Almost home (well, as home as Wuhan can be)

***first of all: if you have received an email from kate's hotmail address (kateriker@hotmail.com), do not open it. it's some sort of virus. best we can figure, someone has hacked into kate's email account and is using it to commit evil e-deeds. to email kate, the real kate, use kateriker@gmail.com***

hello everyone. kate and i are about to begin the long trip back to wuhan, to cold weather, cloudy skies, and, sigh, work. we have also fallen far behind on logging our travels.

we've spent the last 3 days in goa, visiting old goa and pololem, which is a beach area in the far south of goa. old goa was really interesting. it's a unesco world heritage site and was portugal's administrative center back in the 1600s. over the last few hundred years, as the river has silted and the major commercial areas have moved westward, the area that was once a rival of lisbon fell into disrepair. many of the buildings were abandoned or just kind of left to rot. recently, though, the area has been restored and it looks like there is still a lot more work being done. we did the fairly typical 'walking tour' of old goa, which takes about 4 hours and covers only a few kilometers, but it's full of 500-year-old monasteries, convents, basilicas, and cathedrals. it seems like there are 5 portuguese cities worth of massive religious buildings in this small area in western india. most the chapels and churches were undergoing renovations and didn't look like they were used as churches, but the paintings and tile work were still in place and as beautiful as ever. the basilica de bom jesus was the one of the most impressive i've ever seen. there are about 16 chapels and altars on the sides, each with beautiful paintings, statues, and ornate wood carvings. it's also the largest church in asia, and houses the tomb of st. francis xavier, whose body has yet to begin to decay, even though he's been dead for 500 years. sadly, they won't be displaying the body until 2014, and we just can't stay here that long. there are also the ruins of a cathedral that collapsed in the 1800s and excavations only began in 1989. it's so strange to walk through the ruins of such a massive structure. it was also fascinating to watch the excavation going on. there was a group of three women by the main altar that were arranging pieces of broken tile to be cemented back onto the walls.

so, after 4 hours of walking from one church to the other and seeing carvings and woodwork as good or better than that in europe, we decided to head for the beach to meet up with katie, blayne, jacqui, and lindsay (friends of kate from america). after a few hot, stinking hours of trying to change money in margao, which, again, is really difficult when you've got chinese money, and finding everywhere closed because it was friday afternoon, we finally got on the bus to pololem.

arriving in pololem was interesting. we had been expecting a beach area that was a little less crowded and touristy than the beaches we'd been to before, but, for better or worse, the area seemed more tourist oriented. we quickly found bamboo huts back in the coconut trees and sent word to our friends where to find us, and then sat back on the porch with an ice-cold glass of kingfisher beer to wait for them. they arrived, no probelm, that night and after 2 days with them on the beach, that went way too quickly, and some of the best mexican food i've ever had, we had to drag ourselves away from the beach to catch our train to trivandrum. this was made all the more difficult by kate having a case of food poisoning, but she toughed it out, got herself to the train station, and onto the train, and in the process has earned herself a definite spot on the iron-woman indian travel team. this trip away from the beach was not an easy one, since our taxi driver skidded off the road and insisted on playing indian pop, which is not what one needs to hear with an upset stomach.

the train was hot, but uneventful. we bought water, rice, soda, chips and such from the swarm of people that invade the train at every stop. the mantra that you encounter in nearly every station is probably the most unique part of the indian train experience. the one that always made me jump a little was the man who walked by every 10 minutes yelling 'coffee', since it sounded like he was saying 'duffy'. we're still undecided on what's better, the train or the bus. we are now back at kovalam beach for the day, our last in india, and tomorrow we take the flight to sri lanka, then through bangkok, then to hong kong, then the overnight train to wuhan. if all goes well, we should be home by march, kidding, at which time we can fill in some of the extremely large gaps, ie ooty, mysore, hampi, etc, where we haven't had time to use the internet.