Part 15 . Goa- The original life's a beach..
The first couple of days in Chapora we just walked to the beach, swam, sunbathed and slept a lot. The few people there were a delight, an English couple, two American girls, a French family in a camper van and occasionally a few of the orange crew, who mostly stayed in their rented house with their own grounds.
The third day we realised that the entire Indian family was living in a tiny outhouse because we were renting their main house. While it suited them to earn the money, we were just too uncomfortable with the idea and moved down to a tiny room, right beside the beach, one of 3 situated next to a well and a couple of latrine toilets. The rent for ours was about £1.00 a week....
It was pretty blissful, and a few weeks passed, I completely forgot to celebrate my birthday, no idea what the date was..... timeless and a bit clueless you might say. We mostly went to Vagatore beach and just spent the whole day naked in the sun, amongst like minded folk, discussing the various ashrams people had visited, the different teachings of the various gurus and some of the alternative communes people had stayed on.
Sometimes we’d stay over at Chapora and have morning coffee with the French family, walk up to the fort and in the evenings eat and drink Fenny (coconut spirit, a bit like the Irish poitine but sweeter) or smoke a chillum with neighbours, laying on the beach in front of the coconut palms, staring at the southern sky and building better and kinder worlds than the ones we’d left in the west.
A few notable people stay in my memory from this period, a sweet girl I’ll call Jenny who had been living on Vagator for about three years, quietly spoken and thoughtful. While not classically beautiful she had the kind of plainness that some film stars have, like a perfect canvass for others to embellish, a clothes hanger that made whatever she wore, however ordinary, look special. In some lights, at certain angles magnificently beautiful, but at other times you’d not notice her passing by. It turned out to my surprise that she financed her time in Goa by spending a month each year during the monsoon, working the 5 star hotels in Bombay as an “escort”. Really good company.
There was an older guy, probably mid forties, who had bought a fishing boat to repair and sail, he had given up his life in central London, sold his accounting business following his divorce and had almost given up on life, we went sailing with him a few times. I can’t really describe the sensation of hitting the horizon, out of site of land, in the primitive dug out with a single sail, under a perfectly blue sky surrounded by the Indian ocean, diving off the boat to swim.
Occasionally different combinations of us would walk the overgrown paths past the fort and across to the fishing port, joining the fisherman in their local cafe and eating simple Goan variations of classic Indian food, drink the odd beer and club together for a bottle of Fenny (under the counter only) to share over a few days when we got back. Once returning we took a wrong path and a group of kids chased after us waving their hands and making hissing noises, forcing us back along the path to take the right route, apparently a well known Cobra nesting site. You’d often see smaller snakes slither off the path as you went by and scorpions were common in the vegetation, you’d sometimes see quite large ones on the beach, but they’d be soon picked off by birds or monkeys.
The latrine toilets need some description too. Huts made from palm leaves with a piece of wood or tree trunk about a foot off the ground, over a deep ditch. The ditch, about 4 foot deep would run for a fair distance and always ended up in an enclosure for pigs, local people would throw their discarded food waste, peelings and other organic matter into the trench as well as the bodily waste that emptied into it from the toilets, the pigs would feed on the whole lot, another very good reason not to eat meat, I thought. They were legendary, ‘the shit pigs of Goa’.
The well water was crystal clear and cool, when the sun shone directly down the long shaft you could occasionally see a water snake following the water course. It was after Christmas that we decided to take a trip across southern India to Pondicherry, via a couple of Ashrams that we’d been told about. We were a bit loathe to leave and decided to come back for another couple of weeks of life on the beach before heading north for the holy city of Banares and on north again to Nepal.
Three photos courtesy of Ase Forder
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