Cafenet: Fri 19:20

Friday, 24 December, 2010 19:20

Currently at lat/long: n16 59.452 e73 18.431

Hotel Vihar Deluxe, Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, IN.

It wasn't that exciting a road. The Goans like to build nice houses -- often with long faces/roofs parallel to the slope they are built on. There's also the feeling they are generally wealthier than others. The switch to Maharashtra isn't too dramatic though the men tend to wear trousers/long shorts and the women saris compared to their more laid back Goan neighbours. All throughout the south there's been more attention paid to the cleanliness of the place. Frontages look swept clean much more than in the North.

I decided to take the little road from Rajapur to the coast and up to here. It started with a six foot green snake slithering across the road and over a five foot wall at a good pace -- you'd feel a bit uncomfortable if you had to try to outrun it.

I'd been musing that the surrounds had seemed much more Mediterranean for a while and further down here you could easily be fooled. White-walled buildings with red tiled roofs (and very few other buildings), dry grasses, dry stone walls and neat plantations. The trees in the plantations were not olives (I could tell that much) but little more. Each one had a low stone wall 8-12ft in diameter built around it for reasons unclear but it made it all look quite distinctive. The trees may have been mangoes though no fruit was visible.

A very pleasant run and the map suggests the road continues most of the way up the coast to Munur, a little fishing village south of Mumbai, my target for tomorrow.

I stopped at a beach resort out of town who took an age to come up with a price for a room. R2400 -- oddly, no Xmas boost. I've gotten into a slightly cheaper mode and decided that was way too much. I rumbled around town and eventually found the Vihar and they wanted R1800 for a Deluxe room. I said that was too much and they said, oh, we have a non-A/C standard room for R600. That'll do.

I then crashed out for a couple of hours. Not sure why I'm so tired. The bed last night was a bit dubious. I woke up in a depression where my backside was that didn't want to decompress and my back has been killing me all day. This place's bed is a plank of wood, I think, which some people claim is better though I just find uncomfortable.