Dec 2006

Greetings from Mumbai Airport....

Have spent a fitful night drifting in and out of sleep here at the airport, reading, adjusting to the idea that in less than 24 hours I will be back in Berlin, adjusting to the fact that little more than 24 hours ago I was in goa.....here is a little account...

Events:

Spent the last evening hanging out with beach friends.....listening to their plans, making a few of my own... grabbed a couple of hours sleep....woke at 4 am, wandered down to meet my taxi driver... while waiting for him in front of the cafe/bar that I had been hanging out in the suave mystic passed by.... I was accompanied by the swede at the time, and the mystic mentioned to him the urgent pursuit of some woman or other.... after a brief hug i sent him off on his quest.... he walked a little.... spun around..... anounced to the still murmering beach 'when i am drunk i can do anything', and with that he and my goan beach life pretty much disappeared.... the murmers and chuckles of the gujarati boys drifted faintly out of some beach hut or other, but it drifted, like me, into the night....i was gone.....

All the evening the sense of an ending pervaded everything.... the fear and loathing boys, along with a couple of accomplices had spent the day acquiring drugs and music in true Hunter S Thompson style.... some kind of fear and loathing in kerela awaits them all in the new year.....

as for me, berlin awaits..... part of me is sorry not to have a chance to wander on now..... but i feel sure that now is not the time for me to wander on..... besides, I will definitely be back, of that I am pretty sure.....

Final conclusions and thoughts will follow when I am firmly back in Berlin..... for now, though, this is my final report from indian soil.....

lots of love to all

R

Events:

Greetings from my last day in goa....slowly I can feel my life returning to me, in less than 24 hours I will be on a train to mumbai, and unless amazing and reasonably priced accomodation literally falls onto my lap, I'm planning to go to the airport early and just wait it out.....spent yesterday being driven through goa and bargaining with sellers at anjuna market, spent the night hanging out, today so far has been spent feeling sorrowful and happy at the same time, at the prospect of returning to berlin...here are just a few thoughts, a few conclusions on the trip, while I think of them....

Thoughts:

Calcutta/Kolkata:

Not ever having been to Kolkata before, I can be forgiven for having mistaken it for india..... an intense mad place if ever I saw one, one had the feeling of really being on the edge....having spent a mere week and a half there, i am still too much of a calcutta newbie to judge, but i actually get the feeling that somewhere in the madness there is something I like very much...

Indian Trains:

These absolutely rock....At the wedding I was advised by all and sundry to fly, that taking the train was some kind of living hell, and upon my arrival in the station at Kolkata I temporarily agreed...we actually had to break into our own train carraige before boarding.... every thing after that, though, was fabulous, the people i met, the train chai i drank, standing at the open door, watching india pass by, waking up and wondering where you were...all for 9 euros from kolkata to mumbai....

Mumbai:

Go with another person....this city is just too much to process alone....i'm leaving this one for another time.....

Goan Beach Society:

Lies somewhere between a standard beach resort and a rest home for the temporarily insane....a strange mix of short-termers seeking a baterry recharge, a slighly different way of hanging out on the beach and long term travellers burned out on travel, on their travelling companions, on life before travel, life since travel.....add some lovers with complicated travel based relationships and the set is complete..... here are some of the characters that have livened up my experience....

The Swedish 'Swami': Formerly a punkish drifter, now a comitted yogi, albeit a yogi that feeds his unenlighted side with booze, cigarettes and spliffs for a couple of week each year on palolem....after the new year party ends each year he gets on the road and hits the ashrams, and returns to purity and the search for enlightenment....never mentions very much about his 'secret' palolem life while hanging with yoga friends, and sure as hell doesn't seem to do any yoga here. A night porter and trainee yoga teacher in real life...

