Beaches galore!

We've spent quite a few day on and around beaches now. It's been quite lovely. After a rest day of no driving in Baga, Goa, we've sauntered down the coast to a little place called Om Beach (because the beach is shaped like the letter Om) in Karnataka. (Oh, and we've passed the 2000km traveled mark!) It was a short day of driving because we went to bed late last night after hanging out with a bunch of other teams in Anjuna and slept in (or had a bit of a lie-in, as the British would say) and didn't get on the road until almost 11. Got here just in time to sit on the deck, have a beer with another team and watch the sunset.

Our little bungalow thing here is fairly nice, with a pink mosquito net over the bed - completely ineffective, but cute. Haven't tried our luck with the hot water yet, but there's still hope, as the other team said one of them managed to have a hot shower. I've lost count of the number of cold showers I"ve taken now. Travelling through these little towns really makes you appreciate having clean water and good plumbing. Belinda and I have been living life on the edge and brushing our teeth with tap water, which horrifies all the other teams we tell this to, as almost all of them have suffered varying degrees of Delhi belly. Hopefully we're building up our tolerance and not just setting ourselves up for the worst case of stomach sickness ever, ha. 

Tomorrow we'll have to be up early and have a long day of driving because we took it easy today, but only about 700km left to go! The end is in sight :)

Goa bound!

After a long day of winding mountain roads, we've stopped on the outskirts of a little town along NH15 about 120km north of Goa. Oddly enough, using the internet from inside the hotel manager's office because they don't have wifi. I was going to upload some pictures, but unfortunately their connection must be firewalled and won't work with my netbook so it'll be just a text update for now :(

Anyway, I changed the map page to the live map so hopefully now it's showing our actual progress on the map instead of the planned route we had before. (Although today's location is just a guesstimate because Google Maps does not list the tiny town we're in.)

All team members are doing well, just a bit peppered with mosquito bites and fighting minor colds. Our trusty steed is also holding up amazingly, despite the fact that the speedometer no longer works, and a few days ago the tailpipe fell off and it got even louder than it was before - didn't think that was possible, but it did. But that was easily fixed for 150 rupees (about $3. Everything in this country is crazy cheap. Well, except for that one fancy place we stayed at for almost 7000 rupees out of desperation, haha.)

So we are halfway through our 2-week journey and more than half way down the length of India! Planning a much-needed reprieve for a couple of days on the beaches around Goa - hopefully beach huts will be involved. Then charging on again to the finish line! Rawr. 

Hello, we're alive!

After an 18-hour train ride, many many hours on planes, and experiencing the chaos that is Delhi, we've arrived at the start line city of Jaisalmer! And only slightly worse for wear. Over 2 days in Delhi we were:

- mildly scammed - Garrett paid almost 3x as much as he should have for a taxi from the airport to the hotel, but at least the driver actually took him to our hotel

- a little bit robbed - Belinda absentmindedly put her iphone in her back pocket out of habit, and while squeezing through a crowd, someone lifted it :( 

- quite often lost - a large portion of our time in Delhi was spent walking in circles looking for ways to get into things that we could see

- stalked and proposed to - guess who attracts the crazies. yayyy.

But miracle of miracles, we did manage to all find each other, see some cool things and make our way fairly smoothly to where we're supposed to be! Huzzah~

Now we need to go pick up our race packets and test drive our crap vehicles. Next time we get a better connection and have some more time, pictures and videos will be posted!