The Goa Report

I'm back, safe and sound, from India!

My holiday in Goa was... interesting. Let's put it this way: if the state of Goa has the lowest population density and the highest per capita GDP of any state in India (which it does), I cannot imagine the overcrowded chaos and the abject poverty that must characterize the rest of the country. Don't get me wrong, there are beautiful beaches, lush jungle, and a thriving tourist party scene; the locals are friendly, there's great food, and the mix of Portuguese colonial history juxtaposed on indigenous South Indian culture creates a really interesting vibe. But I also saw one of the saddest scenes in Goa that I've witnessed in all my travels, on an afternoon when we were having lunch at a beach shack in Anjuna, an area made famous by the "Goa freaks" - hippies from the US and Europe that arrived in the 1960s, set up a rollicking drug and music culture, and basically never left.

As we were eating, a little girl of about 5 or 6 kept coming up and begging for money. She was cute and decently well-dressed and seemed to enjoy the challenge of dodging the restaurant's security guard who tried to shoo her away, so we figured the begging was mostly a show - after all, that's the mantra of travel in the developing world, right? Give to local NGOs, give to international charities, but if you give directly to the kids, you don't know where it's going to go or what kind of a racket they've been forced into or whether you're actually contributing to something that will do more harm than good. And when you hear that line so many times, you start to almost believe that none of the kids you see begging on the street are really hungry - that they're all part of some massive touristploitation scheme, going back home to comfortable beds at night while their parents funnel their misbegotten earnings into drugs or the sex trade or whatever other social problem plagues their given country.

All of which is to say, you get desensitized, right? You stop believing that they're actually begging for money for food to put in their mouths. At least I do. But then the table of tourists next to us left, and the girl immediately materialized along with her brother and her mother, who was holding a very young baby. And before we even realized what was happening they were furiously diving into the leftover food on the table, the kids stuffing their faces with whatever was left and chugging from an open bottle of mineral water, the mom using her fingers to scoop a half-eaten plate of noodles into a silver tiffin, the omnipresent Indian lunch box.

The girl grabbed a glass with a straw and started feeding its contents to the baby, and just then the security guard reappeared, knocking the drink out of the girl's hand and away from the baby because it wasn't juice, it was a half-finished pina colada, flies buzzing around it, warm and melting, coconut milk and cheap rum oozing in the hot Indian sun, discarded by its sated British purchaser and being fed to an infant. As the guard shooed them away they started to retreat but then the mother stopped, noticing some stray noodles trailing out of her tiffin, and tucked them them neatly back inside, carefully tightening the lid on top.

It was sad. It was especially sad in light of the juxtaposition with the Indian friends we were staying with - an big old Goa family, longtime steel and ore magnates who now run a mobile phone software business out of Bangalore and Dubai just for fun, decorate their 4 beachside villas with the work of up-and-coming Indian artists purchased from Sotheby's and Christie's, own a herd of enormous Great Danes who are fed 3 square meals a day by a special servant dedicated just to dog care, and willingly pay the 100% import tax on top of the price of their several foreign cars because they don't want to drive Indian brands.

None of which is to judge at all because they're a great, friendly, warm family, hosted a whole group of us for a week with an amazing amount of hospitality, and probably do more than their fair share for the community around them - certainly more than most tourists do. It's just mind-boggling to be in a country that creates such haves and have-nots.

On lighter notes. The rest of the trip was fun and crazy and full of hijinx and late nights and market trips and sunburns and 6 AM bedtimes and beachside Kingfisher beer the next day. One of the highlights was going to a hilarious drug-fueled late-night rave in the middle of the jungle, where bratty European kids who live in Goa on their parents' bankroll under the dodgy auspices of "learning healing" and "starting a real estate business" gave me my first real insight into what, maybe, the 1960s might have been like. (Don't worry, I didn't partake - watching was funny enough.)

I also managed to be felled by the onset of a massive urinary tract infection AND really bad food poisoning (I know, I know, so cliche... the American who goes to India and gets food poisoning) within about 3 hours of each other. This rendered me pretty much useless for the last few days of our trip and allowed me to have my own krazy/trippy/groovy hallucinatory experience of throwing up so much in rapid succession that at one point, it seemed like the lights in the bathroom were flashing on and off in time with the beat of my racing heart. Drug free!

And that is absolutely all I have to update on. Happy Islamic New Year (this Thursday) and for those of us for whom it is a public holiday (aka... me), happy 3-day weekend!