Saturday, February 21, 2004
DELHI - Goa seems such a long time ago, such a long way away! Er, I suppose it is ... We've spent a total of 29 hours on trains in the last few days and travelled over 2000km, back up to the capital, which is just as, um, delightful as I remember it from when we initially arrived here.
We had a good wander around Panjim, Goa's capital, on Tuesday, to buy gifts, the obvious bottle-of-the-local-liquor (which'll probably taste rank when it gets home!), that sort of thing. We had a good mooch and potter, soaking up the laid-back Goan way of life for the last time really, knowing that as soon as we left, we'd be back in crazy India proper! There's a traditional Portguese Goan restaurant called Viva Panjim that we popped into for a late lunch, meeting the Melbourne massive there for a final time - suffice it to say, it was G&T o'clock, for at least a couple of us. We made the most of our diminishing chances to eat scrummy seafood and me, Laura and Em demolished some plates of prawns etc, which were good, but nowhere as good as our efforts the previous week. For our last Goan supper, we went across the road from our house to Cidade de Goa, the top-notch five-star resort we had been passing for a couple of weeks, but hadn't yet been in ... We found the buffet restaurant and treated ourselves to a bottle of the finest Goan vino, toasting a brilliant fortnight of beaches and coconut trees!
It was a case of sorting the house out in the morning - and then the trains began! A mere 12 hours overnight landed us back in Bombay at 5.55 in the morning. We wandered around to find a hotel - the one we had thought about had daft procedure about having to check out after 24 hours, if you only paid for one night. Since we didn't want to leave at half six the next morning, we ended up going back to the hotel we had stayed in a couple of weeks before. It's not that we didn't like the place - it's just a bit odd. The staff were a tad Rocky Horror: the brooding, open-necked, soave manager and the cross-eyed hunchbacked night porter were quite a double act. And then there was the moustachioed guy who just sat around smiling insanely, plus an unknown number of others who just, well, hung out. What did they all do all day?
It was brill to be back in buzzing Bombay. And our return gave us the chance to do something that we criminally omitted last time through. Synonymous with this vibrant city is the industry they call Bollywood - and we couldn't come here without catching at least one movie! Bollywood is the biggest film industry in the world; they churn out easily more movies a year than anyone else, even the Americans. And India is rapt by every twist and turn in the careers and lives of the megastars of the screen. Newspapers devote whole supplements to gossip about the stars ("has Sanjay finally found love with Raveena?!") You can't walk down a street without running into an image of Amitabh Bachchan endorsing some product or other (usually very chic suits, actually - he's an older actor in the Sean Connery mould, perhaps, and is wont to make the ladies go weak at the knees).
But how to choose a film to see from this galaxy of stars and their hits - especially when the films are all in Hindi? Well, we were assured by various people that the language barrier wouldn't be much of a problem; we'd be able to work out the storyline, especially through the medium of ensemble dance, which happens pretty regularly. The songs are so important to the films that soundtracks are released before the films themselves, to get the public hooked on the music, so they HAVE to see the film. We had thought of going to see "Maqbool", which is a new Bollywood version of Macbeth! However, one film is on everyone's lips more than any other at the moment: "Kal Ho Naa Ho", now in its 13th week. It's a film that features a Bollywood rendition of Roy Orbison's classic "Pretty Woman" and a song called "It's the Time to Disco" which could well be passed off as a Latvian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest. It stars Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta, two of Bollywood's super-hottest properties. It's a story of love and friendship (aren't they all!) amongst Indians in New York and was an absolutely stunning three hours of entertainment: big and brash, genius music (I bought the soundtrack), completely unsubtle - but, hey, who needs subtlety when you've got funky moves, bouncy hair and the cheekiest of cheeky smiles? It was a hell of a heart wrencher at the end, it brought a tear to my eye ...
Needed a stiff drink after all that. We started with a cup of Golden Orange Pekoe at a tea emporium on Veer Nariman Road, but then our friend Jim turned up (the Bombay businessman we had met previously), told us not to be so soft, and whisked us off to a flashy bar for cocktails. Good man. We had a pleasant hour or so in there, quite an oasis from the hustle-and-bustle outside, gathering advice from Jim on such things as where the best place was to buy Peaberry Coffee Beans in Bombay (they're India's finest). And it was just round the corner that we ate Vietnamese and Thai food cooked by a Nepalese chef - indicative of Bombay's cosmopolitan feel! In fact, the chef actually came out in the restaurant, in his big white hat, and theatrically cooked Andrew's beef in front of him, on a barbecue.
