Right now we’re concentrating on upcoming plans. You’ll may have noticed that the list of destinations on the right of the page has changed. Trust me, it’s been altered a lot more than that on my laptop between uploads.

Today was very eventless as far as sightseeing goes, but we’ve booked flights from Delhi to Mumbai on the 26th so at least we know where we are then. After that it gets a little murky as one place we hoped to go for new year is full so the plan now is to check out Sri Lanka instead. I expect we shall be weeping over the cost of flights, but we don’t have much choice.

By the time we sorted the tickets out, it was gone 11am and the drive to Ranakpur didn’t get us there till after 2pm. We stopped for lunch at a fairly posh place. The food was nice, the decor very “last days of the Raj”, the animals friendly (I had a cat rubbing itself against my legs and a squirrel taking food from my hand)… and the bill huge. In fact, it was more than our accomodation for the last few nights. OK, in the grand scheme of things 340Rp each isn’t an enormous amount for a buffet but when we’ve been paying a third of that for lunch recently, it’s quite a hit.

Accommodation here is also expensive. We’re in the cheapest of about four possible locations and it’s still 550Rp a night. The only internet is a single terminal – dial up, Windows 98, IE5.0 – in a small shop 5km away, and that couldn’t cope with the fonts in some of Hans’ emails. Instead it displayed half of his inbox as a series of squares. All part of the “experience” I suppose.

We’re spending the evening going through possible plans, but we can’t confirm anything until we hear back from several places we’re trying to book. I think we need a good period of time online in the next few days to try and square all this!

India so far has been OK. It’s not massively eye-opening and I’m getting a little “templed out” the same way I was becoming jaded of Buddhas (jade ones or not) in Thailand. I’m really glad to have Hans for company or I’d probably be going stir crazy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad country it’s just that there’s not a while heck of a lot to do while you’re being driven from place to place, and at night, and once you’ve seen the third temple in two days…

Hopefully Mumbai will be a little different, and then Goa for the beaches and so forth. Sri Lanka is also recommended (and not just by the emigrated locals – Indy, I’m looking at you), while Bhutan and Nepal are really seeming attractive right now. Bhutan’s going to be pricey, but not as bad as we’d hoped as all the fees are inclusive of food, accomodation and so on. More on that as and when we book, but it looks like we’ll be there for 4 nights from the end of January.

Right now, it’s 18:45. It’s pitch dark outside, there’s nobody else at the resort at all, neither of us is hungry and we didn’t bring an X-Box. Good job I have a pile of books to read.