We started our day with a nice continental breakfast and some of this amazing lychee juice drink. During the drive, on the highway, I decided that we should see the pretty parts of India, not just the highway. I told Antoine to make a turn inland and we found ourselves in a forest. At one point we were on a road that wasn’t on our maps, but the surroundings were so beautiful that we stayed and took a bunch of pictures. At one point, we were in someone’s yard, he came out and told us that there’s no road if we kept going straight, but he didn’t speak English so I’m just guessing that’s what he said. The road was super narrow, and with all our stuff in it, we couldn’t push the rickshaw out, so Antoine did a several-point turn, almost fell off the little pathway, and made it back to safety. The road was muddy, uneven, and wet, we were scared that we would be stuck, but thanks to Antoine’s amateur driving skills, we made it out with only almost tipping over a few times.
As I was driving, we needed to make a stop at the gas station. As Antoine fuelled up our two external tanks with petrol and mixed the 2 Stoke oil, one of the workers stood next to me and attempted to chat me up. I knew he was flirting with me so I told him that Antoine is my husband, and he still continued to hit on me! He even asked for my number and where we are staying for the night, I just told him that I don’t know.
Cows have the right of way. Cows are everywhere, in the streets, in the fields, on the sidewalks, in people’s yards, and sometimes lying down in front of a parked car. As sacred as the cows are, they aren’t treated too well. We watched as one tried to some plastic bags and as another one tried to eat telephone wires, it’s a sad sight. However, I do think that some of the cows know that they have right of way because they would just step out onto the middle of the highway without a care for any of the vehicles on the road.
Our windshield wipers don’t do a very efficient job of getting rain off our window. In fact, it might make the visibility even worse. We had to stop the rickshaw on the side of the road and try to improvise something. We tried taping some fabric to it, we tried bending the wiper, but everything just made it worse. We decided to just tough it out.
When we got to our hotel, we check-in and went to our room. My phone was about to die, Antoine’s phone was dead. Our battery packs both only had one bar left and we couldn’t find out chargers. All we had left was the solar panel charger, and the sun had already set. To make things worse, the camera had stopped working completely. The iPad still had about 20% battery left so we used it to look up if we can fix the camera, but according to the Internet, the motherboard is fried. We either spend the rest of the trip without a main camera or buy a new one. After much research, Antoine decided to purchase another camera the next morning.
After all our research, we went to get dinner. All the food was spicy except for cheese balls, rice, and cucumbers. Even though the food was super spicy, it was really good. So I kept eating it while keeping a cucumber in my mouth for a few seconds after each bite. We also got a fancy cocktail that tasted like peaches. After dinner, Antoine wanted to go walk to the beach, which was just behind the hotel, but that gate was closed so we walked back and saw a giant chessboard and decided to play some chess. Naturally, I won.
Our stay in Goa was supposed to be relaxing, but so far, it looks like we have a lot of problems to fix.
-Jamie