The semester was finally coming to an end. Fed up with the continuously cancelled classes caused by the apparent catch-twenty two that had been going on the Delhi Teachers' Association strike, I was relieved to leave the classes that I hadn't been enjoying that much anyway. This semester had been a severe disappointment academically and it was time to try to forget it and concentrate on enjoying India itself. It was time to pack the backpack again, it was time for a holiday. Since we had thus far travelled mainly in central and northern India, the south had so far remained unknown. The winter in Delhi was chilling everone's bones, so this was the ideal time to head somewhere warmer. Goa, where many Indians go to escape the constraints of traditional lifestyles and where westerners have come to party since the 60's, came to be our obvious choice to start our southern excursion.
I landed on the Dabolim airport late in the evening. I had no clue where to go and what to do next, but the warm tropical breeze felt comforting. The airport entrance was already rather quiet at this point. My fellow travellers on the plane, most of them Russian and British package tourists, had their own organized chauffeurs to take them to the safety of their resorts. I was supposed to call the rest of my friends, who had already arrived earlier, but there was no answer. Cut off from communication and clueless as to what to do next, I had no other choice but to trust the few grinning faces waiting for me next to their run down vehicles at the airport parking lot. "Yes Sir? Where you want to go? Nice beach? Lot of party! Your friends there too! American, Britishers, Israeli, Finnish, everyone there!" After negotiating a price, the man rang his friend, who appeared to the lot in less than a minute with a car that looked like it's main purpose was taking backpackers to dark alleys to liberate them of their material possessions. Options were limited, so I got in and we headed towards the northern beaches. I had not bothered to familiarize myself with the local geography that much, so I had to trust my drivers' judgement on where to go.
After roughly an hour's drive, I was dropped off to Baga beach, possibly the most commercialized place you can find in Goa - a place for people who want to travel to places to experience everything they can experience back home, except with nicer climate. Baga is mainly infested with Russian middle class and working class British package tourists; as I was walking along the main boulevard past the identical restaurants with their plastic furniture and continental breakfast menus, I was greeted with a host of drunk red faces fossilized in blank stares of boredom and violence. These are men and women branded with shoddily made tribal tattoos and red tan lines the shape of tank tops spending their two week package deals getting wasted on the nearest restaurant to their hotel complaining about their chips to the jaded waiter and in the evening looking for things to hump or punch, or both. The free-floating testosterone made the atmosphere more intimidating than relaxing.
Most of the bars were equipped with widescreen TVs showing Champions League or cricket non-stop while sound systems where pumping dance versions of Bryan Adams and Belinda Carlisle hits. As these package deal people get bored of bingeing on the patios, the touts outside make a killing selling them the appropriate attire of pseudo-hippyish wooden and plastic jewellery, batik-shirts and assorted "I love Goa" and "Goa head" -merchandise.
Nevertheless, I needed to find a place to stay. After checking my mail in the nearest internet cafe, the man behind the counter winked at me and lowered his voice into a whisper while nervously looking to the streets. "psst, you need room?". At peak season, endless torrents of tourists offer lucrative opportunities for all kinds of illegitimate accommodation entrepreneurs. This guy admitted straight away that he needed to be a bit candid in his moves, in case there would be cops on patrol. Usually the rooms are very basic and barely fulfil any standards, but they are also cheap and most of the time adequate for an undemanding backpacker. Exhausted as I was, we negotiated a price and the man's friend escorted me to the backyard, where a small group of Russian youth in their tracks and crocs were sipping their Kingfisher-beers and getting ready for another night of chasing tail in one of the many Bacardi Breezer-sponsored bars and nightclubs by bulging their muscles and lathering their heads with gel. After several hours, a lot of Indian and Russian youth returned from their mission, less victorious and drunk out of their minds, looking for things to channel disappointment. The diminuendo and crescendo of arguing and throwing insults in Russian and Hindi eventually lulled me to sleep.
