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.
