpacks out of the boot of the bus, so the guy came to open it. Tom’s was at the front, but mine had slipped back and was in the depths of the bus, so I crawled in and retrieved it...the guy who had opened the back up then asked for a tip, the cheeky sod, and even gave me a ball park figure of 30 rupees. We just laughed at him and walked off to the next bus. This journey was actually ok considering it was 3:30am. However, when we got close to Gokarna he stopped and turned the engine off and the lights on and told us to get off. We were still a couple of kilometres away but as it was early and cool we decided to walk. A french guy on the same bus was staying 7km away and there were no Tuktuks around so he asked the bus driver what he was meant to do - the suggestion came to walk - he was very unhappy.

We walked to the beach and tried to come up with a plan of action. We had decided not to book anywhere as Tom had heard that you could just rock up and stay in a beachside shack. As it was only 5am nothing was open and we thought about maybe getting a hostel for the night, but decided against it and just made our way over the hills to Kudle Beach. We sat on the beach for a while watching the cows and the dogs all waking up and the sun rise, our first here in India. Tom went to see what he could find for accommodation and came back about half an hour later with some offers. One place would do 200 rupees a night but was full of cockroaches, another was 600 a night - no cockroaches, but well over budget, and the third was 300 per night no bugs and the closest to where we were sat...deal! We went in and it was all ok for £3 per night, and as we were exhausted we both passed out on the bed until about 9am. When we woke it was getting quite hot so we went out and checked out the beach in the sunshine, now with lots more people on it. The water was amazing though, and we just relaxed for a couple of hours.

It began to get really hot, probably up to about 35° so we dragged our stuff back up the beach towards the shade of a tree. Even in the shade it was boiling, so we decided to just get lunch at the cafe which our accommodation was behind. We sat and planned out the next couple of days as we were wanting to take things much looser in India in terms of plans and just move on from one place when we felt like it. We had lunch and absolutely forgot to pay for it but didn’t get chased so all good there! We decided to go and check out Om Beach, just a half hour walk over the hills and when we got there, we were pleasantly surprised as we’d previously heard it was full of Russians. It was nice and quiet and the water was gorgeous! We spent an hour swimming round and messing around and decided to go back to Kudle Beach for sunset.

On the way back, a beach guard stopped me and asked to look in the bag. We’d heard how the police had cracked down on drug use on the beaches. After he looked through a couple of items I asked if he was looking for drugs and he said yes. He also said to the other guard that it was all clean - good to know! We got back to our beach shack to get showered. I walked into the bathroom and heard a strange scraping noise, looked right down at my feet and there was a massive black snake slithering it’s way away from me towards the toilet!! I spun round urging Tom to get out over and over then said simply - there’s a snake! We got out the room to reassess and decided that we’d go back in to check I was right. Tom couldn’t see it at first; but then did behind the toilet. We both decided that we couldn’t sleep in that shack for the next couple of nights as we didn’t want to wake up with a snake on our face. We grabbed all of our stuff and upgraded ourselves to a 400 rupee a night beach house with bricks and mortar - looked sturdy and snake proof.

We got showered and cleaned up, we’d spent 4 days in boiling hot Hampi and a night bus without a shower as the one in Hampi was non existent, this was our first shower in 5 days, we felt truly grim. We checked out the beach for sunset and then walked back over to Gokarna town for some dinner and to find Tom some flip flops which he managed to haggle down to £2. We grabbed some dinner on the rooftop restaurant and I FaceTimed home where Mum, Harry, Bob and Sally-Anne were having lunch in Ilkley. We had a long chat about stuff here and there, but it was nice to be briefly transported back into home world, a world where every meal isn’t curry! We walked back over to Kudle beach and got a well deserved early night.Read more