Sri Lanka - Death of a TravelBlog

So, it would seem that traveling with company has indeed affected my ability to maintain a travel blog.
Despite having easy access to the facility via my iPhone, I wrote absolutely nothing throughout the 3 weeks of our trip.
I attribute this to the fact that the main source of my writings in the past - my over-indulged imagination and relentless inner monologue - was in this case channeled into actual conversation and interaction with another person.
It seems a pity that I was less inspired to write on this particular occasion, but it doesn't mean I still won't in the future.

Sri Lanka 2011

A few things have changed since my last blog entry 3 years ago, that will undoubtedly effect the writings that I post on my next journey;
1 - I now have an iPhone. This means blogging can be done anywhere, anywhen, and uploaded without having to spend hours furtively typing in all-night Internet cafes.
2 - I am older and wiser. Clearly.
3 - I will be travelling with my gorgeous girlfriend, Hannah. I imagine this will have the effect of making my writings shorter, more sporadic, and considerably less self-indulgent and fantastical. A travelling companion could also be considered a witness, so to avoid any future dinner-party confrontations, I shall have to be much less casual in my relation to reality this time round.
Hmmm... Interesting. Here goes:

Hampi - Part 1, Boulders

I arrived in Hampi the next morning, a little groggy, but alive.
Hampi is famous for its temples and its boulders and has plenty of both.
After the routine navigation of the chaotic bus-station, i boarded a small ferry and crossed the river to what i understood to be the less hectic side of town.
Having just left the relatively relaxing and chilled beaches of Goa, I was reluctant to throw myself immediately back into the potential stress and carnage of Indian street life.
The young boy manning the boat came round to collect money from us and said loudly that the last boat would be leaving at 6:30pm. There was no other way to cross the river - no bridges yet - and although the water looked swimable and the river was certainly not wide, someone had drowned the previous week trying to get back to their hotel late at night.
It looked like I would be on this bank for much of the day.

I got myself settled in my new hostel.
I had been warned off it by one of the locals who said that it was full of Israelis, but it didn't particularly bother me, and there didn't seem to be that many anyway.
It was still early morning, so I immediately hired a motorbike and took to the roads for the day. I had been told there was a beautiful reservoir that was good for swimming, and plenty of temples and boulders to look at, so set off on my newly acquired Yamaha to see what i could see.
I found a temple and climbed a nearby rocky outcrop to take in the view.
It appeared as though Hampi, as an area, was actually quite flat. It was, aside from these randomly scattered groups of huge, round granite rocks. They were distributed almost as if they were colossal grains of sand, sprinkled from above - some had collected in clumps, some balanced precariously on one another, and some stood alone. I figured that they must have some sort of geological reason for being, possibly to do with glaciers, but decided not to think about it too much - looking back on my geography classes always gives me an uneasy feeling.
They were breathtaking, and from my elevated position, despite the humidity diffusing the distant landscape, i could see for miles.

I decided that it was a good day for a swim.
I hadn't been diving properly since my accident in Vietnam over a year ago, and wanted to experience the sensation of jumping into water from a great height again. More than that, I wanted to see how I would react when confronted with the sight of water from high above and whether I would be scared or not. Diving is always something I have enjoyed immensely, and I decided that if it came to it, and I felt uncomfortable, I would confront my fear and dive anyway, pushing myself over the edge if i had to.
Experiences are not all there to be learnt from, after all, some should just be forgotten. I just had to find a safe spot.
I found the reservoir without much difficulty, but although i had been told lots of people swam there, it appeared deserted. I stood for a while on a large boulder that overlooked the water and considered my options. I was weighing it up in my head - the fact that no-one else was swimming, the fact that i had no idea how deep the water was, the fact that I could see no direct way back out of the water again, the fact that actually it really didn't look that inviting anyway - when a group of 3 local boys approached me with a cardboard box.
In his broken, but nonetheless very impressive English, the eldest one explained to me that they were selling fruit and crisps. He said that if i bought some, he would show me a good place to swim. I didn't really want any crisps, but the smallest kid looked pretty hungry, so i bought some and gave the pack to him. He tore into them and only offered his friends some when he'd gotten down to the crumbs at the bottom.
The older boy tried to get me to buy a pineapple too, but i told him i wasn't hungry. The small boy looked a little disappointed.
"So... Where is good to swim?" I asked.
"There," said the boy, pointing at the water behind me and the rock that i'd been standing on earlier.
I was unsure whether he was having me on or not, but made a show of looking down at the water and assessing its suitability.
It did look deep, but i was pretty high up on a large round boulder, and i could see no way that even if i'd survived the fall, i'd have been able to get back out again. I suspected, perhaps slightly too paranoid, that the boys were trying to get me into the water so they could nick my bag, wallet and motorbike and sell it all for crisps and fruit.
It was starting to cloud over anyway. I told them i'd come back tomorrow.
The oldest boy demanded a cigarette as some bizarre form of compensation. I felt a little bad about giving him one, as he couldn't have been more than about 10, but remembering that he was probably a thief, the compunction suddenly left me and I handed one over, free of any momentary scruples at potentially shortening his life by a few minutes.

I stopped again in a small town to buy some water and a snack.
A woman at a small stall was battering and deep-frying raw green chillis. There didn't seem to be anything else on offer, so I pointed and gestured and she wrapped me up some in a piece of newspaper. They were incredibly hot, unsurprisingly, and I immediately bought a cup of chai to wash them down with.
I sat down, and as I ate, was slowly surrounded by a group of kids, variously aged 3-8, in immaculate school uniforms. They pulled at my clothes and hassled me for money. I told them I had nothing to give, knowing that i'd be there all day if I showed them so much as a rupee. Their request changed.
"Schoolpen, schoolpen!" They shouted. One of them held out his hand.
I fished in my bag for a biro and handed it over to him.
He cheered and held it aloft with the other kids surrounding him, trying to grab it. He held on and ran back down the street with the others following.
I pictured him being the most popular boy in class that day, his special new red bic on show in his top shirt pocket. Perhaps as a consequence of my gift, he would decide to study hard and go on to excel in school. I also considered that as soon as he'd rounded the corner, out of my line of sight, he might have been set upon and beaten senseless by his classmates.
Either way, I felt that I had somehow contributed to that small boy's ever growing sphere of experience - learning the lesson that study and diligence at school is important, or heeding the warning that you should never take gifts from strange men - I felt a warm glow inside.
It could have just been the chillis though.

