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Published: April 10th 2011
From the airplane
Flying to Mumbai from Bangkok - these surreal cloud-scapes mesmerized us!Flying the no-frills Air Asia airlines, we landed in Mumbai (Bombay) on March 23rd, found our way to an ATM and booked a pre-paid taxi to take us to the least expensive accomodations we could find: the YMCA downtown at $45/night it is still incredibly pricey compared to the rest of India. When Dave handed our taxi driver a 100 rupee tip, he said “Sir, this is very small, Sir” with a pained look on his face. We were tempted to take it back and say sorry and walk away, but instead we just said “No, this tip is fine”, we did just land in India, but we weren’t born yesterday. We caught a late Indian buffet dinner that was included in our room rate and headed for bed to catch a slim few hours of sleep before catching an early morning train to Goa.
While still in Thailand, I had contacted potential couch-surfing (check it out at www.couchsurfing.org) hosts in Goa named Peter and Rose. Rose was in France, but he wrote back that he’d be willing to host us for a while in Calangute, one of the larger towns along the Northern coast of Goa. He had the foresight
Just Because
All of India is a 1/2 hour OFF of the rest of the world's time zones. These clocks greeted us at the Mumbai (Bombay) airport and we were so confused! to see that we would be hard pressed to book train tickets ourselves, so he went ahead and booked them for us. This was a HUGE help as booking train tickets in India is no simple or easy endeavor and still confuses me.
We were hugely grateful to be in a air-conditioned triple-tier sleeper car and met some lovely people in our berth on the 12 hour trip down.
Two separate bumpy, hot and sunset-lit bus rides from the train station brought us into Calangute just after dark. I was giddy with delight to be in India the whole time and was enjoying every second of our trip so far. Partly because of my nervousness from all the fear-mongering and horror stories about travel in India, so far, which were proving to be just that, other people’s stories.
Finding Peter’s apartment was an adventure in itself, navigating a new town at night, but we found a helpful taxi driver who stated “I love to help people, it’s what I do”, and generously let us use his phone to call Peter who immediately came to pick us up, though we were less than a block away. He scolded us for
Me cuddled in on bottom berth
The triple tier A/C train trip to Goa not taking a cab instead of bussing it from the train station, but how could we have known? His apartment was a welcome sight and we dropped our bags in our quaint little room and we all headed out for dinner at ‘The Plantain Leaf’ which marked the beginning of a week of blissful gastronomic escapades, as Peter is quite the fellow foodie. After dinner he asked us how we felt about ice cream and when he was met with our enthusiastic replies he took us to a place called ‘Naturals’, a home-made ice cream parlor with many exotic flavors. To solve our dilemma of what flavors to pick, he asked for a tray full of scoops to share. We nearly fainted with the perfection of this ice cream, and in India? I have to admit I wouldn’t have guessed they’d have world-class ice cream - proved me wrong! Roasted Almond, Saffron Pistachio, Young Coconut, Mango and the most amazing of all, Double Dutch Chocolate!
The next day we went to the fish market and he bought a tuna-like fish and we headed back to his place to cook up a storm, I made a vegetable sauté and some pita/tortilla
Fingers on a Guitar
Dave gets out his guitar first thing upon arrival (after shower of course) to Peter's place in Calangute. like flat breads and he cooked up the fish in a spicy creamy sauce that made my knees wobble it was so decadent. Over lunch we started discussing Pranic Healing and when Dave expressed serious interest in taking the course, we hopped online, found him a course that started the next day in Bangalore, and within a half hour, Dave was in a taxi and racing towards the airport. He flew back to Mumbai, stayed in a hotel there, flew the next morning to Bangalore just in time to slide into class with 10 minutes to spare. I’ll let him blog to tell you about that adventure and experience from his perspective, but my understanding is that the course fit right in with his growing passion for helping others heal and thrive and he's already helped me with back pain and sinus congestion!
