Mark's World Tour 2007-08

Wednesday 19th December

I got up to find that there was quite a lot of cloud in the sky, making the day the coolest since I had got to Mumbai the week before. But, it was still very comfortable, and only about the second day since I had been in India where the sky was not completely blue and cloudless.

The beach was a lot quieter that usual as a result, even though it never gets that busy anyway. All I managed during the day was to send a few emails and get a swim late in the day. It’s very easy to get into a routine of not doing very much, but still feeling like you need a rest throughout the day. And the time passes a lot quicker than you might expect.

I met my friend Tom for dinner, and tried a steak out of curiosity and a desire to try something different to curry or fish. It was supposed to be a fillet, but it looked like it had been pieced together with the contents of the bottom of a butcher’s bin. You can’t really expect too much from steak in a country where the vast majority of people don’t eat beef, with the cow considered sacred to those of the Hindu religion. I haven’t found out too much about how they’re farmed or what they’re fed on. Sometimes we’re better off not knowing about these things. It was cooked OK, it didn’t taste too bad and I was hungry, so it disappeared with the usual speed. It didn’t make me sick either, so there can’t have been too much wrong with it. But it wasn’t steak as I know it.

We finished the evening by heading to the opening night party of a bar and hut complex that was just about to get going for the season. It was busy for a bar in Agonda and it was a good place to hang out and chat to some of the people I had met over the previous four or five days. Music needs to be kept low or turned off completely by 10pm, so it never got too loud and crazy. One of the ways around this noise ‘curfew’ is to pay a backhander – or ‘baksheesh’ as it’s called in India – to the seemingly bent village cops. It’s just another example of how things work here. After a few hours, I wished everyone good luck, as I was heading on to Patnem beach for the next leg of my Goan trip the following morning.