rezendi

Arumbol, Goa

Ah, the time dilation of travel. It's hard to believe I left Paris only six days ago. Feels more like a month. Being on the road actively extends your life, I swear, at least in terms of perceived time, and that's probably what it's all about, innit?

Well, "extends" only if not "shortens". Today I hired a motorbike and bombed down Goa's coastal road for an hour, incidentally violating every motorcycle-safety law known to man other than "no headstands while in motion": no helmet! no protective clothing! first time on a motorbike in 18 months! unreliable Indian bike with unfamiliar gearing system! narrow Third World rutted pitted roads, occupied by pedestrians, oxen, dogs, autorickshaws, oversize pickups, and worst of all, other backpackers doing the same damn thing! Gorgeous, way-fun ride though.

(Dear Mom, if you ever read this; uh, just kidding, in fact I've never been on a motorcycle in my life, okay? Great. Thanks.)

Arambol/Arumbol/Harmbol (never trust a country that has only one way to spell a town name) is a classic backpacker paradise: spectacular beach lined by laid-back banana-lassi-and-chocolate-pancake cafes, spartan but livable hostels, fantastic expat-run restaurants, book exchanges, Internet cafes, stores selling knickknacks and saris and sarongs and other tropical wear, yoga ashrams, a paragliding school, and the inexplicably ubiquitous didgeridoo workshop¹, all yours for as little as US$10/day - though at that price you'll be living in a rather spartan bucket-shower-and-outhouse place, and will be doing no paragliding.

So far Goa feels a whole lot friendlier than Northern India. The locals seem to live in a kind of bemused harmony with their visitors, and while vendors may desultorily hassle you, they're just going through the motions, they don't really mean it. The backpacker crowd is a slightly uneasy mix of twentysomething Israelis, for whom a few months bouncing around India/Nepal is a post-military-service rite of passage, and who, not surprisingly, tend to be exceptionally fit, in a trim-tattooed-dreadlocked way, and exceptionally full of devil-may-care-I-don't fuck-you attitude; low-key thirtysomething Europeans who come back every year (some with children, it's a family-friendly place); the Brits-and-Aussies-on-Parade type you see the world over; and Others like me.

Mind you I'm still on the fringes. The grand techno extravaganzas ended years ago, but the beaches further south have a package-tour-party reputation. We'll see. Also further south, this month, is one of India's more macabre and bizarre tourist attractions, which is saying something - the every-ten-year display of the dessicated corpse of St. Francis Xavier. How can I possibly resist?

But for now let me look back to far-ago yesterweek and tell you about:

( Dubai bai bai )

( Back-to-Bom! ...er, for the first time )

( The Konkan Railway )

¹I just don't get it.

²Rushdie's Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh, Mistry's Such A Long Journey and A Fine Balance, Roy's God Of Small Things, Seth's A Suitable Boy, Forster's A Passage To India. Am ruling out Paul Scott not due to any quality shortcomings but because he wrote about the Raj rather than India. There are presumably others I haven't yet read.