After arriving in Cochin last night our first thought was to grab a beer at the Vasco Da Gama Bar in our “Casino Hotel” which subsequently does not have a casino. We tried the local beer, being the cheapest and it is great! If you know me, then you’ll know I’m not a fan of beer normally, but this one, Kingfisher Gold, is good! Then we headed for dinner at the hotel restaurant, which was to be our very first proper Indian cuisine experience. Now, before we left South Africa we got all sorts of advise on avoiding Delhi Belly, don’t drink water unless it’s out of a sealed bottle, don’t eat fruit that has been pealed already, don’t eat cashews that haven’t been taken out of a sealed bag, be careful of the local cuisine, ect. A few beers later, we were daring each other to try almost everything. If we were going to stay in India, we would eat like Indians. I then learnt my second bit of very important advice from Nancy, “Never expect to get what you actually ordered”. An example, we ordered tomato garlic soup for starters. Can’t go wrong there right? Wrong. We got a broth with tomato cubes, actual garlic chunks and three different types of chillies floating around.
The rest of the meal was buffet and after hundreds of dares we ended up trying absolutely everything, including a fruit that we only found out the name of two days later. Laughing and practically running all the way back to our room after Nancy accidentally let loose on a wild burp for all the waiters, patrons and band members to hear, we were excited to get some sleep. Three o’clock rolled round and I quietly tippy-toed to the bathroom, trying to not wake Nancy so she didn’t think I was weaker than her, only to hear her on the other side of the door, walking in on me just as I was about to pop a valium, sea-sickness pill and whatever else I could find to keep my dinner in. She was desperate, ready to throw, white as a ghost and sweating. We shared our pills, laughed some more at how silly we had been, but that in the end, we were still strong….ish.
When we woke up this morning though, we were as strong as oxen, ready for our city tour and chilly breakfast. Good times.
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