First thing on Wednesday, we were on a boat out to Elephanta Island. Boats leave from the Gateway of India, the first monument that passengers arriving on the ships of yesteryear would see in Bombay, India's major port. Our little vessel took about an hour to reach the island, which has loads of ancient carvings of Shiva and various other deities, hugely imposing and quite eerie, lurking in the shadows. There were also some lovely preening monkeys, picking lice off each other, lounging around outside, when we'd had enough of the monuments! Time was running short now in Bombay, so we whizzed back to the city to meet up with Jeffrey, our Goan guardian, and have a last lunch with him. It was brill to see him again, and really interesting to hear about the evangelist gathering that he'd been to since we'd seen him, where 1.7 million people thronged just outside the city. He helped us out doing a couple more things round the city - including getting hold of that coffee - before chaperoning us to Bombay Central station. We made it in plenty of time, though there was one funny incident where Jeffrey broke the taxi door while swapping seats mid-journey; it had to be fixed in the middle of traffic by two kind bikers who hopped off their Enfield Bullet and rammed the thing back into its housing!
We were now on the train, our home for the next 17 hours. This was luxury travel, though: the Rajdhani Express is the speedy rail connection between the two major cities, and you are provided with food, chai and a constant feed of piped muzak. Not sure whether the latter is a good thing, but you feel like you're getting something for your slightly elevated fare. It's weird: it felt like all we did was read the paper, do a crossword, sleep, have breakfast ... and then we'd arrived in Delhi. Four hour train journeys seem interminable at home - perhaps India has made me more tolerant to such things!
So, here we are - back in Paharganj, back at Hotel Namaskar, back in the less-than-tropical north of India. Not much in the way of Fish Curry Rice up here ... But, there are the Himalayas, and we're going to be amongst their foothills in the next couple of days, which I'm really excited about!
We had a good wander around Panjim, Goa's capital, on Tuesday, to buy gifts, the obvious bottle-of-the-local-liquor (which'll probably taste rank when it gets home!), that sort of thing. We had a good mooch and potter, soaking up the laid-back Goan way of life for the last time really, knowing that as soon as we left, we'd be back in crazy India proper! There's a traditional Portguese Goan restaurant called Viva Panjim that we popped into for a late lunch, meeting the Melbourne massive there for a final time - suffice it to say, it was G&T o'clock, for at least a couple of us. We made the most of our diminishing chances to eat scrummy seafood and me, Laura and Em demolished some plates of prawns etc, which were good, but nowhere as good as our efforts the previous week. For our last Goan supper, we went across the road from our house to Cidade de Goa, the top-notch five-star resort we had been passing for a couple of weeks, but hadn't yet been in ... We found the buffet restaurant and treated ourselves to a bottle of the finest Goan vino, toasting a brilliant fortnight of beaches and coconut trees!
It was a case of sorting the house out in the morning - and then the trains began! A mere 12 hours overnight landed us back in Bombay at 5.55 in the morning. We wandered around to find a hotel - the one we had thought about had daft procedure about having to check out after 24 hours, if you only paid for one night. Since we didn't want to leave at half six the next morning, we ended up going back to the hotel we had stayed in a couple of weeks before. It's not that we didn't like the place - it's just a bit odd. The staff were a tad Rocky Horror: the brooding, open-necked, soave manager and the cross-eyed hunchbacked night porter were quite a double act. And then there was the moustachioed guy who just sat around smiling insanely, plus an unknown number of others who just, well, hung out. What did they all do all day?
It was brill to be back in buzzing Bombay. And our return gave us the chance to do something that we criminally omitted last time through. Synonymous with this vibrant city is the industry they call Bollywood - and we couldn't come here without catching at least one movie! Bollywood is the biggest film industry in the world; they churn out easily more movies a year than anyone else, even the Americans. And India is rapt by every twist and turn in the careers and lives of the megastars of the screen. Newspapers devote whole supplements to gossip about the stars ("has Sanjay finally found love with Raveena?!") You can't walk down a street without running into an image of Amitabh Bachchan endorsing some product or other (usually very chic suits, actually - he's an older actor in the Sean Connery mould, perhaps, and is wont to make the ladies go weak at the knees).
