Year: 2007

We shared the taxi ride with Toby, a barefooted Norwegian hippie, who had earlier traveled with us in the same bus to Goa. He had spent the last six months working double shifts, and here he was, to party. He had been india for a month already, and seen most of the south. Kerala. Tamil Nadu. Hampi and Mysore. And it seemed like this was his regular routine. Work six months in a year. And party the next six. Amazing lifestyle, one must say.

As the taxi driver had promised, the cottage was right in front of Tito’s. A cricket ball’s throw (i.e. < 22 yards) away. Was run by this guy called Francis who had pulled down his kuchcha house and built a few rooms which he would lend out. It was a basic room with two beds and a functional bathroom. Seven hundred a night for the three of us. The price would go up to three grand during christmas, we were told. A few minutes after we checked in, Sathya and Kodhi were fast asleep. Visibly exhausted after the long bus journey.

When traveling with friends, it is imperative that the objective and style of travel match. If you are the kind that decides to do maximum justice to the place you visit, and want to travel a lot, it is no fun to go with guys who just want to spend time in the hotel. If you are the types that likes to be active during a holiday, and keep doing something, you should avoid going with people who decide they don’t want to expend any energy. Making a mental note of this, I put on my cap and headed out, hoping to figure out the geography of Calangute village.

The twin beaches of Calangute and Baga are filled with shacks. It’s perfect competition out there. The menu is supposed to be the same across shacks, as are the prices. Each shack looks the same. They serve the same drinks. Each of them have put out some sun beds for those that want to get a tan. And they have these extra-friendly waiters – even these guys seem to make extra efforts to network. They take hours to get you your order – they know that being in Goa you are in no hurry. And they let you sit around for hours even after you’re done. No one asks you to get up. If only the food were to be better…

They serve the standard English breakfast fare. Bacon and eggs and sausages and baked beans and toast. And pancakes. They also attempt to make pizza and pasta and some tandoori shyte. I happened to eat some pasta and it was downright horrible. By the looks of it they didn’t seem like they were capable of making good Tandoori stuff either. I’m longing for my next visit to Little Italy or Fiorano. I need to set right the pasta taste.

One of the most depressing thing about Goa’s beaches is that naked female skin loses its value. The place is brimming with old and fat firang women, the more conservative of whom wear bikinis. It is not an uncommon sight to see women topless here. However, you’d rather not look at them. One look at the bare skin and you’ll notice that it’s mostly wrinkled and sagging, with lumps of fat underneath. It is impossible to walk ten meters here without seeing some such skin. Horrible. And maybe it would make sense to shoot an “only the balls should bounce” ad here.

Then, we happened to see some stereotypes that we had only read about. We noticed a number of old firang women flirting with young Indian guys. There seemed to be an unnaturally large number of such couples on the beach. “Gigolos”, explained Sathya. On another occasion we happened to spot this old firang guy walking to the beach with his arm over the shoulder of a little Indian boy. “Bloody firang pedo”, exclaimed Kodhi. A lot of stuff that we read in the papers or see in the movies is actually true, I thought.

One fashionable thing to do nowadays in Goa is to go to the “Dil Chahta Hai fort” and get photographed there. For some reason we assumed it was the Aguada and planned an evening visit. Sathya was getting too many calls from his girlfriend and put NED. So it was Kodhi and I who ventured out at five thirty, hoping to rent a bike and get to the fort before dark. I had to pawn out my PAN card so as to rent a Honda Activa (at the usurious rate of three hundred for twenty four hours). I’ve just about taken possession of the machine when the lender tells me that there is no fuel, and no fuel is to be found for another twenty km and so it would make sense for us to buy fuel at highly inflated prices from him. There was no choice there.

