Wanderlust Heaven!

My first night back in Goa I was riding my rented motorbike and was almost run off the road by a Domino’s Pizza deliverman, also on bike. I guess Goa’s starting to resemble the rest of the (developed) world…

Moved rooms at Bean Me Up, from the African Room to the Moon Room. Better bed…somewhat nicer furnishings…and a change of pace. That might just do it for me for the rest of the winter, all my stuff is now out of the backpack and airing out – don’t feel like doing any packing for a while.

Went swimming on Little Vagator Beach. True to its name, this beach is small and it’s rocky on either side, so the actual swimming area is proscribed. While in the water I watched a few cows roaming around on the beach, eating trash. Must be Goa’s recycling scheme – low-cost, anyway. Another guy was swimming near me, introduced himself as ‘Lucky,’ a Nepali working at the nearby Nine Bar. Nice enough fellow – seemed to be a bit deaf, just like everyone else who works at Nine Bar, which cranks out deafening house music every night. Lucky offered to sell – no, give – me some hash which he claimed to have but not want. I smiled and side-stepped the offer…it’s not a great idea to be conducting illegal deals on a public beach. Besides, you all know my hands are far too clean for that…

Bean Me Up’s excellent restaurant wasn’t open yet – it has a Grand Opening every year on Halloween, appropriately enough – so I had to scout around for dinner. Went to China Town, a real dump that’s largely frequented by riff-raff from nearby Chapora, a settlement that is bucolic enough but whose (foreign) inhabitants make Vagator’s look like flashpackers (which they often are). My chicken momos and chow mein were barely edible…tasted like the cook had dropped a few cigarette ashes in the mix. Ugh. And while waiting (without bated breath) for my grub, I watched the middle-aged Italian guy at the next table barking at the restaurant’s dog. I vowed never to return to this place, at least not without going to see Lucky the Nepali first…

Next day, went to the weekly Anjuna Market, held every Wednesday. Talk about a zoo…you’ve probably never seen such a crush of humanity. It’s a huge spread, but most of the vendors are selling the same crap: cheapo shirts (you’ve seen my wardrobe…), hospital-style pants, shawls, wall hangings, fried food, carvings, and, of course, hashpipes and chillums. There are a handful of good vendors – one Aussie woman makes and sells very nice button down shirts, I’ll pick one up soon. Then I can write off my old blue shirt, which is in Bob’s possession in Bangkok, courtesy of the laundry service misplacing it. These are the things that occupy my life…my concerns are probably as dumb as yours, or dumber…don’t think for a moment I’m having hourly epiphanies and am entirely worry-free.

Case in point: while in Bangkok I ripped a few of Bob’s CDs, including Come Dancing by The Kinks. I realized I didn’t have any Kinks tracks and this was a good disc to have. Unfortunately, halfway through ripping it, the disc caused my computer to freeze up – must be a dirty CD. So I went onto iTunes to buy the rest of the tracks, plus a few more I found there. The thing is, sometimes the title of the physical CD and the title online differ (a la ‘the Kinks’ vs. ‘The Kinks’), so it appears you have two separate albums. You can go into iTunes and edit it, and sometimes I indeed do that. Does this sound fun and rewarding? It’s not.

Bean Me Up finally had its Halloween Party. I had a deeply lame costume – I dressed as David Ortiz from the Red Sox (baseball team). My outfit? A Sox cap, a white t-shirt on which I penned a huge ‘B’ on the front and a ’34 – Ortiz’ on the back. A pair of black sweatpants and sneakers and there I was. Of course, the real David Ortiz outweighs me by about 75 pounds, is black/Hispanic, and has a head full of frizzy black hair. Otherwise, I was a dead ringer. But it didn’t matter – most people (the adults, anyway) were drunk and half of them didn’t bother to wear a costume. And no one there ever heard of Ortiz, or the Sox for that matter.

