26 February

On our last day in Goa, we hired a scooter to visit the beaches further north at Calangute and Baga.  It was quite a culture shock from the relative quiet of our beach stay in Candolim to the full-on mass tourism, packed beaches and crazy Calangute traffic, we were happy to survive this road trip with our limbs intact.

Larging it at Calangute

Today we say goodbye to Goa and continued our journey via taxi, the Konkan railway and a 35km auto-rickshaw road trip to Tarkali in Maharashtra state.

 Boarding the train to Kudal

Suddenly we find ourselves in another world where we appear to be the only western tourists, road signs are all in Hindi and very few people speak English.

It is not unusual to see bullock carts in the street and fishermen still paddling out in their canoes to circle net the beach with equipment that dates back thousands of years.  That said, fibre glass boats with outboard motors are favoured by fishermen in the commercial port of Malvan.

Canoe planks are stitched together

Paddling out the net

Beach crew hauling in one end of the net

A typical catch of the day

Washing the catch prior to shipping to market

The rest of our journey towards Mumbai will be on the Konkan railway, considered to be one of the world’s great railway journeys, the construction of it was completed in 1998, a major feat of civil engineering that finally linked the west coast from Mangalore to Mumbai with the rest of the Indian railway network.  This project was never attempted by the British railway engineers and went straight into the too hard basket, which is no surprise when considering a difficult terrain and extreme monsoon weather on this part of the coast. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konkan_Railway