Goa: What’s in a Name?
By KorskiYou’d heard about Goa and its hippies and drugs, and you try to imagine what it was like back in the sixties. Drugs were plentiful, and heavy drinking was the norm, and no one had a problem getting laid, and there was plenty of nudity, and there were many a crazy night that rarely ended before morning light on the beach. Then, too, there would have been—would there not?—lots of “serious” talk about good and bad karma and finding one’s true self, getting at One with the Universe.
Young people from all over the West still come to Goa and its many beaches, and in considerable numbers, you hear. The drugs are here, but one has to be careful, and the police are not kind to those they catch. And certainly not as kind as they once were. Not far from where you’re staying in Calangute, the beach, there’s a prison. It’s just over the hill from a five-star hotel. It’s packed with foreigners who took more liberties than they should have. Dealers, but not just dealers, and they’re serving long sentences. These are people who had a quite poor sense of risk assessment, and had not a clue about changing times, in particular the growing wave of conservative middle-class Indians who increasingly populate the beaches of Goa.
You spend a couple of hours in the morning on the streets of Calangute, and on the beach. The beach you find utterly revolting. Garbage lies everywhere—plastic, candy wrappers, newspapers, cans, mineral water bottles, corncobs. What comes to mind are the encampments on Aboriginal stations in the Northern Territory, forgotten towns in the Brazilian outback, the back streets of Guatemala City where you find the two-dollar whores and the pavement sleepers.
Where the sand is dark and wet and soaked, and for another fifty feet or so out into the gentle surf there are Indians—men, women, children—in numbers that you see clustered and clumped at train stations and morning markets, and on the busier streets of Mumbai and Pena and Kolhapar. Numbers like you’ve never seen on the beaches in mid-summer in Southern California. But then human density in India takes on a new meaning, especially when you learn of the incredible cost of real estate in this poor country, and of all the people sleeping ten to a hundred square foot room--if they’re so lucky.
You don’t see a single beach umbrella on a two-hundred yard stretch of beach. There are a few trees, and groups of men in shorts and women in saris parked under them. But everyone else is fully exposed to the very hot morning sun, a tropical sun that by nine o’clock is burning your exposed arms and face and forcing you to seek shelter.
Panning the beach several times from your lofty restaurant chair in shade, you try to guess what the ratio of Indians to Anglos might be. You want to be conservative with your estimate. You put the ratio at 400 to 1.
Walking down some cement steps that meet the light tan sand, your eyes fall on a sign full of things beachgoers are not supposed to do. They are not to spit. They are not to abuse children. They are not to litter. (You laugh a good one and reread this one.) They are not to go swimming if they’ve been drinking. (You assume this one is aimed at foreigners.) They are not to smoke. (You read this as also aimed at foreigners, and as a euphemism that doesn’t exist in some restaurants where large signs read: DON’T SMOKE CANNABIS HERE.) And then at the bottom of this long list--missing to your surprise is a warning about not bathing in the nude—are the words: This area is plastic free. Plastic free!
You step over and around and on top of more plastic and more litter, and you bring to mind a morning in the fall of last year when you and your son went fishing in a beautiful and spotless cove surrounded by a wall of black rock. There was not another human being to be seen. You were a mere two miles from your Southern California home.
The approach to the beach at ten in the morning is an uninviting mass of tightly packed stalls full of junky sunglasses and conches and fist-sized Hindu idol carvings and cheap clothes and bead necklaces and bracelets and restaurants advertising that they’re also bars or pubs. Kitsch everywhere, the universal landscape so loved by tourists.
The approach to the beach at Calangute at eight and nine and ten and eleven in the morning is a highway of groups of eight and twelve and fifteen Indian men and women and children on the way to the beach. The Third World’s new middle class, the upper third of which, you have learned, makes twelve to fourteen thousand dollars a year. Good thing it’s India, these are genuine starvation numbers back home.
Two nights ago you took a hotel at another famous hippie beach to the north, Anjuna by name. Another disgusting garbage dump, nicely complemented by a long row of shouting vendors who tug at you to take a freaky fourteen-earring head shot with your camera, or buy cheap woven cloth, or beads, or two-bit renditions of this or that Hindu god that means absolutely nothing to you.
