Goa to Trivandrum, India

BEING SET ON FIRE
I left Georg and Jo in Goa on a sad note. The hotel owner and I got in a rather heated argument about how much money I owed for four nights accommodation. Actually the disagreement was over the fact that I left my stuff in the room with Georg without legally checking out. Initially I refused to pay for an extra night but the owner threatened to set me on fire, using my own gasoline that I purchased the day before for the motorbike, and later promised me a bamboo massage. Neither of these options sounded appealing so after exchanging some colourful language (read as we swore back and forth using words that my Mum would be ashamed of) I relented and paid the extra 100 rupees for a night I never used. I never used it because I left for Trivandrum that evening. I should have caught the bus to Mangalore but I came up with another plan that would give me a better chance of making Trivandrum in time to catch my flight to Sri Lanka. I passed on the bus and headed straight for the train station and bought a seat on the Mangala Express to Ernakulam a town about 5 hours north of Trivandrum. This was risky because it still didn't guarantee me passage all the way to Trivandrum and I could well of been kicked off the train because I had no intention of sitting on a hard seat for 16 hours. We ran into a snag as we left Thivim station where I boarded. A woman got caught in the door of the carriage I was in and was dragged along the platform and then a few hundred meters down the way before the train stopped. There was the usual farce of two million people crowded around to see what happened and basically I got pinned inside on one of the seats with my bag still on, unable to move for the next half an hour. The woman was okay, but it could have been so bad. After the path cleared I made straight for the sleeper carriages and walked up and down the isles until I got a lucky break. A woman told me that she was getting off in a few hours and I was welcome to have her bed once she left. I had a few hours to kill so I stood at the end of the carriage next to the toilet and read the paper twice. I fell asleep while doing the crossword and for the SECOND time in six months a mouse woke me up. The Nicaraguan mouse climbed into bed with me but the Indian one just scampered across my foot on route to the toilet. By this stage though the bed became available so I propped by bag up as a pillow and fell quickly to sleep along with the rest of India. When I woke up the train was virtually empty; I had a whole eight-berth section to myself as I studied the Keralan landscape out of the window.

Beach in Goa

After the Goan argument I had to compose myself again because I knew the trip to Trivandrum would be taxing. Thankfully I had one of those days when all the connections line up and things flow smoothly. Off the train in Ernakulam I walked to the bus station had jumped straight on a southern bus to Trivandrum. In the Keralan capital I walked off the bus into a cheap guesthouse with an even cheaper shower - known in the western world as a sink. Dinner was good, I called home, but the day ended with an Internet café whose server crashed not long after I arrived. Rather than push my luck I decided it was time for bed. After three weeks with Georg and Jo it was another contemplative evening on my own but I knew it wouldn't last long. My old pal Phil Harrison was waiting for me in Sri Lanka.

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