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This may be a disappointment for some of you, but this blog is brought to you by Sting Productions and today we will be helped by the letter M and the number 7! I usually assist with bloggy but this time I’m having to write the darn thing, partly cos Kat is still upset that no one commented on the last bloggy, but mainly because she’s far too busy writing texts to her new girlfriend to write anything else……….
At the end of the previous bloggy we promised you that we would be ‘working’ on the Indian girls…..well I think we tempted fate a little!! So, literally an hour after posting bloggy I decide that after the last few hard days lazing on the beach I owe it to myself to get a massage……………according to our bible (the Lonely Planet) Kerala is famous for its Ayurvedic treatment and massage programs……..
Random, but whilst on the subject of the lonely planet they have just released their latest edition for England……describing it as a place obsessed with the ‘celebrity’ culture, has a volatile economy, and that Dover is now basically a shithole! What concerns me most about this is the fact that the same organisation describes India using words like majestic, vibrant, colourful……………..which when you can’t breath through your mouth in this country because of the smell of piss, there is rubbish everywhere, literally EVERYWHERE, and men see nothing in-appropriate about Thomas the Tanking over you in the middle of the day on public transport, you start wondering just how bad England must be for such a negative description!
Anyways, back to the massage thing, the book does advise to be careful as every man in the state claims to be a ‘trained Ayurvedic masseuse’ – which, is why alarm bells start ringing when random men walking along the beach who look like they haven’t showered in days explain that they are a ‘trained masseuse’ offering you a ‘very cheap massage’…………tempting but NO! Anyways, after finding a proper and certified place – well it had a sign saying so, and it was really hot so I couldn’t be arsed to walk any further – they advised they could fit me in for the full body massage now and introduced me to this sweet, and tiny, Indian lady called Sunita (no I’m not making this shit up). We go into this little room, which I can only describe as a spruced up bamboo hut with a plastic table in the centre, some candles and a shower room (without a door) at the back! Sunita put on some nice relaxing music………………… Now That’s What I Call Bollywood 21………..and then told me in her broken English (accompanied by international sign language) to take off my top............... I did………..then my shorts……………. I did……………..then my bikini top………….I did (after slight hesitation)…………… then my bikini bottoms………. I did after convincing myself that she would give me a towel at least…………….she didn’t!!
So, there I am, standing as naked as the day I was born, with no towel, in-front of an Indian women whilst Bollywood hits blared out once again wondering how the hell I had got myself into a situation such as this! After the unsuccessful towel idea I thought laying on the table would be the next best thing (I can’t really explain why, or my thought process at this time…….maybe it was something to do with gravity, who knows), but this idea was also quickly shot down when she told me to sit on a stool as she was going to start with my head. The only thing worse than standing as naked as the day I was born in front of an Indian women, whilst Bollywood hits blare out, is sitting on a stool as naked as the day I was born in front of an Indian women giving me a head massage, whilst Bollywood hits blare out! After rubbing oil all in my hair Sunita finally allowed me to lay on the bed – THANK GOD! I’m still not sure I’m really ready to talk about the next 50 minutes but I will say this, in India, a full body massage means a FULL body massage!
After returning from my ‘massage’ Kat was a little concerned about my wellbeing, as well as the fact that what had just happened may, in Indian law, mean that we were now married, so she ordered us a beer to help calm my nerves! As we have already explained, beer is difficult to get in India and with no butler to run to the black market for us we ordered from the ‘secret menu’ at the bar we were in. Normally to hide the fact that people are drinking beer they give it to you in a Tea Pot, which we thought was pretty cool, but they had run out of T-Pots, so we just had to hide the bottles under the table. We shortly discovered that hiding beer is a talent that neither Kat nor I possess and before I’d had even enough to get an India man drunk the police turned up, searched the bar, found our hidden (badly) beer, shouted something at us that we couldn’t understand and confiscated it! FFS INDIA!!
It was around this point that we decided to just get to Goa as quick as we could – for those of you who don’t know anything about Goa its full of cultural experiences, beautiful green fields, stunning beaches and majestic sunsets – we couldn’t care less about these however and only wanted to go for the alcohol, parties and girls, which is ironic considering the events that unfolded in Goa! We headed up the coast to Kolam where we cruised through the Kerala backwaters for the day to Alleppey. We then got a train to Fort Kochin where I asked a tuktuk man to take us to the fort – it was when the guy seemed totally confused that Kat had to explain to me that the place is just called Fort Kochin and there isn’t an actual fort so instead he took us on a tour of the sights– he took us to the oldest church in India, then a pashmina shop owned by his uncle, then the dutch cemetery, then a jewellery shop owned by his sister, then the docks, then a curtain shop owned by his wifes brother, then a ginger making factory, then a handicrafts shopowned by his goats uncles, sister’s cousin……..!!