But how to choose a film to see from this galaxy of stars and their hits - especially when the films are all in Hindi? Well, we were assured by various people that the language barrier wouldn't be much of a problem; we'd be able to work out the storyline, especially through the medium of ensemble dance, which happens pretty regularly. The songs are so important to the films that soundtracks are released before the films themselves, to get the public hooked on the music, so they HAVE to see the film. We had thought of going to see "Maqbool", which is a new Bollywood version of Macbeth! However, one film is on everyone's lips more than any other at the moment: "Kal Ho Naa Ho", now in its 13th week. It's a film that features a Bollywood rendition of Roy Orbison's classic "Pretty Woman" and a song called "It's the Time to Disco" which could well be passed off as a Latvian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest. It stars Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta, two of Bollywood's super-hottest properties. It's a story of love and friendship (aren't they all!) amongst Indians in New York and was an absolutely stunning three hours of entertainment: big and brash, genius music (I bought the soundtrack), completely unsubtle - but, hey, who needs subtlety when you've got funky moves, bouncy hair and the cheekiest of cheeky smiles? It was a hell of a heart wrencher at the end, it brought a tear to my eye ...
Needed a stiff drink after all that. We started with a cup of Golden Orange Pekoe at a tea emporium on Veer Nariman Road, but then our friend Jim turned up (the Bombay businessman we had met previously), told us not to be so soft, and whisked us off to a flashy bar for cocktails. Good man. We had a pleasant hour or so in there, quite an oasis from the hustle-and-bustle outside, gathering advice from Jim on such things as where the best place was to buy Peaberry Coffee Beans in Bombay (they're India's finest). And it was just round the corner that we ate Vietnamese and Thai food cooked by a Nepalese chef - indicative of Bombay's cosmopolitan feel! In fact, the chef actually came out in the restaurant, in his big white hat, and theatrically cooked Andrew's beef in front of him, on a barbecue.
First thing on Wednesday, we were on a boat out to Elephanta Island. Boats leave from the Gateway of India, the first monument that passengers arriving on the ships of yesteryear would see in Bombay, India's major port. Our little vessel took about an hour to reach the island, which has loads of ancient carvings of Shiva and various other deities, hugely imposing and quite eerie, lurking in the shadows. There were also some lovely preening monkeys, picking lice off each other, lounging around outside, when we'd had enough of the monuments! Time was running short now in Bombay, so we whizzed back to the city to meet up with Jeffrey, our Goan guardian, and have a last lunch with him. It was brill to see him again, and really interesting to hear about the evangelist gathering that he'd been to since we'd seen him, where 1.7 million people thronged just outside the city. He helped us out doing a couple more things round the city - including getting hold of that coffee - before chaperoning us to Bombay Central station. We made it in plenty of time, though there was one funny incident where Jeffrey broke the taxi door while swapping seats mid-journey; it had to be fixed in the middle of traffic by two kind bikers who hopped off their Enfield Bullet and rammed the thing back into its housing!
We were now on the train, our home for the next 17 hours. This was luxury travel, though: the Rajdhani Express is the speedy rail connection between the two major cities, and you are provided with food, chai and a constant feed of piped muzak. Not sure whether the latter is a good thing, but you feel like you're getting something for your slightly elevated fare. It's weird: it felt like all we did was read the paper, do a crossword, sleep, have breakfast ... and then we'd arrived in Delhi. Four hour train journeys seem interminable at home - perhaps India has made me more tolerant to such things!
So, here we are - back in Paharganj, back at Hotel Namaskar, back in the less-than-tropical north of India. Not much in the way of Fish Curry Rice up here ... But, there are the Himalayas, and we're going to be amongst their foothills in the next couple of days, which I'm really excited about!
Monday, February 16, 2004
MIRAMAR, Goa! - ...
