Bit of a whistle-stop today. We’d intended to get an open-top bus tour around the CBD, but couldn’t spot any of the buses so left it. There was enough to see on foot, walking up and down MG Road (yes, Bangalore has one as well) that we didn’t really need a bus.

Prashant has been a wonderful host. First of all, he sorted out our bus tickets for tomorrow night. This saved us a long trip to a travel agents. In the evening, he took us out for beer and dinner, refusing to accept any money. More about dinner in a little bit, but from Hans and I – “thank you”!

We really just beetled up and down the one street all day. In one bookshop, we managed to offload four books that we’d both read. And then bought four more. Whoops. And another couple in another shop. Whoops again. Ah, well, they’re all ones that will get read and we’ll be chilling in Goa shortly.

The “fun” bit was meeting quite a character in the first bookshop. Visually an Indian, but with an accent which would pass very much for Steve Buschemi if you closed your eyes, this chap apparently lived in Texas for 20 years before being deported. Some silly thing like being caught with 130lbs of marijuana in the fuel tank of a car he was driving. Anyway, it seems he’s trying to set up a new business in Bangalore – drug running and prostitution.

Erk.

Well, it’s these things that makes travelling interesting.

Lunch was a KFC we happened to spot, and a late afternoon snack of fresh fruit and milkshake indulged in. We also spotted a gazillion pubs and bars – more than we’ve seen in the rest of India combined where the only bars have really been inside posh hotels. We chilled in one for a couple of hours, during “happy hour” which runs from 11am to 5pm. 50Rp a pint for draft beer – top notch.

As mentioned earlier, Prashant took us to dinner in the late evening. First to a place called Mojo where we drained two pitchers of beer (along with free popcorn) and then on to a very authentic Indian restaurant called Nagarjula. All tiles and white walls, with a uniformed oriental guy holding the door open and doing the Thai “one-handed-wai” as we entered.

Our first thought was “hang on – there aren’t any plates”. Each table had four folded banana leaves on it. Following our host’s lead, we unfolded these and sprinkled them with water. Then the food arrived. Each of three types of sauce/paste dolloped onto the leaf and then rice dumped in the middle. Followed by several small metal bowls of other flavourings being placed around each of our leaves.

Spoons were provided, but we all “went native”. Ghee (melted butter) was drizzled onto the rice to make it a little sticky and then we used out hands to mix in the other foods. Eating then involves a simple procedure. Lift it up in your fingers and shove it in your mouth.

Actually, there is a little technique which reduced slurping. Place the cupped fingers in front of the open maw that is your hungry mouth, and push the food in with the thumb of the same hand. It becomes remarkably second nature very quickly.

All too soon my belly started pulling the gates shut and the bouncers at the bottom of my oesophagus began telling boli of rice that their name wasn’t on the list so they weren’t coming in. Some curd managed to sneak in by pretending it knew the manager, but after that I was officially stuffed (I have a certificate to prove it).

Somehow we made it home without requiring wheelbarrows or belly-wheels. Hans, however, has nodded off in front of the TV while I type this up. I swear I can feel each of the grains of rice I ate through my stomach walls. It reads “FULL” in braille.

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!

We looked into the backwater cruises north of Trivandrum and decided they were too much hassle and not worth the effort. As such, it made sense to change our travel slightly and head to Bangalore a day early.

To this end, we booked a bus ticket up there departing at 13:30 tomorrow, and cancelled our existing train ticket. Both procedures were a doddle, and the cancellation charge for the train negligible. The bus is actually more expensive than the train, but slightly quicker and likely to be more comfortable. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

We popped into a hotel on MG Road (there are a lot of MG Roads in India – I’ll let you work out what MG stands for) for a thali. This was only 90Rp and neither of us managed to finish it due to the copious amounts of rice provided. Rather nice, though.

Afterwards, we found a hotel bar and had a quick drink and a natter before checking emails and the like. I’m heartened to hear that another friend back home’s been a mum for 6 months, and another is due her second in a couple of weeks! You lot certainly aren’t wasting time while I’m away.

There’s very little else to do around here, so we grabbed some snacks and headed back to the room to read and mess about on laptops until dinner.

For that meal we popped back to MG Road and up to a rooftop restaurant. Fresh pineapple juice and chicken fried rice cost less than a pound.

The internet still wasn’t working back in the hotel so the challenge was to finish the books we were reading before falling asleep.