The party was good fun – loads of kids, all in costume, good music, and a great buffet. Lisa, BMU’s proprietor, was the MC and awarded prizes to the kids with the best costumes. And she was interviewed on television – this was a biggish event for Goa. As for me, I sweated in the brutal heat and drank beer with Richard, Lisa’s boyfriend/soon-to-be hubbie. And after an hour I took off my costume and got back into civilian clothing, far better for the heat.

Now BMU’s restaurant was open. This is a key plank of my fitness/spa plan…last year I lost nearly 20 pounds in 6-7 weeks, via daily running, some yoga, and lots of vegetarian fare at BMU. My recent travels in Indochina featured too much white rice and noodles…I’ve gotten pudgy and need to focus to get back in fighting form. Just joined a nearby gym too…it’s got minimal equipment but that’s just fine, all I want is a treadmill and enough floor space to practice yoga, as well as aircon, and the gym has all these. Time to face the music…

Have continued to struggle against the bureaucratic torture that is India. I’m still working on getting a Vietnam visa, as my trip is just over two weeks away. How many times must I visit the local travel agent…and come up with additional documents…who would have thought that Kong Keo, a small hotel in Phonsavan, Laos, would be able to get me a Vietnam visa on the fly, in just two days, whereas these bozos in Goa and Mumbai can’t get their act together given weeks of time? I’m sure it will all get done, it’s just a matter of my time and the cost – at this point I’m sure both will be high.

Had dinner with Lisa and Richard on November 1, the first ‘normal’ night of BMU operations. Things were still coming together – new staff, a few new dishes, testing some CDs, etc. Lisa and Richard already feel like old friends…I love our chats about BMU’s business, about Goa’s (counter)culture, about US politics, etc. And Pakistan just got martial law so we’ve been venting on that. Also – BMU just opened an outlet in Hyderabad, and that’s going well thus far. I think that the BMU concept has legs…and I think that Lisa would be an inspiring presenter in front of b-school entrepreneurship classes, for example. Although the idea of ‘entrepreneurship class’ is a bit weird…and I should know, I took the class at Virginia. But my point is that Lisa has done some special things in starting and running BMU – spotting an opening in the market, i.e. tofu and related products in India, a country with its own huge vegetarian scene but lacking in protein-rich foods like tofu. And, of course, running a biz in India is a nightmare – corruption, staff turnover, lack of professional standards, you name it – she could talk ad nauseum regarding the operational side. She and Richard have already done much of the hard work, now I think they can move to ‘expand the empire’ and monetize their ideas. So we periodically chat about creative ways to do that.

Have recently written a couple short stories (mentioned in previous postings) that were spin-offs from this slog. The first was on Burma and submitted to the Solas Writing Competition. The second was about my near-death bus experience in the Philippines and I might submit that to Outside Magazine shortly. I’m also going to write up an experience on the overnight Manali-Dharamsala bus in India, which you might recall – an Israeli girl went from sleeping on the bus floor to assaulting me (with my full concurrence) within a matter of seconds. I’ve occasionally wondered if I should be doing anything with this slog…it’s so wide-ranging and unthematic that as a whole it probably wouldn’t make a cohesive book concept. But there are lots of short stories in there that may well deserve a second look, and that’s the way I’m leaning right now. If you have any faves from the slog please let me know, I will be taking requests…

Took a ride up to Morjim Beach, which is probably my favorite in north Goa. There’s usually no one there, except for hundreds of birds drawn to the rare Ridley Turtle eggs at the south end of the beach. It’s a remarkably peaceful place, one of my sanctuaries in Goa. Swam for an hour, walked the beach, then rode back to BMU.

