Goa, goa, gone...

Ok – so I have pretty much been off the radar for a while and for that I apologise – my little trip to Goa wasn’t very technologically compatible!

So travelling halfway across India - sounds pretty easy… well at least I could never write about it being boring!

As you have no doubt already read my little rant over the nightmare of obtaining any sort of travel tickets in India (and if you haven’t - shame on you!) you will probably understand why I did not have much hope for my coach trip. When I saw the vehicle I was meant to spend the night travelling in what little hope I had was decimated! The ‘coach’ was, to be honest a rough amalgamation of dented and twisted metal that somehow resembled a giant, monstrous iron coffin – and sat inside it definitely felt like it! Basically I was not feeling at my most confident ever… But somehow I survived the mad dash to Bangalore alive – with me not getting a single wink of sleep all night nor allowing my knuckles to relax their tight white grip on the armrest that was brought on by the manic speeds and downright mad near crashes. When we arrived at Bangalore I quickly found the nearest park and passed out on a bench and let myself crash from a night spent completely pumped up on adrenaline.

After spending a very uneventful day in the city of Bangalore sat on a supposedly holy rock and looking at a few trees I decided that my luggage was too big – this was also in small part due to, like an atom bomb dropped on a large city, my bag had actually exploded at the seams and created a large sprawl of my belongings all over the nearby vicinity. After a few generous donations from my pack to any lucky passers by and my equipment halved I managed to, with some ingenious action with a needle and some dental floss (the most amazing invention in existence), repair my bag to something of its former shape – with the added benefit of it now smelling minty fresh – and I hopped onto my next coach which was the sleeper bus to Goa.

Now sleeper buses are a very novel idea to someone like me; I am a boy who has spent the majority of any of my previous long coach trips having teachers checking and making sure I’m safely buckled in. On a sleeper bus you don’t have a seat belt, in fact you don’t even have a seat – you have a small, open shelf to curl up on… well most Indians don’t have to in fact curl up but me with my ‘six foot whatever’ height I certainly did! The beds are bunks two high and were generally the size of a small child’s bed. This would still have been alright except for the fact Goa is so busy at new years that they had to double up passengers - for me this meant squeezing up with a French backpacker, who was actually quite a nice guy, and his guitar. Travelling with him, on the bunk below were a few of his mates, we all got on famously and it ended up with us splitting an apartment for a few days at a costal town named Calangute.

Despite enjoying the company, I was not particularly fond of the beach which had all the charm and energy of an Essex girl’s Mediterranean-island hen party on speed – and not in a good way!! There was always about 57 different songs blasting all at you and the locals were trying to scam you out of every penny you had… I eventually decided to head north to a beach that was said to be a place to chill out from all the parties in the area I currently inhabited – and I am so glad I did! I managed (after an excruciating hour-long motor bike trip with my massive pack on my back) to stumble across this little bohemian village paradise; it was a place where everyone was relaxed, the sun setting over the sea was celebrated every night by an acoustic jam session on the postcard-perfect palm fringed bay and, most importantly, the beer was extremely reasonable - being priced at only about 40p a bottle!!!

After stumbling about for a bit I managed to find this gorgeous little guest house, which was a cosy little place run by one of the best cooks I have ever met! It even had the added benefit of food available 24/7 – one night about 2 minutes after describing in passing the delicious virtues of a perfectly crispy potato wedge at about 3:30 in the morn, there was a whole massive tray full of them under my nose in varying spices and dips! The people who occupied the guesthouse were also completely and totally bonkers – one resident was an older Dutch hippy with a voice in his head named ‘Jo’, ninja boots on his feet and a squirrel tail duck taped to his hat…

And so eventually, with one of the oddest groups of people I have ever encountered, I passed the bell tolling New Year in complete and absolute paradise – I even had a few Scots there to give a crowd-gathering, rip-roaring rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne!!!’

And getting back - how was that you ask? Well with a some help from a little know-how, some of that cheap beer and a few sleeping tablets (obviously not together!) the 24h direct return coach trip was a breeze!

I hope you all have a brilliant new year – I have a good feeling about 2010…

Waitlist...................................

OK, now i actually have several excuses for why its taken so long to publish a new post - these range from sporadic Internet connection, the worst power design in a building EVER and the fact that I just had my birthday so I had to 'ahem' celebrate in the Indian family fun sober way!

But seriously I have also spent the last 17 days stuck inside of the local 'Railways of India' corp ticket office... This is due to me deciding i was much to cozy and lazy here so i have completely changed my January schedule. Originally this consisted of me going to a different boys town and generally hanging round Chennai a bit longer but I decided to something a bit different, how i do not know though - I have somehow conveniently forgotten to work that bit out yet... but one part I know have decided (as with every other backpacker in the entirety of south Asia) to head to Goa for new years... if you haven't heard it is famous for its parties (esp. new year and on full moons - the full moon this year happens to be on the 31st - double party!!), it also has some of the best beaches in the world and is within a days travel from me - or so I thought...

I was impressed with myself as i walked into the ticket office on the morning of the 9Th of November for being so organised and early in booking a ticket... the hour long queue seemed like minutes and I didn't even notice the incorrect English on the reservation sheet... then I got to the lady at the counter and handed in the sheet thinking how wonderfully simple India is...

I first got the impression that this wouldn't be so easy when the lady opened her mouth and started talking with one of the thickest Indian accents I have ever heard - and it didn't help that she was only whispering over what i was beginning to notice was a more of a mad angry mob than a queue. I told her that 'I wanted to go from Chennai to Goa - though not on the direct train but through Bangalore' this was because the direct train only leaves once a week and it was leaving to early... She promptly spent the next ten minutes trying to book me on the direct train , (O.k. - I know it would be very easy to blame me here by saying she probably couldn't understand my accent, but I had handed her a sheet with the exact itinerary of what I wanted) - when I pointed this out she then spent ten minutes undoing everything before typing it back in and ending up with the same direct train... as soon as she realised this she told me I had filled the form out incorrectly and she started helping the customer next to me. After four more attempts at filling out the form she finally accepted it (I only actually filled out two forms - the one that in the end she accepted was the same one she had turned down - I just gave it to her again without her realising)

Eventually she worked out that a if a man wants to get from point A to point B but there aren't any direct trains he can connect through point C (point C being a place nicely in the middle of point A and B)... five minutes later it had even clicked into place that Point A: Chennai B: Goa C: Bangalore, a few bits of data entered in and BAM - a result!!! I would be wait-listed...

It turns out that whilst India has a population of about a billion people they actually have the rail capacity of Luxembourg. The trains are apparently so few and far between that to actually get some of them you have to tell your mum to start queueing before you have even left the womb... it is however very hit and miss because some trains fill up randomly and with no rhyme nor reason why there was a sudden boom in tickets...

so we checked about 37 different routes to Goa through the most roundabout ways possible all of them either impossible (ending up spending 3 days waiting in a rice paddy in the middle of nowhere) or *Tada* wait-listed behind 200 other people - One pretty major part of the problem is that there is a quota on the amount of foreigners on a train. It's obvious though if you think about it - too many white people in one place - we might break out into an impromptu game of golf...

So in the face of hoping that 200 people spontaneously decide not to go on that new years holiday trip I just did what any sensible person would have done - I walked out, drove home, logged on, had a cup of tea and booked me an overnight coach ticket on the world wide web...


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