Now in Goa, but left Mumbai for Matheran about a week ago. Matheran is described as a hill station, but a better idea is to think of it as a Monument valley style mesa with a town and jungle on top. The ride up is very impressive and everywhere you go the views to the valleys 800m below are stunning. There is also a ban on motorised transport at the top so you get dumped at a car park 2km from the village itself. We're so bloody minded that we refused to hire a porter to take our bags up and instead struggled up ourselves in the 30 degree heat (which is noticably less than Mumbai).

Luckily we found a helpful hotel owner for the first time in India - he was actually honest and even took us to a festival one evening and paid for our dinner! The festival was actually a Hindu and Muslim one that happened to fall on the same full moon. It was held at one of the lookouts and the view down into the misty moonlit valleys surrounded by jagged silhouetted peaks was quite magical. Makes the Taj by moonlight sound a bit rubbish really...

Matheran is actually famous for having a narrow guage railway run from the bottom to the top, built around a hundred years ago. When we arrived it wasn't running, but it transpired that after a 2 year hiatus (from monsoon damage) they'd just finished the repairs and were doing test runs. After a lot of negotiation (read pleading) they let us ride it down on one of the tests for free. It didn't exactly feel ready to go, and half way down we had to stop to help clear a pickup that had got stuck on the rails...

We headed down to Goa straight afterwards, sharing the overnight train with a couple of snoring brummie indians innit. First we headed for Palolem beach, right in the south of the state. It's a massively overdeveloped beach, made to sound quite nice in the Lying Planet. Actually it is quite nice as all the development is bamboo beach huts and bars but very busy none the less. The sea is very warm here, but quite murky, and full of fish that you don't see until they jump over your head.

One day we decided to hire a scooter. Then we didn't. We never went for a wander on it. Grapes never decided to give it a go and she certainly didn't fall off after 20 metres. She definitely didn't require a bandage on her knee made of sanitary towels cos that would just be embarrasing. Just to reiterate, none of this ever happened.

(At the bottom of the screen even before I started typing: "Labels for this post:e.g. scooters, vacation, fall". Strangely prescient these computers aren't they? ;-)

Now we're at Arambol beach, right in the north of the state, a journey requiring 4 individual bus journeys (at a total cost of about 60p each). The last bus was so full that you couldn't move for sweaty Indian men - needless to say not a particularly enjoyable experience.

Arambol is a bit of a hippie backpacker place. Its full of people with dreads, henna tattoos and psychadelic trousers. We haven't really explored it yet but have just had lunch and feel too lethargic to so have gone to this internet cafe instead. We'll probably stay here for a few days before heading off. I fancy hiring an Enfield (tried on the other day, even worse than my bike but sound fantastic so who cares) to wander round the rest of Goa for a few days, and as Grapes hasn't had a scooter accident she's quite receptive to this idea as well.