The evening on my side of the river seemed pretty quiet.
Evidently most of the nightlife, including evening festivals and parades, happened on the other side of the river.
I found a restaurant and sat down next to a table of people that i recognised from the previous night's bus journey - the woman that had been dispensing valium, her boyfriend and 3 Canadians. We discussed the bus crash as the woman, Polly, negotiated with the waiter to mix hash into our lassis.
I ordered a chicken dish and was interested to see that they made freshly squeezed garlic and chilli juice, so ordered a glass to wash it down with. It tasted exactly as you'd imagine, but perhaps slightly better - surprisingly good actually.
One of the Canadians rolled a joint.
Apparently the bus driver had been the only person to have been seriously injured in the previous night's crash. Having been removed from the wreckage, he had been brought onto our bus and dropped off at the first hospital we'd passed. Apparently we'd stopped there for some time, but by this time i was asleep.
The time between the accident and him receiving actual professional medical help had been about 5 hours. This seemed quite amazing to me, as the roads had been awful, the accident had happened in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, there were no ambulances, and i imagined hospitals to be somewhat of a scarcity in the area.
A young British woman from another table joined in the conversation. She was a doctor, she proclaimed - as doctors often do, apropos of nothing - and was working out here for a year. She agreed with everything that everyone said about Indian hospitals. She added very little to the actual conversation other than giving us her profession.
She told us extensively about her placement in India and the kind of work she was likely to be doing. Her boyfriend, a slightly repressed and fearful Simon Pegg lookalike, said nothing. My other tablemates slowly drifted off to their respective beds in the neighbouring hostels, and I was left with this couple, Jen and Nathan.
Despite the fact that all she appeared to do was talk about herself and belittle her boyfriend infront of me, I gradually warmed to them and their odd dynamic. She left to go to the toilet, and I asked Nathan what he was intending to do when Jen's job resumed in a few weeks. He didn't seem to know, and as a graphic designer, felt that he was unlikely to get particularly well paid work out here. He didn't seem to like the idea of doing charity work or teaching, and sounded like in all likelihood he would probably head back to London. She returned and our conversation changed mid-sentence.
She sat down.
Nathan said, "I was just telling him about that dinner we went to last week."
He nodded at me, asking me to be complicit in his little lie. He hadn't been telling me anything of the sort. I suspected that he had yet to reveal to his girlfriend that he wasn't planning on staying in India for the next year with her, although i have no idea why he'd had a momentary lapse and all but admitted it to me.
He continued on with the story of the dinner, which, whether he'd actually planned to tell me or merely panicked when he saw her approaching, is irrelevant because it had me enthralled and in hysterics within seconds:

A surgeon at Jen's hospital in Delhi had invited them to dinner at his family home.
After some polite chit-chat and a drink, he'd brought them into his living room where there was a big pad of paper on an easel set up. What they had been assured would be a simple dinner then turned into some sort of bizarre catalogue-based pyramid-scheme sales pitch. The surgeon drew diagrams and told them what a solid investment it all was, and his wife nodded excitedly and showed them various products from the catalogues. After an hour or so, by which time Jen and Nathan's ability to feign interest had slowly diminished, they managed to convince them politely that they were not interested in investment and were actually quite hungry.
The host understood respectfully, stowed away his pad of paper and ushered them into the dining room with a shower of apologies.
They sat down for dinner and as they ate and chatted, Nathan noticed a large shrine on the mantlepiece. It was a stone head with pillars either side of it, and the family had covered it in photos of themselves and their children, flowers, burning candles and josticks.
Nathan asked about it, mentioning that he found it to be strangely familiar, and the surgeon proudly told them how it had been there when they'd moved in over 20 years ago. They had found it on the floor in the corner elsewhere in the house, but decided that it was really quite exquisite and wanted to make it the focal point of their dining room.
It stared at him throughout dinner, and when they'd finished eating, Nathan, his curiosity still unsatisfied, asked if he could have a closer look.
Their hosts of course agreed and made themselves busy pouring coffee.
As Nathan examined it, it became quickly obvious that it was not in fact carved from stone, but was actually moulded from lightweight plastic. Upon even further inspection, he discovered a trademark symbol and a "Masters of the Universe" insignia.
This family of well-educated and well-respected medics had appreciated the aesthetic qualities of this item sufficiently to show it off and place it in pride of place. It had been adorning their mantlepiece for two decades as if it were some beautiful ancient artifact.
It was, in fact, a plastic toy model of Castle Greyskull, the home of He-Man from the 1980s TV cartoon.
Nathan sat down and silently drank his coffee. He didn't mention the shrine again until later, when he and Jen were well away from the house and its hosts.

I thought it was one of the funniest stories I'd ever heard and laughed all the way back to my hostel. Of course, it could have been the laced lassis or the joint, but even now, I can't help but crack a smile when I picture the the surgeon and his wife lighting their ceremonial candles and incense.

The Bus Crash

I decided to approach the overnight bus trip to Hampi a little differently from my previous Indian long-haul journeys. Rather than simply dose myself with valium, which helped with the ordeal but left me feeling groggy, I went for a yoga session in the morning, swam and lounged on the beach all day, did another yoga session in the afternoon and then went for a massage.
Surely, this would leave me sufficiently relaxed so as not to neccessitate the use of prescription drugs to knock me out.

I found the bus stop without much trouble. It was a non-descript shack by the side of the road, distinguishable only because of the rucksacked tourists waiting hopefully under an awning by a flickering streetlight.
We waited an hour until a bus stopped.
Before we had a chance to get on, it drove off again.
We stood around, a little bewildered, myself, a Finnish couple and two Argentinian women. It had definitely been our bus. It had been the correct company, it had said Hampi on the front, and it had arrived at the right time (about an hour late). The driver had even seen us and stopped, albeit momentarily, so we couldn't be at the wrong stop.
All these possibilities were discussed at length in broken English for about 10 minutes, until another, identical bus, appeared. The Goa-Hampi route was evidently popular enough to require two buses to accommodate demand.

