[Villages Kahuna]

One of our grandsons took a job as a SCUBA instructor at a dive resort on the Bay of Bengal in western India. After traveling over 30 hours to Paris then Mumbai, India (until 1995 Mumbai was Bombay) and finally across India to it’s west coast, he reported back on his trip, including pictures.

He said he was amazed at the impressive architecture as well as the smoothness of the operation of the foreign airports he used, particularly those in India. He has done some traveling here in the U.S. and commented that “we don’t have any airports here in the U.S. as impressive and smoothly operated as the one in Mumbai, not even close.”

He said that many Americans think of India as almost a third world country. He said he’s prepared to encounter the poorest classes of people, he hopes he won’t be too badly surprised. But at least from what he described of the crowded Mumbai Airport, he was very much impressed from what he has experienced in India so far.

He described the large crowds of Indian travelers as clean, well-dressed, polite and friendly. He commented that even the small children were quiet, polite, and well behaved. Many of the Indian travelers spoke English, even a few of the small children attempted some English. He knew that 22 different languages are spoken in India, so he was surprised that he had so little difficulty communicating.

He’ll be working in a former French colonial resort city on India’s west coast. It’ll be interesting when we begin to get reports of what things are like there on a day-to-day basis.

You might ask why he chose to work in India. He’s had a lot of travel experience, from a number of islands in the Caribbean, to South America, the Galápagos Islands, and French Polynesia in the South Pacific. He’s even spent several months at sea, sailing across the South Pacific on a 125 foot schooner where he earned his IYT master of yachts (200 ton) certification.

He’s viewing this part of his life as more of an adventure than a career. He’s planning to spend a year or so in India, and then maybe on to Southeast Asia and maybe Australia.

He’s a graduate biologist and says there’s plenty of time in his life to move on to that profession.