Arambol 2

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Saturday - Day 17

After going to the centre to do the same and after managing to get hold of a t-shirt this time, Kelly, Denis and I went to Arambol as arranged. The drive was very enjoyable and when we arrived, Kelly and I headed for the Blue Pyramid bar whee the hippy festival was going on as we waited for denis to turn up because he'd left an hour or so later than us. We parked behind Om Star, popped in to visit Babu, then started our long walk along the beach in the midday sun. Eventually, we arrived at a surprisingly quiet bar/festival and entered the enclosed, fenced off area to see what was going on inside. Apart from it being a very pleasant space with a stage and sound system at one end, there were only a few people there. Some were sitting on the many chairs that had been arranged into a massive circle around the space and the others were 'dancing' under a shade in the middle. i say 'dancing'. They called it 'contact dancing'. It was enough to make me want to burst out laughing as I looked on at the total cliches in front of me. I apologise to anyone who goes in for that sort of thing and I am quite tolerant in general, but this was truly stupendous. Rory, you would've laughed a lot :-) If any of the Cambridge lot have heard the spoken word piece 'It's all a load of Hippy Bollocks'... this could have been the video for it.
It wasn't something I could stay at seriously, so we went to sunbathe instead. After some snacks and soft drinks, we waited fo Denis to arrive... and we waited... and we tried to buy Ice Cream but the seller didn't see me even though I was waving my arms like a loony... and we waited... and we thought (three times) that that was Denis walking along the beach, but it wasn't... and we waited. Eventually he turned up just as we were talking about leaving to get back to the bikes, try to exchange Marjorie (Kelly's affectionate name for her crappy old scooter) for another one and get back to Vagator before it started to get dark. We still had time to have a quick swim, get snapped by Denis and his camera (neither of us looked as bad in our bikinis as we thought...) and wander slowly back along the beach whilst throwing stranded Starfish back into the sea...

One day an old man was walking along the beach. It was low tide, and the sand was littered with thousands of stranded starfish that the water had carried in and then left behind. The man began walking very carefully so as not to step on any of the beautiful creatures. Since the animals still seemed to be alive, he considered picking some of them up and putting them back in the water, where they could resume their lives.
The man knew the starfish would die if left on the beach's dry sand but he reasoned that he could not possibly help them all, so he chose to do nothing and continued walking.
Soon afterward, the man came upon a small child on the beach who was frantically throwing one starfish after another back into the sea. The old man stopped and asked the child, "What are you doing?"
"I'm saving the starfish," the child replied.
"Why waste your time?... There are so many you can't save them all so what does is matter?" argued the man.
Without hesitation, the child picked up another starfish and tossed the starfish back into the water... "It matters to this one," the child explained.


I also found a green bug with a shiny back and a dead butterfly that had been trapped in the wet sand. I picked them both up carefully and stored them in a paper flyer to take home and send to Lorraine as she collects bugs... I'm not sure if they'll get through customs though... or in one piece.
The last time I came to Arambol, I spotted a stone, spiral earring in Turquoise (my birthstone) which would have looked great in the stretched hole of my left ear. I'd been thinking about it ever since and had decided to get it. Once we got to the shop after our starfish session on the beach, Denis had a look at it, stated that he didn't think it was stone, but turquoise dust that had been compressed into a stone-like substance. I had no idea, but decided not to buy it, although thinking about it now, wonder whether I should have just bought it anyway... there was obviously some reason why I shouldn't have bought it at the time though i think. On returning to our bikes, a man climbed a palm tree to throw down ripe coconuts, trim the dead leaves away and perform some general maintenance on the palm trees in the area. I'd seen this in Kenya before and marvelled at the nimble-ness of the climbers who find it second nature to shimmy up what is essentially a fat pole with their bare hands and feet. They tie their feet together with rope to get more grip into the carved out 'rungs' in the tree...
Some English 'rude boys' sat on their bikes as we reached ours and we had a brief conversation with them about where we were all staying... They were in Calangute. Calangute was where we were expecting them to say they were staying :-)
Ou journey back to Vagator involved arranging a mechanic to look at Marjorie, me buying some amazing purple trousers, driving back quite fast, Kelly not being able to keep up, a samosa, a fried chilli and going to the wine shop to buy a litre of Gin and loads of Tonic for around £4.
We drank outside my room on the chairs until the early hours when Vijander and his friend (the owner of Apana Punjab) turned up a bit drunk to join us. We drank some more and communicated as best we could in pigeon English before everyone disbanded and I left Denis asleep on the bench outside with the cat from last night.

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