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Two at Large in Goa — a package holiday unpacked...
Calangute
Calangute is a crazy, bizarre mixture of dust and decadence, crammed with shambolic traffic and shuffling tourists, a cacophony of car horns, the cries of hawkers and taxi drivers, the croaking of crows.
This was a package holiday Indian-style. You get the feeling that you are on the edge of India, both geographically and culturally.
As a Portuguese colony, Goa missed out on the British Raj. There are, on the coast at least, more white churches than temples, there are Mediterranean-style villas dotted amongst the palm-frond huts and concrete hotel complexes.
But this is a developing country, as we patronisingly call it, despite the fact that it has civilizations stretching back thousands of years, and so people's priorities are set on survival rather than keeping everything clean and tidy...the luxury of being anally retentiveness is obviously a western malaise. So everything, from the oldest building to the newest hotel, has an air of half-heartedness about it, a veneer of grime, a lack of maintenance.
People sleep, pee and crap everywhere, plonk their home and family and plastic bags wherever they can, be it a half-completed building, a bus station, a back alley. Scavengers, human and otherwise, fail to keep up, defeated by indestructible, indigestible plastic that gathers in slimy heaps. The only places that look clean and well-kept are the heavily-guarded mansions of millionaires.
So far so typical I suppose, but through this disarray wander pale and flabby westerners and best-dressed Indians (the Goans don't regard themselves as Indian. "Too many Indians," they'll complain), all of us on vacation.
The westerners are, almost to a man and woman, overfed. The few lithe bodies still lack the surface tension of the wiry locals. The Indian visitors are small and wide-eyed, with occasional spreads of wealthy brown fat in evidence. We all seem obscenely over-nourished compared with the Goans.
COMING SOON...
Panjim
Old Goa
Waterfall
Mapusa
Flea Market
Food (Vegan)
Ticlo Resort
updated 6th August 2002
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