Trains, Rain, Spirit & Splendour Part 1: Insert 3 Gokarna

GOKARNA      30^th December 2012

Clean Bathrooms. Finally. Only yet again to realise that the real necessity here is toilet paper! The infamous and elusive ‘white gold’! I must be on my fourth or fifth dodgy toilet experience now. I do foresee the benefit of strong legs from all this squatting!

I still feel like I’m on the undulating creature of a bus that we took to get down here. I’m exhausted, but we’ve finally hit the coast and I’m sitting with Lauren at Namaste Café, sipping away at her very first India brewed chai while I gulp down some mango juice and await a rather continental serving of honey on toast.

The First (of many sweet) Chai

We’ve been wandering up and down the curving curls of sand that are Ohm Beach scouring for accommodation and hoping that one of the 25 doors we peeked into would reveal our friends Joshua and Dan. Our backpacks were heavy, we were dehydrated and I had run out of my sneaky stash of tissues which had been keeping my sinuses at bay. Namaste Café was our only mild solace.

It was a tricky situation to get to this point. We had landed, in the pitch blackness of Gokarna, at a petrol station around 04:00 am, not a soul in sight, but for a welcoming looking (and rather tiny) white mini taxi.  In just as much of a rush as we had  boarded our bus, we had been ejected hurriedly out, the conductors wails of ‘Pani Bottle! Water! Pani Bottle!’ , fading into the deep night as we stood on the side of the road. We were quickly snapped to by the waiting taxi driver ‘You need lift?’, ‘Yes Please! To Ohm Beach!’. We climbed in and in the few moments of silence he again piped up, ‘You want song?’ and, naturally, being as close to Goa as we were, a loud and happy trance track ensued.

We bumbled up and down the roads, watching sari-clad women swaying down the early morning road with clay pots on their heads, wandering how close we were and why on earth Gangnam Style had made its way onto the radio.

We arrived in the dark still, a lilac glow beginning to creep over the horizon. But we had no idea where to go from here. Taxi long gone, Lauren and I stood on the edge of a cliff, where we found a lone bench to lie our bags and our bodies down until the sun rose.

Waiting on the Edge of Ohm Beach 

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Back in Namaste Café, we were feeling immediately settled by the arrival of our friends. Breakfast and chai in our bellies, feeling the need to rest but our souls beginning to smile as the heaviness of the past 24 hours began to leave us and the Gokarna sunrise lifted our spirits.

The salt water stung me as it sang to my body as I rediscovered floating. Water bottles flying over the murky, cool sea water, delightful shrieks of play echoing across the small bay. My fingers are already itching to greet strings. It’s going to take me some time to settle into this new rhythm, this unfathomably peaceful flow. I will gladly take restful refuge in one of our palm leaf huts tonight.

Palm Leaf Huts @ Om Shanti Cafe, Om Beach, Gokarna

Trains, Rain, Spirit & Splendour Part 1: Insert 2 _____ Mumbai

Trains, Rain, Spirit & Splendour 

Part 1: Insert 2

MUMBAI – Early morning 29^th December 2012

I’m playing a waiting game now, trying to find sleep on cold grey floors in Mumbai airport, fighting with my phone and its inability to contact anyone, wondering if I've missed Lauren's flight, wondering how much longer I'll be stuck here. I’m hoping to glance upward at the right moment to catch Lauren as she arrives. I met an older Indian woman, who had just ‘upped and left’ from a job in Saudi Arabia which hadn’t been feeding her. She journey’s back now, to meet her family in Bangalore.

It’s a bizarre thing here, caught between physical spaces, not having stepped foot in the country outside of the airport doors, wide open to my right. I’ve packed and reorganised my backpack, changed my clothes, washed my hands and haven’t spoken a word to anyone except  goodbye to my four British acquaintances as they made their way out into Maharashtra, India. 

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No signboards to tell me when the Emirates flight from South Africa was going to land, I kept my eyes peeled on peoples bags and ears open for accents. It was four hours on those cold floors until my spirits soared as I saw Emirates labelled bags round the corners and brown beautiful and tired looking Lauren, coming around the corner. 

We flustered and embraced hello’s and stepped foot outside of those be-damned sliding doors. Immediately thronged by taxi drivers, wanting to take us to Colaba beach and Leopold’s Café for a whopping 2000 Ruppees; our senses told us to do better than that and we managed to book a 200 Rupee ‘tuk tuk’ through to our middle-of-nowhere bus-stop (if you could call it that). Lauren's backpack was thrown gingerly onto the roof while mine was stuffed next to us in the small gas run vehicle and we were hit senses first with the noise of blaring Indian traffic and the dizzying, worrying speed of everyone on the road, worrying about the wayward backpack on the roof but oddly ready to accept its dangling fate. 

Our driver didn’t know exactly where the bus depot was. After some middle-of-the-road stopping and direction-asking he wheeled around and left us on a dusty corner beneath a huge highway bridge. Mottled puppies wondered around in the dirt, people sat on the sidewalks watching us and our eyes bulged with the instantaneous shock of not knowing where we were. But somehow we mustered our courage enough to wander across the busy section beneath the bridge and began the long three hours search for an internet café and a place to eat.

 People pointed us in all different directions and our heavy legs carried us down streets lined with drooping Banyan trees, schools where young boys played cricket. We passed shoe repairmen, sweet vendors, a huge red Ganesha whom an old man was excited to point out to us, fruit sellers and a confusing array of places to eat! We found a tiny room with four computers to send out emails and update our social media, letting everyone know we were safe, if not somewhat bewildered and then decided upon a place to eat an Onion stuffed Roti, where I had my first ‘lovely’ toilet experience as well. (See my insert on toilets for a laugh! ) .

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A Glimpse of Ganesha

A Shoe Repairman

We were almost left beneath the bridge in that dusty intersection. If we hadn’t known the name of the coach and waved frantically at it as it  passed our waiting spot, it would have forgotten us and carried on. Not a moment to lose it reversed at a speed, took our tickets, shoved us on and before we had a second to contemplate our surroundings we were already on the main highway out of Mumbai along the sprawling slum city. Our backpacks at our feet, we had climbed onto the second level ‘bunk’ of the sleeper bus onto our two person sized mattress, replete with built in pillows, a rack for shoes  and a small TV already blaring a colourful Bollywood movie. Sleep was very welcome.

Backpacks at our feet