Goa and Gorkana

"I'll be telling this with a sigh, ages and ages hence"


My coworkers suggested a kickback at my apartment the night before our 6 am flight. Last minute packing consisted of throwing clothes in my backpack. At 3 am the 12 of us drove to the airport for our flight to Goa, on the coast of the Arabian Sea, south of Mumbai.  At the airport we loaded into a Traveler van and followed the coast to our stay, a homestay just off of Baga beach, one of the main beaches in the state known for all night beach parties on long stretches of white sand under swaying coconut trees.

Goa is an anomaly in India. Though Bangalore is considered one of the most Western cities in India, “Pub City,” though bars are ordered to close at 11 pm, the beach territory of Goa caters to the flocking tourists that sustain it. As a result, the police, normally dismissive bribe hungry overfed men in khakis, are on their beat to protect the tourists from themselves and the elements that prey on them. And the Russians. Goa is their Caribbean vacation. I had read somewhere of how the Russian mob and tourist packagers discovered Goa a few decades back, and since fortified their hold over the once easy breezy sands. They brought and bought clubs, hotels and attractions, and controlled all the elements for losing control, creating a Vegas on the beach. Together this eccentric state was a mix of Red Russians (I mean this because they were sunburn, nothing else), Indians selling beach trinkets and marketing tattoo shops on every corner, and all night and day beach shacks blasting Bollywood hits.  

My first swim in the Arabian Sea. The water was brown and with salinity like nothing I had ever tasted before. To find shells I just closed my eyes and used my hands to scour the bottoms, looking near the sand bars. I found one and in feeling it, something crawled out of it and felt me back. I immediately dropped it. And on the shore, starfish and hermit crabs in the spirally shells washed past your feet with each receding wave.

During the days we went swimming and returned at night when the shacks put tables on the sand with candles for dinner and picked from the catch of the day. While our seafood dinners were prepared we were visited by all sorts of people walking the beach offering head massages, tattoos, and fresh pineapples. On our first night there, with but an hour sleep from the night before, we went to an Indian club. That was interesting. The next day we headed to Old Goa, the former capital of the Portuguese colony. Through narrow streets and under the shade of trees, we rode past churches in ruin on our mopeds.

Our visit to Goa coincided with the display of St. Francis Xavier’s body every ten years in one of the churches. I believe the intended effect was aiming for something of reverence and awe, and obediently felt some of that too, but also a curiosity and revulsion when looking at a 500 year old saint’s body.

That night my friends had me try the local liquor of fermented cashews and another, err interesting night ensued.

And as days on the beach with too much sun and little sleep do, the days blended together. We slept in and stayed up late. On our last day we took the scooters to Anjuna beach for the weekly market where locals and people that were once tourists sold to tourists. In the parking lot, ear cleaners from the street greeted everyone getting off their bikes with their metal picks and waist bands that held their cleaning oils. I have grown accustom to politely declining unwanted sellers, and for the persistent ones that followed, ignoring them. These simply came up to you when you weren’t paying attention and started examining your ears with their hands and prodding you with their metal cleaners, to which I first shocked then laughed, had to push away. One Russian man in the same predicament turned red and began yelling, sending the people around him laughing even more.

We made our way to Vagator after, and climbed the hill to the ruins of a Portuguese fort atop the bluff that overlooked the mouth of a river flowing into the Arabian Sea. The hillside was strewn with the same red and black porous rocks that made up the natural beach walls, the same rock of the old Basilica and fort we approached. I sat on the ramparts of the old walls and watched the sunset. The first sunset I had ever seen over an ocean that wasn’t the Pacific. A whole 12 hours ahead of all those back home sleeping, and I imagined them soon waking to the same sun I was seeing now dip into the Arabian sea.

The next day, Thanksgiving, I ditched my flight back home. My coworkers tried to talk me out of it. They saw that after a week of Goa I was exhausted. But I had stumbled upon an article about this isolated beach gem south of Goa called Gorkana and decided I had to go see.  I had only looked at it from a map and misjudged the distance. I be there in 3 hours I figured. Three buses later and almost 8 hours down the coast shouldering the Arabian sea and Western Ghats, the bus came to a halt in the last stop in Gorkana village and I figured it was as a good as time as any to get the hell off. I had been sitting on the window watching the passing seaports and fishing towns and ended the trip with a sunburn on one side of my face, a two-faced look.

I hadn’t eaten much all day except local cashews I bought before leaving Goa and the fruit I purchased from the bus windows from women who swarmed the bus when it stopped long enough in the villages we passed to extend offerings of plantains, pomegranates and oranges.

On the ride down I became aware of an incredible body ache I was having. I attributed it to peculiar arraignment I found myself in on one stretch of the trip where the crowd of the bus forced me into my seat before I could take of my bag and I was squeezed in a corner. But as soon as I got off the bus it hit me again, and harder. I planned to get a ride with the Chilean backpackers I had met on the bus, but I realized I needed to get moving. It was a 9km ride from the village to the coastal bluffs, through the corridors of the village up the dirt roads to the untouched hills that spilled into the ocean.

From the bluffs I put on my pack and made my way down the rocks. As soon as I hit the sand something happened. I was having trouble breathing.

