INDIA - A few days
in Trivandrum, Kerala then onto Goa
Written
by Aaron
Oh back to India...my India, the India of all Indias. Oh India of flies, Oh India of palaces, Oh India of smiles and friendly people, Oh India of touts and cheats and lying bastards. Oh India of marble, of gems, of art, of beauty, Oh India of excrement, of urine, and spit and snot.
We had thought that our time in the Maldives might have softened our remaining time in what Queen Victoria called the jewel in the crown of the British empire. Alas, that was not the case. We flew back into Trivandrum, and we realized that we had a long time left in India and we were exhausted with its charms and graces. However, in Trivandrum we had our restaurant and our email shop and I bought a CD of Mohabatein, the hotest India soundtrack to the hotest Indian movie of the year. I was dejected and dying, and I had to calm myself with Star Movies, and I watched probably the worst movie I had ever seen, Obsessive Love. Don't look for it, I repeat, don't look for it. I also watched Three Men and a Baby. It was directed, oddly enough, by Leonard Nimoy! And I watched it closely, and I didn't see the ghost, supposedly a mysterious woman appears out of nowhere at some point. But it was nice to see Steve Guttenberg get work, and Tom Selleck, oh the trials of Tom Selleck's erratic career...kind of like a more successful Mark Harmon, the Coors commercial guy. If you haven't seen Summer School, rent it immediately. It's a sweet little film with Kirstie Alley, another TV to movies to TV actress, but like both Tom Selleck and Mark Harmon, quite delightful. Let's face it, the Cheers guy who played Sam Malone, his name escapes me, he was lucky to work after that particular Boston bar closed its doors.
It was in this barrage of bad movies that Laura struck upon a golden idea. We were done. It was either pack it up and go home, or come up with a better idea. Also, at our email place (fully Air Conditioned and the guy was great and the computers, at least one of them was fast) we checked the web and Indonesia was just a mess and getting worse. If we went, we'd have to stay on only Bali, and we had read some bad, India-like things about Bali, lots of touts, possibility of theft, just the things we were so tired of. We had spent six months in Asia and were ready for something different. Laura thought we'd make it to January 20 for our flight back to Bangkok but I knew that something had to give, and I needed the Lakepoint Service Apartments. I included it in my prayers...God bless Laura, and my parents, and the Lakepoint Service Apartments in Bangkok. Amen. So Laura was fantasizing about me being dead (we had spent way too much time together) and she had come up with the idea that if I was to die, she'd cry at the funeral, wear something nice and black and stylish, and then see her friends and then move to either Berlin or Paris and study languages. Morbid yes, but a lot of this trip was trying to follow our bliss, follow our little dreams that we thought would never come true. And we had the time, and it was either return to the States and start life over again, or spend the spring in Paris. And being stuck in the backwaters of India, Paris looked just this much better than the Elysian Fields. Our fate was sealed. (What would I do if Laura died? Get a nice, stoic Thai wife, maybe two of them, but that's another story. Not as poetic as Laura's fantasies but what can I say? I've always been earthy).
We got on a train to Goa and we had our usual problems -- we had two confirmed seats but they weren't together, and so we had to find the train conductor to get our seats rearranged. He was helpful, and so we began our journey which we were told was 36 hours. Actually, it was half that time. We arrived at the main train station a day early, a full day early, and so we booked a hotel in Margao, your usual Indian town. The whole reason we were going to Goa was to meet friends, either Katie, a friend of a friend, or our usual partners, Gail and Vince, those crazy, cheap Brits, going around the world on literally a shoe-string. Literally. Vince had given up both his shoestrings to get a place in Myanmur and so he was shoeless (a little poetic hyperbole, okay, but still...we could not have done our trip as cheaply as Gail and Vince, we would have lasted five minutes. I NEED air conditioning, you don't understand). So emailed Gail and Vince and I put Laura in bed; she was beaten and bloodied with being back in India. We ate a quiet meal in, Dominos! Not the Rava Dosa, the Dal, the Chana Masala, the chipaathi that we were used to, and Dominos is just bad pizza, no matter where you are in the world.
But the next day, we got an email from Gail and Vince and we met them at Baga Beach. They had found us a room and everything! We were well taken care of by our British friends, our constant companions that had followed us all the way from China, or we followed them, depending on your point of view. In Baga Beach we went to the Banana Republic, a delightful little restaurant run by a French couple, a Parisian French couple. Fancy that after our new plans. After a couple of delicious sandwhiches, Gail and Vince escorted us to our hotel, a guest house behind a grocery store in front of a chicken run/town dump/goat herd. On the one hand it had a high bug factor, but on the other, it was a little over five dollars a night, and in Goa, during Christmas, it would have been a bargain at twice the price. And it was nice just to have someone take care of us. And Gail and Vince gave us the nice room, without a doubt.
