Goa Day 3

I write this in my dark hotel room. The only light is my laptop screen running on battery power. There have been power cuts on and off all evening. I thought the power cuts on Friday may have been because of the violent storm that had blown through earlier in the day, but there were no violent storms blowing through today – even though the BBC World said Goa was in for more rain dumping. I don’t get BBC World in Mumbai, so I’m nearly overjoyed to have it here. It’s quality journalism.

I dined solo on my hotel’s balcony. I had prawns in a red curry. It was o.k. Goan food doesn’t really do it for me. I think it may not also be the season for seafood – maybe because boats can’t go out into these rough monsoon seas. I did see lots of young men fishing in the river in Panjim today. They weren’t using poles. They were just holding lines, which were more like strings – i.e. not fishing line. I didn’t need dessert, but a dessert on the menu called “cheese on toast” intrigued me. I ordered it, and I was disappointed when the waiter brought me some shredded cheese on French toast. Now I’m stuffed, which is ok because I’ll be skipping breakfast. My flight is at 6:30 a.m. It takes 45 minutes to get to the airport. I’ll be waking up some time shortly past 4:30.

And I may not smell real great. It has been a long day with a lot of walking and lots of humidity and some stinky busses. (and the power’s back on again, and I can hear the BBC on tv, and because it’s late here and daytime in the U.S., a U.S. news roundtable is going) I started the day by taking the Lonely Planet Panjim walking tour. I saw a bright orange Hindu temple on a hill. I saw the Archbishop’s House and across the street, the Chief Minister’s House (the Chief Minister is like the Prime Minister to the State of Goa). These were on top of a tall hill, and when I started trudging down the hill, a motorcycle guy stopped and asked if I wanted a ride. Because I now love riding on motorcycles, I asked how much. He said free. I asked him to take me to the Public Library, which was closed.

I’ve given up on telling people I’m a “legal intern,” or a “legal trainee,” or that I work in a “legal department.” It’s so much easier for me to say, “I’m a lawyer in Mumbai.” Plus, when I say this, people get happy, and some even tell me congratulations. I also like telling people I work in Mumbai because it makes me seem a little more with the Indian picture, as opposed to the typical blind-sided white tourist. This motorcycle guy asked for my contact information because he was so happy to know a lawyer. So all day, all the people I met, I told them I was a lawyer, and faces lit up every time I gave this news. And I am old enough to be a lawyer by U.S. standards. There are lots of 24 year old first year lawyers, and in India there are lots of 22 year old first year lawyers. So whatever, I’m a lawyer now in my mind.

We parted ways, and I walked around the business district of Panjim a little and onto the bus depot to catch a bus to Ponda. I knew right where this was since I already took a bus to Ponda yesterday. Panjim was bustling on this Sunday morning. Most businesses were closed. Even when Panjim bustles, it does it in a very relaxed manner. I had to stand on the bus the entire 45 minutes to Ponda. This is interesting because we have to drive over a ridge and up and down hairpin turns, and this bus driver drove very fast and rather reckless, and I got a real workout from holding onto the overhead bars while keeping myself from falling on women in saris sitting in seats.

And I went to Sahakiri Spice Farm. It was interesting enough. The spice farm is 130 acres (I was told), and the plants are in plots on the hill sides. However, we saw very little of this and instead went on a short hike on a trail with various spice plants planted along the trail. The trail took us through a sort of demo farm. A woman gave us a tour and showed us the different spice plants and told us about them. I had the feeling that I was at a jungle summer camp. Luckily, no snakes were trying to step up, and that’s fine, we know they need to be falling back when I come around anyway.

Adding to the summer camp feel, after the tour we sat at picnic tables under a pavilion and ate Goan food from a buffet. The vibe of the farm is that spices are good for holistic healing. There was a sheet detailing the benefits of the various spices. Of interest might be tulsi oil (sweet basil). One drop of tulsi oil in one cup of tea every morning for 30 days while cutting meat and protein from your diet will cure “unpleasant body odor.” NGOs should be distributing this to Indian men. Deodorant isn’t real popular here. There was also much mention made that all the spices are organic. My dad told me spices tend to be organic no matter what because no pesticides are needed to control weeds since labor to pick the weeds is so cheap. Nevertheless, this farm was real big on touting its holistic and organic qualities. The farm was using the remnants from the cashew fruit to make compost. The farm also had elephant rides, but the elephants last week went back to Karnataka for the monsoon. There was a spice store too. I bought some black pepper and some white pepper.