(Ben pauses to pop his arm back into his shoulder socket)
Yoga was great! At 8.30am this morning, I sat down cross-legged on a straw mat in front of a mystically bearded and fabulously elastic man called Virdu, who proceeded to take us serenely through some quite remarkable postures. To see me and Jamesy attempt "The Crab", "The Lion" and "The Tortoise" must have been quite a sight, next to the languid lagoon and amidst the towering coconut trees. I discovered tendons that I never knew I had! There was one special moment when I was having difficulty in working out exactly where to put my flailing limbs; Virdu approached, and with the air of a boy scout on marijuana, he deftly tied me into a knot that gathered together the loose ends of my dharma. Or something. It was a great experience; it made me realise that I'm frankly as supple as a brick and that people who bend deserve vast respect. It also reminded me that "repulsing the monkey" (see last installment) is - duh - a move in Tai Chi. Perhaps that's the next phase in my exploration of the inner self.
Worryingly, I had a bowl of muesli with fruit and curd for breakfast just afterwards. And a big salad for lunch - yikes! Don't worry, folks. Some beers await me at home and big lard beckons for the evening's entertainment. I'm still the Ben you know! Actually, I could murder an ommmmmmm-lette ...
(Ben pauses to pop his arm back into his shoulder socket)
Yoga was great! At 8.30am this morning, I sat down cross-legged on a straw mat in front of a mystically bearded and fabulously elastic man called Virdu, who proceeded to take us serenely through some quite remarkable postures. To see me and Jamesy attempt "The Crab", "The Lion" and "The Tortoise" must have been quite a sight, next to the languid lagoon and amidst the towering coconut trees. I discovered tendons that I never knew I had! There was one special moment when I was having difficulty in working out exactly where to put my flailing limbs; Virdu approached, and with the air of a boy scout on marijuana, he deftly tied me into a knot that gathered together the loose ends of my dharma. Or something. It was a great experience; it made me realise that I'm frankly as supple as a brick and that people who bend deserve vast respect. It also reminded me that "repulsing the monkey" (see last installment) is - duh - a move in Tai Chi. Perhaps that's the next phase in my exploration of the inner self.
Worryingly, I had a bowl of muesli with fruit and curd for breakfast just afterwards. And a big salad for lunch - yikes! Don't worry, folks. Some beers await me at home and big lard beckons for the evening's entertainment. I'm still the Ben you know! Actually, I could murder an ommmmmmm-lette ...
Sunday, February 15, 2004
PALOLEM, Goa! - This is perfect. We've moved down to south Goa for a couple of days. We're staying in a "coco-hut" next to a lagoon, one minute's walk from the beach, surrounded by palm trees and beach shacks playing chill-out tunes ...
We turned up yesterday after a comedy bus ride in which the very full bus seemed to absorb more people than was physically possible. Luckily, me and Laura (one of the "tough Aussie chicks", who would like to point out to everyone that they're not that tough really; only when they have to be) managed to end up in the 'cockpit' with the horn-insane driver and all of our luggage. While we were in club class, watching our in-flight movie and sipping champagne (if only - though the coffee sweets flowed, as we both pined for espresso), the others were like sardines on military drill, standing squashed into the armpits of all and sundry. I felt for them, I really did.
We got to Palolem and hit the beach. It is truly idyllic, with fishing boats punctuating the sands. Development goes as far as these coconut-built beach shacks, in which there are cafes, restaurants and accommodation. It was interesting that the girls thought it was pretty developed; compared to vast empty beaches in Oz, I guess it is. But, for the Eurocentric amongst us, used to the sizzling concrete-fringed meat markets of the Costa Brava and the crammed insanity of, say, Brighton on a vaguely sunny day in August - or even crumbling Rhyl on a less than mediocre day in March - there is relatively nothing here. There are a pleasant amount of people here, including loads of Israelis who, it seems, are fresh from serving their time in the army. All the development tastefully melts into the forest behind the beach - no high rises. It's lovely.
We got a couple of huts, by the aforementioned lagoon, around the corner from the beach. And here we have stayed, having a swim here, a ridiculously scrummy chocolate-filled-pancake and pint of juice there ... Last night, we started out at a cafe that was hosting a Jamaican dub session, and though we resisted the lure of jerk chicken, the beers and rum-n-cokes were consumed with gusto. We ate just along the beach - waited for ages, but it didn't really matter by that stage. I ended up lying in the sand, getting expert tutorial from the Aussies in their finely honed talent of imitating farmyard noises, which I think shocked some fellow beached revellers. Later, we all climbed, SAS-style, into the disco-bar next door to our lagoon, raising the odd eyebrows.
