Six weeks and three days and we are heading out of India: the last ten of those days have been mostly uneventful! Having arrived in Goa last Wednesday at the back of a two-day train ride I was exhausted. Indulging in my first steak dinner of the period, washed down with a couple of beers I was subsequently sent to sleep while watching England attempt to score a single run to seal their game against Bangladesh.
The following morning I woke with awful stomach cramps realising: ‘maybe I shouldn’t have ate those bajis and samosas with the hair in them’. No wonder the wallah selling them was so keen to flog them to me! For the next four days I was not really in the mood to do anything. The less said about this period the better really, but I felt like shite! The arrogance of thinking I had successfully dodged ‘Delhi Belly’ came back to haunt me!
Through this period I did, however, manage to move myself, and belongings along the coast about two hundred kilometers to a different beach only to return again the following day! I had read that the beach, Arambol, was great so we moved on despite our collective illness. This being the logical course of action as Mark was meeting Belinda (his girlfriend who had come to visit) at the airport, which was halfway to our destination.
Upon our arrival the town was deserted and the beach quite dirty. Despite the large number of British lobsters and irritatingly broad accented cockneys, whose every third word seemed to be an expletive, hanging around in Palolem we decided to return; at least there was some life there! Fortunately upon our return this contingent seemed to be somewhat diminished; maybe it was just the illness, possibly I had been hallucinating and in this case having a ‘bad trip’!
Finally I recovered on Monday and was ready to begin eating again. This however would have to wait until I had moved room for the third time in as many days. As I was no longer sharing for the next week I wanted to get something cheaper than the first room I had checked into. Striking gold I stumbled upon a block about five minutes walk from the beach. Haggling the price down I scored a room for a quid fifty a night, owing to the fact it was ‘off season’ and the proprietor seemed to take pity on me.
With the illness out of the way and a nice roof over my head I was ready to sample the delights of Goa. For the past five days I have mostly been rising late morning before going for a spot of breakfast, followed by reading and then swimming in the late afternoon once the fierceness of the sun has abated. When I was fourteen I used to always say: ‘God, that’s a boring way to spend the day, I want to do something’! Should my parents ever adopt this course of action during our summer holidays. Whether it is the heat, tiredness after traveling around northern India for the past five and half weeks, or growing maturity, 24 in two days, I can’t say and am not going to get to philosophical about, suffice to say I have been enjoying doing nothing!
The evenings have mostly drifted by; heading out for some dinner with Mark and Belinda, where I have sampled the delights of: calamari, Kingfish, Swordfish, Lobster, Baby Shark and Pomfret. Ok so some of these are not all that unheard of back home and I have tried before, but others were a new and delicious experience! This has often been followed by some alcohol and on two nights retiring to the room at 12:30 to watch the football, forgot to mention that I also scored a TV.
With my time in India at an end the first stage of the journey complete. Mark has departed for Old Goa to spend the day with Belinda and see her off at the airport, and it seems like the closing of a chapter.
All around me shops and restaurants are closing up, the proprietors ‘pulling out’ like a retreating army escaping their enemy, in this case the decreasing visitor numbers associated with end of season and the threat of the impending monsoon. One restaurant in particular, which Mark and I went to on our first night apparently closed yesterday. This morning I woke to head there for breakfast and found nothing left, but the detritus of its former existence. The Kashmiri owner, apparently through with the heat here, must have headed back north to sit out the summer in the cool valleys of Kashmir.
It seems fitting, poetic almost, that with the departures all around me this should be our last stop in India. As I wait now, passing the rest of the day before the flight tomorrow, I can’t help but think over the times I’ve had in the last six and a half weeks and feel a little sad that I’m leaving. One things for sure though south-east Asia will be a another experience alltogether and I certainly won’t miss the pestering Walla’s asking ‘rickshaw sir’?