Got an email from Palm.com that Daylight Savings Time change was nigh (in the US). Dates have changed significantly from prior years…so software downloads required. Torture. Downloaded Microsoft’s for Windows, no problem. But for my Treo it was not so simple, the patch via computer didn’t work (I have Vista and that seems to clash with Palm’s Quick Install program), so I had to go to Panjim and see the AirTel people there, who got my GPRS working – then I could use the Treo to get email and was able to download the patch directly from the Internet. Was this worth a few hours of annoyance? Hard to say…I do have the proper time settings now and know what time it is in the States…and I suppose I feel good about plowing through the process and ticking off another item in my to-do list. At the same time, I sort of wish I didn’t give a shit about these tasks (see: editing iTunes album names) and would just let them slide right off me. But it’s as my father has said – if you don’t have anything important to worry about, you find other things to worry about. There you go…

Finished the excellent book ‘America’s Boy’ by James Hamilton-Paterson. Haven’t learned so much from a book in a long while. The book manages to provide an excellent, succinct overview of Filipino history while also delivering huge insight into the country’s elusive, complex culture. I’ve spent a lot of time in the RP, but didn’t know half of this (the author has spent the past 20 years splitting time between the RP and the UK), and what I was aware of became crystallized by reading this. And while ostensibly covering the RP and the Marcos regime, the book serves as a mirror for the USA, against which the RP compares itself and often takes guidance from. I wasn’t particularly proud to be an American after reading about the flippant and devious manipulations we’ve subjected the Filipinos to…as the author rightly says, the only thing the United States cares about is the United States. And, of course, the US is always on ‘the defensive’ and simply ‘responding to provocation’…yeah, right.

Some great stories in this book. One concerned the first visit of the Marcoses to Washington, where Marcos gave a speech to Congress in which he told of how he helped the US fight the Japanese in WW2, and how he was wounded along with a GI – their blood commingling into Filipino soil. The brilliance of this speech? Marcos was hardly a resistance fighter, and in fact had a pretty good war – he sold goods to the Japanese and made a bundle of cash. His father, who did the same, was caught by Filipino patriots and US soldiers, and was quartered by water buffalo. LBJ and the CIA knew that Marcos was lying, but Vietnam was heating up and the US wanted allies in Asia, so we covered up his real actions and painted him as a war hero.

During that same visit, LBJ was dancing with Imelda Marcos, and putting his hands all over her. She said to Ferdie, ‘Hey honey – this guy’s groping me!’ and he replied ‘Don’t worry Meldy – it’s for a good cause.’ And he was right about that.

One more story – during the 1983 elections (I think that was the year, but it’s not important) voters in one town were trying to get to the polls, but couldn’t seem to get around some people milling around the ballot boxes – these people seemed sickly. Turns out that Marcos’s party trucked in a bunch of lepers from a nearby colony to go to the polling place and scare off voters – and it worked perfectly. Leprosy isn’t a contagious disease but if you’ve ever been close to a leper and seen the damage, you’d have a hard time remembering that fact. Classic…anyway, if you can find this book (try Amazon.com or eBay) I suggest picking it up. I know I often recommend books, but I have had the opportunity to read some real winners this year and have a few more promising tomes in front of me. Trust me, dear readers…

My first few days in Goa were during elections and were therefore ‘dry.’ This is the norm in Asia…you apparently can’t trust the people to show up at the polls sober, or refrain from violence (that’s the more likely concern, methinks). So Nine Bar was closed, and it was challenging to get a beer – but not impossible. Indians are Indians and everyone likes to make a rupee or 30, so C.O.D. usually works.

Felt like eating some meat, went over to nearby Dhum Biryani. This place has good northern Indian/mughlai cuisine, I just got some garlic cheese naan and chicken tikka kebab in a mild mustard sauce. Very aromatic – I love that about Indian food. Western food doesn’t often have much of a smell – whereas everything in India has one, good or bad. Inhaled the food, read a bit, and waddled out of there fat and happy.

