Our second and final day in Bangalore was another rusharound. We went via Prashant’s office to try and cancel our train ticket for tomorrow night, but the web site was down. It stayed down all day, so when we finally did cancel it we were into another “penalty” timeframe so it cost us more. Grr.

After this, we walked to a nearby mall and checked out the cinema times. The only convenient film was Stormbreaker which I fancied anyway, so we picked up tickets for the afternoon performance.

A quick tuk-tuk ride took us to the city park where we wandered for a short while before walking back into the city centre, grabbing some lunch and then heading splitting up. Hans went to take photos of some old buildings, I went online for two hours to clear some backlog!

After this, we met back up at the cinema and picked up some nice cheap salty popcorn and artificially flavoured beverage (which the label tells us “contains no fruit”) and settled in to watch the film.

Things to note based on my experience of one movie in India: Cinemas are glitzy, comfy and cheap. Food is good and cheap. People talk on their phones right through the performance and as you’re in a foreign country, you can’t really kill them unless you’re planning on leaving soon anyway. There is an intermission around halfway through, and the film starts again with no real warning.

Specifically, Stormbreaker was a pretty good film. Very much Bond Jr., with a superb cast. Bill Nighy was his usual excellent self, Stephen Fry was outstanding in his small part as the “Q” equivalent and Robbie Coltrane was earily prophetic as the bumbling, overweight Scots Prime Minister. Be scared – vote Labour in again and we could have one of these in real life in two years.

Plotwise, it was nothing amazing. But neither is Bond. Stuntwise, it was over the top. But so is Bond. The women were hot. Bond. It was silly. Bond. And so on. Only the dialogue was a little simpler and it’s centred around a fourteen year old boy. I’m hoping they adapt some more of the novels.

We didn’t have too much time after the film, so we headed back to Prashant’s for a quick bite to eat before he sorted us out an autorickshaw to the travel office where we would catch our next bus. This one another overnighter to Margao in Goa, and a lot more comfy than the previous bus. Our tickets were “sleeper” ones, so we were alloted a “bed unit” between us which was just big enough for two pygmies who knew each other intimately. Hans couldn’t sleep in it anyway, as he fell out into the walkway every time we made a sharp right turn, so I got that area to myself while he zonked out in a reclining seat further forward.

There were a couple of stops for toilet and food, though nowhere we could get a meal. I nibbled on my ginger biscuits which kept me going through the night. On the whole not a bad journey, though our next long-haul ones are all by train.