Maybe my straps were too tight. I dropped my bag on the sand, when I realized I was having an asthma attack. I couldn’t even stand. So I too dropped to the sand, hand clutching my chest. The sun was going down. I needed to find a vacant beach hut on Om beach and soon. Each deep breath sent me coughing and a pain ripping through my chest and head. I grabbed my bags and in shallow hauls, kept moving. My arms were getting tingling.

I struggled to formulate sentences and inquire for an empty beach hut. I finally found an owner with one and as soon as he opened the door, I walked in, dropped my bags and sat up in the bed.  Under the mosquito net I turned on my cell phone for the first time since LA to notify my mom and college roommate of four years I was having an asthma attack. First one in almost five years, but I knew the symptoms too well.

And I knew I had to spend the night there. I was a 2km hike to a 9km service road to a village hours away from a main city. I had to relax as best as I could. Thankfully I packed an emergency inhaler.

This was my 7^th Thanksgiving away from home, first alone. I thought of all my friends and family and their very different Thanksgivings, far from being alone having an asthma attack in some isolated beach hut. And my very different Thanksgiving last year. At first this made me resentful, I was cursing my stubbornness and curiosity that got me into this situation. I was alone except for a monkey overhead of the hut keeping me up. So in the middle of the night in just my jeans I moved my stuff to another hut closer to the beach. And then I did something a little more productive, thinking about the things I was thankful for. And for the first time since August, fell asleep to the sound of the waves.

I woke up to the sounds of the roosters roaming outside my beach hut. After muesli and a mango lassi, I took a swim in the sea. In August I spent a lot of time at the beach, in the weeks leading up to leaving for India. On one of those days I went with some friends, days before some of us were leaving for school, work, some of us not knowing we would soon leave. I was in my favorite cove. With goggles, I swam out and kept going down to the bottom, turning around and kicking off. As I approached on one dive and was about to touch the bottom, the sand shook up right my face and a stingray the size of dinner plate came up and darted past me. I remember spending the rest of the day swimming around the cove with my friends, bobbing in the waves, listening underwater to the waves run over the pebbles, utterly content.

Only this time there were no rays, only gentle slow turtles. I felt so rejuvenated after the swim I almost convinced myself I didn’t need to leave today to see a doc. For the first time since getting to this secluded beach paradise I felt on the same wavelength as the backpacking couples around me. Lounging in the sand, playing Frisbee with locals, and swimming together. That has always been my definition of perfection, swimming in the ocean with someone you love. And despite the coughs and shallow breathes, I managed a nap on the beach. Waking up I went to a shack and had red snapper fish for lunch. “Stay for dinner and the fishermen promised me king fish” said the cook. I agreed, but knowing I had to leave that the beach before sunset.

I packed up my bags and left after my late lunch, stopping along beach several times to breath. I stopped a French couple to take my picture since I hadn’t had any of myself before I left. The protective lens somehow shattered on the bus ride here, and catching the sun, casts a tear down each shot. I took pictures as I walked, knowing I had seen the most beautiful beach I had ever seen in my life, and though my stay was shorter and unlike what I imagined it to be, I might not ever see it again.

At the top of the bluff, out of breath and coughing, without the usual verbal arraignments, I jumped into the tuktuk and agreed to whatever price it took to get to the village and await the 10 hour sleeper bus to Bangalore. While waiting for the bus I figured it was as good of time as any to self medicate. The cities and villages of India have medical shops on each corner, some Ayurvedic natural medicinal and other pharmaceutical. No need for a prescription or doctor’s note. I walked up to one and conversed in a cough and pointed to my chest and was handled a bottle of something. With no legible instructions, I drank some as I boarded the overnight sleeper bus to Bangalore.    

With my bag at my feet, the scent of the incense in the driver’s cabin drifting through the body of the bus mixing with the mountain air of the Western Ghats, I lay on my lower cot with the windows open and watched the stars on my way to Bangalore. And but for the brief stops picking up passengers in the dead of night at crossroads and train tracks, the medicine knocked me out. I made it to Bangalore and the hospital got a breathing treatment for the first time in five years, rested and recovered.

And I kept thinking for what I was thankful for. My niece, my grandmas. The power of support coming from all my friends and family back home, and how in turn I will share them such stories. And my parents, to witness not just their love, but a bond of commitment and communication, and how those two things gift a lifetime of shared moments borne of sacrifice, raising a family, and giving to the other continually. I’m thankful for the ocean, for being big enough to take all of my worries and thoughts and give me serenity and ecstasy in return. I’m thankful for my coworkers turned friends, who help me order food, who grab me by the arm and lead my across streets while I cross oblivious to cars I assume will stop. Who show me their homes, answer my silly questions, introduce me to their children, share their stories. I’m thankful for a job that gives me this opportunity. I’m thankful for cilantro in Indian food. I’m thankful for trains. I’m thankful for elephants. I'm thankful its December and I have a tan (Arabian sea tans look quite good on me). I’m thankful for India tapping into and indulging my politico, spiritual and nerdy history sides. And I’m thankful to be able to move. Thankful to breathe. And yes I am even thankful for my stubbornness and curiosity.