The trip from Pune to Goa was uneventful, although we were shacked up with the National Indian Olympic swimming team. They were very polite. The cockroaches were also quite unimposing. The AC however, had decided to make its presence chillingly felt. It was artificially cold in India again!
We arrived in Goa and it was wet, the monsoon season was in its last throes and the clouds hovered overhead. The palm trees swayed in the breeze and the taxi drivers were eager to rip us off as much as possible. After 30 minutes deliberating we took the guy that offered the 45 minute journey to Anjuna beach. The journey was beautiful, small roads and palm trees along the coast, people just chilling out on the street, Singoalla sleeping on my lap and reggae music surprisingly being played in quite a few establishments as we drove past.
One of the things that I have decided to embark upon after some time in the future is to drive an ambassador from India to England. An Ambassador is the first mass produced car in India. It is a large cream coloured british imperial car that I have fallen in love with. I have never really been into cars, but this car is just too nice. Everyone uses them here, as taxi’s, governmental vehicles and just generally. Its comparatively very cheap compared to other cars on the market, so you see them everywhere. Imagine driving it through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey etc.
Anyways, we arrived at a really cheap but nice and spacious place called sunshine guest house. The landlady was really nice to us, and led us to our room. Quick shower and we set out for the beach. This place is hippy central. This place caters for hash and LSD heads, it’s the least Indian place we’ve visited. There’s as many tourists as there is native Goans. A note on the history of this place. Colonized in a big way by the Portuguese, this place is the central hub for Christians in the country. After Indian independence, some Goans tried to achieve independence from the rest of the country but failed. This western hangover leaves me a bit uneasy, just like any place that is specifically tailored for a particular type of consumer, and consumer is the operative word. As everybody knows, you never get to know a place to any meaningful degree by just visiting the specific touristy places which are geared to making you spend as much of your money on quaint ‘ethnic’ souvenirs and other such stuff that has nothing to do with the local populations ways of life. It seems that in these types of places, the roles of each person are more clearly demarcated, tourist and restaurant workers, tourist and shop vendor, tourist and local, and to a certain extent its tourist vs local, as both battle to see what quantity of money interchanges between them. Obviously we have seen this in other places too, but in Goa it seems to be much more concentrated, it is a western tourist’s playground.
The beach was o.k, we saw a scary sea monster washed up on the beach (it was really scary, I think it was some sort of think eel with jagged teeth) and was continuously harassed by beach vendors. We walked back home after a while and we realized that I strong sun burn on my shoulders and back (ala blue vest). Painful, painful, painful. My stomachs telling me things I don’t want to know and I can’t sleep cos of the pain from aforementioned body areas. But I can’t complain, Singoalla was taking care of me in her hyper motherly way. By the way, pain killers are very good at numbing the pain enough to let you get some sleep.
One night, we went to the nicest bar/restaurant we have been to so far in India. It’s called Tito’s (I don’t know if that’s a reference to the Trotskyst leader of Yugoslavia) and it is really nicely decorated on the inside, the epitomy of cool relaxed atmosphere but not so cool relaxed prices. That didn’t matter though, everything we ate was delicious, and the wine is the best I’ve tasted this year. (I can’t remember the name, which makes me quite sad. It was 500 Rupees, about 6 pounds which is very expensive for India) if anyone decides to venture into Goa please visit this place, but be ready to splash the cash.
There were cows everywhere. Everywhere. They all have different types of horns. They all have exotic eyes with elegant eyelashes. Cows walk through the streets like they own them. I was walking from the internet café to the house and a bull started to charge at me (perhaps not charge at me, but lightly jog) whilst I had my back turned, luckily I moved out of the way as one of the locals warned me in time. Its not that he was being aggressive, I just getting unconsciously too close to its calf, so it was just getting me out of the way. Cows keep up the traffic. I like the cows; they are considered a holy animal here that is to be treated with respect. MacDonalds does not sell big macs here cos they contain beef. In MacDonalds, they have more vegetarian burgers ready to go than they do any other burger (wave of gratification has just washed over all my vegetarian friends, perennially frustrated by the attitude they receive from McD staff when ordering vegetarian burgers which never arrive.)
The drugs trade is very active in Goa, with people continuously offering all sorts of illicit substances to complement the various trance clubs and parties on the beaches. There’s a restaurant called ‘munchies’ which shows trashy US tv and is open 24/7. They sell all that hippy crap, tie dye, bongs etc all over the place and the local population speak in a slight Jamaican accent when speaking to us. All the restaurants sell ‘English, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Russian and Israeli food.’ A lot of Israeli’s come here, after completing their year of military service occupying what is left of the Palestinian territories. We met an Israeli woman living next door to us and we had dinner with us. The conversation was interesting, and strangely similar to many left wing Israeli’s i’ve met in my life. Starts off by saying that the ‘occupation is wrong’, she refused to do military service (very much respect this), says that the Palestinians are in the right, but then comes out with the typical racist stuff ‘I can’t trust Palestinians, not even my Palestinian friends,’ ‘I think that there should be a two state solution, I could never live with arabs in the same country,’ and then concludes by saying that generally the east and west cannot and should not be mixed. She detested India, and thanked god she was in Goa with white people. This, for me, was Goa in a nut shell. I’ll give her this though, she hadn’t spent time with Indian families and generally people that aren’t associated with the tourism trade (to whom you represent a fountain of money and little else), so she would not have experienced much that I find beautiful about India. We have met some wonderful and generous people who have been amazingly hospitable to us. There are good people everywhere, but you never expect to find them until you actually find them. The question of Palestine never seems to escape me wherever I go! Haha.
We left after two nights, which was enough for me, and got on the train for our final stop in our journey, Bangalore. The minute we got on the train, a man in uniform asked me to fill in a form assessing the cleanliness of the train. It all looked very clean so I put 10 out of 10 for everything. After the train had safely departed I discovered the resident rat on the train. Small fella, very hyper active, running from carriage to carriage. There was nothing more I could do then lie in my bunk and read about the taj mahal.
Rats!
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