Very un-summer camp-like was the cup of fenni they brought us before our lunch. My tour guide said, “This is Goan fire water. It’s good for appetite.” Just the smell of it made me gag. I thought about it for a few minutes, and everyone else was dumping it down, so I took it like a shot and got it over with. It was actually easier than Friday’s fenni. This fenni was probably fresh while Friday’s fenni had probably been sitting in a warm bottle in the kitchen for a few years. This fenni is made at the spice farm, although Spring time is time for distilling fenni, which is made from the fruit of a cashew tree. I guess there’s more produce from a cashew tree than just cashews (i.e. a cashew fruit too)? They grow cashews at the farm, but we didn’t see any cashew trees today. I ate some cashews at lunch, and they were much better than the cashews I purchased yesterday.

Earlier in the day, I did see many plants growing that I had never seen before. I saw black pepper, which grows in hanging bunches like grapes. The plant is a vine that grows up trees. Th southwestern coast of India, from Goa south, is called the Malabar Coast, and it is the Malabar black pepper that brought the Portuguese here in the first place.

I saw vanilla pods, the world’s second most expensive spice, I was told. (saffron is the world’s first) I saw cardamon which grows low to the ground. I was told this is the world’s third most expensive spice. I saw a cinnamon plant. Cinnamon sticks are the bark from the bush, and I’m told the oils from the plant can be so potent they can burn the skin. Speaking of burning, there was a microscopic pepper that had been imported by the Portuguese. This pepper is 2800 times stronger than a long pepper. The lady broke it open, and I put it on my tongue for a few seconds. It was very spicy. I also saw allspice, which I’m told is five spices in one. I broke a clove leaf and smelled it. I saw green coffee beans dangling front the branches of the short bush-like coffee tree. I saw bunches of bananas hanging from trees, and did you know that the stem of the banana is at the bottom when it’s in the bunch on the tree? The banana grows up.

I also saw beatlenut leaves, which are dried to make traditional eating platters. Our lunch plates today were made from beatlenut leaves pressed into the shape of a plate. Traditionally, however, you would just eat off a dried leaf – no plate pressing. The beatlenut is, of course, a main ingredient in the infamous Indian favorite, paan. Remember my experiences with paan? I said it was like chewing mud with sticks. Anyway, I ate by myself, hitched a ride with a Sakahire Spice Farm van back into Ponda and jumped on a bus to Margao.

Margao is southern Goa’s capital, and it’s rather bustling compared to Panjim. There were big Portuguese buildings, but the city was more in the ugly Indian style than Panjim – I mean, lots of big, dirty concrete buildings. From here I was going to go to the village of Chandor where there are some restored Portuguese mansions. Because I now love riding on motorcycles, I hitched a ride to Chandor village 15 km away on the back of a motorcycle taxi. I took a lot of photos from the back of my motorcyle taxi. I saw women in saris bent over in rice paddies. I also saw a steel plant. I’ve noticed the water here is red. So are the stones and dirt. This could mean there is a lot of iron in Goa, and even if not, it is near the sea and there are a lot of huge, wide rivers from the sea that are perfect for shipping in the coal and iron to make steel. Also interesting is that Mario manufactures its Parachute hair coconut oil in Ponda. But anyway, calling Chandor a village is an overstatement. Chandor is a crossroads with a few shops and a huge church. There’s also a huge mansion right across the crossroads from the church. This was my primary destination.

The house is just like every other restored European house I’ve been to, except this one in India, not Europe. There are marble-topped tables, chandeliers, mirrors (the mirrors and chandeliers were from Belgium), Chinese porcelain pottery, ball rooms, uncomfortable-looking chairs and couches and four-poster beds. I guess this house is special though because everything was imported so far.

The house was built in stages. The first state was built 350 years ago, second 250 years ago, third 150 years ago. This is what I was told, at least, and the house is actually two wings, a wing built by each of two brothers. The wings are still owned by descendents of these brothers. Fifteen generations have passed through now. I wish I would’ve asked what business the brothers were in, but I forgot. I imagine them as owners of shipping companies, or maybe they were just aristocracy. My tour guides were first an old Goan lady, and then a middle age Goan man with health problems (huge gut, he smoked, and he liked to keep his tongue to his front teeth like a Down’s Syndrome sufferer), and all were difficult to understand and not particularly lively. I took a picture of this guy in the ballroom smoking a cigarette. I wanted to take it because I thought he would look cool smoking a cigarette in a ballroom. He said ok but I can’t publish it. At first he seemed tickled I wanted to take his picture. He asked why I took it. I told him cause I thought he looked cool. I don’t know that he understood what I meant. And as I was leaving, he asked me again why I took his picture, and I gave him the same answer, so he probably still didn’t understand. I think he’s really worried I’m going to use it to make fun of him. He told me his head is out of sorts because he had just woken up when I came to the door, and that he smokes to keep himself awake. Whatever, dude.

