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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Sunday 26 November 2000 (Day View)

Wed 22 Nov | Thu 23 Nov | Fri 24 Nov | Sat 25 Nov |   Sun 26 Nov   Mon 27 Nov | Tue 28 Nov | Wed 29 Nov | Thu 30 Nov |

26.11.2000 – Sunday 26 November – Puri

• I slept well on the train, arriving in PURI eleven hours later. It was nice to be out of the smog, horror and expense that is Calcutta, and back into true India again.

10am

• After a quick walk from the train station down to the beach where the guesthouses are, I found a 40-rupee room at the “Nilambu”, near “Z Hotel”, which seems ok with an attached bath and shower. I then went for a walk along the beach, enjoying the relative peace and tranquillity in stark contrast to the past few days in Calcutta, and bought some mosquito coils, 15 rupees for 12.

Dugongs

• Puri beach is both lovely and vile. At one end, there is a fishing village, and at the other end, there is a tourist village. The beach at the fishing village end is covered in dead fish, dugongs, and faeces, and there are many scary dogs in the village itself, who look as though they might bite. Why have toilets when you have a beach that automatically flushes once every high tide? The tourist end has nice sand, sunburnt and overweight tourists swimming and sunbathing, and tourist shops.

Evening

• I did some washing, had a reasonable lunch, lazed about, had a reasonable dinner and lit some mosquito coils to scare the mossies away. Normally I’m not so worried about mosquitos, but in India who knows what they might do if you are bitten. I have lots of phlegm on my chest, which is giving me a bad cough as I try to remove it. I don’t think I’m coming down with the flu or anything like that, I think it’s just what happens after staying in such a horribly polluted place as Calcutta.

Comment by Ned – Thursday 5 June 2003, 6:06 PM

  The way it’s going now, it looks like I might never get the time to finish this.

Comment by Ned – Monday 15 December 2003, 2:35 AM

  Finished :-)