I boarded and took my seat, deciding immediately that my pre-journey yoga, swim and massage combo would definitely not be enough to sufficiently lull me to sleep.
I took a valium.
The bus was fitted with a mixture of reclining seats and beds, and was heaving with more people than could reasonably fit either. A large Russian man stood over me, drinking from a bottle of rum and talking to his friends who were seated one row infront. Somebody's feet hung from the top bunk and swung dangerously close to my face, while the Japanese man I was seated next to, refused to open the window despite the lack of AC.
As soon as the engine started, I realised that one valium simply wouldn't be enough, so took another immediately. My seat was positioned directly above the wheel-axel, so every bump in the road - and there were a fair few - was amplified and directed up through by spine.
The Russians began to sing, and more feet started to appear from above, swinging rhythmically with each over-revved, psychotic turn or gear change the bus driver made. The windows that were open let in a warm, sickly combination of air and diesel fumes and the engine was deafening.
I washed down my second pill with remnants of a bottle of warm water, pulled my cap down over my eyes and pushed play on my Ipod, setting off over 8hours of uninterrupted Buddha Bar compilations to not only set the mood, but more importantly, put me to sleep.
I only remember hearing the first 20 minutes or so.

When I woke, drowsy and confused, my Ipod had stopped. Out of batteries, I assumed.
It was dark and silent. Very silent.
The bus was, in fact, not moving, and the engine was off.
I lifted my cap and looked around. The bus seemed suspiciously lacking in Russians and dangling feet. I looked at my watch. 2am. I had been on the bus about 5 hours, but it was way too early for us to have arrived at Hampi already.
Maybe this was just a toilet break.
I got up and heard people talking and shouting outside, so went to the door, passing the few people who had been lucky enough to book beds and were consequently still asleep.

There had been a crash.
Our bus hadn't been involved, but the road was blocked and we'd stopped.
A truck and another coach had evidently had a head-on collision, the coach swerving slightly and ending up in a ditch with its front caved in. The truck was still on the road but was in a similarly flattened state.
I got off the bus and stood looking at the chaos infront of me.
Two coachloads of people stood around in the road. Some were bleeding, some were crying. Some, like me, were standing, slightly dazed and unsure of what to do.
A crowd of local Indian men were crowding round the front of the coach and there was a lot of shouting and directing going on.
A young American man stumbled up to me.
He had blood on his hands and a small gash above the eyebrow which - gushing blood as headwounds do - looked a lot worse than it really was. He said that he'd been sitting at the front of the bus by the driver and had fallen asleep. He woke up, he said, as he hit the ground, having travelled through the windscreen. He seemed remakably calm, placid even, and without knowing exactly what else to do, I offered him a cigarette - it's what they do in action movies. He wiped the blood from his hands onto his trousers and took one from my pack and i lit it for him.
We watched the scene for a few minutes, feeling slightly dislocated from it.
Lots of people were wandering around in a state of shock, but nobody, surprisingly, seemed very badly injured. The driver, however, was still in the coach, unconscious at the wheel. The group of noisy Indian men were trying to get him out without inflicting further injury.

It took a while for me to recognise the bus and to register that it had been the one that had passed us at the stop in Goa. Had it not been full, i would have been on it too.
A very calm English woman approached me smoking a cigarette. I recognised her from my bus. She asked me if I had any valium or codine and that if I did, it would be a great help if i distributed them amongst the people in shock and those in pain. She had given all hers away already. I said I did and boarded the bus to get them, not stopping to think whether she had been going round asking everyone, or whether I just looked the type.
We both walked around together, me giving out prescription medication, and she offering people what she had left, cigarettes and water.
Miraculously, very few people had even sustained more than cuts and bruises, and the driver, now conscious, although the worst off, was definitely not as bad as you'd expect from looking at the wrecked vehicles. Most people seemed just a little dazed and disorientated - like me, i guess.
As the last of my drugs disappeared and the crowd started to get bored and reboard our bus, it was obvious that there was very little more to do other than gawp morbidly and take a few voyeuristic photos, so I did.
The truck and coach had been pulled to one side of the road and now it was clear for us to proceed. We pulled off and I heard someone telling their friends that apparently all the drivers here drink this special amphetamine-based alcohol to keep them awake on the late night shifts. Evidently sometimes the alcohol/amphetamine mix was off and they became more sleepy and drunk than awake and alert.
I pulled my cap back down over my eyes, and didn't think about the passengers on that coach who, although alive, were now well and truly stranded by the side of the road for at least another few hours.
I slept again almost immediately.

Lisa and the Rat - Part 2, The Rat

The next morning, I awoke in my treehouse to a faint and unpleasant odour.
I checked a pile of clothes at the base of my bed and discovered them to be damp and slightly musty, so I hung them by my open window to air and dry and headed off to find breakfast.
The remainder of my day was spent on the beach fantasising about my upcoming date with Lisa.
She was not just a yoga instructor, but she instructed instructors too. With muscle control like that, she'd probably be able to suck a monkey through a hose!
I had been planning to go to the temple complex, Hampi, in a day or so, but maybe that could be delayed.

I turned up to pick her up at 8:00pm on the dot.
A post-it on the door read: Having a massage. Back at 8:30, latest. Love Lisa x x.
I peeled it off and held it in my hands.
I was a little deflated, but at least she had not forgotten.
Turning the piece of paper round, I discovered a doodle on the back. It looked like a pencil-drawn picture of a turd. Unsure whether or not she had meant the picture for me, I wandered back to my treehouse, convinced that irrespectively, she was my perfect woman.
I got back and noticed the smell again, slightly stronger. Deciding this time that it must be my dirty trainers, wet and worn from my jungle trek almost a week ago, i hurled them outside and aimlessly moved other articles around in my rucksack for half-an-hour in an attempt to take my mind off Lisa's supple, oiled body.

I returned at 8:30 and she still hadn't returned, so i decided to wait instead.
Picking up her copy of Tatler, I reclined into one of the hammocky-type things on her deck. I spotted the ashtray and noticed that there were a couple of centimetres of joint left from the previous night, so I picked it up and lit it. I leant back and opened the magazine, glossing over an article about the importance of having a private outdoor pool in Knightsbridge, and another about the party-lifestyles of the young British aristocracy.
Glad to be away from this nonsense, I puffed.

