Gokarna, Karnataka, India – This morning, we woke up inside our basket, gathered our things, and upgraded to a room with solid walls. This was your basic room, a little smaller than our basket with walls made of homemade bricks and mortar. I touched the mortar with my finger and a huge chunk of it fell out of the wall, so I assumed it was not real mortar.
Headed to town for breakfast, but we got side tracked and went to the pharmacy instead. Now, Kate is a medical student, probably one of the best people to have around a dispensing chemist that will give you anything. After consulting her, about 20 tablets of diazepam, also known as Valium that cost 60 cents, got to love those Indian chemists.
Found a restaurant, but since no one has any menus in English and very few waiters speak English as well, it is kind of a free for all breakfast. When we entered the restaurant, Kate went over and looked at what they were serving to get an idea of what to order. We ended up getting parathas and a bowl of this yellowed stuff called sheerah, which tasted like cream of wheat with tons of sugar in it. We filled the parathas with this stuff and washed it back with chai.
As I exited, just outside the door to the restaurant there was this beautiful green Tata Tea ad painted on the building and right in front of it a good looking cow so I snapped a shot. [2009 Note: The Tata Tea cow was one of the most popular photos in all if the Traveller’s Tales collection, and in 1998 I returned to the same spot to see if the tea ad still existed. It had been painted over. In the photos at right the top photo is the cow, the bottom what it looked like five years later.]
We wandered through town back to our room for we needed to get our stuff and go to the beach to the left of the place we were staying with a large rock headland complete with Hindu temple that we were told we needed to go over to get to the nice beach. We walked over to the temple at the base of the hill, but instead of taking the steps up to the side of the cliff, we thought we would walk around and see how it went. After 5 minutes of walking and crossing one rather large canyon, we hit a rock face that did not look that hard to climb, but in thongs it may have been a major project. Kate and Rich started scaling the thing 
and I went back to the temple and used the steps to the top. At the top, there was yet one more temple with a little old man asking for money, which I bypassed and started walking over the top towards the other side.
Along the way, I spotted a guru sitting cross-legged at the next cliff over. So I hid in the bushes and took a photo of him sitting at the edge of his shoe rock face. I finally found Rich and Kate walking through a cow field just as three of us spotted the beach we have been looking for. We made it down the other side of the hill and ended up on this secluded beach with about 30 other people on it, all westerners and most of them hippies. Long hair abound on most of the people with the topless or no-cloth option definitely in play here.
The beach was really uncrowded and so relaxing. We assisted our bodies in contracting melanoma for a few hours, then we moved up on to the deck of one of the local chai shops with remainder of the afternoon. Had our tea and snacks and all of a sudden, it was 5 o’clock. We did not know where the time had gone. We gathered our things and made the hike back over the hill to our room.
Upon our return, we got so wasted that we literally could not move, so we just lounged around until we could deal with going into town to get dinner, made it to dinner, but we were still out of it hours later. We crashed in our room shortly thereafter, but I could not sleep. So, I went and laid on the beach and watch the stars.