March, 29th 19:42
DELHI, India
There are few things in life harder than leaving a place that you have come to think of as...if not home, then at least a place of great comfort. So it was with great reluctance that I packed up my bag, paid my bill and hoofed it down the beach with the rest of my companions, setting off in a slightly unstable van to the flea markets of Anjuna, about 2 hours north of Pallolem.
Carl. Great guitar player
Those who know me well, know that there are few things that I like less than shopping. I imagine that I would like acid dripped onto my face a bit less. Maybe being smashed in the head a few times by a board with a nail in it, a rusty nail...with acid on it would be something that I would enjoy at a lesser level than the selection and purchasing of goods. Nevertheless, it was to be a day of shopping, and as we were now 2 hours away from our base with the plan of continuing on, we were wearing our full complement of gear. I can assure you that walking around in 85% humidity, with a 26 pound pack on your back, in the blazing sun and being constantly harangued by aggressive Indian merchants is a less than pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
Anjuna Market. Miserable.
Handbags! Stupendous!
YY (Yeah Yeah or Evan, my traveling partner) had wandered off for a while to see what there was to see. Apparently, there was much to see. He, in his meanderings, had come across a large group of Norwegian doctors-to-be with whom we had spent a few evenings on the mystical beaches of Southern Goa. These gentlemen now informed us of a "great party" that would be occuring that very night on the beach, at one of the bars along the beach. "Great" we thought, a plan now firmly in hand. We spent several hours walking around the area, getting acclimated to our new digs, then decided to wander over to where the party was supposed to be happening, maybe be there a bit early to see what the "vibe" was.
Waiting to party.
The "vibe" as it were, could fairly accurately be described as "nursing home." Not too many people around, those that are are talking far too loudly, lots of bland looking food and a general hopefullness in the air that someone would remember to come around and visit.
Needless to say, the "party" was a bust.
Thus, we found ourselves walking slowly down a brilliantly moonlit beach, discussing our options. Where the beach ended, we found ourselves clambering over and through a rocky road past a small amalgamation of stalls and huts, past an internet cafe, and finally to a bar that was charging a cover. An empty bar, complete with day-glow paint, thumping bass-heavy music, and hardly anyone inside. As our options were to stay and maybe scrounge up the ounce or two of fun that was to be had, or to admit defeat and go home, we boldly bargained for our entry and took up a position at the far corner of the truly hideous room...
...where we largely spent the rest of the night. YY did some dancing, I moped about and nearly fell asleep in a chair. So it came to pass that around 3AM, our spirits slightly sunk, we found ourselves loping along the beach towards our hotel. That was when Evan experienced a brush with, what could only be described as the super-human.
Often times in a comic book, movie etc., a person is granted extraordinary powers under an unusual circumstance (though that circumstance is, as often as not, atomic energy related). In other stories, a person is granted a flash of supernatural ability, allowed to graze lightly against a great cosmic force, temporarily absorbing a bit of the magic that it possesses, which endows them with a knowledge or power far beyond that of the average person. This is the only rational explanation for the fact that at 3 o'clock in the morning, on a beach with all ambient noises effectively canceled out by an unusually high surf, from 5 kilometers away, YY head the deep, primal sound of a back-beat. As I had not had a scrape with the eternal-afterworld, I blissfully carried on, teetering precariously on the edge of the envelope of sleep-walking. As such, I found myself walking (stumbling) along alone, only the full moon to keep me company as my impulsive friend had wandered off.
I finally caught up to him at the end of a darkened lane.
"I heard something" he said
"I didn't, I'm tired."
"I'm going to go find it."
And off he went. A deep sigh on my part was not enough to dissuade him. Following whatever internal pulse there was that had manifested externally to his ears only, we started walking. The clouds had cleared by this point, and the indigo drape thrown over the top of the world glowed all the more brightly for the glimmer of the moon. We walked along a raised road, open fields on either side. At its end, the road dove deeply into a stand of trees, passing away to the left.
"YY, there's nothing there, there is no sound lets...damn." I had heard it. Faint, elusive, yet definitively a sound. My pause only served to add to his resolve.
"I know that you heard that...come on."
My last resort, as usual, was shaky logic.
"Do you have any idea how far sound can carry at night...it can carry...like...really damn far!"