Decided to see if Nine Bar had opened yet. Rode my bike there, en route was passed by a couple on their bike. Came to a corner that usually had lots of sand/dirt on the road, somewhat treacherous…and sure enough, the couple had taken it too fast and dropped their bike. They were still lying on the ground when I got there (probably 10 seconds after they fell). They were both OK…hopefully they learned not to take dusty corners so fast. That’s what you get for passing me, fuckers!
Nine Bar was still closed. Still ‘dry time.’ ‘Lucky’ the Nepali fellow was at the door – he tried to give me a hug, I ducked that and just shook his hand. I’ve already had my fill of affectionate/homosexual Asian men and just want to be friends…

Rode back to BMU. Lots of bulls and cows wandering around. Who owns these animals? I thought. Not that they’re going far…they move like turtles and are pretty calm. But the next day while riding I passed a column of bulls and cows, and one of the bulls jumped on the back of a cow and aggressively mounted it. The cow’s eyes widened noticeably and I laughed so hard I almost fell off my bike. And I temporarily forgot that I was on my way to a travel agent to discuss getting the Vietnam visa…yes, motorbikes can indeed be dangerous, particularly if you come into contact with humping bovines.

It’s been raining in the afternoons, and that’s strange as the monsoons tend to finish in late September. This year Lisa told me it rained for nearly six months. That would be hard to take. BMU’s garden is awesomely lush, as a result – but it was hell getting BMU up and ready to open. You can’t get much painting done in the rain. On Wednesday I went to the gym and worked out, and while on the treadmill, oblivious to all but my music it started to thunder and rain…and the ensuing storm was vast. I did realize it was raining, and wasn’t happy to have to ride home through huge puddles, but the rain went on for hours and the storm took down power lines, trees, and billboards (that’s ‘hoardings’ for Alan and Janine). A power line was down on the road I meant to take home, so I had to turn back. It took me an hour to re-route and get back to BMU, the usual travel time is 15 minutes. And all the power was out – BMU had to fire up its generator to keep the restaurant going. The head of the Alliance Francaise was coming to dinner that night – Lisa and Richard (who’s French) will probably get married in December and will have him officiate. It was obviously not a great night to show off BMU, what with the rain and circumscribed operations/crowd. People stayed at home that night and lit candles.

I slept badly – no fan, not much breeze. I woke up shvitzing every 30 minutes. The next morning I couldn’t have been crankier. Where was Imelda Marcos when I needed her?

Took the rest of the day for the power to come back. I couldn’t wait, and spent the day either at the beach or at the gym, soaking in the water and the aircon. When I returned to BMU around 6 p.m., things were back in order and people were much happier. I don’t mind going primitive now and then, but when it’s hot and the power’s cut unexpectedly, I’m not pleased. I am 40 years old, after all…

Went to the nearby town of Mapusa this morning to get some cash. Friday is when I pay my weekly bill at BMU, for both hotel and food, and that does add up. Of course, there was a long queue at the ATM in Mapusa – and Mapusa is just about the hottest place around, up there with the Anjuna Market and all of Vietnam. I sweated for 15 minutes and went through my handkerchief, wringing it out on the street much to the amusement of the locals, none of whom displayed a single bead of sweat. Is there gene therapy available for me?

While in line an older couple waddled up, confused at the system in front of them. Evidently they’d never waited for an ATM before. They had nametags that read ‘Norm Slarz-Boca Raton, FL’ and ‘Sharon Slarz-Boca Raton-FL’. Incredible – two elderly Jews from Florida, from the same town as my friend Matt (he of prostate cancer/surgery fame). Two elderly Jews, set loose in Mapusa, Goa, India, trying to get some cash. Two elderly Jews, having a hard time discerning how to do just that. Two elderly Jews, wearing nametags of a place that meant less than zero to every Indian around them. They were with some tour group that was listed, in tiny letters, at the bottom of their nametags.

This was nearly cruel and inhuman punishment – and while my cynical side sneered at their ridiculous provincialism (“Of course they’ve heard of Boca Raton, honey!”), I did feel a bit sorry for them. So I motioned them over and let them cut in front of me. I didn’t bother to ask those behind me in line – this is India, and lord knows how many times I’ve had Indians cut in front of me. They didn’t bother to learn queuing from the Brits, it seems. I was pissed off when they jumped in front of me – this was my revenge. The Slarzes were overjoyed and I felt I’d done my small part to re-balance the universe and restore equilibrium. I’m probably just deluding myself, but there in the 90 degree heat it all made good sense and that’s the line I’m sticking to. Over and out.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 2:40 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.