It is very weird here, miles of grey, open desert with camels wandering across the wide roads and very few cars or people around. The buildings are all low level and white washed colours and the long beaches are very sparten.

What a contrast to the intense, crowded and colourful streets of Mumbai.

Yesterday we had booked a hire car for 9 am and by 1.30pm we had refuelled the boat and we were getting a bit impatient as the car had still not arrived, so we found Mahamed to complain. He asked if we could wait another hour whilst he went to pray !

We said ‘no!’ so he looked around the cars in the car park, took the keys out of the ignition of one of them and said ‘Here take this one’.

Later in the afternoon we bumped into Brian from Miss Tippy and learned that it was his hire car that we had been given, he picked it up from the airport that morning !

Luckily he had borrowed a car from Jackamy.

It was a Friday (religious day) and the shops were closed until 5pm anyway.

During the day security men tramped over all the boats and even went inside those that were not locked – we think they were looking for whiskey etc – they were not very friendly.

The Port is a secure area and you assume that you can trust the men in uniforms but that is not the case.

Today we have the rally briefing at 10.00, it is currently 8am and Mark is already at a skippers meeting on shore to try and decide on groupings for the next leg since several yachts have now dropped out of the rally and groups need to be re arranged to accommodate that. There are some very strong personalities and everyone has different opinions – I hope it can be resolved before the briefing so that we can get on with the matter in hand – the transit through the GOA.