Goin Goan Vol. I

From time to time it is a fun thought experiment to consider how small decisions we make end up shaping our fate and future; for me and my trip in India, it was mustering up the courage to jump on stage and wail out ‘Red House’ as performed  by Jimi Hendrix with a local band that would shape the next 6 months of my life.

My friends had left, and I had just gotten a new editing assignment, so I figured I would stay in my cheap and clean guest room for another few days, paying my landlord on a day to day basis as to avoid paperwork (he told me that booking for 3 days or more would warrant paper work, with a dreadful tone of voice. Between my desire to feel off the grid and his lack of desire to fill out forms, we settled on me giving him cash roughly every morning). I also met some lovely Australian girls with a fondness for partying, so my days consisted of posting up at a beach shack and editing a journal on the provincial economies of China and then drinking heavily with a posse of ladies from the land down under.

They told me of an all you can eat seafood buffet with live music that was the cat’s pajamas at one of the original beach shacks at Anjuna beach (a party destination known throughout the subcontinent). I personally feel a bit guilty gorging on food when surrounded by poverty—or any time for that matter—but the live music caught my attention.

Anjuna beach is a long stretch of beach lined with shacks that fulfill most all beach going needs: shade, music, alcohol, people, hash, food, drinking water etc. There are hippy markets on both the North and South side of the town where you can score any last minute beach needs or tapestries.

In the stead of dinner, I drank Kingfisher© strong beer—the  thicker, more filling, sibling of the ubiquitous Indian beer. Despite the more than ample energy the band was giving off, no one was dancing, so I took it upon myself to be the crowd I always wish I had; I let my hair down and rocked the F out. Before too long, a dance party had commenced.

The guitar player/vocalist was wailing, shredding, jumping up and down, screaming, yelling, and all the other –ing verbs you would want a guitar hero to be doing. I felt a certain connection with him; his licks were not unlike mine, albeit better executed. His choice of songs was eclectic and at times ironic and humorous, at least by my standards (you know, like Bob Marley at Starbucks or something). His in between song banter was dry and funny. I liked this guy; he was good people.

The always necessary blues number began—‘Red House’ as performed by Jimi Hendrix. The music was tight, but the vocals were seriously lacking; I figured I could do better. I gestured to the microphone, and the guitar hero gestured back yes.

After performing a number of songs with them that night, and having a plethora of drinks bought for me by people who appreciated what I had added to the evening, the clock struck midnight, meaning the music had to stop (this was my first experience with Goa's election time noise ordinance; I will address Goan elections at some point in the near future).

I joined the band for a post-performance smoke. I introduced myself to the guitar hero and told him I loved his style, he responded back with something similar and invited me to his apartment the next day to jam and crash for a day or two. This was the start of me and Anirban’s fruitful friendship.

I packed up and the next day hopped on a bus to Panjim, the capital and port city of Goa, as well as Anirban’s place of residence. He picked me up from the bus station on his sports bike and took me through Panjim, along the water. We crossed over a river that emptied into the bay on the right and was lined with old Portuguese style buildings to the left. Then we passed by downtown, a bustling urban area with some taller buildings to the left and casino boats in the bay on the right, all lit up with neon signs connoting royalty or luck or the likes (despite the 30 cent minimum bets and my love for casinos, I never made it out). Then we passed down a recently revamped road lined with new, old-looking, LED street lights. This long straight road was the site of Anirban’s most recent bike wreck—a comforting piece of information to hear as we are swerving through buses and cars going 60 mph.

The apartment was big and covered in posters of late and great rockstars. The guy who lived above Anirban heard us jamming and came and knocked on the door and offered beers and hash; we welcomed him and his gifts. This was Antonio, a super cool and passionate Spaniard from the Basque country who was really into sustainable farming. We spent the night playing songs and watching youtube videos of musicians we admired.

I felt quite comfortable in the apartment from day one—it was definitely a quintessential bachelor pad; full ash trays, dirty dishes, burn marks on the glass table, a toilet with a thin film covering, signifying the avoidance of scrubbing, and many other tell-tale signs that very few women enter the premises. Little did I know at that point that this would become my place of residence for the next two and a half months as I continued goin Goan.