But it does take a lot to really raise eyebrows round here - not even northern European blokes in really tiny pants, or octogenarian hippy ravers dancing insanely under a palm tree cause much of a flutter. Jamesy was perusing the menu at a cafe yesterday and was intrigued as to what a "Queen Lassi" was, being deeply loyal to QE2. A couple of unfamilar words were fired in our innocent direction by the amused waiter; we finally realised that the Queen is generously seasoned with hashish (I always knew she had too much Charlie) ... Jamesy had a pineapple juice instead.
Assuming I cope with tonight's festivities, I may well join in our camp's 8.30am yoga session tomorrow, which Em and Laura are well into. Repulsing the monkey sounds a health-giving exercise and I'm keen to tap into some of this subcontinental spiritualism ... Yeah, I know me and the attribute "supple" don't normally mix. But you've got to start somewhere. By the time I'm back home, I'll really be your Flexible Friend - putting the Ben into bendy ...
(This installment was typed with my toes, the backs of my knees resting on my shoulders, my entire body balanced on my left thumb while my right hand played a tourist-souvenir mini-sitar. Ommmmm.)
We turned up yesterday after a comedy bus ride in which the very full bus seemed to absorb more people than was physically possible. Luckily, me and Laura (one of the "tough Aussie chicks", who would like to point out to everyone that they're not that tough really; only when they have to be) managed to end up in the 'cockpit' with the horn-insane driver and all of our luggage. While we were in club class, watching our in-flight movie and sipping champagne (if only - though the coffee sweets flowed, as we both pined for espresso), the others were like sardines on military drill, standing squashed into the armpits of all and sundry. I felt for them, I really did.
We got to Palolem and hit the beach. It is truly idyllic, with fishing boats punctuating the sands. Development goes as far as these coconut-built beach shacks, in which there are cafes, restaurants and accommodation. It was interesting that the girls thought it was pretty developed; compared to vast empty beaches in Oz, I guess it is. But, for the Eurocentric amongst us, used to the sizzling concrete-fringed meat markets of the Costa Brava and the crammed insanity of, say, Brighton on a vaguely sunny day in August - or even crumbling Rhyl on a less than mediocre day in March - there is relatively nothing here. There are a pleasant amount of people here, including loads of Israelis who, it seems, are fresh from serving their time in the army. All the development tastefully melts into the forest behind the beach - no high rises. It's lovely.
We got a couple of huts, by the aforementioned lagoon, around the corner from the beach. And here we have stayed, having a swim here, a ridiculously scrummy chocolate-filled-pancake and pint of juice there ... Last night, we started out at a cafe that was hosting a Jamaican dub session, and though we resisted the lure of jerk chicken, the beers and rum-n-cokes were consumed with gusto. We ate just along the beach - waited for ages, but it didn't really matter by that stage. I ended up lying in the sand, getting expert tutorial from the Aussies in their finely honed talent of imitating farmyard noises, which I think shocked some fellow beached revellers. Later, we all climbed, SAS-style, into the disco-bar next door to our lagoon, raising the odd eyebrows.
But it does take a lot to really raise eyebrows round here - not even northern European blokes in really tiny pants, or octogenarian hippy ravers dancing insanely under a palm tree cause much of a flutter. Jamesy was perusing the menu at a cafe yesterday and was intrigued as to what a "Queen Lassi" was, being deeply loyal to QE2. A couple of unfamilar words were fired in our innocent direction by the amused waiter; we finally realised that the Queen is generously seasoned with hashish (I always knew she had too much Charlie) ... Jamesy had a pineapple juice instead.
Assuming I cope with tonight's festivities, I may well join in our camp's 8.30am yoga session tomorrow, which Em and Laura are well into. Repulsing the monkey sounds a health-giving exercise and I'm keen to tap into some of this subcontinental spiritualism ... Yeah, I know me and the attribute "supple" don't normally mix. But you've got to start somewhere. By the time I'm back home, I'll really be your Flexible Friend - putting the Ben into bendy ...
(This installment was typed with my toes, the backs of my knees resting on my shoulders, my entire body balanced on my left thumb while my right hand played a tourist-souvenir mini-sitar. Ommmmm.)