She arrived, whiffling through the wood, wet, warm and glistening. I actually smelled her before I saw or heard her. She was barefoot, naked but for a towel and smelled like lavender, fruit and black pepper.
She apologised profusely for being so late, apparently these massages tended to run over a little.
I had no idea how late she was, as I had become totally absorbed by the urge to buy a two-up-two-down with outdoor space in Chelsea.
I told her that I was more than happy to wait if her entrances remained as enjoyable to watch, and she giggled, kissing me on the cheek.
We chatted through her open door as she showered and changed. She was excitable and it was contagious. Her book launch was in a month and she had to organise all the PR for it. Ontop of that, the tour that she had been planning for 12 months was to start in the new year and she was going to travel the world, teaching her form of yoga in Europe, America, Asia and Australasia. It was a very important week for her and her class, and normally she wouldn't go out, but she'd been very disciplined for a long time now and felt that she deserved a bit of a break.
I told her I felt privileged.

I was already quite stoned, but we had another joint and then stumbled off through the forest and across the beach towards the source of thumping beats we could hear, talking as we went.
She had spent much of her childhood travelling, due to her father's job as a diplomat, and had been teaching yoga for 10 years, based mostly in West London, but taking these retreats every year to India and Thailand.
She would say things like "I only really found myself and got into my stride in my 30s," which excited me, as it meant that I really had no idea how old she was. After I'd say something silly and benign, she'd respond with a "...well you would say that, you're an Aries and a fire-type. You're all children, young at heart but scared of growing up."
We had, at this stage, not discussed my date of birth or type, so I found these bizarre and fairly accurate insights from someone I had spent such a small amount of time with, fascinating.
I told her that I was enjoying travelling alone - although it hadn't been my original intention - because it allowed me to be a bit of a butterfly, and without obligation or guilt, feel free to jump around, talk to anyone, ignore anyone and to a certain degree be anyone.
She turned to me and said, "Basically, you just enjoy being a social slut."
I liked her. She was a little crazy and full of herself (her was one of her favorite topics), but she was still attractive and a yoga instructor.

We flitted and slutted our way round the party.
It was a little like a tropical section of the Glastonbury festival.
A large screen displayed random images to booming techno. Candles and UV lights lit the surrounding rocks and beach. People drank at the bar and smoked in the teepees, dancing on rocks and paddling in the sea.
Lisa was a fantastically glamourous companion, very exotic to look at and interesting to listen to, and wandering round with her, dancing, talking to random strangers, drinking gin and tonics and just getting to know each other, seemed like a very natural and easy process.
As a yoga instructor, with a my-body-is-a-temple mindset, Lisa was reluctant to drink much but happy to smoke as much dope as possible. I could feel my ability to communicate gradually deteriorating with every puff, and decided that alcohol was definitely my drug of choice.

She seemed to know a lot of the people there, from a DJ called Veejay, to the barmen and some of the partygoers. Even I ended up bumping into various people I had met in various states of inebriation throughout the week. Every time I introduced a male to Lisa, there would be a pause, a double-take and a what-are-you-doing-with-him? look directed towards her, and a how-the-fuck? directed at me.
I enjoyed it, as it is always a nice feeling to be envied, but I was starting to grow uneasy with paranoia, undoubtedly fuelled by the huge quantities of marijuana my brain was attempting to process.

I can pinpoint the moment that it all started to go wrong.
The Spartan emerged from the teepee, backlit with dense smoke billowing out from behind him.
He wasn't Spartan, obviously, in fact he was from San Fransisco. He just had a huge beard and was built like one of those guys from the film 300.
Lisa and he hit it off immediately. I had turned towards the bar to get another couple of drinks, and turning back, had discovered him with his soft, tactlie, Californian ways complimenting her as she did definitely-sexual yogic stretches infront of him. He had his hand on her belly, feeling her six-pack as she tensed it, and was telling her about an Enfield motorbike he had just bought and suggesting they go for a ride.
I realised very quickly that what I had initially translated as sexual flirtation, was in fact Lisa's default communication setting. She was like that with everyone. When it had been just her and I, she had made me feel special and interesting, but out here with all these other people, her attention was elsewhere and she flirted with everything almost indescriminately.
A good tune came on and I decided to go and dance. I'd had a good night so far, enjoyed the fantasy of being Lisa's date, but now that it was evidently just that, a fantasy, I was not going to waste time getting terretorial over her with a guy twice my size who had nipple piercings, his surname tattooed on his arm and a beard that would make ZZ-Top jealous.

I danced for some time.
They had a projection screen set up with a stage behind it that you could dance on unseen, but that would cast your silhouette onto the screen over the crowd. I drank more gin and tonics and danced crazily with random people, trying to make more and more elaborate shapes to silhouette.
I was actually having a great time when Lisa returned. The Spartan had left and Lisa had to get up at 6am to teach. It was already 2am, and she wondered whether I might walk her back. The party would be continuing until dawn, undoubtedly, but I was actually pretty tired and had no inclination to spend the following day sleeping off tonight.
We stumbled back accross the beach. It was pitch black and high tide.
Whereas before we had simply had to wander over across the sand, now there were sections where we had to wade through the surf up to our knees.
As we rounded a corner where a few boats were moored, Lisa slipped. Badly.
I was a few metres behind her at the time, gazing at the stars, when I heard the splash. By the time I'd reached her, she'd picked herself up and was examining her foot in the dim light, swearing.

I'm shit at comforting women who are in pain. Normally all they want to do is to complain and whine about it, whereas my immediate reaction is to suggest we get back and look at the wound to assess the situation in a more approprate and comfortable environment.
I attempted to alieviate her discomfort as she limped back by suggesting that using her mastery of yogic skills, she might be able to meditate herself past the pain barrier. She said that she might be able to try, but not right now when her concentration was very much on not falling over any more slippery rocks.
It took us a while to get back. She refused my offers of a piggy-back, and didn't think much of my suggestion that tomorrow, in her class, she should concentrate on the exercising all parts of the body above the ankle.
We smoked a joint on her deck. I rolled it as she applied ice to her, by now, quite swollen foot.
I apologised profusely, suggesting that perhaps I shouldn't have given her so much to drink and if I had been paying attention, I might have caught her. She said it was fine and that it certainly was not my fault, but I could still feel an air of resentment.

The injury could prove troublesome to her right now.
Her course was coming to an end, her book was about to be launched and she was about to start a year-long world tour.
I apologised again, feeling that somehow, her agreeing to go out for a few drinks with me had perhaps jeopardised her entire career trajectory. I've been known to have a negative effect on some women or be a bad influence, but never to this extent. This was next-level stuff.
We said our goodnights and I retreated back to my room.
It still smelt unpleasant, but I was too tired to start throwing articles of clothing outside, so I just lay under my mosquito net and quickly fell asleep.