Christmas in Goa was nice. We tried to hook up with Katie Rinki during that time, a friend from America that didn't talk funny, like our Brit friends, and didn't order dippy eggs and soldiers for breakfast, but it was not meant to be. Katie was flying India Airlines (motto: we've gone a whole week without a crash!), and India Airlines screwed her over and then her posh resort screwed her over because of what India Airlines did, and she had to bivouc in western hotel before getting out of Goa and heading to Dehli. But we had a nice holiday with Gail and Vince (had Yorkshire Pudding which isn't pudding at all, and the Brits use the word "pudding" without any regard for its true meaning, i.e. Bill Cosby's treat). On Christmas Eve we ate at a Goan Food restaurant, had wonderful Goan food (we were serenaded by the owner who sang us the Sorpetel song), and then Laura and I went to midnight mass, and well, mass was an event unto itself. The priest didn't welcome the visitors in English, he just started right out in Goan, or Hindi, or whatever they speak there. The church was packed with visitors and locals, standing room only, and for the guy next to us, slumping room only (he was a little drunk), and the lines curled around the building like incense smoke. Fifteen minutes after his Indian homily he switched to English and went right into his pitch. At one point he said, "Everyone is invited to the table of the Lord, well, except the Jews, they're not invited. They chose not to be invited..." and so on and so forth. It's nice to know that the Roman Catholic church is still so accepting, but we'll come back to that little theme later. Laura and I snuck out after an hour and a half, and went back to get Gail and Vince and loaded them into a taxi and we went to a rave.
Raving in Goa, yahoo! We drove to a hotel in the boonies, and there was light and trees and techno, all glowing the Christmas spirit and a lot of illegal substances. We walked onto the dirt grounds of the hotel and started dancing to the beat, boy! The vibe, though, was ruined by people trying to sell us things on the dance floor, and not drugs either, water, cigarettes, neon glow-paint for face painting (which I partook in), and when people weren't selling us things, drunk/stoned/strung out Indian men, having been unleashed from their sexually inhibited culture, were out to party, P-A-R-T-Y, and I had to almost physically remove one from Laura. We lasted a little over an hour and then jammed out of there. It was disappointing, but then the rave scene is not what it once was in Goa, I think because of that very thing.
Christmas Day we had a long lie in, to quote our Brit friends, and then ate dinner at a nice hotel and played Progressive Rummy and had carrot cake. Yum. We also walked on the beach and saw cows and Indian men wandering about, and topless sunbathers which is a big no-no, but Westerners on the prowl in a foreign country are liable to do anything, and Goa doesn't draw the cream of the crop. We went to bed early, walking back in a power outage, and power would be a problem for us for the rest of the trip. I won't go into the train ticket problem, but this is just a warning, if it says Travel Agent Office, it really means a place for a bunch of guys to hang out in. The next day, Boxing Day, we escorted Gail and Vince to the train station in Margao, three hours away, to buy our train tickets for the next part of the trip, and then we took the local buses three hours back to our room...we then upgraded to the Sunshine Beach resort, it was three times more than the Khata Guest House, but there was three times less bugs. Keeping the tradition alive, we had pizza again, in our room, from U.S. Pizza; they delivered! It was delicious, and we got to watch friends until the power went out. Has anyone seen the episode where Monica and Rachel move into Joey and Chandler's apartment, and Monica becomes obssessed with a light switch that doens't turn anything on? We watched the whole thing except the last couple of minutes, and I am dying to know, what does the light switch do?
The next day we did email, bought more books, can't have too many books, and Laura needed a Leslie Pierce. I had finished Charles Dickens' Christmas stories, just to get into the holiday spirit. Laura devoured Camelia, but I passed on it, and started on Bleak House, a fat, slow Dickens novel that is too fun to give up on. And then we started a three day train journey up to Amritsar.
Touring the local sights in Old Goa with Gail & Vince. This is the catherdral built to house most of the remains of St. Francis Xavier, the one who brought Catholicism to most of Asia. He was well traveled.
Christmas eve with our loyal friends, we really enjoyed the tastey Goan food
Escorting Gail & Vince back to their train in Margo. Thanks to them we had a marvelous Christmas.
I'm ready to read more, onto the Punjab
I'm lost, take me back to the India home page!