We wake at 4.30am on the 13th and catch a rickshaw to the train station for our 5.30 train which is (OH MY GOD) ON TIME. We are sharing our carrigae with an older Indian couple, two Indian men travelling on business, and Claire, a young woman from the UK on her 2nd trip to Goa in 3 years. Over the next 36 hours on the train, the older Indians teach us by example that burping, farting and singing in public are perfectly acceptable on public transport, and Beck bonds with Claire who teaches us a card game called shithead which we play ceaselessly til we arrive at Londa - a nowhere town which we go to only because tickets to anywhere actually in Goa are fully booked out for weeks and this was the closest we could get. I play hackysack with the local primary school kids while we wait for the bus to take us to Panjim, the capital of goa, 5 hours away.
Claire aren Beck have dressed as local women on the bus (headscarves, shawls, etc) in the hope of escaping the unrelenting, unembarrassed attention of local men. It doesn't work. Claire gets her breast grabbed by the guy sitting next to her who she yells at. He gets off at the next stop. We arrive in Panjim at 8.30 and decide to stay bthe night rather than keep going to Arambol, our final destination. Claire decided to keep going, so we say farewell, exchange phone numbers and agree to see each other on the beach. We immediately notice the difference between Goa, which is in the south, and the rest of India we have been exploring in the north. It is 30 degrees at 8.30pm, there are palm trees all around and the people are dressed far more casually. The guesthouse provides our first hot shower for many days.
We continue the next morning - a 1 hour bus ride to Mapusa, change buses for another hour to Arambol and a short rickshaw ride to the beach. The guesthouse we were planning on staying at is some walk away. At that moment, a grandmotherly woman asks if we are looking for a room. She leads us to a guesthouse with good sized room and bathroom, though dirty enough that Beck later buys detergent and scrubbers and scrub the floors. We get the room at normal rates, a really good price considering it is peak season and prices go up by up to 5 times as much.
We were planning on staying at Arambol for 4 days, then heading further south to Palolem, which is meant to be India's most "idylic" beach for a few days, and then onto Gokarna, a similar beach spot in the next state south. We never make it. Within 2 days, we have cancelled all our other plans and spent the next 2 weeks playing in the sun, sand and surf of Aarambol, watching the cows play and occasionally fight on the beach, hiring mopeds and riding for day trips to other beaches and to meet up with Claire in Anjuna, 4 beaches (1/2 hour) south, which is meant to be the "party" town, but we never manage to find one there, there are more and better parties in Arambol. Aparently the party organisers pay off the police each season not to close the beach parties down, but they have been this season. No-one can explain why. They also pull over tourists on mopeds and fine them for things like not wearing a helmet or some other made up charge so they can get baksheesh (a bribe). Whenever one has tried to pull us over we just gun the moped and, I wish I could say speed off and leave them in our dust, but the state of the mopeds is such that they could catch up if they wanted to. There are enough tourists silly enough to pull over that they don't have to.
Whilst here, it occurs to me that Beck and I will be travelling apart for 2 months, and that this would be a great opportunity to travel with Jett and let him experience some of the world so different to what he knows as normal, which is actually abnormally wealthy. I put Joy (his mother) and Barbara (my sister) through all kinds of hell over the next 2 weeks organising passports, flights, vaccinations, etc. Jett wouldn't travel on his own and I send out a distress call email to see if anyone is travelling to Asia over that time and might be able to escort him. Jamie, Justine from Charity Challeng's partner, is travelling to Vietnam on Feb 10 to set up the next Charity Challenge tour which is cycling through Vietnam and he agrees to escort Jett. Joy and John offer to send my mother (Jett's grandmother) to Bangkok for a week's holiday to thank her for all the work she has done over the last few years with their 3 boys, and to escort Jertt home. I make a mad overnight bus trio to Bombay to fill in forms at the Australian embassy to give Jett permission to get a passport, and being peak season, have to go to over 20 travel agents to find a bus overnight back to Arambol, at double the price because it is now December 23 and many Indians as well as tourists are heading to Goa for Xmas and New Yeras when prices go up again.
We try and extend our stay even further, (it is VERY hard to leave Goa), but our room has been booked and Beck tries 15 other guesthouses and all are booked. We accept it is time to move on and catch a bus on the 27th to Pune, a developed city 3 hours from Bombay where we fly out of India on Jan 2. Goa has been a magnificent time, certainly the time that it has really felt like a holiday. Travelling in India is as much hard work and patience overload as it is a sensory and experiential one. Goa gave us a breather before we begin the next stage of our adventure.
posted by flamethrower77 at 3:35 AM
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