Madgoan

There was a train at 11pm from Madgoan to Gokarna. But it arrives at 2am. Not a good time to arrive. On the other hand, there was a train to Kumta at 7am. Kumta is 26 km from Gokarna. I took a motorbike taxi to a fairly dirty hotel, the taxi driver holding my luggage on his handlebars. There were centipedes in the bathroom of the hotel. Upstairs was a restaurant/drinking den, where I tried to order fish, but it was all finished. They brought me some miniature crabs instead. The men at the next table were drinking whiskey with their meal. They had bought a whole bottle of it and one of them stuffed the remains of the bottle in his pocket when they left.

Next day I caught the train to Kumta, travelling with a young Norwegian man who had spent the night in the station. He had been accompanying his mother to Delhi for an operation which you cannot get in Norway, to alleviate the symptoms of her MS. It helped a little bit but not much.

At Kumta we saw a train headed to Gokarna road, so we jumped on it, squeezing in beside women and children sitting on the floor of the corridoor and hung on for dear life, as the train hurtled through tunnels. We had no tickets for this train, but nor had most of the other passengers, I suspect.

At Gokarna Road the usual touts tried to get us into rickshaws and taxis but we all headed for the mini bus, which somehow managed to squash us all in. I had half one buttock on the seat. We then took a rikshaw to Om beach, dragged my luggage down a steep path to the beach and checked into a cheap beach hotel called Namaste.