Monday 29^th October

Tasmania is so beautiful at the moment – lush and green, with so much foliage and blossom on the trees that it is like being in a steroid-fuelled nature documentary!  I don’t think we realised quite how much the long-term drought had affected our surroundings.  The contrast between the parched desert-like Midlands of recent times and the glorious rolling green pastures is breathtaking.  Go for a drive!

India #4

Our first experience of Indian hotels was at the Strand on the esplanade near the Gateway to India - a huge, grandiose archway built as a monument to the British Raj in 1947.  Something like 14 years after it was completed the entire British armed forces left, never to return…  I think Pete had stayed at the Strand 4 years ago, and it was fine.  Things deteriorate very quickly in Mumbai, because of the heat and the damp.  It was no longer very nice at all, with great frescoes of mould on all of the walls.  They led us to “deluxe” and “super-deluxe” rooms which were nothing of the sort – gloomy mouldy and yucky are the words which spring to mind.  And expensive, around $100 per night.  Never mind; there were beds on which travel-weary people could get horizontal, always an attractive prospect.  But not yet!!  Vish rang Amed, his nephew, as soon as we arrived at the Strand, and Amed, a lovely man full of bonhomie and evening energy, said, “Wait!  Do not go to bed!  I will be there in half an hour, can’t wait to see you!”  His wife Anjuli had very sensibly gone to bed quite a while earlier.  “She is an earlybird but I am a night owl!” he shouted, rushing in the door with huge smiles to have a drink with us.  By then it was about 11.30pm Mumbai time, 3.30am Australian time… Mary and I were very much hollow-eyed ghouls but we were happy to meet Amed nonetheless.  We could, after all, sleep any old time….

The next morning we had breakfast in the hotel dining room, which was more in the nature of a storage room for oddments, but never mind; eggs were on the menu (or fggs, as it actually said.)  I had boilded ones, but I could have had pouched, or even pounched.  Later on in Goa we found scrumbled eggs, which sounded very tempting. 

It is in fact tempting as well to laugh a lot about signage and spelling, but it is not really fair.  It is SO wonderful that nearly everywhere in India signs are in English as well as in the local languages.  I might smile tolerantly at a sign saying TIOLET, but how lovely that I knew where to find one, and that it wasn’t written in some script indecipherable to me!  (And we all know full well that Australian menus are full of weird and wonderful spellings and misspellings.  Pauline and I found some delicious-looking soup on a board in a restaurant in Georgetown a few years ago: potato and leak soup.  Yum!) 

Mary’s breakfast came with toast and jam of a most lurid shade.  “Ummm…what is this jam made of?” she asked, politely.  The waiter beamed proudly.  “Fruit, sugar, and colour!”  And my boilded eggs came boilded hard as bullets, still in their shells, floating in boiling (boilding??) water.  I actually enjoyed them once I had managed to remove the shells, butter some toast, and slice them into edible proportions.  I ordered boiled eggs a few more times over my five weeks, and they always came floating in hot water, sometimes with, and sometimes without their shells.  And I was always very grateful for them because they were so bland, filling and comforting on my sometimes less-than-settled digestive system.