Goa, India

FOR SURE WE ARE GOING TO GOA
At 10.50pm on the evening of ANZAC Day (April 25th), our train bound for Goa was scheduled to depart. At Victoria Terminus though we found out that the train had been delayed by over eight hours and wouldn't be leaving until 7.05am the following day. Rather than stay in the retiring room at the station, the three of us joined up with a Dutch girl and an Iranian guy and stayed at a cheap hotel few kilometres away. It wasn't the best finish to the day and it meant that instead of sleeping on the train and waking up near the beach, we would have to spend eleven hours of the next day on the train. The hotel was nothing special and the Iranian guy confused us with his family history that somehow includes Canadian, Australian, French, British, Turkish, Russian and Azerbaijani heritage. Along with this he lived in India for 6 years, speaks Hindi, Farsi, two types of Turkish and English and has two birth dates. After the two birthday story we all got bored and fell asleep while he lay in bed smoking cigarettes until he drifted off to sleep.

We had fun on the train playing cards and joking with the chai sellers but arriving in the darkness it was difficult to find the best place to stay near the beach. Before too long we settled on a place called Sonic, perched beside the shore overlooking some threatening rocks and the Arabian Sea. The beach proper starts 100m further to the south but the location of Sonic is hard to beat. It has a perfect view of the sunset, a large sitting area for relaxing and a massive set of speakers through which we played our own music. Perhaps one of the most relaxing features was sleeping so close to the sea, waking to the sound of crashing waves. We were the only ones staying there so we took over for a few days and made ourselves comfortable.

Sonic Guesthouse beside the ocean

One day we hired scooters and rode further south along the coastline. The scooter took a bit of getting used to but I was already familiar with the rules of the road, which can be summed up as 'anything bigger than you has right of way'. On a scooter you come pretty low down in the pecking order so it's best to stay as close to the side of the road as possible and keep watching everything. We didn't have many issues with the traffic; in fact the roads were pretty empty, but we did have a few problems with the bikes. The first required Georg to commission the use of a qualified mechanic to change spark plug but the other ones were mainly due to faulty gas tank needles and not much fuel. We ran out of gas on three separate occasions.

WHILE INDIA SLEEPS
I'm sure that the rest of the world gets a lot done while India sleeps. I get very little done. Sunset is the time of day around which all activities are organised. The most important plans revolve around where to watch the sun sink into the Arabian and listen to the waves crash upon the shore. After that the only thing to do is to watch the stars emerge and then trace them across the sky for the next few hours. While India sleeps I just watch. Tonight I'll be watching from the inside of a sleeper bus bound for Mangalore. The train all the way to Trivandrum was fully booked so I've had to book a bus ticket for part of the journey and hope that I can get the rest of the way either by bus or a different train.

Sunset over the Arabian Sea