After Kochin we got a train to Mangalore, stayed overnight to watch the cricket (England got trashed so I won’t say anything more about it), before getting the 1pm train to Goa. We got to the train about half hour early and found our seats (I know this is very organised for us two but if you don’t you have to sit on the roof – although sitting on the roof may have prevented what happened next……..).
We were just sitting there looking out the window, minding our own business, observing the joy of Indian culture. When we suddenly became aware of an Indian man standing a few feet away. We innocently looked at him….. we wondered what he was doing standing so close… it looked like he was wanking….how odd….. surely not…. Oh no wait…. he was!! Shouting followed and large amounts of swearing on our part ensured the man quickly vanished. Leaving us to ponder the actual “joy of Indian culture”….
We arrived at Palolem beach in Goa and soon found some nice huts to stay in – I say nice, they were wonky, wooden shacks on the most unstable stilts ever with holes in the walls – but they were overlooking the beach and cost 2 quid a night so we didn’t complain! It wasn’t until I was sat on the loo and got the fright of my life when a pig stuck its head through a hole in the floor that we realised just how bad they were – it was at this point that Kat asked in a concerned manner “What the hell is that noise in there’, I tried to explain it wasn’t me it was the pig but i'm not sure she believed me! Palolem beach itself is amazing, one of the nicest beaches in Goa, its in its own little cove with restaurants and bars planted along the sands and unlike Varkala, you can go in the sea without much risk of drowning! After a day lazing on the beach we headed into a bar to enjoy a nice beer as the sun went down, it was here we met Nikos, an American guy who worked at the bar – I say work, he basically just sits out the front every night drinking trying to get as many people to join as possible! Well, we obviously had to help him with this and soon we were joined by some Dutch girls whose names I can’t recall now - Helga and Heidi maybe - then a Dutch guy (Bjorn), then three more English people who were staying at the same beach huts as us, then a few more people whose nationality I could not remember if you paid me……..maybe it was because Kat and I were unfriendly and didn’t ask or maybe it was because we’d just finished a 3 hour long drinking game and didn’t know where we were even from anymore, who knows! Now the rest of the night is a bit of a blur, so much so that I only remember 2 thoughts…. Firstly… that I had lost my flip flops….. and secondly when I thought it wouldn’t be the worst idea I had ever had to sleep with Nikos…………a man!!!………..and it wouldn’t have been had the beach huts not been attached to the stilts with very small pieces of string! For those of you wondering about now why Kat didn’t try and stop me………well your’ll have to ask her that one……..! She was however waiting for me on our porch as I stumbled back at Midday minus my flip flops and gay card, which if anyone finds btw could you please return to me!
The majority of the next day consisted of us dying on our porch with Kat bursting into fits of laughter every ten mins, still unable to quite comprehend the events of the night before. The next few days we spent relaxing, sunbathing, drinking, getting ridiculously stoned with the English guys from the other hut….and praying for a period asap!!... OK, so as I write this an Indian man on the train has just asked Kat whether she would like his baby…………..and not wanting (or knowing) how to politely decline, she now has a baby….an Indian baby – great, we discussed a travelling pet, not a travelling baby!! oh no wait, panic over, they just want to take pictures of her with the baby….(silly people, clearly they have no idea how unphotogenic she is).. I’d like to say the baby is cute but its Indian………now everyone is taking photo’s, not just the family, and now the baby’s crying, great! Talking of photo’s, this is probably just a more subtle way of getting photo’s of western girls, which seems to be a favourite pastime of Indian men, and boys…..along with staring. Literally, everywhere you go, they just stare at you, and they don’t try and hide it or even look away when you stare back at them – we’ve tried smiling at them – not a great idea, they then think you like them, so we tried frowning at them, they think you like them, asking them why they are staring, they think you like them, and finally telling them to fuck off but still, they think you like them. If the staring isn’t enough they also try and take photos of you on their phones, regardless of what we are doing; sleeping on trains/buses, queuing for the toilet, eating curry, holding Indian babies etc….!Some at least try and be subtle and pretend they are taking a photo of something next to you and slowly turn further and further till the camera is blatantly pointing straight at you, others just stick the camera in your face and take a photo and don’t seem to be even slightly put off when we turn, frown or look away! We went to the gateway of India in Mumbai yesterday, and suddenly all camera’s were on us and not the famous ‘gate’….or whatever it was!
