The Beach Of A Thousand Dogs

First off, congratulations to Ben and Mandy on the birth of their daughter Rose - she was born on the 9th of April, and Dan and I wish them all the best for the future.

And so we arrived in Goa - a part of India I had pegged as somewhere to laze around on sun drenched beaches, clear my mind and not do very much. I am very pleased to report that it lives up to my expectations totally - even if Palolem is clearly not the secluded paradise it once might have been (it's very much geared towards tourists now, I get the feeling it would have been very different ten years ago). We stayed in a hut on the beach - basic, but perfectly alright for our needs. When I say basic, I don't mean the sweaty concrete walls of a Kochi hellhole, but a wooden platform on stilts with a bamboo roof. The entrance is right on the Arabian sea, and it backs onto a pig farm. Perfect.

The journey there was notable only for the bus ride (which was something like being on the back of a teenage kangaroo at it's first Green Day concert - several times I was suspended in mid air for a few seconds before coming down suddenly and sitting on my testicles). Poor old Jaz was looking a bit green, as we'd gone nuts for booze the night before after meeting some other English people. Brendon and James were two blokes from Devon, Brendon being a professional Rugby player with a fine array of drinking yarns. We now have some speakers to listen to music with, and the age difference between us and Jaz was momentarily highlighted with our choice of music. Dan and I crashed about like lunatics listening to jangly early-90s indie, Jaz looked unimpressed.


Note the audiophile positioning of the speakers. Nothing's too good for us.












The beach was lovely, despite the fact that it seemed to be a gathering point for all the stray dogs in the area, and we were kept company on a morning run along the beach by a load of snapping canine interlopers. A few days exercise and decent food made all the difference, the rest of the time being spent careening around the Goan countryside on bikes and playing drums. The last two days have been spent hanging around Mumbai again, and we bid farewell to Jaz this morning. It was awesome travelling around with her, and she will certainly be missed - if you're reading this Jaz, hope to see you in Thailand ! I hope all our stupid jokes and improvised skits of Sylester Stallone naming his daughter Zucchini didn't drive you too nuts.

Happily we managed to find a music shop that would send on some instruments and books to the Emmanuel Orphanage - I only hope that they get there in one piece (nagging feeling that they might not - there was a bit of a language barrier in getting the point across that we didn't want to take them with us). My parents will probably pleased to know that the language barrier precluded an attempt to ship international. My advice is to laugh it up while they can, because buying a sitar and drone box is priority Numero Uno on my return.

The drive in the Kool Cab (meaning 'leopard skin seat covers') provided a reminder of the sobering poverty that greeted us on our entry to Mumbai. Miles upon miles of thrown together shelters, most stacked two high spilling onto nerve-jarring roads of speeding taxis under the gaze of grinning models on billboards, hawking the latest designer shirts and life insurance. Children run around in the stagnant water and slide gleefully on their bellies on the ubiquitous piles of dirt dug from unfinished road works. I can only imagine what happens around the time of the monsoon, most of the shelters being constructed out of odd planks of wood and torn plastic sheeting - I've no idea how many people live in these areas, and without wanting to sound naive or patronising, how they cope on a day to day basis with the disease and misery that comes of living in such an environment.

Now here's some more inane photos of us that didn't fit elsewhere :


I put this up under duress from Jaz. It's one of her favourite photos - my opinion is that we look like a pair of tools.











... divorced the same day.