For someone who usually drives a geared bike, it’s tough adjusting to an ungeared one. Every time you accelerate, you hold down the left brake (actually the clutch) and press down the left heel hoping to change gears. When you have to slow down, the left hand comes into action only later. It’s the right toes and right hand that move. And by the time I had got acclimatised to this ungeared beauty, we were at Fort Aguada. Only to see a wall with a huge door and padlock on it. There was some signage by the Archeological Survay of India. And it was getting dark. The fort was closed for the day. We had missed the DCH moment. I had even planned the caption we were going to give the photo on orkut – “we wanted a DCH pic but Sathya ditched us”. All in vain. We cursed our luck and took a few snaps anyways. And began the descent, hoping to return the next morning.

For dinner, we decided to abandon the shack and go to some place on the Baga causeway. “It’ll be the same food”, Sathya warned us. “And ambience will be inferior”. We didn’t care. Alfredo’s was where we were going to go. However, at the last moment we saw a live band in action at the neighboring La Calypso and entered that. Decent Indian food. And good music (they played the Doors, Hendrix, etc). Not much conversation. And in the meantime Monkee had called us and told us that DCH was shot in some fort in south Goa, and that Aguada had nothing to do with it. The Aguada visit got promptly deleted from our calendar the next day, which was eventually spent just lazing at St. Andrew’s shack.

Our last few minutes in Calangute, before we got picked up by Paulo’s complimentary shuttle, had a filmi angle to it. Just when we were about to leave Calangute, VAK Kanti had landed up there and wanted to meet us. We told him we were at the Calangute bus stand and to meet? us there. He got somewhere close and called us saying he couldn’t see us. I took over the phone (I pride myself for being an expert with directions) and proceeded to direct him. And he seemed to be going round and round in circles without ever seeing us. The shuttle got ready to leave. We loaded the luggage and Kodhi, and I was standing outside still barking out directions. And there was still no sign of Kanti. Things were getting desperate. And unlike in the movies, the bus left before he could turn up. I sometimes think I saw a bald bespectacled figure chasing the shuttle as it pulled away from the Calangute bus stand. However, Kodhi refutes this claim, and hence I’ll just credit it to my imagination.

As much as I would have loved to end on this filmy note, my essay about Goa will be incomplete without mentioning the scene that to me symbolized Goa. It happened a few minutes before I left, while I was walking to the Calangute bus stand. A couple of dogs (yes, a couple) were fucking. From what I have seen in Bangalore and other places, when a couple of dogs are fucking, the others just move away to give them their privacy. No one hangs around. Clearly not the case with Goa. As these dogs fucked, there were some four of them around them. Watching. Open eyed and open mouthed. Tongues hanging down. And while they watched, the fucking dogs went on about their business, totally unmindful of the attention. I wanted to capture this on camera, but the camera was in the bag which was with Kodhi at the bus stand. This great moment thus goes uncaptured. My apologies for the same.

There is a CCD some ten minutes away. A ride by a maruti omni taxi takes us fifty bucks. Apart from the ride, we also get loads of conversation, and also the chauffeur’s mobile phone number. “Saar, next time you come to goa saar. Call me saar. I’ll pick you from airport saar. And give you nice and cheap hotel saar”. For the uninitiated, the whole place works on commissions. it’s all interlinked. The taxi driver finds accommodation for you. The guy at the hotel recommends a place to eat. The guy at the restaurant helps you rent a bike. And the guy who rents you the bike will tell you where you can fill the petrol. Amazing system. Works like clockwork. And of course, everyone gets his share. Maybe the doctors and the drughouses and the labs and the pharma companies in the US could learn from this.

Private bus operators have figured out a new way of minting money. Sleeper buses. Over and above the existing seats (literally), they have added a layer of sleeper berths. Two on each side of the aisle. Two people to share a three and a half feet by six feet space. If you aren’t traveling with your wife or girlfriend, you might get to sleep with a friend. And if traveling alone, you get to sleep with a stranger. Such joy. And they charge you a hundred and fifty bucks more than they would for the seat! Travel by this seventy two times, and you don’t need to be a terrorist. I should file a case against these buses saying they promote sex against the order of nature (how many single women do you expect to travel this way?) and the moral police will surely burn these buses. For the record, we had seen through the scam of the sleeper berths. With no intention of going gay, Kodhi and I had booked seats.