There’s another restored house in Chandor that offers tours too. I walked and walked out into the countryside, and I thought I would be very humble and ask some kids for directions. They told me I’d walked too far, so I started walking back and then started to think these kids gave me the wrong directions. I asked directions at another, much smaller, restored house, called Villa Formosa (Formosa, I know, means beautiful in Portuguese; Formosa was what the Portuguese called Taiwan.). The house was freshly painted orange and there were decorative tiles accenting it. It was quite beautiful and renovated more thoroughly than the tourist houses – but because the renovation made it appear very modern, I don’t think much about it was original like in the tourist houses. Anyway, those kids had told me the wrong direction, so I trudged the 1 km or so back to where I needed to be. (see now why I don’t ask people for directions?) Amazingly, it didn’t rain a drop until I got into the second house – I mean, I didn’t get soaked in rain today like I did yesterday.

This house was even older and had originally been a Hindu house. At some point a Catholic took control. This house had seen a lot of battles apparently. There was a trap door in a bedroom with a passageway that led into the cellar and out to the back where there’s a river. This passageway to the river was to escape invaders. And in this ground floor cellar there were lots of holes for gun barrels to slide through. This house was much less opulent. The floors were wooden, not stone or tile. The furniture was all very old and uncomfortable looking. Some chairs were carved out of a wood so hard that termites couldn’t eat through it. I was told that termites are a huge problem in these parts. There was a tv, and this house looks more like someone still lives in it. In fact, an old lady, who had married into the family who owned the house, lives there with her son and his family, and they gave me the tour.

On a side note: the old lady said that her kids knew Portuguese, Konkani (the native Indian language for this region), English, and Hindi. She told me that all children in Goa still learn Portuguese, but I’m skeptical of this. Goa was given up to the Indians in 1961. The Indian Army actually invaded and received no resistance. But what’s the purpose of learning Portuguese other than for tradition? And if tradition is the only reason, this, I know, wouldn’t be a strong enough reason for every parent and every school to make sure that every kid learned it. Judging by the Indian nationalist movements of other states where nationalists insist on glorifying the local language and teaching it to all kids in schools, I would think that Konkani would be the language of tradition, not Portuguese. My apologies to Portugal, but it and its language are such a small player on the world stage, who needs to know it except for the Portuguese and Brazilians and people who want to go to those places? English is the premier international language, especially for India. Anyway, I’m not sure the lady was all together because she thought the U.S. was the U.K. Whenever I would tell her about the U.S., she’d start talking about Europe and the U.K., so I gave up trying to explain anything about the U.S. (“I’m from the U.S.A.” “Oh, I have a nephew in the U.K. I went there a few years ago. I went to the rest of Europe too.”; “The streets are very clean in the U.S.” “Oh, I know, I’ve been to the U.K.”)

A group of obese Indians came to the house while I was there. They were about my age but not my weight. I asked if I could get a ride with them back to Margao, and even though there wasn’t room for the 9 of us in the Toyota suv, I rode with them. It was raining, but it stopped raining before I got out of the car. Sweet timing. Not so sweet was how they dropped me off at some country crossing outside of Margo where there were overflowing trash dumpsters and feral dogs scavenging. I’ve found it very helpful during my time in India that the word “bus” translates. I was able to ask if I could get a bus to Margao here. Someone said yes. I waited for 45 minutes, stepped in some dog poop, and got my bus to Margao. At the Margao bus terminal I caught a bus to Panjim, and once in the bus, it began dumping rain for half an hour of the one-hour journey. Again, sweet timing.

I had wanted to try to head to the most southerly of Goa’s beaches today. Supposedly it’s the state’s most idyllic (Calangute is definitely dirty and crowded), which is to say it’s the only beach that hasn’t been trashed yet. I’ve never been to an idyllic beach before, just urbanized beaches. I wanted to see a fine, white sand beach with palm trees like in the Corona commercials. I would have had to take a one hour bus ride from Margao to get to this idyllic beach. But I spent so long in Chandor and trying to get back to Margao, it would already be evening by the time I got there, and then I’d have to get a bus all the way back to Panjim, at least two hours away. Margao is an hour south of Panjim, the southern beaches are an hour south of Margao.

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