If you come down to the beach today...

... watch out for the little bloodsuckers. To date, Lydia reckons she has been bitten by 30-odd mosquitos. The hotel we are staying at provides mosquito nets and to date it has caught 131 mosquitos. Nasty little blighters.

Our hotel is fantastic, for the record, it's called the Z Hotel, and at Rs500 for both of us per night (approximately 6 pounds) it's a little more than we'd normally pay, but worth every paise. There is a huge dining room table where all the residents commute for breakfast/lunch/dinner/tiffin, we have met people from Germany, France, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium and of course the UK. There's a television room, with a film screening every night at 7pm, books to borrow if you feel the need to read, and the most excellent jam and toast in South India!

We managed to drag ourselves out of our relaxed coma - and headed to Chilka Lake with two lovely Frenchwomen, Delphine and Gaelle from Paris. I've been bemoaning the fact that we haven't met any women travellers yet, and the ones we have are all rude or square. Delphine and Gaelle have completely blown this view out of the water. They were fantastic fun and it was so nice to mix with other travellers and hear about their experiences. We're also determined to be more like Delphine in the way she talks to people. When people hassle us we've tried smiling and saying no, we've tried waving them away, we've tried ignoring them and walking off, I've tried threatening them with a bottle of water, to date, none have been successful. What Delphine does is look at them as if they're a piece of dog shit (sorry Mum) on her shoe and go, "NO! Move!" Works a treat.

Anyway. Chilka Lake. This is Asia's largest lagoon according to my Rough Guide and suppposed to be fantastic between December and February when flamingos, pelicans and painted storks, fish eagles, ospreys and kites all emigrated here. It's also highly expensive on peak. Hired a boat with Delphine and Gaelle and several others and headed out on a three hour boat trip that had us dolphin spotting and walking along a sand bank dividing Chilka Lake from the Bay of Bengal. It was beautiful in it's own way, but not as beautiful as expected. Still, a great experience. Don't expect photos of dolphins anytime soon - they're not the kind that jump out of the water and show off. Rather they're the teasing kind that surface for 1 millimetre of a second leaving you with nothing but twenty photographs of water ripples.



Back to women backpackers - we've also met Jessica from Vancouver, Canada and Valeska from Cologne, Germany. Hello guys! *waves* All of us, Lydia and I, Delphine, Gaelle, Valeska and Jessica went out for dinner last night at the Pink House, a restaurant-hotel right on the beach. With sand in our toes we ravished enormous garlic-coated king prawns and chips, washed down with beer and followed by a chocolate and coconut pancake at Mickeys. Does life get any better than this??

Supposed to go to Konark today - but it was royally coming down - think monsoons - think British rain times one hundred - think overflowing roads and wet feet. British stiff upper lip or not, there is no way on earth I'm going on the road in this weather - so a trip to the bookshop (1 Philip Pullman, 1 Josie Lloyd, 2 Nick Hornbys) soon had us settled with a hot drink around the communal table watching the rain fall.

We're leaving tomorrow but hoping to book a car to Konark before we head off to Vizag - no trip to Puri is complete without a visit to the Sun Temple in Konark. Then it's two more train journeys, only 8-9 hours to be fair, to Vizag via Bhubaneswar. I'm more worried about Lydia than anything else. I wonder if the local pharmacy stocks Prozac?

Oh, and I'm ill. Again.

Caroline xx