Our bus to Bangalore was at 13:30 so we had a late breakfast before getting a tuk-tuk to the bus station. Our deluxe air-con sleeper express jet-powered supreme lime-flavoured mega-transport hove into view. While we waited, we fended off tuk-tuk drivers wanting to take us places for 100 Rupees. We kept telling them “Bangalore!” until one came back with a quote. “Two days… 5000 Rupees”. We considered haggling him down to 4000 for the hell of it, but it would have been a shame to throw away our bus tickets.

Bus. With seats that recline far enough back to turn the passenger behind into a quadriplegic. No functioning reading lights (thanks, Hans, for your headlamp). Aircon that blows about as hard as a fly farts. Stereo blaring Indian music and soundtrack from films at earsplitting decibel levels until well after 11pm when we finally got the guy at the front to stop putting VCDs into the player.

Let’s just say it wasn’t the most comfortable trip, and it cost us twice as much as the equivalent train journey would have. The train would have had beds to lie down on, though no aircon and I don’t know about reading lights.

Still, it’s all part of the “experience”. We have one more definite bus journey to make from Bangalore to Goa. This one’s because the train we have booked gets us to a place called Londa Junction which is 100km away from anywhere useful in Goa – it’s the best one we could get from the train timetable. So we’re ditching this one and getting another “deluxe” bus instead. It’s also 4 hours quicker, and thankfully a shorter journey than last night’s anyway.

It’s the morning of the 8th as I write this and we got to Prash’s flat at around 7am – an hour earlier than we’d anticipated. So we woke him up. Sorry, fella!