The next morning, things started to look up. After getting in contact with my friends, I hopped on the bus towards south Goa. Cruising around Goa's narrow roads, one gets glimpses of why Goa is unique in India.
Back in the day, before hordes of tourists decided to colonize the place, Goa was one of India's best kept secrets to the occasional individual traveller. Come sixties, the hippie era was booming and traveller culture was slowly gaining ground as young people went to India to find spiritual enlightenment, expand their consciousness and to party. Weary travellers exhausted by Bombay's heat and traffic ventured south and often found themselves in a strange, beautiful tropical place with unspoiled beaches surrounded by green mountains. All of a sudden you would hear a strange archaic variety of Portuguese spoken everywhere, the lush green valleys and hills would be dotted with white colonial villas emerging between the palm trees and whitewashed churches would mark major street corners. In the midst of India trying to shake off it's British past, you would end up in this small enclave like a lost piece of the Mediterranean. The architecture is still there and the juxtaposition of modernity and past in its absurdly glaring contrast makes it a place that, only in India, could exist and still make sense: the binge drinking tourists get road rage as they mount their scooters and motorbikes after a day well spent staring at the bottom of the pint. They scoot off to terrorize the roads surrounded by the decadent romanticism of ramshackle portuguese colonial architecture. In the meantime, the pandemonium is calmly observed by Konkani fishermen, who mostly make their living by selling their catches to holiday resorts.
After reconnecting with my friends Dan and Arpita, and after seeing Arpita back to the airport, me and Dan continued our journey onwards. The plan was to venture south to Kerala the next day, so for the rest of the night, the objective was to find an affordable place to stay, preferably somewhere that would serve fish and beer. After quick contemplation, we ended up moving back north to the beaches of Chapora and Vagator. After being ripped off by the taxi driver again, about an hour later we found ourselves in a different, but also very distinctly Goan scene.
As a seamless continuation to the hippy-era travellers and their scandalous partying on the deserted Goan beaches between the 60's and the 70's, the 80's brought along a culture of electronic dance music that would eventually become strongly associated also with Goa and it's seasonal party population. The early 90's is often regarded as the peak era of the Goan beach party culture that eventually spawned it's own genre of electronic music, Goa trance, which (or it's successor psytrance) is still ubiquitous as you approach locations such as Anjuna, Vagator and Chapora in North Goa.
The taxi dropped us off to a junction where we could choose which beach to head towards. By random choice we ended up heading towards Chapora. While walking on the pitch black road, the faint steady thumping of Goa trance led the way to the centre of the village. Once again, as we were walking along the main boulevard past the identical restaurants with their plastic furniture and continental and Israeli breakfast menus, I was greeted with a host of drunk and stoned red faces fossilized in blank stares of boredom and indifference. These beaches are mostly infested with old hippies and their younger techno-disciples, who in their shoddily made tribal tattoos, neon-coloured single dreadlocks, plastic trousers and mini skirts and shirts with pictures of mandalas, elves, mushrooms and bong hitting aliens look like some lost tribe of 90's suburbia that the rest of Europe deported to these communities to roam free and rut.
Come morning, the knell of the church bells echoes around the beaches and a group of elderly Konkani women are returning from a mass while the sleepy "disciples" greet them from the patios while scratching their pierced bellybuttons and lighting up their first bongfuls of the day and wiping their hummus-stained hands on their neon dreads. A coexistence that could've hardly been foreseen by anyone.
The next morning me and Dan made our way towards the nearest railway station to head down south towards Kerala for a few days (to which we shall return in the next post). A few days later, on Christmas eve afternoon, we returned to Goa to celebrate the holiday. Since turkey or ham were a scarce resource, but seafood abundant, we celebrated Christmas by feasting on a big tuna fish on a beach while watching fireworks and drinking beer. Not your usual Christmas dinner, but certainly a memorable one.
