Always Ready To Go

6 a.m. Train Station in GOA, India. Somehow we got there in spite of all the heat and lack of tickets. Two days on a train. +35C at daytime in the car without glass in windows, +12C at nights with air conditioning. Delicious tomato soup with crackers and memorable masala chai. Mixture of various dialects of Hindi and English. Kids eating peanuts with chili. Palm trees, ocean and waterfalls outside the window. And we are here at last! Without any plan, without booked hotels and transfers. Without cash but with a popular in Ukraine Visa Electron card which none of ATM in India accepted. Two 25-year-old Ukrainian girls. Happy as ever! Sweat and dirty, sunburnt and itchy though free and ready for new adventures.
All we needed to jump into was getting to any beach. So we decided to ask someone. There was a girl there, wearing authority glasses, dreadlocks, loose pants wrapped around her waist and belted with the rope – that was how the Real Traveler should look like, we decided. So we came up to her to talk. She replied she could help and actually she was going to the beach herself so we could join her. Of course we agreed. All of us spoke English. So we started to discuss the upcoming trip. And I asked her where she was from. "Moscow", she replied. ‘Hmm, we’re from Ukraine’, we said in Russian and all three of us burst into laughing. The girl’s name was Ann and she actually had been an experienced backpacker for more than 5 years already. She had been to all the European countries and most part of Africa. And when we asked her how she managed to get enough money for all those trips, she explained that first, she rented an apartment in Moscow which is a pretty good income nowadays; second, she got a job everywhere she traveled and third, she had a lover everywhere she had been. I bore that in my mind, especially the part about lovers.
Ann was a great companion. She could answer every question. She was heading to her friend’s house on the Arambol beach. To get there we had to take a train to the bus station and then take a bus to the nearest town from where to take a taxi-bike to that friend’s house. We rented a room and stayed in that house for amazing 7 days full of bike riding and swimming in the ocean and having breakfast in beach cafes.
The best Ann’s advise was: "Sit and sweat." She said that while we were waiting on the bus and complaining about the heat and mosquitoes. "Relax, girls. Sit and sweat." And we did. And it was perfect.