The next day, as I ate lunch, I could see her taking her class on the beach infront of me. I was massively impressed by the physique and flexibility of some of these people.
Her foot injury appeared not to be impeding her too much, but as the class ended and she approached me, she started to limp a little. She sat down and, smiling despite the obvious pain she was in, ordered a drink.
We chatted for a bit. My day was going to consist of sitting on the beach, reading, writing, swimming and eating. She said that she still had an afternoon class to give but that after that, she was going to the hospital to get an x-ray and see if her foot was broken at all.
I was just about to suggest that perhaps I should accompany her, when I noticed a large shadow loom over my omelette and watermelon-juice.
It was the Spartan. He had seen us from the beach and come over to say hello.
Hearing about Lisa's foot situation, he immediately offered to give her a lift to the hospital on his motorbike. She readily accepted and he sat down.
We all sat around chatting for a while and he arranged to come and pick her up later in the afternoon. She got up to go back to her class, leaving me and the Spartan alone, and we sat and watched for a while.
I must say that, company aside, it was one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had for a very long time. Watching girls do yoga is now one of my favorite spectator sports. I could have stayed there for hours, but after our conversations about yoga, motorbikes and India dried up, I decided to head back to my room to change, leaving the Spartan behind.

I arrived and sniffed. My room stank.
How was this possible?
I ransacked the place, smelling every item of clothing closely and hanging anything that was even vaguely damp up to air by the open windows. I sprayed stuff everywhere and satisfied that I had now done all that I could to irradicate the problem, got changed and went off to my yoga class.

I had dinner that evening at the hotel with a few of Lisa's students. They were all London-based and were mostly female in their late-twenties/early-thirties. Halfway through, Lisa limped in accompanied by the Spartan. She described how he had been good enough to give her a lift to the hospital where she had been given an x-ray, but that they wouldn't be able to view the results until the following morning. Unfortunately the Spartan's motorbike had broken down just as he was dropping Lisa off, so he was slightly stranded and would be having dinner with us.
Lisa sat down next to me and told me that she liked my shirt, particularly the design on the back. I looked down. The shirt that I was wearing was an entirely plain, off-white, short-sleeved shirt. As far as I knew, there was no design on the back.
I was confused, so decided to go to the bathroom and inspect the shirt in the mirror. In doing so, I saw that there was a colossal amount of birdshit sprayed down my back. So much so, and of such rich variety of colour and texture, that as Lisa had, it was easy to mistake for some sort of Pollock-esque design.
My shirt - the one I had deliberately hung by the open window in order to get rid of the smell - had been defiled by what looked like a flock of angry, diarrhea-suffering parrots. I got back to the table just as Lisa and the Spartan were excusing themselves. She was "very tired" and he was going to "have a look at his bike". I stayed and chatted to the other yogis for a while, but then decided to go for a walk on the beach instead.
Women, pah!
I lit a joint I had stolen from her the previous night.
I had spent the last week-and-a-half being relatively healthy, and almost blissfully unaware of the opposite sex. Suddenly with the appearance of Lisa, I had been once again plunged into the all-too-familiar territory of misread signals, mindgames, disappointment, jealousy and frustration, not to mention the paranoia that comes with pot-smoking.
How easy it was to slip back into headfuck mode. I should leave.
There was more of India to see and I had allowed myself to be distracted.
I took one long look at the beautiful evening beach. The bars were already preparing themselves for the evening's revellers and people were wandering up and down looking at menus and talking to restauranteurs.
How strange they must think we are, to turn up here in this beautiful place, embracing the wholesome virtues of Eastern mysticism by day and the excessive alcoholism of Western debauchery by night, I thought.
I suppose there's only a finite period of time you can spend somewhere like this before the environment becomes irrelevant and you simply return to the bad habits that you hoped you'd left behind.

I went back to my treehouse to pack. My room still smelled awful, but I only had to put up with it for one more night's sleep.
As I lay under my mosquito net, trying not to imagine Lisa and the Spartan having crazily acrobatic, non-foot-related, tantric sex a few huts away, I found it difficult to drift off.
The smell was all-pervasive and filled my nostrils with every breath. I tried breathing through my mouth, but that seemed almost worse, like i could taste it instead.
Tired and stoned, I switched on the light to have one final half-hearted look round for the source of the smell, and that's when I saw it.
Under my bedside table, invisible from all angles unless you happened to be lying in bed was what looked like, in the dim light, a pair of wet socks. I reached down to pick them up, but something made me stop. Instead, I put lamp on the floor and leaned down to get a closer look.
It was a dead rat.
Dead for some days now, the thing was litereally writhing with maggots.
As soon as I realised what it was, the smell got exponentially worse. It was so rotten and decomposed that when i reached down and picked it up by the tail to fling it out, the head stayed on the carpet. Gagging and wretching, I threw it into the bushes and sprayed the infested area of carpet with as much mosquito-repellent and aftershave as I had.
I went to the bathroom and splashed my face with water, trying to eject the vision of the rat and its evocative smell from my mind. The thing had died and rotted no more than a metre from where I had been resting my head for the past few days. I'd been breathing it in in my sleep!

Returning to my room, I looked around.
6 days I had spent in here - my little house in the trees. I had thought it wonderful when I first arrived, a beatiful little leafy retreat. Now it just looked like a room that birds could fly into and shit in and rats came to die.
Time to leave Palolem, I thought.
And with that I got into bed.
The chemical smells of insect-repellent and Hugo Boss mingled in the air to create a bitter taste. It wasn't nice, but it was infinitely preferable to the alternative. I would sleep better now, at least.
Tomorrow, I will get on the bus to Hampi.

Lisa and the Rat - Part 1, Lisa

"Why is the air-conditioning in here not working? This place is so damn hot!"
This was Lisa. We had not met yet.
I stood in the doorway, tired and damp with sweat from wrestling my motorbike for several hours on the road back from Chandor. It was now dark, and i'd made it just in time, as i'd discovered on my journey back that my headlights didn't actually work.
As i'd pulled in to the hotel, I saw the boy whose bike i had borrowed for the day, and who had been waiting for god-knows-how-long, possibly all day, heave a sigh of relief that not only was I still alive, but more importantly the bike remained intact and entirely unscathed.
I had decided to go to reception and go through my usual ceremony of asking them if my room was free and whether i could stay another night. I had been doing this all week. Palolem was proving difficult to leave.
So, there i was, stood in the doorway of the reception, hot, damp and tired.