Our days on the land of beaches, fresh seafood, cheap beer were soon coming to an end, but there was one more thing to do. As a project for a university course, Dan had the idea to try to interview some local fishermen on the environmental impacts of mass tourism on their livelihood. To locate the fishermen, we needed to explore some of the lesser known beaches and villages. For this we needed transport; Ideally, a scooter or two. As the peak season was still in full swing, finding one turned out to be easier said than done. After going around different beaches and asking around hustlers loitering on street corners, getting a ride started to seem impossible. Finally, a fat Sikh man with a lint-covered sweater convinced us that he would get us a ride at a good price. Dan goes with the man to get the ride; twenty minutes later he returns with a contraption that looks like something that should've been demolished ages ago. This thing had no mirrors, no working tail lights, no working horn, no working speedometers or fuel meters and finally, no proper breaks. However, this turned out to be a good thing, since this cruiser could only go as fast as 50 km/h. The man also was kind enough to let us know that he had recently changed the engine to the scooter, so we might want to be careful with it as he wasn't sure how it would work. The cherry on top was the decoration, which included a sticker of a skeleton hand giving the finger and an anarchy symbol. I was surprised not to find the words "rad" and "cowabunga" anywhere. Taking this beast to the road, Dan on the reins and me on the back trying not to fall off after each bump, we certainly provided a wealth of entertainment to the locals as we tried to dodge herds of cows coming at us and the drunk speed freaks from Baga beach.
We headed to the fishing village of Morjim, where we, sure enough, found some men sorting out their nets and collecting the catch of the day. Communicating with the men remained unfortunately rather simple as their English was limited and our Konkani even more so. One of the younger ones was chatting with us about the catch of the day and after a while asked whether we'd be interested in going fishing with them for a few hours, to which we responded with an immediate "yes!", and so we agreed to meet the men the next morning. Next morning one of the fishermen was waiting for us with his small boat. The rest of the crew had gone already to the open sea, so we were to go to some of the spots just off the coast to try our luck. Our fellow fisherman was a middle-aged Konkani man with squinting bloodshot eyes, a perpetual grin and a slightly disturbing chuckle, which was his response to almost everything we said to him. We climbed in and the man pushed to boat to the sea. The sun was just getting up, the first rays felt warm against the cool breeze of the sea. We arrived in one of the spots and got our fishing rods out. We sat silently, waiting for the fish to bite. The waves splashed lightly to the sides of the boat, seagulls were circling the boat shrieking. In the middle of marine serenity, somewhere in the distance the steady bass of of Goa trance was pounding on one of the beaches.
I landed on the Dabolim airport late in the evening. I had no clue where to go and what to do next, but the warm tropical breeze felt comforting. The airport entrance was already rather quiet at this point. My fellow travellers on the plane, most of them Russian and British package tourists, had their own organized chauffeurs to take them to the safety of their resorts. I was supposed to call the rest of my friends, who had already arrived earlier, but there was no answer. Cut off from communication and clueless as to what to do next, I had no other choice but to trust the few grinning faces waiting for me next to their run down vehicles at the airport parking lot. "Yes Sir? Where you want to go? Nice beach? Lot of party! Your friends there too! American, Britishers, Israeli, Finnish, everyone there!" After negotiating a price, the man rang his friend, who appeared to the lot in less than a minute with a car that looked like it's main purpose was taking backpackers to dark alleys to liberate them of their material possessions. Options were limited, so I got in and we headed towards the northern beaches. I had not bothered to familiarize myself with the local geography that much, so I had to trust my drivers' judgement on where to go.
After roughly an hour's drive, I was dropped off to Baga beach, possibly the most commercialized place you can find in Goa - a place for people who want to travel to places to experience everything they can experience back home, except with nicer climate. Baga is mainly infested with Russian middle class and working class British package tourists; as I was walking along the main boulevard past the identical restaurants with their plastic furniture and continental breakfast menus, I was greeted with a host of drunk red faces fossilized in blank stares of boredom and violence. These are men and women branded with shoddily made tribal tattoos and red tan lines the shape of tank tops spending their two week package deals getting wasted on the nearest restaurant to their hotel complaining about their chips to the jaded waiter and in the evening looking for things to hump or punch, or both. The free-floating testosterone made the atmosphere more intimidating than relaxing.
