Goa

  Vagator, Goa, India
Monday, February 19, 2007

Still in Goa - Vagator beach. Have managed to get ourselves a brand new Royal Enfield after test riding a few bikes that were not up to scratch. We originally planned to be on the road by now touring around. As usual in India , everything takes twice as long as you think!
We need to arrange to have a luggage rack fitted to the bike before we can head off, this will happen next Tuesday - if all goes to plan.

Vagator beach

beach cow 2

Vagator Beach from Headland

Karen looking from the fort on the headland

I'm now able to type with two hands - one hand was just too frustrating, so Tim has been typing the journal to date. My wrist is feeling much better after lots of exercising and i'm looking forward to losing the cast in a couple of weeks.

Luckily I fit in here with a broken arm, just like in Thailand there are wounded tourists everywhere! Motorbikes and inexperienced riders don't mix. I would never ride here - too many obstacles and the road conditions can be bad - luckily Tim is a safe rider! There's the mentality that it's ok for Westerners to ride around with small children on their scooters/motorbikes. I can understand locals do this out of necessity, but it just seems to be another way to cultivate an image for free thinking hippy parents. I wonder how free thinking they'd be if they had to peel their 3 year old off the tar mac??

Anyway, we have been in Goa a week today and enjoying the relaxation,  

Sunset beer

especially as we know that chilling out will be a thing of the past when we leave the Goan border! We've read masses of books already. Here's a taste of what else we have been up to...

On hiring an Enfield...

Royal Enfield Thunderbird 350cc

 

Street bar Goa

Tim got on the case the very day we arrived. He was shown two Bullets - shit heaps, both had clutches that were slipping and numerous other mechanical ailments. One of the local 'jack of all trades' guys who hangs around in the street managed to find a 'Thunderbird' that in comparison looked pretty good. We negotiated a price and took the bike for a month rental, but soon after discovered that there is a new law in Goa requiring tourists to ride with yellow 'tourist plates'. We had plates that weren't even Goan and certainly weren't yellow. Besides this we later discovered that the indicator, stop light and horn (most important of all) were not in working order. We cursed our luck and went looking for our man. He was predictably nowhere to be found but i managed to extract his mobile phone number from one of his mates. We rang and found him amongst the crowd watching cricket in Goa's main town. 'No problem.OK, OK' was the only response we elicited.

Two days later, after strained waiting and not riding the bike for fear of  a fine/confiscation, we managed to catch up with the guy. Surprisingly he was willing to give us our money back, minus the days we had the (stationary) bike. The owner of the bike was not so keen to do do the honourable thing and pleaded that he would pay any fines if we kept the receipt! We nearly laughed in his face, as most likely we would be stranded somewhere on the road with no bike and our wallet a lot lighter! Eventually we got our cash back and breathed a sigh of relief.

As luck has it our man came up with another bike two days later - another 'Thunderbird' 350cc, but brand spanking new with only 2000kms on the clock. Success! We got a good deal and can't believe our luck, though now we're afraid of scratching the damn thing! So we've been cruising around the gorgeous back lanes of Goa and have already managed to buy some ridiculously unsafe helmets which fit in with the whole 'Thunderbird' theme as they make us look like puppet pilots! We're now scouring spare parts shops for a luggage rack as we want to ride to South Goa in the next couple of days.

Bar - what a great parking spot!

On the Goan Crowd...
Last time we were here it was positively dead. Although all the sellers are bemoaning how quiet it is now that the Christmas rush is over, it seems busy to us. The sellers also say that there is less of a crowd (especially the much despised Israelis) because of recent bomb threats, but now the police presence has gone and it seems to be largely forgotten. We have been shocked to find that the new much despised brand of tourist here is now the Russians! Their surliness is not admired by the locals, particularly the beach sellers who we have been chatting to quite a bit.

On the first day we attracted one seller in particular who talked to us for a good while before trying to sell us anything. She sweet talked Tim into paying an extortionate amount for some beads, I could only laugh when he asked me to take over the haggling! He is now wearing them as a 'badge of stupidity'!! Chatting with these girls is really entertaining and they don't take any shit from the tourists - Indian or foreign. One girl walks around inviting sunbathers to look at her 'expensive rubbish', one has insulting swearing matches with a very tanned German guy everyday (but always walks away with a cheeky grin on her face!), another says 'hello darling' in a gushing English accent to all the girls!! They all treat the Indian men tourists with sheer derision, scowling at them!!

On our first day we walked the length of the beach and sat down for a drink. On one side was a group of ageing hippies (over 60) smoking hash like it was going out of fashion. How have their lungs and brains survived the last 40 or so years i will never know!! They made us feel positively conservative! On the other side of us a group of 30-something dreadlocked and tie-dyed Europeans dancing in the afternoon sun with those in the restaurants as an audience. In typical raver style they were trotting and pawing the floor possessed by the never ending psy trance pumping from one of the cafes. The girl was the most absurd thing i'd ever seen ... she kept breaking into ballet moves frantically running this way and that across the sand pulling at an imaginary rope - like an awful version of Kate Bush!! I looked around at the locals laughing and slapping their knees at the free entertainment.

Like in so many tourist places there is such a clash of cultures here: male Indian tourists (drinking red wine straight from the bottle) far more interested in touring the rows of topless women than paying any attention to the Arabian Sea (some even with binoculars for a more intimate experience!); Indian families picnicking under the coconut palms amongst heaps of rubbish; a trashed English geezer shouting at the poor little nut seller for no reason; 'multi cuisine' restaurants where it's hard to find any Indian food ... the list goes on. If this was your only experience of Westerners, you would think they all had very untidy hair, smoked copious amounts of hash, were extremely rude and lazy, wore only loose fitting lairy clothing and were generally debaucherous- and i'm sure that's what many of the Indians think!! We sat in a Tibetan restaurant one night and were the only people without dreadlocks and the various other accouterments of hippydom. I just want to know what these people do for a living! Anyway, don't get me wrong, I'm quite aware that we are dumb ass tourists too - but apparently from the goretex rather than tie-dye brigade!