"Look at this poor man," she continued. "He's sweating in here it's so fucking hot!"
I actually hadn't even stepped into the room properly, so the likelihood of the lack of aircon actually affecting me at this stage, was slim.
"No, I'm alright," I reassured the busy receptionist. "I just got off my motorbike, so i'm hot and knackered anyway."
The woman looked at me and there was a pause.
I had inadvertently made myself sound pretty exciting.
A motorbike? Hot? Knackered? This guy seems pretty cool, I could hear her think.
I'd like to have sex with him.
"I'm also just generally quite sweaty."
She laughed and I winced slightly. Somewhere a waiter dropped a trayful of glasses.
I floundered desperately, trying to fill the awkward silence that the rather unsexy subject of my sweatiness had precipitated.
"Do you work here?" I inquired. Not an unreasonable question, I thought, seeing as she was sitting in the office with her feet on the desk, swearing at the receptionist.
"No... Not really. Well, yes, sort of..."
Now she was floundering, and I was confused. Her eyes wandered the room, searching for the correct phrase.
"I guess I kinda live here," she concluded vaguely.

She was of indeterminate age. I guessed that she could have been anywhere from 25 to 45, but it was genuinely very difficult to tell. She was very attractive, tanned, athletic-looking and had an accent that i couldn't place either. Everything about her seemed like a mixture of something else and the air of mystery clung to her.
I asked her where she was from. She said that she was Swiss-German with a Colombian mother, but primarily - and i assumed, expensively - educated in England and India.
She asked me where i was from.
I said London.
She asked where.
I said West.
She asked where.
I said Ladbroke Grove.
She asked where.
I said that up until recently, Saint Quintin Avenue, but i was currently between homes.
She said that she owned an apartment on Ladbroke Grove, had lived there for years, and worked as a yoga instructor in the Gym at the end of my road.
My gym.
I did yoga there.
Somehow we had never met, as she taught the daytime classes and i had only ever gone in the evenings and weekends. Very odd indeed.
She maintained that she recognised me from somewhere and definitely recognised my name -
"You're the Adam Rowland?" - but i was pretty sure I'd never laid eyes on her. She began to list names of people that sounded fantastically exciting that she was sure i was connected with but with whom i was not. She listed places we both knew that we might have met and mutual friends we did not share that might have introduced us, but i steadfastly maintained that we had never spoken to one another. She said she was sure that she had heard of me, like i was some kind of celebrity, which i thought a little odd. I didn't consider myself a famous denizen of West London. At best we might have passed each other in the gym, but i liked that she thought we knew each other and didn't discourage her from continuing her train of thought - she was after all, attractive and a yoga instructor.

"Well, I'm done here," she said slamming her laptop closed. "Do you fancy coming back to mine for a spliff?"
My, this girl was forward. I most certainly did.
We walked through the jungle-like gardens of the hotel back to her bungalow. If my treehouse was at one end of the Palolem accommodation spectrum, then her place was definitely at the other. She mentioned that hers was the most expensive bungalow in the complex but that she had struck a deal with the owners to let her have it cheaply. I asked her what the deal was and she told me that every year she took classes of London-based yoga-students and taught them how to be instructors. She came here for 3-months a year and brought with her at least 8 students each time - consequently guaranteeing the filling of 8 cabins for 3 months every year.
We sat down on hammocky-type contraptions on her deck and i flicked through a copy of Tatler I found as she rolled a joint with some very sticky looking hash.
Tatler, I thought.
West-Londoner, I thought.
Most expensive bungalow in the complex, I thought.
I could assume a series of wholly inaccurate, sweeping generalisations about this girl, I thought.

As she lit the joint, she reached down and passed me a book.
It was her book - a book by her - to be published in early 2009 to coincide with her world tour. It was an all encompassing overview of what she described as Quantuum Yoga. It seemed to me to be a combination of ancient Eastern mystique and sub-atomic physics - the idea being that everything, being part of the same universe, affects everything else; things only exist if you observe them and by observing them you affect their state and therefore their destiny; and that we are all one and built from the same molecules as everything else, so we should embrace that and realise that to aspire to material wealth or worldly possessions is to neglect our true path of spiritual enlightenment as a whole.
The book looked great and was full yogic history and glossy photos of Lisa in not very much, holding impossibly bizarre and sexy positions. I wondered whether it might be easier to take on the whole denying material wealth and worldy possessions thing, if you had parents who were diplomats and were therefore evidently quite wealthy, had been educated well, owned a large flat near Notting Hill, and travelled the world extensively every year in what appeared to be a very chilled out existence.
However, i did not pose this quandry to her, as she was, after all, attractive and a yoga instructor.

She told me she had just split up with her boyfriend via email. That is what she had been doing when we met in the reception. She passed me the joint.
The relationship had been on a downhill for a while and the sex had been bad for a long time, she said. With his visit to Goa imminent and looming, she had decided to call it off rather than confront him upon arrival and jeopardise both the remainder of her classes and book-launch and his holiday. He was a DJ/music producer based in London and Ibiza and they had been together for less than 6 months. When they had first met, she had told him that she was damaged from a previously relationship and that was not looking for anything long-term. He had said that he generally lost interest in sex after the first few months of a relationship, but that this in no way reflected his level of commitment. It sounded like a disaster from the word go.
I told her that i was fantastic at giving advice about other people's relationships and she continued at length. We both agreed in principal, that in this particular situation, honesty had been the best policy. She had needed to tell him that it was over before he got here - perhaps though, email had not been the best way of doing this, but it was done now.
I suddenly realised that the conversation had gotten very intimate very quickly and we were quite openly flirting with one another. She was fun - a little showy-offy and aloof, but good-natured and friendly.
I could forgive her these minor foibles. She was, after all, attractive and a yoga instructor.