My weekend was filled with lovely walks on the beach, amazing meals and lots of down time to journal, read and connect with Peter and 2 more couch-surfers who showed up, a German woman Christianne, and Luna, her 11 year old daughter. The day they arrived we headed out in the evening to experience the Night
Our little bed at Peter's
Nice antique bed frame - this is LUXURY 'couch'-surfing!
Bazaar in Anjuna. The market was spectacular! There were delicious food stalls, rows upon rows of textiles, jewelry, clothes, teas, spices, shoes, and craft vendors, little drink bars set up in circles underneath towering banyan trees, several different stages with live music and dance performances and sparkling lights everywhere. We meandered through the maze of human activity and consumption and enjoyed ourselves mightily, buying only a couple things along the way.
Dave came back by sleeper bus and arrived Monday morning, tired but enthusiastic about his growth and learning over the weekend. Christianne had horrible migraines and nausea, so he had a person in need of his attention to practice upon immediately, and an experienced, if a little merciless, guide, Peter, to help him along. She did feel quite a bit better and was hugely grateful for the healing work.
We spent a couple more days in Calangute, which included a hot and sweaty motorbike trip (Yes, Dave braved driving amongst the utter chaos!) to the Wednesday afternoon flea market where we scored some amazing bedding, jewelry, Indian fusion music, a sari and some spices. We felt the need to have a few days on the beach together,
not in someone else's home or on someone else's schedule, so we caught a taxi up to Arambol, in the farthest Northern corner of Goa for some serious R&R. We had 3 nights there and though we struggled to find quality food, we enjoyed an evening of live music at a hippie-heavy jam session, walks on the beach, writing postcards, reading, swimming in huge waves of the Arabian Sea on a super-windy day, and generally just enjoying each other's company and soaking up the beach-town vibe.
After Arambol, we headed back for one more night in Calangute to see a concert being held in Goa's capital city, the Portugese colonized (now independent) Panjim, imaginatively called 'A Musical Evening' where a few famous musicians would be sharing their classical Indian music with us, for free! We motobiked in to Panjim around 5pm, the concert didn't even start until 7pm, so we walked along the river-beach promenade holding hands and talking about life. Dave started up a conversation with an eccentric, yet wise and clearly distinguished older man from Bengal, named Dhruv Dalmia. Dhruv is one of 18 children his father sired with 6 different wives, none of whom he seemed
New style of fishing
I've never seen this before: two guys scope out a school of fish (trained eyes!) and direct a group of about 4 to 6 swimmers towards the fish and when they are in position, the men on the rocky point throw big rocks toward the school of fish and holler loudly, scaring the fish into the simmer's net that has 2 poles on either end. They lift the poles into the air trapping the fish and roll the poles towards each other and come to shore... to treat with tenderness, love or affection. There is a book written about him we'll have to find someday and read, fascinating lives! Dhruv proved to be delightful company during the concert and we exchanged info so as to connect with each other the next day for lunch before we caught our night train to Mysore.
Lunch in Panjim with Dhruv was entertaining to say the least. We enjoyed Vegetarian Thali (set meal) at a fine restaurant called Bhojan (which translates to 'food') where Dhruv comically flirted with the hostess trying to get us seated quicker, bombarded the servers with curt and loud demands and generally monopolized the attention of anyone who would surrender to his barrage of pointed questions and comments. Despite it sometimes seeming a bit embarassing, he proved to be delightful and articulate company and we headed with him via scooters, to his lovely apartment where he told us more of his story and expressed interest in joining us on our way back to meet Peter and gather our belongings to catch our train. We headed back, returned the scooter, and had some nice little chats, mostly involving Dhruv's pain and what Pranic Healing could do
Swimming Fishermen
Heading out for a catch for him, with Peter, a quick little photo shoot on the rooftop terrace, and then we all hugged and parted ways. Driving away from Calangute with Peter doing Pranic Healing on Dhruv's back in the early evening dim light was the perfect image to lock into our minds as we were whisked off to our next destination, the glorious city of Mysore in the South Western state of Karnataka.
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