Most of the bars were equipped with widescreen TVs showing Champions League or cricket non-stop while sound systems where pumping dance versions of Bryan Adams and Belinda Carlisle hits. As these package deal people get bored of bingeing on the patios, the touts outside make a killing selling them the appropriate attire of pseudo-hippyish wooden and plastic jewellery, batik-shirts and assorted "I love Goa" and "Goa head" -merchandise.
Nevertheless, I needed to find a place to stay. After checking my mail in the nearest internet cafe, the man behind the counter winked at me and lowered his voice into a whisper while nervously looking to the streets. "psst, you need room?". At peak season, endless torrents of tourists offer lucrative opportunities for all kinds of illegitimate accommodation entrepreneurs. This guy admitted straight away that he needed to be a bit candid in his moves, in case there would be cops on patrol. Usually the rooms are very basic and barely fulfil any standards, but they are also cheap and most of the time adequate for an undemanding backpacker. Exhausted as I was, we negotiated a price and the man's friend escorted me to the backyard, where a small group of Russian youth in their tracks and crocs were sipping their Kingfisher-beers and getting ready for another night of chasing tail in one of the many Bacardi Breezer-sponsored bars and nightclubs by bulging their muscles and lathering their heads with gel. After several hours, a lot of Indian and Russian youth returned from their mission, less victorious and drunk out of their minds, looking for things to channel disappointment. The diminuendo and crescendo of arguing and throwing insults in Russian and Hindi eventually lulled me to sleep.
The next morning, things started to look up. After getting in contact with my friends, I hopped on the bus towards south Goa. Cruising around Goa's narrow roads, one gets glimpses of why Goa is unique in India.
Back in the day, before hordes of tourists decided to colonize the place, Goa was one of India's best kept secrets to the occasional individual traveller. Come sixties, the hippie era was booming and traveller culture was slowly gaining ground as young people went to India to find spiritual enlightenment, expand their consciousness and to party. Weary travellers exhausted by Bombay's heat and traffic ventured south and often found themselves in a strange, beautiful tropical place with unspoiled beaches surrounded by green mountains. All of a sudden you would hear a strange archaic variety of Portuguese spoken everywhere, the lush green valleys and hills would be dotted with white colonial villas emerging between the palm trees and whitewashed churches would mark major street corners. In the midst of India trying to shake off it's British past, you would end up in this small enclave like a lost piece of the Mediterranean. The architecture is still there and the juxtaposition of modernity and past in its absurdly glaring contrast makes it a place that, only in India, could exist and still make sense: the binge drinking tourists get road rage as they mount their scooters and motorbikes after a day well spent staring at the bottom of the pint. They scoot off to terrorize the roads surrounded by the decadent romanticism of ramshackle portuguese colonial architecture. In the meantime, the pandemonium is calmly observed by Konkani fishermen, who mostly make their living by selling their catches to holiday resorts.
After reconnecting with my friends Dan and Arpita, and after seeing Arpita back to the airport, me and Dan continued our journey onwards. The plan was to venture south to Kerala the next day, so for the rest of the night, the objective was to find an affordable place to stay, preferably somewhere that would serve fish and beer. After quick contemplation, we ended up moving back north to the beaches of Chapora and Vagator. After being ripped off by the taxi driver again, about an hour later we found ourselves in a different, but also very distinctly Goan scene.
As a seamless continuation to the hippy-era travellers and their scandalous partying on the deserted Goan beaches between the 60's and the 70's, the 80's brought along a culture of electronic dance music that would eventually become strongly associated also with Goa and it's seasonal party population. The early 90's is often regarded as the peak era of the Goan beach party culture that eventually spawned it's own genre of electronic music, Goa trance, which (or it's successor psytrance) is still ubiquitous as you approach locations such as Anjuna, Vagator and Chapora in North Goa.