I asked her if she intended to go to the beach party the following evening. I had been handed a flier earlier and it looked quite good. Organised by the same team who had put together a silent-disco a few nights previously, this one promised dancing on the beach, video projections, teepees, a stage and a bar - for free. I thought it would probably be quite fun and had intended to go anyway.
Lisa said that she hadn't been planning on it, but that she could be persuaded.
I said that i would pick her up at 8.
I left to go and shower and get changed out of my still-stinking motorbike clothes. I had arranged to meet a few of the Northern girls and their hangers-on for dinner. I had told them lst night that i was going out for a motorbike ride today, and that if i wasn't there by 8pm, they should maybe alert somebody of my disappearance as i was more than likely to be seriously injured or stranded somewhere. It was 7:30 already.
As I turned to leave, Lisa spoke.
"You can use my shower if you like. I have hot water."
There was a definite twinkle in her eye.
I was stoned and unsure exactly what she was saying, finding it difficult to gauge the seriousness and flirtaciousness of her offer.
I laughed awkwardly and smiled, saying that what i probably needed now, more than anything, was a cold shower, but I'd happily take her up on her offer the following evening. Anyway, right now, I had to go and get into some clean clothes.
Idiot!
Our date arranged, i said goodbye and staggered confusedly into the night back to my treehouse, incredibly stoned and quite aroused.
Mental note: If you ever again get offered a shower by an assertive, attractive yoga instructor who's just split up with her boyfriend and evidently hasn't had a good shag for some time, under any circumstances, you take it.
Idiot, idiot, idiot...

I smiled to myself as I made my way back. The past hour had been totally unexpected and rather odd. She seemed cool, and she was very attractive and a yoga instructor. I considered what kind of things she'd be able to do with her pelvic floor muscles and even entertained the idea of purchasing some viagra in order to keep pace with her obviously voracious sexual appetite and tantric requirements.
Suddenly I realised that I had already doomed myself to a holiday of definitely no sex by bringing condoms with me - a schoolboy error. If you come prepared, you can guarantee that you won't be getting laid.
Slightly deflated by this annoying realisation, but nonetheless looking forward to my date the following evening, I felt a rumbling in my stomach and prayed that tomorrow would not be the day that i was delivered my well-overdue heinous bout of diarrhea.

The Motorbike Ride to Chandor

The bike was huge - far bigger than anything i had ever ridden before.
I will quite happily admit in hindsight, that the fact that i survived the journey entirely unscathed, with Indian roads being what they are, no previous experience on anything even remotely resembling this machine, no mechanical knowledge whatsoever, no map, and with no protective clothing other than a helmet, is not just a minor, but a major miracle.
At the time, i did think that if Euan MacGregor and his freeloading friend Charlie Boorman can do this, then there is actually no reason that i shouldn't be able to.
Of course, i was without the trucks of producers, camerapeople and support-team stationed at strategic points along my route, or the knowledge and experience of riding a big motorbike, but i didn't see that as a reason for me not to at least give it a go.
I figured that i'd ride around in the area round my hotel for half an hour or so, and if i wasn't truly comfortable on the bike in that time, then i'd just call it a day and head off to the beach to read my book or something. At least then, i could still say that i'd tried.

The young guy whose bike it was eyed me suspiciously as i got on. I was paying him the equivalent of about 6 pounds to take it for the day.
This thing was massive and looked a little like a dark red Harley.

"You have a license?" He asked, reasonably.
"Yeah, yeah, of course." I said. I did, after all, have a license. His question was not specific enough to catch me in a lie.
"So, er... How does this thing work then?"
He showed me where the brakes were (the back one is under your right foot, the front you grip with your right hand), the clutch (like the front brake but on the left handle), the throttle (the twisty thing on your right handle), the gears (under your left foot), the kickstand and the hole where the keys went.
Alright. I thought. This is piss-easy. Just like one of those mopeds but louder.
I twisted the key and kicked it into life.
It jumped forward half a foot and stalled immediately.
He looked at me the way that i remember being looked at by teachers at school - an almost withering "I don't know why i bother" look and explained that i had to start it in neutral and then use the clutch if i wanted to change gears.
I stalled it a few more times.

The difficulty, i felt, was that it was difficult to know exactly what gear you were actually in, making not stalling upon ignition, actually quite problematic.
I told him i thought this was a major design floor with this particular model and that in my experience i had never come across it before. Other bikes I had ridden didn't work like this.
He looked a little insulted but patiently took me through the process again.
This time I got it to work, and the engine roared into life. Man, was this thing powerful.
A little gas, a gear shift and a little fiddle with the clutch and I was off. He ran behind me for a bit shouting something, but i couldn't quite hear what it was he was saying - it couldn't have been that important - so i shifted up into second and sped off.
Riding the bike was surprisingly easy, actually.
Starting and stopping remained quite a problem for me throughout the day, but once i was moving, the thing behaved pretty intuitively. I found very quickly that at speed, cows and potholes were difficult to avoid - the bike did not steer that easily, so delicately navigating round things had to be done at low speed and preferably in second gear.

The ride to Chandor took me just over 2 hours.
I think it was about 60km, but rugged, twisty roads all the way and i had no real idea of where i was going. India is not famous for its signposting.
When I arrived, I parked the bike next to a store and looked around, suddenly wondering why exactly i had chosen this particular town - which appeared to have nothing but a crossroad, a store and a church - as my destination.
I pulled out the Lonely Planet.
Oh yeah, apparently there's some building here that's supposed to be quite interesting.
I'd driven here, risking my life in the process, to look at a building.
I cursed the life-long effects of having architects as parents.

The building was, in fact, worth the journey, although perhaps not the risk.
Built as a mansion in the 17th century for a rich Portuguese family, Braganza House had been passed down over 9 generations. The family, fabulously wealthy traders, had become victims of the local communist government's wealth-redistribution policies in the 1960s and, although they'd managed to hold on to the house, had lost everything else.
From the outside, it looked very grand, but was obviously falling apart a little.
The door was open, and there seemed to be no-one about, so I walked in to the central courtyard. A section of wall had been engulfed by ivy and parts of the red-tiled roof looked like they'd fallen in. The place was deserted and silent.
Up the stairs I entered a grand hallway lined with huge tapestries and cracking framed paintings. Mirrors stained with mildew and ragged curtains hung from discoloured walls.
I could hear the sound of children laughing.
I looked around, thinking that this was just all a bit too Kubrick, and took in the scene.
The place was amazing. Ancient and expensive-looking furniture sat on teak-tiled floors, chandeliers hung from the damp, sagging ceilings and gold-leaf detailed, moldy paper peeled from the walls.
I continued to wander round, finding each room to be more impressive than the last.
It was as if time had stopped here and just slowly crumbled. Cutlery lay laid out on a vast mahogany dining table and books lined the shelves as if the place were still lived in.
This was, as i was to discover, not for from the truth.

