Baga Beach by bike

There was no repeat of Jeannette's naked performance of the day before which was a shame. Two days running and I might have mentioned it. Oh well, never mind.

My notes begin "By bike to Baga Beach'. There was a bike at my disposal. It was a couple of miles to the beach and a very easy ride.



The beach was okay, if a bit windy and the waves crashing onto the beach made going into the sea less than fun. Sunbathing was about all there was to do. Even though the pace of life was completely different here it was not completely devoid of hassle. You had to keep you head down or else the many hawkers plying their wares up and down the beach would catch your eye or, in my case, ears.

I was sitting on the sand minding my own business reading, smoking and listening to music when this guy comes up to me and asks if I want my ears cleaned. He handed me a piece of paper explaining the process and extolling the benefits and as I began to read it, before I could say "no thanks", the man inserted a kind of surgical instrument into my ear and then showed a pellet of gritty gunk that he claimed had just come out of my ear. I was half done by then so he did the other ear. It was probably just another sleight of hand trick. I don't think it cost very much. It was an experience. My ears felt cleaner but I am not entirely sure that the instrument used was very hygienically safe. I suppose I could have ended up with a serious ear infection, but I didn't so if there was any harm done I didn't notice then and haven't noticed since.



I am not a beach bum. Sitting in the sun catching rays has never really struck me as a very profitable use of time. I don't like trying to read lying down and sitting up on the sand isn't much better. Whatever position adopted gets uncomfortable after a few minutes and my Ray Bans always begin to side off my nose.

My notes say that I took a ferry from Baga Beach to Anjuna to visit the flea market. If I hadn't noted in the filofax I would never have remembered and it wasn't until I uploaded the postcards I bought at the time that any memory of it began to return. I think there was a small boat that acted like a bus up and down the coast. The notes say that I met a solicitor from Streatham who made a similar impression on me to the visit to Anjuna. I also met another Canadian who was more memorable. He was a beach bum. I recall that he told me he worked as a maintenance man at a Canadian Ice Hockey rink where he piled up as much cash as he could to fund a few months bumming around in Goa. What was remarkable was the temperature range between Canada when he left which he said was sometimes 30 degrees below zero to over 35 degrees above on arrival in India.

There were plenty of people like this guy to be found. Jeannette and Ute were in the same kind of lifestyle. It seems great. You work hard for say 5 months and then chill out in Goa and perhaps some other tropical paradise for the rest of the year living pretty well very cheaply on the cash earned. It's great while you are young, fit and good looking but there's no pension and there has to come a time when you get a bit too long in the tooth for it, when perhaps the new generations of beach bums seem more interesting to the waves of likely conquests that blow in and out on holiday flights.




I don't think I took my bike to Anjuna so I must have caught the ferry back to Baga beach before cycling back to Jeannette's. She wasn't there but Ute was in next door and she was just in the process of buying a car, a second hand Hindustani Motors Ambassador (as pictured in my post about the trip up to Aru in Kashmir) or perhaps it was the Premier. Anyway she was taking it for a test drive so I went with her. Great fun it was. To tell the truth, though, just sitting anywhere close to Ute was great. She was just so cool and so beautiful.

I ate in again and after dinner went out to Tito's bar again.

Baga Beyond

The heading for this post is a terrible pun for which I apologise.

I was woken the next morning in a way that just increased the feeling of surreality. I became aware of Jeannette coming into the room. It was her house. She was opening the wooden shutters. I came to and as my eyes adjusted to the light I realised that Jeanette was stark naked.

What was I supposed to make of this? I suppose my reaction was typically English. I just paid no attention at all. I do sometimes wonder whether I should have reacted differently. Perhaps I should have done something else. Maybe this was an invitation. Jeannette was not bad looking. Anyway the moment came and went. Jeanette left the room telling me that breakfast was at Ute's next door. I was left just wondering what that was all about.

I got up and noticed that beneath the large window there was a big black scorpion. I decided to ignore that too.

