Falling in the ditch and other tales

It's not often that you find your wife yelling at you for getting into a 6 ft deep ditch to look for one of your slippers, especially when the truth is that merely a second ago, your head hit the ground and you have just started coming to terms with the fact that you have fallen in a ditch perfectly camouflaged with some shrubbery on your way to answer the nature's call.

Your efforts at finding that elusive slipper are only representative of the defense mechanism that has kicked in upon realization of the free fall and not knowing what to do next. You have no clue as to how to explain that though, not to your yelling yet concerned wife, and definitely not to her brother (and his fiance, for extra comfort) who can't make up his mind about what to do first...try to help you out of the ditch or feel amused about the entire situation.

It is also not often that you spend the new year's eve at one of the coolest hangouts in town, an open air club on a hill playing some absolutely fantastic music to an absolutely awesome crowd in a setting that's replete with fireworks, drunk people dancing in the swimming pool (and everywhere else), and absolute strangers wishing you a happy new year (and getting a back-handed push and shove in return).

So yes, you may come back to me and say that you have been there and done that but I am sure you won't have too much to say when I tell you that post this party, you may stand to lose keys to your little rented villa where you had planned to continue the celebrations with some good old Punjabi music and Maggi. Your tongue is likely to be tied even more as you realize that at 4 AM on January 1st, there is hardly any chance of encountering the stray key-maker roaming on the streets or expecting help from the otherwise lovely, nail-clawing, and suspiciously paranoid facilities manager of the villa society.

And God help your chances of speaking ever again as I tell you that not only were we not fortuitous enough for all this, we had to spend six hours sleeping on the villa's tiny little gym's floor, all dressed in our new year party finery...and oh yes, with the Villa's entirely unhelpful guard commenting on our bad luck on the first day of the year, if only to help us see the much obfuscated obvious.

I can almost smile benignly at your slow nodding of the head when you hear of the little spats we had with the local taxi mafia...I know, happens everywhere right, all these tourist places have gone to the dogs, you say! That they have, and spats we did have...some mildly irritating and others almost life-threatening but all part of the game.

It's just that these little spats assume those gigantic proportions in your mind, inching towards top of the mental billboard when they follow something even more interesting that happened just a couple of hours ago. What can be more interesting than a few North Indians getting potentially beaten up by locals, you ask? Well, not much...just that half of the shack we were sitting in got engulfed in fire within minutes and the doped staff and perennially semi-naked firang hut-dwellers started throwing water on open electric wires jutting out from all corners (thankfully, after the fire was doused by some by-standers throwing sand over it).

Well, that's Goa for you!

And oh, we had fun on the beaches too, the complete Christmas-New Year-Goa treatment with foot massages on sun beds, sun sets...one more bewitching than the other, waiting for hours for food, watching waves crash against your table laid out at the beach, guitar next to the roaring sea under the moon, and the occasional hijacking of the DJ at a beach shack party.

GoA - Go Away?

Goa has always been one of those vacation destinations that endear themselves to you not just for what the place has to offer in terms of visual treats but also for the overall experience. Experience, which each one of us looks at as per our own idiosyncrasies, may be composed of myriad facets, some emotional and some circumstantial. However, of all these facets, the local ecosystem plays a big role - the kind of food you can find, the character that the destination's cafes and restaurants hold, the kind of hospitality its hotels offer, and most importantly, the vibe that you get from the locals.

In numerous visits to Goa that most of us have had in the past, I am reasonably certain that its score card has always had a big tick mark on this one...but not any more perhaps? Over the last two years, I have been to this place some 5-6 times and have never had to think twice about the Goa experience - something that has always been taken for granted when it comes to this place. The sea has been the same and the nature still at its beauteous best but there are some things that seem to be changing, though and certainly not for the better.

Over the last two occasions that I have been to Goa, there clearly seems to be a certain negativity in the air. It seems as if Goa is tired of the people that keep coming to its shores, month after month and day after day, season or off-season. With travel having become affordable and something that is part of the middle class budget now, there are all sorts who do travel. At the cost of sounding snobbish and somewhat elitist, there are norms that you need to respect when you travel and which are often not preserved by the amateur traveler.

It is no wonder therefore, to see the discomfort and in some cases, even angst that the locals feel towards such tourists who are careless with how they treat Goa...those who throw garbage in the open, those who bring their road rage infested traffic sense to the place, those who get aggressive at the slightest provocation, those who do not believe in sharing Goa with its actual natives, thinking they own all the beaches and the greens because they have paid for it.

Moreover, if you actually look at the Goa landscape today and compare it with what it was a few years ago, you will also realize that the mainstay of the hospitality industry here, the foreign tourist is slowly doing the vanishing act. From finding foreigners lounging at sun-decks on the Baga beach 4-5 years ago to now seeing them only at off-course beaches either in extreme south (Palolem) or extreme north (Arambol), things have changed and so have the earning capacities of locals who used to cater to this segment of the tourist population and make big margins out of it.

While the locals do understand that such margins can not be made of the not-so-gullible Indian tourist, the grudge they have is not this alone. Once again at the cost of sounding elitist (this time on behalf of the locals), perhaps the Indian tourists are blamed by the Goans for exodus of their foreign counterparts. With cases of hooliganism coming to the fore once too often and things far worse such as lootings, murders, and even rapes forming the news headlines, Goa has not had it easy recently.

Many tourists (Indians and more so, foreigners) have, if not sworn off Goa, been easier with other destinations like the South of India (Kerala and even Sri Lanka) when they make their travel plans. As is true in cases like these, the cause and effect get lost somewhere over time and things that Goans believe have led to this downfall are the ones that they are indulging in themselves now. Out and about to teach a lesson to the boorish Indian tourists who have allegedly brought bad name to Goa, the locals are not sparing anything to use diamonds to cut diamonds.

For a state that depends on tourism for a major portion of its economy, it is an unfortunate set of circumstances, seeing things come to such a head. As the clouds gathered during the Goa Monsoon bring out the violent shades of the sea to the fore, one can only remember the blue and green waters when the weather was calmer. While this cycle will complete its course and once the Monsoon is over, Goa's beaches will again have the hues to calm and soothe rather than those to excite and awe, one wonders if the Goa experience will follow some cycle as well.