Lawyer in the desert: The lawyer is in his mid thirties, based in london,a passionate and engaged guy.... I still do not know what happened to him, what drove him on this mission he is on, but he is certainly on some kind of mission...he has spent the last five months driving across from sweden to india on a motor bike, filming everything, acompanied by one friend..... his arrival in palolem seemed to prompt the release of all sorts of tensions....either from his life before, or from the journey..... spent at least 2 weeks going truly crazy...drinking gin and tonics from 10am till late, babbling insanities, retelling the same stories over and over again.... wandering round in midday sun on the beach, turning redder and redder, his hair sticking up..... he appeared to me, as if he were some kind of shamen on a quest for truth in a desert, speaking to things that were not there....searching for a resolution..... a couple of days ago he seemed to return to sanity.... a sense of calm engagement that i had not detected before came upon him.... he no longer babbled.... he left the gin and tonic to one side, and i got the feeling that whatever he was searching for, he found....

The fear and loathing crew:

Consisting of a few israeli musicians in their early 30's, a french man that drifts in and out like some kind of suave mystic, and an engaging brazilian these guys have seriously been on some kind of altered state of mind quest..... ran into a real problem the other evening when they were all on lsd, as they tried to translate things from french, hebrew and portuguese into english..... as they tried to put their ineffable experiences into words in a shared second language.... some parts of this crew are off to kerela to ride the backwaters on mescaline....

The gujarati boys:

The gujarati boys, quite apart from being extremely funny are also a sociological gem..... thing is, the 'gujarati' boys are actually londoners with, if memory serves, gujarati parents, and they really are as london as you can get.... it is fascinating for me to watch them negotiating india pretty much as europeans with indian faces....they face the same problems with food, digestion, they view india with pretty much the same strange eyes.....like all good north europeans they secretly miss the rain(did a straw poll last night, pretty much all of us from the north of europe do...)....yet for them india is also does not have the same cast that it does for the standard north european.... what is fascinating, deeply true and enlightening for the swedish 'swami' simply gets a snort of derision and a 'that sounds exactly like something my grandfather would say' from GB1, the same guy who once jokingly pondered whether he could get his family to arrange casual sex for him under the auspices of trying to introduce him to suitable marraigable women..... GB2 is quieter, more reflective, and is possibly ready to wander further... I do wonder how he will get on.....
both the GB's try to remember some of what stuart hall wrote on identity.... may chase it up later....

loads more thoughts, but i'm not going to miss this opportunity to catch some of the last goan sunrays i have....

love and greetings

R

Events:

Disappeared so thoroughly into goan and karnatakan beach life that I did not notice time passing....looked at a calander yesterday in gokarna and noticed that I only had one week left....how did any of this happen....let me try to explain....

Arrived by night, spent the day alone, wandering.... swam and wandered up the beach by sunset, looking for connections....saw a group of people, looking energetic, rough round the edges what I usually look for and decided to sit down beside them.....was invited to join...talked with them....returned the following day and the day after that for sunset, food, songs....I have somehow ended up in a kind of family here....have acquired some kind of goan beach life yet i have no idea who these people are in there other lives....it is also totally irrelevant in a sense....all that matters is what exists on a beach in india..... decided to go travelling a little further south with one, to gokarna in karnataka....a hindu holy place and with quiet beaches on the brink of discovery nearby.....spent a day discovering the quiet beaches, and another walking into the town, encountering a swami, looking at temples, eating great vegetarian food, being immersed in india again....now back in palolem again for a christmas with this new makeshift family before contemplating a little and moving on again.....

Thoughts:

On beach life and identity:

Was wondering previously how one could characterise travelling life, the travelling experience, how it forms identity.....I suppose I was thinking when i wrote this about how this compares with the bohemian experience of being an exile within ones home society, travelling in a sense without moving, orientalising the european without perhaps going to the orient..... after a week of hanging round with long term habitual travellers i have come to see that they are quite different experiences.....in both cases one is trying to become, or becomes some kind of different versions of the self, however, in terms of the intensity of struggle they are really quite different experiences.... for the traveller, the posession of self comes from that sense of being very far away from old identity and struggle, the sense that it can all go, float away into the ocean and picked up at some other time....all really quite meditative.... bohemian life, on the other hand, because of the intensity and conflict that are necessary when one adopts a different identity, philosophy from others in a society in which one still lives is not an easy letting go at all, rather it is a life full of struggle.... as one seems to have replaced the other in western europe(bohemian life is on the decline, traveller life in the ascendent) it would be interesting to compare the two types of life course these two different phenomena involve.....

