Goa

In-road cozy B&B

Who could resist ?

Waterbuffalo strolling through town

Our WC

The much inproved quarters, Sevas at $17 a night

Eating garbage

Not a bad life





Our casual and often unfair disdain for Westerners who come to turbulent, raucus and sometimes crassly materialistic India for spiritual fulfillment is being put to a test. On the south coast of Goa, we're staying at a yoga and meditation center called "Sevas---an eco-friendly habitat." There's lots of spun cotton over pale skin walking around here. But unless these people discover who we are and turn on us, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers---"Get them! They are cheeseburger people! Get the cheeseburger people!"---we plan on spending eight relaxed days in this tranquil garden spot with its cozy palapa huts that are a short walk through the palm groves from a pretty beach.

We turned up at Sevas after a first-night-in-Goa fiasco. A Lonely Planet-listed hotel we had phoned from Cochin was fully booked, and the manager recommended another up the road. But Ojas was not so much up the road as in the road. The motorcycles hurtling by several feet from our beds made for a sleepless night, as did the neighbors' dogs snarling and whining, and the night manager outside our all-too-well-ventilated room har-de-haring on his cell phone. In the morning, when we checked out after one night instead of nine, Raj, the previously cheery manager, tried and failed to extort a "deposit" fee from us. Although, we did overpay for the room---$50 instead of the $30 we thought we had agreed to---just to be able to move on. Mai pen rai, said we, Thai-style. The lovely Sevas is setting us back just $17 a night.

If it sounds as if the spoiled brats are taking a vacation from their vacation, it's true. You don't come to Goa, the former Portuguese enclave between Cochin and Mumbai, for India's cultural riches. It's largely a winter vacationland now for Europeans. Northern Goa has its rave, chug-beer and package-tour scene. Palolem, down here in the South, is uncrowded and mostly tranquil. At lunch yesterday, we sat under thatch by the sea, chatting with the Nepalis---one of them married to a Swiss woman---who run a little open air restaurant, and enjoyed the speciality of the house, yak-cheese sandwiches. The cheese was ripe and flavorsome, like a good aged Parmesan, and not at all woolly.

We flew up to Goa from Cochin on IndiGo, one of the well-run new airlines that have started up since India's economic liberalization of the early '90s. They compete with Indian Airlines, the abysmal state-owned carrier. Here's a story about Indian Airlines. (Some of you have heard it more than once.) In 1966, on a Peace Corps program-evaluation trip, I was to fly from Trivandrum up to Bangalore on the only domestic airline then operating. At the scheduled stop in Cochin, all the passengers were politely instructed to get off the plane. Inside the terminal, we milled about confusedly---and then watched as another group of passengers was led out and up the stairs onto our plane. Which then flew off. We were told to come back the next day. Some of our group of 40 or so were apoplectic. I just thought of it as a day off from work, checked into a pleasant seaside hotel, and sat on the terrace eating Kerala fish curry and smoking Rothman's as the sun sank into the Arabian Sea.

While Indian Airlines may treat people like cattle, it would never treat cattle like people. Cows really are sacred here, as are, to a lesser extent, snakes and monkeys. Cattle and water buffalo are put out each day to roam freely, even in towns and cities. Their owners locate and milk them twice a day and then fetch them home in the evening. These animals forage for vegetation in rural areas and eat garbage in towns. (Garbage is plentiful. Government garbage collectors require bribes, and apparently many people refuse to pay. The trash all over the place is ugly---and smelly, as some people burn garbage in the streets.)

About 40 percent of Indians are vegetarians, but the rest eat chicken, goat, lamb, pork and even beef. When it gained control of the federal government for a few years in the late '90s, the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party, tried unsuccessfully to ban cow slaughter. That and other theocratic and radically nationalistic policies---notably nuclear sabre-rattling with Pakistan---scared the bejesus out of most of multi-cultural, religiously diverse India, and the BJP has been on the wane since then.

Indians are used to sharing the nation's roads and lanes with cows, and by now so are we. Though as we walked to the beach yesterday, a testy water buffalo took a swipe at me, the tip of one horn grazing me as I passed. Joe said the bull may have been provoked by the red stripe on my bathing suit, and he described the incident as "Hemingway-esque." Palolem does sound something like Pamplona.