In its heyday, it would have been truly breathtaking. As it was, there was something a little sad about it. Like a young genius reduced to senility in old age, this once grand and imposing structure with its rich and exotic interiors was slowly deteriorating through nothing more than lack of funds to maintain it properly. Ming vases stood gathering dust next to Italian amber pots and an old London-made grandfather clock stood motionless and grey, an eternity at five-past-eight, as windows made with oyster-shells clattered softly, breaking the silence where there should have been ticking.
It reminded me of a scene from Apocalypse Now, edited out of the original cut, but reinserted into the Redux version. The Martin Sheen character stumbles across a house of French colonialists still living it up in a state of denial and fantasy in the Cambodian jungle. They're so isolated from the outside world and therefore reality, that everything about their lifestyles just seems surreal and dislocated.
Braganza House was all laid out meticulously with exquisite attention to detail but with an inherent ghostly museum-like emptiness that enveloped everything. It was a home without a soul - it too had left through a hole in the roof when the money ran out and the family left.
But the family, as i was to discover, had not entirely left.

I heard footsteps and an old man appeared around a corner. He had a large scab on his nose - from the removal of a melanoma, i suspected - and shuffled as if it were difficult for him to lift his feet more than a few centimetres.
This was the caretaker.
He happily took me round the place, retreading a lot of my steps but informing me of the age, origin and style of the different articles we passed. We went through the rooms and he told me a little of the family history and the architectural features of the building.
It was difficult, however, to understand everything that he was saying, as his accent was quite strong, his English broken, and a tracheoctomy he'd had made everything he said sound like it was being regurgitated.
We stopped in the middle of a grand dining room. He made a gesture and waved his arms all around us.
"...And this," he gurgled, "was the dining room for entertaining visiting dignitaries."
I looked around. Very impressive indeed. Venetian candelabra lit up Belgian tiles and the room was one of the few which had electricity, so he lit the chandeliers and everything glowed.
"...And this," he continued as he gestured back down to a side table, "is our donations box."
It was a small, unremarkable wooden box.
He opened it unceremoniously and looked at me hungrily.
It was totally empty except for a book of matches.
If this had been a cartoon, one solitary moth might have flown out, coughing slightly and gasping for breath.
He eyed my pocket.
I reached in and found my clutch of notes, hoping that blindly i would not pull out anything of too high a denomination. I pulled out 100 rupees and placed it in the box.
He reached in, picked it up, flattened it, folded it in to quarters and slipped it into his shirt pocket, closing the box as he turned and led me out of the room.
"Thank you." He sputtered.

We came to a door.
"And would you like to meet the lady of the house?" he burbled, and as the question rose at the end, so did the frequency of his phlegmy timbre. I wondered if he ever had to wipe drool from his neck.
The lady of the house?
I was half expecting him to open the door and reveal some sort of vampyric, zombie-like femme-fatale, backlit with a windmachine blowing her hair dramatically towards the ceiling.
Without waiting for a response, he knocked.
There was a pause and a shuffling noise and the door creaked open.
A tiny old woman appeared, looking a little like Morgan Freeman would have done if you'd shrunk him down and made him dress up like the Queen Mother.
She ushered me into another hallway, where she lived, and the only remaining private wing of the building.
She was 92, and the children that i had heard earlier were her great-grandchildren, visiting with their parents from Delhi.
She told me more about the house, how her incredibly rich family had been left practically destitute by the communist takeover, and how the building now survived purely on the goodwill of donators like myself. The contents were undoubtedly worth a few pennies, but she couldn't bear to auction any of it off, prefering to keep it all togther as a permanent, slowly-dissolving collection rather than see it split up and distributed round the worlds' museums.
She showed me grand oil paintings of her ancestors, crystal-cut goblets, chinese silver jewelry and turkish carpets.
We paused by a dining table surrounded by red-cushioned seats.
"Do you recognise these?" She asked, waving her hands at the chairs.
I said I didn't.
She narrowed her eyes and pulled out a photograph from a nearby drawer.
"See?" she jabbed her finger at the picture of another grand dining room.
"These chairs used to belong to Queen Elizabeth II. My father bought them at auction in London when she decided to redecorate at Buckingham."
From the photo, they certainly looked like the same chairs.
"...And this," she waved dramatically round the room. Her hands settled over a small wooden box.
"...is our donations box."
I repeated the procedure, hoping that i didn't pull out anything higher than 100 rupees. I imagined her and the caretaker comparing notes on me after i'd left, commenting on my generosity or lack of it.
I pulled out 100rupees again and placed it in her box.
She closed it and thanked me.
I told her i thought her home was stunning and that i wished her well for the future and maintaining its upkeep.
She ushered me out, telling me that it was time for her to serve her great-grandchildren tea.
I left feeling a little sad about the place. It obviously had the significance of a world heritage site, but was barely even on the map, achieving only a paragraph in the Lonely Planet.
If they sold off a fraction of the stuff in there, they'd be able to afford to really clean the place up and renovate the parts of the building that were crumbling. They could even print a brochure or two, stick up a signpost, build a cafe and turn it into an attraction that might draw tourists from the nearby coastal resorts of Goa. They would easily be able to get a steady stream of visitors that would consequently assist in the financial upkeep of the place, but it was as if the thought simply hadn't occured to them.
It was going to continue crumbling until it became dust or Madame Braganza died and one of her slightly more business-minded sons decided to just cut his losses and sell the money pit.
I don't think any of them had the slightest idea how much some of these heirlooms would be worth had they gone under the hammer at an auctionhouse like Sotherby's in London. They were literally sitting on millions, and it was slowly disappearing beneath them.

I returned to my bike and spent 30 minutes trying to kickstart the thing.
It suddenly occured to me that my lack of mechanical knowledge, might, in this case be somewhat of a hindrance. If i couldn't get it started, i genuinely had no idea what i would do. I was miles from anywhere, and it didn't look like there was a mechanic in this one-street-town.
I was getting pretty tired by the time i discovered the choke, and it immediately came to life.
As i drove out of town back to Palolem, a small cheer erupted from the locals sitting outside the store who'd been watching me with interest as I wrestled with my trusty steed.
They had all gathered with cups of tea to take in the spectacle of the idiot tourist try and start his motorbike in 4th gear.