My notes say that after breakfast at Ute's I spent the day planning (exactly what, I don't know), reading and chilling. Then there is a big gap to the words "eat in". Jeannete had the services of a houseboy called Suraj. I think he acted as the cookm too and I think dinner was a prawn curry.

The big black scorpion had disappeared by the time the shutters were closed again.

Goin' on a Goan holiday

This was a good decision. Another long train journey. More re-hydrating powders and snoozing, reading and recuperation.

It is funny how things work out. Things seem to be so random. There doesn't seem to be any reason for things working out the way they do.

One of the subjects I took as part of my university studies was "Sociology of Law". It was a bit of a soft option. It was all a bit woolly and I never really grasped what the point of the course was. It was very difficult to revise for the exam at the end of the second year because I couldn't really say for sure what the course was about. I don't know how I passed. Anyway, the point is that something came to mind that I think I learned about in that course that might be of relevance here. For some reason the phrase "intersecting teleologies' popped into my head.

I had not planned to be on the train to Goa. The only reason that I was was because the illness that had begun in Pushkar had laid me so low that the plan to visit Mumbai had had to be abandoned. I found myself sitting next to, or possibly opposite, a European girl with whom I struck up a conversation. Her name was Jeannette. She was a German from Berlin who was on her way to a rented house in a village near Calangute in Goa. She invited me to stay at her house.

So what were the chances of that happening? You could get into a pretty heavy philosophical discussion trying to understand how these things happen and it's not a discussion that would be helped by smoking any dope. To tell the truth I can't remember very much at all about teleology. My recollection is limited to a vague idea that some things happen for some causes and other things happen by reason of other causes and each of these have their own teleology. From time to time there is an intersection of teleologies bringing about different events.

I'm not sure about this at all. I have been off to research it and it hasn't helped much. It would be nice to put it into a nutshell but you can't. Wikipedia (which may not be the soundest reference work) has quite a bit about it. It says: "A teleological school of thought is one that holds all things to be designed for or directed toward a final result, that there is an inherent purpose or final cause for all that exists."

I am tempted to say "whatever", who cares? What is true is that for a lot of random reasons I was on this train and for a whole lot of totally unconnected reasons Jeannette was sitting opposite. It was a simple coincidence but a lucky one, I think. Synchronicity has something to do with teleology.

We alighted the train at Madgaon and took a taxi to Arpora and Jeannette's amazing house which was in a Portuguese style. The rooms were enormous.

We are now nearly where this blog began. We had arrived in the morning and after dropping our bags Jeannette and I went next door to Ute's house. This was Ute Schutz mentioned in my first post. She was super cool and super good looking. What's more her house was even nicer than Jeannette's. Ute gave us breakfast after which we returned next door to clean up.

The bathroom had no running water. It had a well and you pulled up a bucket of fresh water from the well and then just tipped it over yourself. This is, I believe, called a "mandi" because "mandi" means to bathe. It is something that takes time to get used to doing but after a while it seems like the most natural thing in the world and now whenever I am somewhere hot a mandi is something I look forward to.

Arriving in Goa was turning point on my trip. This was a holiday. The weather was lovely and warm and we were by the sea. There seemed to quite a community of cool cats who populated this place. On returning to Ute's kitchen next door there was a Canadian guy there. Spliffs were being rolled up and I could tell that I had arrived in some kind of paradise. Plans were being made for the evening and before too long we were off out for something to eat.

I was ready to eat something. I couldn't really remember eating anything substantial since the blow out that made me ill nearly a week before. I must have eaten something but if I had it was probably the usual yellow dal, aloo ghobi and rice with chapatis that can be advance ordered when on the trains. This evening I had stuffed crab at "Electric Cats" on the Baga Road a restaurant featured in the LP guide but also actually frequented by these "locals". After eating we went to Tito's which was a happening sort of beach bar.

