The first time I went to India, the friend of the family I was supposed to stay with died just before I arrived. I didn’t want to intrude on their grieving, so I took my shit to the train station nearest Mumbai International Airport and bought a ticket to a place that people went to the most, per the gentleman at the counter. That place was called Goa and this is about the time I went there.
So, the trip to Goa started with a days-long train ride wherein I wracked up my second ‘getting groped by a strange man’ experience. I also used a Turkish toilet for the first time. I’d never before taken a shit which could be measured in miles traveled on the ground. But here I am and there the shit was. This time was also the longest I’ve ever gone without eating. 3 days. I wasn’t even hungry by the time I got where I was going. And that’s not accounting for the nauseating bus ride from the train station terminus to Goa itself. I will tell you that the curried rice was some of the best food I’ve ever had. It’s weird to think how many people go hungry now and how many people throughout human history have gone hungry and I had never gone for more than 24 hours without food up to that point.
Anyway, I rented the stilted hut above for 2 weeks and languished on the beach where they filmed Broke Down Palace. The hut had fleas, which sucked. That meant that I had fleas. A Canadian told me that the fleas were dog fleas and would die after feeding on my acidic human blood. He made that shit up. I believed it until I checked on it a year later. That Canadian’s name was Dusty Rhodes.
It’s weird; I hung out with a group of people for a lot of this trip, but I don’t think any of them liked me. They tolerated me, which was nice. I can’t say I’ve ever been moved by the desire to find any of them, either.
The two German girls was cool. There was also this American girl who had a staph infection. That’s about all I remember. I wasn’t much fun; I don’t drink and that’s all there was to do at night on the beach. It’s weird to think that for two weeks I knew these people and then they, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. The world is so big and the parts I see are so small. That’s true for all of us, though. And for them regarding me. Life’s a funny old thing.
I did swim to a terraced monkey island where I almost died (again, not the first or last time on this trip). Also of mention is the fact that my foot was bleeding quite a bit during my swim and there were sharks in the water. I sometimes wonder if I’m not just a version of me that hasn’t died any one of the times I was supposed to die; like I port into the version of me that didn’t die in those moments just before I punch my ticket. That’s just some ego-centrism, though. If I am a version of myself, I’m not the saved version, I’m just the continuous version that didn’t die. But, again, that’s not possible. You know when people talk about the multi-verse and how every ‘decision’ or option branches the universe? That’s super ego-centric. As if the fucking universe- THE UNIVERSE- dumps energy into duplicating the entirety of the cosmos every time you make a fucking decision or do or don’t trip on a rock or whatever. No, that multi-verse shit can’t be possible. It’d violate the law of conservation of mass and energy. And it would make all of us way more important than we could ever possibly be in the scheme of things.
On an unrelated note, I surreptitiously watched a pirate on this trip in a cafe. Dude had a peg leg and an eye patch. He was grizzled. Spoke barely passing English. Totally legit. He was trying to get some kids to rent his services for a ride to Monkey Island. That’s where I got the idea to swim out there. If I were to have kids, I’d definitely make sure they eschewed pirates and their words. Never take advice from someone with a missing eye and a peg leg; they’ve already made some bad decisions. Unless the advice is how to win a one-legged race with one eye covered. Then they know of what they speak.
I tried to befriend some beach dogs, but they were mangier than was safe to associate with. The cows were sweet and sufficiently friendly to pet and connect with, though. I don’t get how people are okay murdering cows and eating them. Seems like a dick move. Cows are chill.
Eventually, I had to make my way BACK to Mumbai. This was after emptying a buy/sell/trade library of every single James Bond book and a really good translation of the Arthurian legend. A beach is a good place to read. I also re-read Faith of a Heretic on this beach. I wrote a lot about it. I forgot about that until just now. So, back on the bus and to Mumbai International.
The bus ride back to the train station was the worst vehicular experience I’ve ever had. I’d never been car sick before. I thought I was going to ralph multiple times. No one would give me a seat and people kept slipping into seats as I was about to sit down. Joke would have been on them; me standing hurls on a 300 degree plane roughly 6 feet off the floor of the bus. If you do the math, they all would have gotten slimed. I didn’t puke, though. And I learned something about myself. I can not puke sometimes. No joke, not counting the time I had spinal shingles, I’ve puked maybe 6 times my entire life. From the age of 15 on, I mean. I don’t remember baby pukes.
I got to the airport and flew to Vietnam; this was the first time I went to Vietnam. It was wild. Not much to say about it. I experienced the first of many VN traffic jams I’ve experienced in my lifetime. Little did I know, sitting in that people pile in 2002, that I’d be living in VN in a handful of years.
That’s another blog.