His only reply was a jack-o-lantern grin and a shift of his weight to turn and walk away. I let go with the biggest sigh I had, to no avail. On we went. I couldn't imagine anything that we could possibly come across that could be good enough to justify all of this walking. It was late and I was tired and being crabby, but I wanted to sleep, not go on an adventure.
And that is one of the truly funny things about life, you don't get to choose your adventures. You can't package them and set start and end dates and confine them within a neat little framework. This is what group tours to interesting places try to do. They give you the thrill of adventure, without all the mess of having to stumble into it. Really, there's no adventure. An unplanned adventure is risky, it's dangerous, there's no predictable outcome and there's no guarantee (There is an irony here that my first few weeks in Africa were as a part of a packaged safari type thing, but I always tried, and occasionally succeeded, in reminding myself that you can't plan an adventure, they just happen to you.) An adventure, a real one, is something that sweeps you in, more often than not against your will. Things often happen to you, they happen quickly and you don't always get a chance to think through all of the consequences, you have to just react and hope for the best. In the case of this particular evening, it was very much against my will, but no quick thinking was needed. Instead, I spent most of my time trying to remember the increasingly serpentine route that we were taking over cow pastures, through woods, down roads that were getting more and more narrow and over rocky streams that I felt sure were largely used as open-air sewers.
And we were barefoot. I forgot to mention, or reiterate this earlier, so I do so now. All of this walking, all of the tramping through underbrush and fields and what-have-you was done without the benefit of footwear. This, all things considered, was fairly painful.
After spotting lights far off in the distance, I resigned myself to finishing the journey, mostly because the number of turns required to walk back, to say nothing of the distance, was too epic to even consider.
At long last, we reached a parking lot, set deep into the woods. A completely full parking lot. At 4AM. The bass beat that we had been hearing ever louder over the past hour finally revealed its source as an enormous, not-quite-believable party (also known as a rave) in the middle of nowhere's-ville. The scene was like something out of a Hollywood movie. A Hollywood movie that you watch and think "well that certainly looks like fun, but when does that ever really happen?" And then you go home and don't give it much more thought.
Let me assure you, even if it was the only party of its kind that ever happened, or ever will (which it wasn't), this was exactly that kind of scenario. It took me a while to reel my jaw back up.
In a sunken area of stone steps, hundreds of long haired, baggily clothed people sat around on intricately designed rugs, being served steaming hot cups of something from huge pitchers. The elderly Indian women who were serving the "tea" were at the same time tending enormous hookahs, out of which those not sipping tea were taking lazy puffs and gently exhaling the smoke.
The main event was a raised dirt area, supporting roughly a thousand people, all of whom were gyrating, stomping, singing and grooving to the insistent rhythms emanating from the speakers hung high overhead. A DJ booth, 30 feet in the air, revealed a frenetic man, head cupped to earphones, a fist in the air pumping along with the beat. The lights were clearly a professional set up, with ice-blue strobes winking in and out, a green laser net descending and then re-ascending over the crazed heads of the dancers, and violent looking red pulses flasing at an irregular pace.
So we danced...well, YY in his infinite energy danced and I sort of swiveled around a bit and shook my head.
As the sun rose over the tree tops, some of the revelers took a moment out of their dancing to lay down and promptly pass out. Other, hardier souls sat down to collect their groove, then, as the enormous orange orb completed it's emergence from the shelf of the world, they were right back to it, usually after stopping at the bar which was still doing a steady business right up until 8am when we left.
It should be noted that as we were leaving, people were arriving.
We had managed to find the Norwegians (our friends from the beach long ago) and it was with them that we exhaustedly bartered for a very small van to take 8 of us back to our lodging. Collapsing on our respective beds, there was a moment or two when we both were aware of the fact that something not quite real seemed to have passed us by in the night.
"Evan?"
"Yeah."
"You win. That was fun. And you will never know how unbelievably pissed off I was at you for about an hour there."
"Yeah yeah, I know."
Fin.
Next: I attempt to summarize far too much travel in far too short a posting
1 comment:
that was a spectacular, nay, an awesomely-whim-tastical story. As I was reading it all I could think about was LOTR. You and Ya Ya off on an adventure and there was light and fire and people smoking from all sorts of different instruments and some elves. No wait, scratch the elves. There were no elves. But if there were, that'd be sweet. You can really tell when all those authors you've been reading pop out in your writing, some real nice-soundin stuff you got there. good job.
p.s. see, i read your blog. ha, eat it.
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