Goa! Beaches! Ocean! Short shorts no longer totally culturally inappropriate! Happiness! Except for the fact that this is my last stop before I return to London. Right now, with 16 hours till my flight leaves, that makes me distinctly unhappy.

But to back-track to the end of the last post, I left Udaipur on an overnight bus to Mumbai about a week ago. It was probably only fitting that having cursed the aircon on pretty much every AC-bus I’ve been on for the past 11 months, on my last overnight bus journey I couldn’t have wished for anything else. Damn it was hot and gross and sweaty in the cheap seats at the back of that non-AC bus. For 18 hours. At 2am, when we stopped for some random reason, I wedged myself out of the claustrophobic nightmare of a seat I had (there is literally so little space so why do the seats recline so far back that you basically have some random person’s head resting on you?!) and laid down on the 4 non-reclining seats in the back row. It seemed smart but it wasn’t. On an Indian bus driving on Indian roads, it’s pretty much suicide and I’m surprised I came out of that trip without having sustained some kind of head trauma from being thrown against the back of the seats in front of me or a broken back from all the times the bus went over a road bump and I went flying. Repeatedly. For hours and hours and hours. While still wishing there was aircon so at least I wouldn’t be a totally sweaty mess to scrape off the seats in the morning. Do I wish I had spent the extra money and booked an AC bus? Definitely. Is it so very indicative of my approach to transport this entire trip that I went for the cheapest option instead? Definitely. Will I do anything differently next time? Hmm yeah probably not.

But I made it to Mumbai with no obvious signs of permanent physical damage. Just not quite to the stop I had been assured, repeatedly, by the travel agent that the bus would terminate at. Because, several hours late, the bus arrived into Mumbai, stopped at the side of the road and we were all told to get off, this was the final stop. Where in Mumbai we were I had no idea but the place I had been told the bus terminated it wasn’t. With limited Hindi vocab (ok, no Hindi vocab, just English which I hoped the bus driver would understand), I tried to ask where we were and why we weren’t going any further. The bus driver didn’t care, just smiled, wobbled his head and repeated that this was the only stop. I then learned from a fellow passenger (who had been informed the bus was terminating somewhere different from what I had been told and who was even further from his final stop than I was from mine) that I had about a 30min taxi ride still to go. And this was unfortunately not the part of town where taxis line up to pick up passengers which meant I definitely did not have the upper hand in the bargaining. It didn’t stop me trying and I eventually got one for the ‘local’ price my fellow passenger had told me it should be and I was finally on my way to Victoria Station, with yet another experience to file under the title of ‘oh so typically India’.

I had to connect through Mumbai to get to Goa but knowing how I usually feel about big cities, I hadn’t planned on hanging around any longer than I had to. Which was 12 hours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I left my bag at the luggage storage at the train station, walked south, found a hole in the wall restaurant that served dosas and followed the walking tour (backwards. Partly because it’s more fun not to do things the expected way but mostly because it was just infinitely more geographically logical) neatly outlined in my Lonely Planet down to the Gateway of India. On the way, I passed an art gallery that looked like it might be interesting so, having no particular plans, I went in and it turned out to be awesome. Artists had rented exhibition space and when I stopped to write down the name of one of the artists and the name of his print, he came over, introduced himself and told me just to ignore the giant ‘no photography’ signs if I wanted to photograph any of his work. Snaps (that don’t do the work justice at all) below. So armed with that knowledge, I just chatted to whatever person was sitting at the desk in each of the rooms where I liked the art and got the kind of explanations of their work that no gallery’s little info plaques ever really capture properly.

I also stopped by the modern art gallery which had a cool collection of photographs on display (‘Time Present: Photography from the Deutsche Bank Collection’) and clearly forgot that I was still backpacking when I bought two posters from the gift shop.

By dinner time, having survived the day on bhelpuri from smiley street food vendors, I stopped for a thali (will I ever survive not having access to that on a daily basis? I’m not sure…) and returned to the station where I ran into some of the people from the Udaipur crew who had left before me but were on the waiting list for the same train to Goa. So we killed time at the station in the insane heat (temperatures hadn’t dipped below 40 degrees at any point that day), including trying to fit my poster purchases into my backpack (tougher than it was in Argentina so clearly I’ve become a worse packer since I left South America), until the 11pm departure.

It was a long but nice train ride to Madgaon. My tourist quota ticket meant I got the company of a lovely Swiss guy and a Dutch couple and the view as we approached the sea in the morning the next day was amazing. No photos because I just wanted to take it all in and hold on to the memory. On arrival into Madgaon, the Swiss guy was heading to Palolem in South Goa like me (the Dutch couple were heading north) so we teamed up, flagged down the local bus, made our way to the bus station and bought our onwards ticket. I kept dozing off the entire bus ride and the lady next to me clearly didn’t trust that I wouldn’t end up falling asleep on her shoulder so she kept pushing me back towards the window to no avail; the bumpier the local bus, the more likely I am to get lulled to sleep.

Once we got to the beach, there was a definite moment of just wanting to take it all in quietly. So we did. And it was bliss setting foot on a beach again, seeing the ocean again, just being by the coast again. After a few minutes, we started the walk down the beach to find accommodation and ended up being recommended a place by an awesome Swedish guy we ran into on the way.

Goa has been brilliant but has had a lot going against it – the season is over, most backpackers are gone, huts are being dismantled, bars have shut up shop. And my flight back to London is departing from here. But what Goa has been is my last opportunity to just live life on completely my own terms. And I have just taken full advantage of that because I know that real-life in London won’t allow me to do that when I get back. It’s been a routine of sleeping, reading in the shade on my room’s front porch, eating masala omelettes and drinking chai at Little World, swimming in the sea at sunrise, sitting on the beach, wandering along the random paths from beach to beach along the coast, drinking lassis, binge-listening to Ghostpoet on my iPod, watching the sunset from the rocks, dining on fish thalis, drinking till sunrise at the only bar still open 24 hours a day and miraculously turning out to be good enough at pool under the influence to have our rounds paid for by our challengers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been, and am, in complete denial about accepting that this trip, this adventure, this best-decision-I-have-made-in-my-entire-life, is coming to an end. So now I just have the rest of today to keep living the dream.

I’m off to the beach.

Today I’m listening to: Ghostpoet – ‘Shedding Skin’