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Saturday.
The start of this week was rough.
Serious bowel crisis. Lucky for me some awesome friends came to my rescue today.
After languishing in Nashik, within a three metre radius of a toilet for a couple days, I chanced a trip down the road to the internet cafe and uploaded a blog post.
Hayley came on line on FB.
She’s like: what are you doing in Nashik?
I say: I’m supposed to be hitchhiking but I’ve been massacred by bacteria. The Indian railways did me in. Ambushed me with an IED disguised as a curry puff.
I warned you about street food, she reminds me.
You didn’t say anything about railway station cafeterias. I’m a bit disheartened, I tell Hayley.
You need R+R she tells me. You need to be around friends. Catch a bus down to Goa. We’re living here in Anjuna Beach. Come visit us.
The bus ride I had last night was pretty intense. LOL.
The bus has some problems, the guy at the bus office tells me. You will catch a different bus and then change to another bus. Here is the phone number of the bus driver.
Wait, wait! I don’t have to find this bus right? The guy will take me off one bus and onto another bus right?
Yes, yes.
I get on a bus. We bump down the road until 11:30.
I am woken by the bus driver’s mate shaking my shoulder.
OK OK. Bus stops here. Change bus.
Me and another guy stumble, bewildered off the bus.
Where’s the other bus? I ask the driver of the first bus. Where’s the second bus?
OK OK. Five minutes.
The bus takes off.
Me and the other bewildered, abandoned passenger stand there.
They screwed me I tell him.
They screwed me too, he agrees.
We find another bus station. We find out what city we’re in.
My fellow castaway is from Mumbai, so he knows the ropes.
We get new tickets.
I am so grateful that I ate crackers and 7Up for the last two days. I really need my backside on my side in a situ’ like this.
Around 2am our new bus gets underway. It’s a flat-bunk sleeper so I spend the next 5 hours rolling from side to side as we snake along winding narrow roads. At first it’s kind of weird, but after a while it starts to feel like being rocked to sleep.
Hayley and Amit are waving at me from the roof of their house as I come up the narrow red clay lane.
I haven’t seen these guys for more than a year I think.
I remember talking to them around a campfire at Rainbow Gathering ages ago, and them telling me incredibly cool stories about their lives in India, Australia, and America.
Their home is on the border of a jungle and a dramatic black stone coastline.
They are renovating and decorating their house. Amit tells me excitedly about the paint colors they have chosen.
Anjuna Beach is just so pretty, and the village is fanned by cool breezes this time of year. The monsoon has relented in the last week, and drier, sunny, sweet smelling weather has settled on the coast.
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Monday Jam at Blue Tao.
In the afternoon Hayley and I walk through the souvenir market and meet up with Ping Pong, a long term ex-pat resident. He takes us for a long walk across the headland south of the city and along a grassy ridge-line with panoramic views of Anjuna Beach.
The coast is big chunks of erosion sculpted stone. Wild stretches of stony beach. Steep clay cliffs with fringes of perfectly blow-waved golden grass.
After dark, when the air is cooling down, we head down the road to a bar called Blue Tao, and check out Ping Pong’s ‘Open Mind’ music night. It’s a barrel of fun. Lot’s of great live music. Dancing. Pizza. Ping Pong keeps the party going with a funky playlist.
You’ve come to Goa at just the right moment, Amit tells me. The weather has just turned sweet, the massive influx of tourists and expats hasn’t started yet. These are the golden days of the season.
Diwali.
Occassionaly I have uncanny good luck with timing. The way I travel is so random, but as I bounce and spin around the planet I keep landing in places where festivals and parties and cultural events are happening.
It happened in Sitges, Spain, when I arrived in the city randomly the day before Festa Santa Tecla. It happened in Edinburgh when I dropped into town right when the famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival was kicking off. It happens all the time, and it just happened again here in India.
I touched down in India last week right at the beginning of Diwali.
Diwali is India’s biggest Hindu holiday. In the streets are thousands of pop-up market stalls selling rainbow coloured lanterns, fireworks, candy and gifts. All the shrines and shopfronts are decorated with yellow and red flowers. Families go out shopping and dining together.
India is a deeply religious place, so the focus of the Diwali festival is on holy sites and prayer, but there is plenty of holiday spirit as well. Everyone is dolled up in their holiday glad-rags. Every night for the week long duration of Diwali there are kids running around in the street throwing firecrackers everywhere. It’s mayhem. Even the tuk-tuk drivers look nervous.
The Diwali festival isn’t a huge deal in Anjuna where Amit and Hayley live, because it’s a majority Catholic area. But there are lanterns up, and plenty of firecrackers going off randomly. Also there is a gigantic and grotesque red statue looming over the downtown marketplace; some kind of awesomely punk religious icon.
Never any shortage of amazing creative expression in India.
India’s super friendly character seems to come to the fore at Diwali. People see me walking down the street and call out “Happy Diwali”. All the shopkeepers have little trays of sweets and cakes that they offer to you when you come into their shop.
Here in Goa, which has a big westerner ex-pat community, Diwali is merging with Halloween, so as well as firecrackers and candy and lanterns there is also teenagers riding around on their scooters wearing plastic fright masks. I don’t know if trick-or-treat has caught on in India yet, but seeing how much Indian people love candy, it seems like a good fit.
Most exciting thing about Diwali for me?
A couple of days ago I finally dared to eat proper Indian food again. I am loving it.
My friends laughed at me when I told them I got sick from railway station food.
Amit said “You ate at the railway station on your first day in the country? Are you crazy? You must never eat railway station food. It’s a miracle you survived.”
What doesn’t kill us makes us wiser. Right?
Indian food is so, so, so delicious. I’ve got a tough constitution so I’m reasonably confident it won’t kill me, but if it does, I think it would be an OK way to go out.
Death by curry. Fine with me. At least I’ll die with a full stomach and a content smile on my dial.
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