'Something' in Goa

I decided at the last minute to go to Goa, despite the condemnations of the place from my pretty devout Muslim hotel owner in Mumbai ('all they do is drink,' 'there is nothing there but trance music and drugs,' etc. [after a month here, that’s not completely inaccurate]). While waiting for my bus outside a water bottling plant in North Mumbai, I met two guys about my age who were going on the same bus as me. They were pretty clearly gay, but if you know me you know I don’t care about sexual orientation at all (I like to select my friends based on things like coolness); we hit it off and ended up rearranging our seats so we could sit near each other on the bus. It was a long and bumpy overnight sleeper bus but I managed to get 5 or 6 hours of light sleep. Over the course of the bus ride we decided to split a room for economic purposes, and come to find out a friend of theirs had already reserved a room for us. I always love avoiding walking in street clothes with my pack in a tropical environment searching for a hotel, but I don’t love it quite enough to actually plan or make reservations (it’s worked out for me so far!).

When we arrived in Goa, I instantly got the feeling that I was in some kind of quasi-Latin American parallel universe. There was a big catholic cathedral situated right next to a bright orange Hindu temple blaring chants over the loud speaker, and the language in Goa is a mix of Portuguese and local Indian languages, so I could understand about 12% of the words from my knowledge of Spanish (a considerable improvement over the 0% of Hindi I could understand in Mumbai!). Once again the slacks and mustaches made me feel like Ron Burgundy was lurking around the corner; or perhaps people were earnestly discussing the battle between disco and rock over a Tab© soda.

We ended up, despite our explicit questioning, on the wrong bus to the beach. This was actually nice though, because it afforded us time to have a morning tall-boy can of beer while we waited for the correct bus. We weren't quite finished with the second man-can when the correct bus finally came, but I had the distinct feeling from what I had seen around me that no one would say anything if I imbibed my beverage on the bus… I was absolutely correct.

To get to the room we were staying in, we had to walk through a back alley about 3 feet wide, dodge clothes lines of numerous households, and walk through a few back yards, all of which included rubble, burnt trash piles, and cows. Our place was actually really nice, and the landlord was a big, sarcastic, dark skinned Indian man with a huge mustache and an outfit that almost always included wearing boxers in the stead of pants and a silver cross on the outside of his shirt or tucked away in his impressive chest hair when topless. I ended up staying there almost a week, and I guess he appreciated my sense of humor as much as I did his because he gave me a pretty hefty discount when it came time to pay him, without me even asking.

We went down to the beach and wound up at a beach bar that I would later become a regular performer at; we drank numerous big bottles of Kingfisher© Strong beer and jammed out to some light-day-happy-psy-trance, or something like that. 

I love music, but I find it very hard to connect with trance, a problem that very few others in Goa seem to have. I have been, nonetheless, trying to make sense of it, though; I always ask a trance fan what kind of trance I am listening to. It seems there is a gradient of light to dark, which refers to the texture as well as what time of day that it’s good for, and then there is psychedelic, which I believe means something different than the word describing such psychedelic classics as 'Innagadadavida' or 'White Rabbit', because I could hear no connection whatsoever. The beats per minute are also important, and it seems the later at night a song is played, the faster the tempo is (just for fun, try listening to a dark trance bass line at 220 BPM; if you are like me, it will likely bring you massive amounts of distress). 

After a month of daily exposure, I can say that to get the full experience of trance, it might be necessary to take MDMA or LSD, two things I have no desire to do (I like my current consciousness a lot, so I ain’t fixing what ain’t broken, as they say). This brings me to another thing I don’t like about trance; it’s really hard to talk to women when they are twisted on drugs of such a caliber, which takes away about 60% of why I like to go to dancing establishments in the first place. But I digress, and we wouldn't want that to happen on a blog... so back to the day at hand!

After about 11 hours of beer drinking and an hour of dancing to inhumanly fast music, we took the next logical step: go back to the guesthouse and drink liquor. It was there that my friends finally came clean to me about their orientation… sometimes I feel like it’s a shame that we live in a world where it takes inebriation for someone to peek out of the closet, but that is neither here nor there, I suppose. Now that that was out of the way, life was just that much more comfortable.

While walking on the little roads next to the beach and through the backyards filled with livestock and the smell of burnt plastic, I started to feel something. The hippies here didn’t piss me off that much; they seemed pretty legit. The international array of women attracted me; options, options, options. The law enforcement seemed lax to non-existent; a friend would later tell me he loves living in Goa because you can ‘bend the rules.’ It wasn’t the absence of cops, or abundance of girls, or the presence of homemade clothes, though, that was making me feel this ‘something.’ I still can’t tell you exactly what this ‘something’ in Goa is, but I can tell you that my weekend trip to Goa has turned into a month, and I am still feeling it every day when I wake up, and it makes me smile both to myself and those around me, and I have been laughing on a notably regular basis (and no, the abundance of hash is not to blame either, although it may play just the slightest of roles).