I was riding pillion on a motorcycle being ridden by the Canadian guy whose name escapes me. Everyone was smoking chars and it was the most chilled atmosphere you could imagine.

It had been a long day and eventually it was decided we should go home. It was already "home". Before we got back on the motorcycle the Canadian guy warned me that if a policeman should try to stop us there was no way he was going to stop. It seemed that although hash was in plentiful supply and everyone seemed to be smoking it, it was just as illegal here as anywhere else and the cops hung out on the roads to stop tourists and make as if to bust them. Of course the "bust" could be negotiable. It depended on how much money you had.

The Canadian knew what he was talking about because as we sped back to the house, sure enough, there was a policeman with a lathi standing on a corner waiting to try to stop us. It would have been disastrous to be stopped and busted. Just as he promised the Canadian didn't even slow down. The cop was standing at a junction where we had to turn right. The cop brandished his lathi at us but we swerved around him and sped off. It was a scary moment. The lathi could have snagged the front wheel, we could have come off the bike. It didn't, we didn't. We got home unscathed.

So ended my first day in Goa. I had a giant double bed and hung my mosquito net over it and crashed.

Agra Cantonment Incontinence

So as darkness fell I returned to Agra Cantonment station. As I arrived I began to feel unwell again. One of the symptoms was a burp that left an eggy taste in the mouth. Once more I was thankful for the First Class waiting room facilities.

My next destination was Bombay or, more properly, Mumbai. I had about an hour to wait before the earliest time the train might depart and I was in and out of the rest rooms all the time. I felt absolutely wretched and became increasingly weak. By the time the train was ready for boarding I was feeling very faint indeed. I was almost glad of the unasked for assistance of a First Class porter who helped carry my pack onto the train. My seat was located, the pack secured and I lay down.

I wasn't laying down for very long. I'm not sure whether I adhered to the golden rule about not using the w.c. while the train was in the station. I was in a bad way. Even if I did I'm sure as soon as the train set off I was back in the very unsatisfactory lavatory. It had been bad before but this night it was worse. I ran out of toilet paper and was reduced to doing things Indian style (ie washing my backside with water and my left hand). I can't remember how long this went on.

Eventually when there seemed to have been a relatively decent period of time since the last cramps I popped an immodium tablet and hoped for the best.

This turned out to be a very long journey. The train left Agra Cantonment at approximately 8.00pm on Saturday 24 November 1990 and trundled to Mumbai. I think it arrived there at about 6.00am the next day. I still felt dreadful. I didn't know what to do. I had absolutely no energy and couldn't face what I could only suppose would be total mayhem and anarchy outside the station. My dreadful feeling was not only related to the loss of fluids but also because I was full of dread about be jostled and hustled if I attempted to leave the station and go to a hotel.

I hung about in the station which was at least fairly peaceful at that early hour. I need not have worried about whether it was OK to use the lavatory on the train while I was in the station because I could not help noticing at least one person squatting down with his backside hanging over the edge of one of the platforms performing an evacuation of his bowels straight down onto the track below. Sanitation in India today is improving but I understand it will be a very long time before there is sanitation in every home. Even when there is there will still be a problem for people who do not have a home. At that time vast numbers of people lived on the streets of Bombay, people with respectable jobs, not homeless people as we know them here. There just weren't enough places to stay. It was stories about, say, teachers, having to camp out on the streets that decided me that I couldn't cope with a teeming city. The sight of someone doing a crap over the edge of the platform at the station was another reason I decided not to remain there. It wasn't because I was disgusted. I had started to take things like that in my stride. I just decided I wanted a change of pace and to be somewhere less crowded.

I decided to head South and booked a seat on the next train out to Goa. Then I went and had some chai in the Station's restaurant. It is still strange to recall that tea served in a pot in India already has the milk in it. I think I may have nibbled on some dry toast too.

A couple of hours later I took my seat, the one always reserved for me as an Indrail Pass holder on the train to Goa. This was a First Class A.C. Chair car, rather than a sleeper.