After waking at 3pm (!), I took a very late lunch at the Cathedral's cafe which is over the road from the hostel I'm at. Sausage, bacon, poached eggs, tomatoes with toast and has brown (all x2) did the job perfectly in filling me up. The next three and a half hours I spent updating my finances (as well as following England's progress in the First Test against India). Before I left I'd compiled what people would probably view as a complicated spreadsheet whereas in my view its rather straight-forward (though relatively large) and just helps me record what I've spent so far on my trip and the expected costs of the rest of the trip over the next few months.
Needless to say, with it being the 60th day on tour, I had a lot of updating to do to it as this was the first time since starting my tour that I'd got round to doing it. As anticipated, I'm a little poorer than what I thought I might be but I know that if the situation called for it, I could utilise a combination of the various overdraft facilities I have. A trip like this probably won't come around too many times in a lifetime so if there's a chance of doing something that I wouldn't have a chance to do back home then I really should do it, regardless of the cost implications.
The useful thing about going from east to west (most travellers I've met appear to be doing it in the opposite direction!) is that having done USA and New Zealand early on in my trip is that two of the most expensive legs are out of the way. New Zealand I count as expensive partly due to the costs of the organised tour and also the additional activities (such as skydiving, glacier hiking etc) that I've done. Also, there were many costs in the USA that I won't be repeating elsewhere, such as acquiring "more-suitable" clothes and shoes than those I'd started my tour with (shoes, waterproof jacket, new comfortable jeans etc) as well as the money I spent gambling in Las Vegas. Food can be purchased everywhere relatively cheaply but I admit my daily estimates of GBP 10 a day for food was a bit unrealistically-low; for the rest of my tour I've now increased that to GBP 20 a day - just doing that increases expected costs by approximately a further GBP 1,500 !
Anyhow, this took me up to 8pm and after returning to the hostel briefly and chatting to a new room mate who'd just turned up at the dorm I went to Little India and had a chicken saagwalla with basmati rice and a bottle of Steinlager.
After following the English cricket effort on the internet and doing some further research in to the places I'll be visiting in the coming months, I got to bed around 12.45am, relatively early for me! I will be intriguing to see how the day ends in the cricket - when I left there were about 20 overs left and Virender Sehwag was hammering the English attack all over the park as India set about a run-chase of 387 that England had set them earlier in the day after fine centuries by Andrew Strauss and Paul Collingwood.
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