The taxi dropped us off to a junction where we could choose which beach to head towards. By random choice we ended up heading towards Chapora. While walking on the pitch black road, the faint steady thumping of Goa trance led the way to the centre of the village. Once again, as we were walking along the main boulevard past the identical restaurants with their plastic furniture and continental and Israeli breakfast menus, I was greeted with a host of drunk and stoned red faces fossilized in blank stares of boredom and indifference. These beaches are mostly infested with old hippies and their younger techno-disciples, who in their shoddily made tribal tattoos, neon-coloured single dreadlocks, plastic trousers and mini skirts and shirts with pictures of mandalas, elves, mushrooms and bong hitting aliens look like some lost tribe of 90's suburbia that the rest of Europe deported to these communities to roam free and rut.
Come morning, the knell of the church bells echoes around the beaches and a group of elderly Konkani women are returning from a mass while the sleepy "disciples" greet them from the patios while scratching their pierced bellybuttons and lighting up their first bongfuls of the day and wiping their hummus-stained hands on their neon dreads. A coexistence that could've hardly been foreseen by anyone.
The next morning me and Dan made our way towards the nearest railway station to head down south towards Kerala for a few days (to which we shall return in the next post). A few days later, on Christmas eve afternoon, we returned to Goa to celebrate the holiday. Since turkey or ham were a scarce resource, but seafood abundant, we celebrated Christmas by feasting on a big tuna fish on a beach while watching fireworks and drinking beer. Not your usual Christmas dinner, but certainly a memorable one.
Our days on the land of beaches, fresh seafood, cheap beer were soon coming to an end, but there was one more thing to do. As a project for a university course, Dan had the idea to try to interview some local fishermen on the environmental impacts of mass tourism on their livelihood. To locate the fishermen, we needed to explore some of the lesser known beaches and villages. For this we needed transport; Ideally, a scooter or two. As the peak season was still in full swing, finding one turned out to be easier said than done. After going around different beaches and asking around hustlers loitering on street corners, getting a ride started to seem impossible. Finally, a fat Sikh man with a lint-covered sweater convinced us that he would get us a ride at a good price. Dan goes with the man to get the ride; twenty minutes later he returns with a contraption that looks like something that should've been demolished ages ago. This thing had no mirrors, no working tail lights, no working horn, no working speedometers or fuel meters and finally, no proper breaks. However, this turned out to be a good thing, since this cruiser could only go as fast as 50 km/h. The man also was kind enough to let us know that he had recently changed the engine to the scooter, so we might want to be careful with it as he wasn't sure how it would work. The cherry on top was the decoration, which included a sticker of a skeleton hand giving the finger and an anarchy symbol. I was surprised not to find the words "rad" and "cowabunga" anywhere. Taking this beast to the road, Dan on the reins and me on the back trying not to fall off after each bump, we certainly provided a wealth of entertainment to the locals as we tried to dodge herds of cows coming at us and the drunk speed freaks from Baga beach.
We headed to the fishing village of Morjim, where we, sure enough, found some men sorting out their nets and collecting the catch of the day. Communicating with the men remained unfortunately rather simple as their English was limited and our Konkani even more so. One of the younger ones was chatting with us about the catch of the day and after a while asked whether we'd be interested in going fishing with them for a few hours, to which we responded with an immediate "yes!", and so we agreed to meet the men the next morning. Next morning one of the fishermen was waiting for us with his small boat. The rest of the crew had gone already to the open sea, so we were to go to some of the spots just off the coast to try our luck. Our fellow fisherman was a middle-aged Konkani man with squinting bloodshot eyes, a perpetual grin and a slightly disturbing chuckle, which was his response to almost everything we said to him. We climbed in and the man pushed to boat to the sea. The sun was just getting up, the first rays felt warm against the cool breeze of the sea. We arrived in one of the spots and got our fishing rods out. We sat silently, waiting for the fish to bite. The waves splashed lightly to the sides of the boat, seagulls were circling the boat shrieking. In the middle of marine serenity, somewhere in the distance the steady bass of of Goa trance was pounding on one of the beaches.
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