Wednesday 28th - On the Beach

We wake to the sound of the surf and the wind in the palm trees. A pre breakfast stroll along the beach is the stuff of dreams. Hardly a soul about and a warm sea to plodge in. The Canadian ladies are moving on today but there is no great hurry. We all breakfast together under a canopy on bananas fried with coconut, boiled eggs, some kind of roti with sambhar and a choice of 4 different fresh fruits. This was washed down with mugs of black tea. Big thumbs up from R.

We pass the time until the girls' car arrives and then go for a longish beach walk. It is close to low tide and the sand is alive with small crabs that are almost invisible when still but easily seen when they race away to their burrows. A couple of fishermen drag their boat up the beach. Overhead brahminy kites glide effortlessly in the blue sky. We take a break and sit on some rocks in the shade of the coconut palms. There are birds to watch, as well as men fishing from boats and rocks and a couple of chaps diving.

Time to get back to the ranch and in some shade. On the way back we see a couple of much bigger yellow crabs with eyes on stalks. They scuttle off into the sea when we approach. Our balcony provides shade and a welcome breeze as we sit reading, drawing and bringing the blog up to date. D's new found, if belated, mastery of smartphone trickery pays off as we can use the phone as a wifi hotspot for our other gadgets. Hyacinth has gone to market to get tonight's supper so we have the place to ourselves - so peaceful. The water is solar heated and once we have worked out which tap does what there is plenty of hot water for a jug shower each.

As it cools down we take another turn along the beach, still deserted apart from a whimbrel. Or is it a Eurasian curlew? And that little one. It must be a stint but what kind? The time flies by and soon we sit down for dinner. By way of an hors d'oeuvre R is treated to having her toenails painted.

Tonight's menu is baby shark, snake gourd (a vegetable), beetroot and carrot, green peas and rice. The shark is cooked in a spicy red sauce, not too hot, and is a bit like tuna but less firm fleshed. For dessert we have coconut halwa and some biscuity things. Just as we are finishing dinner a very young Australian couple turn up by auto, looking for a room on spec. They want to pay about a third of Hyacinth's standard charge so she makes a couple of calls and finds them something that suits their budget better. They plan to Couchsurf their way up to McLeodganj. Rather them than us.

Doing nothing much can be quite tiring. We sit on the balcony and listen to the night for a while and then turn in and sleep like logs.