Anyways, back to Goa. Now, for those of you who haven’t been crossing off the number of days on a calendar since we both departed from your lives, its 80!! That’s 1920 hours, or 115’200 minutes, or six million nine hundred and twelve thousand seconds that Kat and I have spent together so it won’t come as a big surprise that we are starting to run out of intelligent and thought provoking things to discuss; economy, check, dealth penalty, check, the war, check, incest, check!! Admittedly we ran out of things to discuss about an hour into the flight out, but we’ve amused ourselves since with more trivial things like shag, marry, kill etc! Now, maybe it was the dodgy Indian water or maybe it was the spliffs but the question game reached a whole new level sat on our porch in Palolem for days on end. Initially it was ones like what colour would you be (Me blue, Kat yellow), what number (Me 6, Kat 7), what letter (Me M (I love m), Kat O), what texture (Me can’t remember, Kat the feel of a sony laptop cover), what country (not visit, actually be……we both chose Canada…..(surprised it wasn’t Sweden actually –least then we’d have Swedish girls inside us), what animal (both birds, just so we could fly). Now, I’m not really sure how but this progressed onto, if you were stuck in a lift with the 7 of your closest friendsand you had to kill and eat one of them to survive, who would you pick? …..(er, swiftly moving on). It was then that Kat came up with possibly THE best question in the world EVER…….Which would you choose, to have every girl in the world fall in love with you but you never fall in love with any of them for the rest of your life or you only ever fall in love with one person but they, and only this one person, are also in love with you…………………
We got stuck in Goa a little longer than first anticipated but eventually we got a train toHampi, which is just basically full of rocks. We decided to hire a pedal bike to visit them all, but 50 metres up the road we were mobbed by loads of children who climbed into our baskets and by the time we’d cycled up and down the road enough times so each child could have a go we were knackered so abandoned them and went by boat. So imagine the scene, us, one small bamboo basket, two 10 year old boys, one paddle, and a mobile phone blaring out Bad (btw, all Indian’s think if you speak English, you love Michael Jackson…..!). This one seemed to be going much better than our previous bamboo boat experience until I enquired what was moving in the water not far away……..Small child: ‘croocodie”, Me “sorry, didn’t quite catch that”, Small child “crocodile”, Me (jokingly) “crocodile”, Small child “yes”, Kat: “WHAT”…..! I explained to Kat as she was scrambling out the boat that he must be joking as I was sure that there were no crocodiles in the rivers of Hampi!! I’m pretty sure she would have believed me as well if we hadn’t turned the cornerand walked into a sign saying ‘Beware, Crocodiles’. Talking of animals, India is full of them, not just the usual like dogs and kats, and the obvious like rats and cockroaches, but ones that I really wasn’t expecting! Goats and cows roam the streets……we had to find another tuktuk once as a family of goats had apparently got there first…….and the other day we were in a restaurant in Hampi when a cow walked in……….he was a veggie though so he left pretty quickly! Then to top if all off, when we arrived in Mumbai we were waiting at the traffic lights, I look to the side of us, and a cow is stood there also waiting for the lights to go green…..WTF!!
We had to book two sleeper buses from Hampi to Mumbai, taking a total of 48 hours, which would have been fine, had I not got a bout of Delhi belly on the day we left…….THANK FUCK for Imodium, although its worked a little too well and I haven’t been able to go since, that was a week ago…... Now, Indian sleeper buses are slightly different from the ones in Southeast Asia, you don’t get your own ‘chair’ that goes back into a bed, its just a very small double mattress with some manky curtains for privacy that don’t fit all the way across. Travelling as a pair, this isn’t too bad as we just spent the night spooning with an agreement to swap little/big spoon every hour, it’s the women travelling on their own who are paired up with an Indian man that I feel sorry for!
Anyways, the first one wasn’t too bad as we got the back area, which is a row of 5 beds. We shared with 3 American guys (no, I didn’t sleep with any of them…..!) who started on the spliffs as soon as we started moving………never thought I’d ever sleep so well on an Indian sleeper bus…..until we hit a pothole and all 5 of us were catapulted in the air, smashing our heads on the above bunk! The second one however was not as good, no Americans, no spliffs, and Kat woke up in the night to find an India man standing next to our bunk staring at us….bad times!
We finally arrived in Mumbai stinking and looking like death, although apparently not bad enough to put the India men off taking our photo……………
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