My Wanderings in India Come to an End: Goa

[continuation of July 31, 2004 email]

 

Colva and Benaulim

Thankfully I was able to sleep pretty well during the night on the train's sleeper berth and got off at Margao around 8am on my last Friday in India. From there I caught a local bus to the small south Goa beach villages of Benaulim and Colva.

 

 

I hadn't realized that Goa isn't one place, but a string of beach towns running along the coast of the small Indian state of Goa. These beach towns are very popular with western tourists during "the season" from November until April; some of them are all-out party scenes then, but in July it's raining in Goa and there isn't much going on.

 

 

I walked around Colva looking for a room, didn't like the ones that were shown to me, and eventually found a place on the beach in Benaulim a couple of kilometers away. I enjoyed just sitting on the beach watching the ocean, reflecting on my time in India. Later I took a walk and met Stephanie and Christine from Austria, and we spent a nice afternoon together, having lunch, talking about yoga and our travels in India. That night there was a power failure and I ate dinner by candlelight as the only diner in the guesthouse's restaurant.

 

 

The next morning I enjoyed another early walk by the ocean at dawn, and watched as a group of twenty or so fisherman pushed a twenty-foot boat off the beach on rollers and out into the ocean, only to be flipped over in the rough seas and be hauled back to the shore to try again on another day.

 

 

 

Old Goa

I hired a taxi to drive me to Old Goa and wait for me while I walked around for a couple of hours taking a look at what was left of a colonial city said to have rivaled Lisbon in its grandeur. Only a half dozen huge old Portuguese churches remain from that time. The churches are pretty nice and impressive, if you like that sort of thing--oh, and one of them contains the mortal remains of St. Francis Xavier, whose body miraculously didn't decompose after his death. But after two hours of walking around visiting these churches, I was ready to move on to north Goa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we were driving in the rain towards Arambol, the northern beach village I'd selected for my second and last night in Goa, the driver, Julius, was wiping some condensation from his windshield and not paying attention to the road for a moment and wham! ploughed into the rear-end of an SUV ahead of us. Thank God I was wearing a seat belt in the front seat, or my head would've smacked the windshield hard enough to have changed the end of this story. The damage to the vehicle turned out to be not too bad (though the SUV driver was sure pissed), and we were able to continue to Arambol. I realized, after all the crazy kamikaze driving I've seen in India over the past three months, how fortunate I've been to avoid bad luck on the road, and how easy a visit to India could turn into a nightmare.

Arambol

 

 

Arambol is the northern-most beach town in Goa. At this rainy monsoon time it was a muddy, wet, ghost town of partying. Only one restaurant was open and almost all the guesthouses were shuttered. I walked with my backpack down to the beach where one of the locals I talked to managed to find a room for me on the ocean, located up on the rocky headlands at the northern end of the beach. Getting to that room involved walking across the beach, through several small streams of monsoon rainwater flowing into the sea, climbing up the rocks and negotiating some steps which were pretty slippery with wet mossy mold--thankfully I avoided falling on my ass and getting my stuff stowed before having some lunch. A few of the sole restaurant's staff and a scruffy unresponsive western couple were watching TV (Indian StarTV, with HBO grade-B western movies) and smoking hash as I waited for my lunch to be served. It was a bit of a strange scene. Later I took a nice long walk south along the beach--the surf was very strong, and although there were a few fisherman casting nets into the ocean and a group of teenagers playing soccer on the sand near the village, the wind and gray skies lent an atmosphere of lonely desolation to the place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I met an interesting local guy named Shanti, who tried to help me find a place to exchange some dollars as I was almost out of rupees. Everything was closed, but Shanti kept saying "Bholenath"; I asked him what that meant and he smiled and said that was another name for Shiva, and meant to him that there was no reason to worry about anything (and he had 5 kids and a wife to feed with no appreciable business to be done in Arambol now), that Shiva would provide. I liked that. Later I looked it up and found that Bholenath is Shiva's name as innocent, Kind-Hearted Lord. I had coffee with him and bought him a Coke and he told me how busy Arambol was during the season, describing how crazy the scene would be over the winter with people getting high, sleeping with each other, and going off into the jungle to cover themselves with mud from the "mud baths" and living like stoned sadhus. I had to admit that must be something to see, but I wasn't sorry to be missing it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next day I walked along the ocean to the north along the cliffs above my guesthouse, and later enjoyed another long walk along the beach to the south, and then it was time to aim myself towards my final stop in India, Mumbai. I hoisted on my backpack and carefully clambered down the rocks from the beach house and started walking the 3 kilometers towards the Arambol bus stand. It started raining again, and I got soaked before I'd taken 100 steps. That walk to the bus wasn't too much fun, nor was the 45 minutes' wait in the rain for the local bus to take me to Mapusa, the small town where I was to pick up the overnight bus to Mumbai. Then, when I got into Mapusa, planning to use the internet and go to the bookstore for a few hours before my bus left, I found that everything was closed because it was Sunday. I began muttering mentally to myself that I was ready to go home.

 

 

 

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