Our overnight bus ride from Hampi ended an hour before dawn in Panjim, the principal city in Goa on India’s west coast. With a few days at a nice beach in mind we caught an auto-rickshaw to Calangute, arriving there as the first light of day was licking the faces of the stray dogs. But the apocalyptic scene that greeted us was not what we had in mind. Acrid smoke curled up in the half-light from the fires smouldering in damp trash piles on the street, fouling the air, while dogs, cows and ravens feasted on garbage. And the ground was blanketed with more litter than we’ve ever seen. We couldn’t get out of Calangute fast enough.
Two local buses and 40 minutes later we found ourselves at Vagator Beach further up the coast. This was more like it. Fresh air, nice sand, swaying palms. We stayed for a couple of days, enjoying the beach, great Goan food, and walking around the village. There were many overseas visitors – nubile Norwegians, frisky French, buxom Belgians. And us two. I dropped my towel apparently casually on the beach sand but in truth its position was carefully calibrated to be out of reach of the waves while still close enough so that I could hold my stomach in until I was safely in the warm embrace of the Arabian Sea. The water was clear and clean, and the temperature perfect.
From Vagator we moved on to Panjim to see what remains today of the centuries-long occupation of Goa by the Portuguese. This seems to consist mainly of impressive churches and a few fort ruins. We inspected the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi and adjacent museum that contains amongst many other things large portraits of the Portuguese Governors and a great wooden carving of Mother Mary. Nearby is the Basilica Bom Jesus that contains in a glass sided coffin the body of St Francis Xavier. Francis came to Goa in 1541 with a mission to tone down the lifestyles of the Portuguese colonials, considered much too sinful by the old religious movers and shakers back in Lisbon. At the time Goa was booming, the “Rome of the East”, with a population larger than that of Lisbon or London.
We walked down to the river, passing through the Viceroy Arch topped with a small statue of Vasco da Gama, built to commemorate the initial Portuguese conquest of Goa.
Yesterday evening we boarded an overnight train to continue our northward journey. While waiting for the train to arrive, 27 year old Helga B…… and her 28 year old husband Christopher M…… walked past. We didn’t speak to them at all but deduced their details from the quirky booking procedure used nationwide. An hour or two before a train arrives, a sheet containing the full name, gender, age, booking class, carriage and berth number for each passenger is put up at the station. As passengers must board quickly within the very short time period the train is stopped at the station, it’s essential to be standing at the correct position when the train arrives. There wouldn’t be time to run several hundred metres along the platform with luggage after the train pulls in. Station signage and a posted train plan enable passengers to stand at exactly the right spot.
Using this info, it’s possible to accurately identify several of the passengers (as we ourselves would easily have been identifiable by others). In this way I amused myself while waiting for our train to come. For their part, friendly stray dogs amused themselves by trotting up and down the platform with me. They seemed to be enjoying my company - much more than I was enjoying theirs. The last thing I wanted was for any of them to lick my legs (not having had rabies shots), so I had to keep a close eye on them all which somewhat degraded my concentration on identifying the passengers. I’m quite confident though that it was Boris Y… aged 64, probably from Russia, standing over there at Coach position 24 chatting to Yvette N… aged 61. Boris didn’t hold his age at all well I thought – he looked more like a man in his mid 70s. Too much Vodka or cigarettes I gratuitously presumed. Probably both. Can you imagine the lather privacy advocates in some other places would work themselves into if such a system was mooted for their platforms? But everyone seems to take it in their stride here – part of the lower need for personal space and privacy I guess.
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