On travelling with a man:

Went down to gokarna with a guy.....an interesting experience from many perspectives.....from the feminist one i noticed this..... being attached to a man has immediately rendered me unproblematic and completely invisible..... in the hotel the staff spoke only to him, this morning in a restaurant the staff looked for him to order for me.... some girls at a table opposite us looked at me with astonishment when i put down the money to pay for us both....

thats all from me for the moment....

A happy and safe christmas to all....

love roisin

Events:

It takes some effort to remember what day it is here, how long ago I arrived....all the days, actions, people seem to blend into each other.... by the time i awake for my first swim it is already ten, by the time breakfast is over it is twelve....another swim or two, a few conversations, some haggling over jewelery with beach traders or a massage and the it is time to join the other solo travellers down by the beachside of food and drink while the sun sets, for conversation and songs and spliffs before the sun sets again. Somewhere between eleven and midnight we all drift back to our beach huts, drift off to sleep before blending back to light sometime the next morning and doing it all again....

Thoughts:

This is not really the place for thoughts..... more reflections when I leave...

Events: Another day long journey later, and I find myself among the backpackers at palolem beach, right at the southern tip of goa....train was delayed so i arrived at my destination after dark, was lucky to find a reasonably priced beach hut with private bath shower and a bed that was a dammed sight more comfortable that the one i had in mumbai.... woken this morning by the dawn chorus...off after this for a swim, perhaps a massage, to dig into a good book and hopefully to meet some cool people.....

Thoughts:

On travel:
I was accopanied on my 12 hour train journey to the south by a bunch of israelis, newly released from the army and in the grip of the travel bug..... 'i'm sure i'll see you treking around somewhere in india next year', said one of them..... 'once the travel bug gets you you will keep going'.... I replied that i could definitely see the appeal of just being on the way somewhere without any general destination, without any permence...but that had not done this travel thing before in this way(i.e. short term, exotic, cheap) before because my life in my early to mid twenties had enough of a sense of impermenace, of being constantly on the road with no general destination and no idea of who your travelling companions are going to be, in and of itself, and that that was not necessarily a pleasant thing. This comes back to some thoughts of mine that have been going through my head for a number of years, a thought roughly hegelian in character, that one needs the thesis before one seeks or needs the antithesis.....that one needs stability and a sense of permenance of a 'home place' in order to really desire and enjoy impermenance of 'away and exotic' ..... the question i am asking myself this morning is whether this is really true... or whether this thought is just something i have used to protect myself against adventure.... more on this later

still more on sexism:

Some old adage somewhere states that 'sexism hurts men as much as women'..... cannot remember the reasoning or the precise counter arguments at this point, but had an interesting conversation on the train with an indian born canadian citizen in his mid 20's...... having left india at the age of 7 to go to the middle east, and then on to canada when he was 14, he is virtually as non indian as any of us temporary travellers and too experiences this country as a 'stranger'....he asked me for my impressions of this country, and i did express my frustration at how the perceptions of women hampered me in my daily interactions in this country.... i noted that while a man can walk down the street and banter with men, with me such banter would be percieved as sexual looseness..... he agreed and responded that he could also not talk to women in the way he was accustomed, as to simply strike up an innocent conversation with an unknown women would be percieved as a sexual advance on his part.....

right, thats it from me..... i'm off to try and buy a copy of hemmingway's 'the sun also rises' that i saw second hand and vastly overpriced down the road.... if i can get them down to 50 rupees, the that is my afternoon sorted......love to all, R