Lounging on the Beach

ALLLRIGHT, I really have absolutely no excuse for not keeping this up to date. I'm obviously not the blogging type. Oh well.

At the moment, Im sitting at our hotel in Goa, which is absolutely beautiful and quaint, with huge welt-like bug bites covering my feet...lovely. This blog post will go backwards I think which will make it easier for me to give as much detail as possible on what's been going on.

Currently, we are checked out of our hotel and awaiting our taxi which should arrive in the next half hour to take us to the train station at Thivim, where we will being our 13 hr. train ride to Erankulam (Kerala). We'll do an overnight on a houseboat, and then two night homestay. After that, we have a 10hr train ride to Chennai where we'll be for 5 nights, before returning to Delhi and then...drumroll please...HOME! :) So I will be in the U. S. of A hopefully by the evening of Dec. 6th :)

So Goa...unfortunately, as following with much of my experience in India, Goa has not been at all what I expected. We're staying at Grandpa's Inn, a beautifuly cute little hotel with a very nice pool and a nice staff, located near Anjuna Beach, one of the most well known beaches in Northern Goa. Anjuna is known as the "freak capital of the world" (don't believe me? Google 'freak capital of the world' and Anjuna Beach, Goa will come up). Naturally, I was expecting a beach full of "hippies" or generally, just funky people doing funky things. I was told that we would be offered drugs left, right, and center (obviously, the primary reason I wanted to come to Goa...), and that there were crazy parties every night all over. In our two nights here (and to be fair, we only went out one night), we really didn't see any partying, and were only offered drugs once and it really seemed like he was just offering as a joke or because he had to, without any real interest.

Goa is absolutely gorgeous, lush and tropical; it's hot and muggy, but the beach is beautiful (aside from constantly being hassled by people trying to hawk their wares) and the water is warm. There are thirty plus restaurants along a strip of beach approximately 500 yards long or so. The restarants go straight up to the water; while at dinner, with the tide coming in yesterday, one of the tables was swept away so Alex jumped in the water (he was wearing shorts underneath his pants) to save it. There is fantastic seafood in Goa (as it's right on the water) and it's all relatively cheap compared to Gangtok or even Mumbai. The people all seem to be incredibly kind and its a very laid back community from what we've been able to tell in our two days here. To get around, we rented mopeds and we really must have been quite a sight in them. As many of you know, I'm not necessarily the best at operating mechanical vehicles, but as Claudia wasn't keen on learning to drive one (by the way, far more difficult than it looks, especially in India where there are no road signs, you drive on the left side of the road and people just generally do whatever they feel like), so I decided to try my hand at it. After running it straight into a wall, I finally got the hang of it and was zooming along like a pro :) I even mastered having Claudia on the back of the moped with me!

After hanging at the beach for a little, we went out for lunch in town and then just drove around on our mopeds for awhile to see the surrounding area. Finally, we came back to the hotel, where we all settled down for a mellow afternoon. Around 4 or so, the power went out (not a strange occurance in India) and we were in darkness until sometime late into the night when I woke up freezing because our AC had finally kicked in :) As Anu's cousin told us in Kalimpong on that first visit, power outages and lack of food listed on menus is how you know you're in a third world country. We decided to go and get some food so we moped'd into town where we had DELICIOUS tandoori kebabs and biryani (a local dish I believe), and then we went back to the beach to see if there were any parties (there were not) and came back to the room around 10 and then went for a quick night swim before bed :)

We had come to Goa on the 24th, after having been in Mumbai since the 19th. Mumbai also was not at all like expectations- we'd been told it was dangerous, that people would constantly try to rip us off, that it was a huge mess of people. Personally, I found none of these things to be particularly true. I do however think that if Mumbai had been the first place in India we had come and spent time in, I would have been incredibly overwhelmed. It is a lot of people, but its location on the beach gives it that 'chill' aspect that you see in people who live near the coast anywhere in my opinion. I also hadn't realized how important being near the ocean is for me until I was back in Mumbai...I felt a weight lift off my chest as I breathed easier near the ocean and felt more at ease. I guess I'll alway be a California kid!

On the first night we saw firsthand the disparity in wealth that Mumbai is also famous for. Our hotel, the Sea Princess (kindly set up by the incredible Ajay Babla, Meghan Babla's uncle in Mumbai who hosted us and truly made us feel welcome in the city), has a club attached that is apparently a major hot spot for rich kids and stars to party. And then we were talking to the staff at the hotel who told us that they lived in villages outside of town and commuted massively to get to work each day. It was honestly somewhat incredible to see this wealth discrepancy so obvious in front of us.

The 20th we were delighted by the incredible deluxe breakfast at the hotel. After breakfast, we went down to Colaba (the tourist area) and got our tourist on in Colaba, the highlight being going to Leopold's for lunch (Shantaram anyone?!) where we spent the entire time looking for anyone that we were convinced COULD be Gregory David Roberts. Then we wandered around Chowpatty beach until a little before sunset, when we went to have lunch with Ajay and his wife.

AHK! Our car is here to take us to the train station. I promise to compose another blog post while on the 13 hour train ride that will highlight the pieces of the trip I'm still missing!

But for the record, safe and sound and loving India still :) Can't wait to see everyone when I get home though!!

Love always,

Sara