At Anjuna, or the particular piece of Anjuna that one meets on the short two-block walk from the hotel where you are staying, there’s no beach, only a rocky and ragged shoreline, slapped and pushed by white waves and roiling water the color of iron-rich soil. No bathers to be seen anywhere. Inviting? You gotta be kidding.
At sunset you sit in a raggedly restaurant of cheap Formica tables and randomly colored plastic chairs, a typical restaurant in the tropics, this one with little more than a corrugated iron and thatch roof, with a sitting area big enough to seat sixty or seventy raucous young people. You have a large bottle of Foster’s as night comes on, and you anticipate the dazzling colors on the horizon. There are some nice but hardly spectacular blues and oranges as the sun sets, framed by palm trees and bamboo roof supports.
This is May, the off season, but you’re still surprised that you are the only person in this seaside restaurant. You sit here for over an hour, your mind wandering, drinking, trying to imagine the revelry and conversations you might overhear when the next wave of foreigners in search of their Goan or Indian Nirvana is here.
Fulfilling their young dream. To get laid in India, and in the tantric way, without having an orgasm as orgasms are defined in the West. To get laid by an American or an English or a German, someone of the same skin color, because in India you’re not going to have the pleasure of an Indian woman—this as good a generalization as you can make about a country so large and diverse and about which you still know so little.
Fulfilling their young dream. To enjoy some ganja or Ecstasy or meth, and be damned the laws of India and how they are enforced, this my once-in-a-lifetime Goan adventure. Could I honestly say I have been to Goa and not gotten high?
Fulfilling their young dream. To be able to talk meaningfully about the mystical and magical ways of the East where it is so easy to make oneself whole, and to connect with other humans as you can connect any other place on earth. Only in India! Only in Goa!
Back to Calungute and a hotel as expensive, in off season, as you get in busy Bangkok any old time. Hotels in that marvelous place you playfully call your Southeast Asian base camp, where you can lick the floor, but not here. Where you can have hot water in the shower that never turns cold, but not here. Where there are no cigarette butts lying under the bed, as there are here. Where there are no two-day old take-out box of pastries and crumbs in the hip-high refrigerator sitting under the TV, as there are here. And where the marble floors outside the doors in Bangkok hotels for the same price don’t look like they were last washed two weeks ago and the air conditioner doesn’t sound like a diesel truck without a muffler and the power doesn’t shut off four times in the two hours you’re sitting on the bed with your laptop and trying to put together another small piece of rambling thoughts on your Road to Nowhere.
Night comes to Calungute and you’d like to get a whiff, however small, of exciting Goa, this place that everyone tells you is not really India. It’s open, it’s liberal, it’s different. Calangute must be open and liberal and different, right? There are more signs for bars and pubs in scruffy and dirty and noisy little Calangute than you’ll find in ten square miles in that great industrial and forward looking metropolis called Mumbai.
But there’s a local election to be held in another ten days and in anticipation, to get everyone in the right mindset, all the bars and pubs, without exception, are closing at ten o’clock. Ten o’clock! Fuck me! Bangkok and Jakarta and Manila, and even Hanoi, are just starting to open the doors and get rolling at ten o’clock.
You have a couple of beers at a table that gives you a view onto a fairly busy side street just up from your hotel. You don’t see a single woman or man or couple walk by that strikes you as attractive. They’re fat. They’re poorly dressed. They’re wearing shoes that you seen at heavy construction sites. Are your eyes deceiving me? Is this possible? How many drinks have you had? But then drinks have the opposite effect, don’t they?
Of course, maybe it’s the souring beach experiences that have so colored what you now see. And then too all that Goan legend in the back of your mind, images larger than forty-storey buildings. Yeah, the mind is tricking you! Or...maybe it’s not that after all. It’s your cynicism; there’s just too much that has piled up through the years. It’s your age; you’re not twenty-five and going to get laid by a pretty fat English girl who smokes a pack a day and drinks more than you do. Shit, she won’t even look at you! No, it’s really all about all that time spent in all those other places in Asia where people look good, and smell of sex, and there are plenty of steamy nights, and no shortage of places to meet any carnal or twisted need that comes to mind.
Goa, oh Goa! How could you have done this to me?
Stickman's thoughts:
Very interesting indeed. I like your brutal honesty and frankly, you have just removed this from my list of places to visit.
The author can be contacted at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