I’ve always wondered how a traffic jam can take place on a straight road. Of course i know from my op-man course that if the flow is greater than capacity, there will be a bottleneck. However, I’ve assumed that most Indian roads are capacity constrained by intersections. This is based on my experiences at traffic jams in Bangalore. Life on NH17, however, is slightly different. On either side of the road, you have parked trucks. Stretching for miles. Rendering the national highway into a ONE LANE road. One lane, and vehicles have to pass in both directions. Disaster are there.

Then you have the Lingaraj syndrome. When Lingaraj, who was my father’s driver, saw a traffic jam ahead, he would instinctively move to the right side of the road. He didn’t figure out that for the jam to clear, the vehicles coming in the opposite direction needed a way to get past us. Lingaraj didn’t care. For all he cared, going on the right was a good arbitrage opportunity. And would duly be taken. And a million other Lingarajs would follow him on the right.

There are a few cops out there. And a few dozen random guys running around with sticks. Trying to clear the jam. They make the parked trucks move. Some can’t – since they are broken down – and their windshields are duly broken. There is a little movement on both sides. The Lingarajs are shouted at and their trucks beaten with the sticks. Some seem to back off. And there is more movement. We are lucky to be near the nucleus of the jam. We get past it in only an hour, during the course of which we realize there is a much bigger jam on the Karwar-Hubli highway. We are now going to take a detour. Through Kumta and Sirsi. And join the Golden Quadrilateral at Haveri.

The bus stops frequently. Every time someone on board wants to take a leak. Or put download. And it’s contagious. Every time someone takes a leak, someone else follows a minute later. And then someone else. Thus each pee break lasts for quarter an hour. And I wake up every time the bus stops. And look out to see what the golden quadrilateral looks like. I see some country roads next to the bus. And realize that we are yet to hit Haveri. That we are yet to reach the GQ. Even if the bus would reach on time, half the day would get wasted. Now, I’m sure I’ll reach only by dinner. I continue to hate private buses.

I wake up at a quarter to seven. And we are going past Chitradurga. We are on time after all. It’s just that the daymn GQ doesn’t exist beyond that. It’s essentially a dirt track. The current government has no incentive to finish it. After all, the credit will just flow to the previous government. However, I remember reading somewhere that there is a 100km stretch in Karnataka which has been unbuilt because of some legal issues. I guess it is Chitradurga-Haveri.

We seem well on course to reach ahead of schedule. A couple more pee breaks (this time initiated by some firang hippie women) push us back by half an hour. And then the bus stops for breakfast. Some “National Restaurant”. “My dad always says that when a restaurant is named “National”, it is owned by a certain community”, remarks Kodhi. A few skull caps at the counter confirm this belief. We don’t see too many of the bus’s occupants eating anything. The drivers and cleaners emerge after an eternity. The choice of restaurant was again a part of the commission cycle, we decide.

And amazing drive (Tumkur-Peenya) and an awful traffic jam (Peenya) later, the bus finally makes it’s way to the Paulo Bangalore office on Race Course Road. There is a huge crowd of auto drivers, waiting patiently for the bus to roll in, so that they can cheat unsuspecting incoming tourists. I say “meter” and get laughed at. After all, these guys have invested time to get a tourist so that they can make a fast buck. Agreeing to meter fare at the end of it will only result in their time having been wasted. The trick in times like this is to find an empty auto that is traveling – one where the driver hasn’t got down to accost the bus. It’s likely that this guy hasn’t wasted much time waiting for tourists, so isn’t expecting to make much of a supernormal profit. If you try two-three such rickshaws I’m sure you’ll find one that will take you at the meter fare.

It’s almost four days since i returned. I’m yet to recover from the effects of two painful overnight bus journeys and much lost sleep. I still have a blocked nose. I still move around like a zombie. And always feel weak, sleepy and hungover. And don’t feel like writing about my trip. I’ll be back with the third part of the series the next time I can muster some enthu. I’ve to go sleep now.