Chapter 22: India here we Goa!
Goa, India, March 1-March 8, 2024
We began our time in South Asia where many people end: on the warm beaches of Goa. Again and again, people would tell us that folks usually go here last to “decompress” from the magical, chaotic place that is India. We liked that we started these six weeks easy.
Friday, March 1, 2024
Just after landing, we took in the weather of Goa. It was around sunset time. This was supposed to be a hot time of the year for South India – indeed, it was in the 90s Fahrenheit – but something about the humidity or proximity to the coast made it feel really nice.
Our second impression of Goa was leaving the airport and having to set up their state-run rideshare service. No other ride share apps or taxi systems were allowed, we could only use this thing called Goa Miles. Using Goa Miles feels like an impression of a rideshare app. All the features are basically there, except they're slightly off or broken to the point that the whole experience is kinda shitty.
The nice man at the Goa Miles taxi booth set us up with the app – including connecting us to his company wifi – and got us our first ride. Here, we peaked our Goa Miles experience. While waiting, we met a French hippie woman who was trying to bum a ride to North Goa. She was playing with her fire poi sticks while complaining about how the taxi to raver Goa was too expensive. We were happy to be heading for the old city, Panaji, overhearing this.
The first impression of our hotel was bad. It seemed run-down and the man behind the desk was unfriendly. It was located next to a dilapidated historical building: a tall pile of red bricks and some walls were all that were left of what looked like a church. It was a big difference to the really nice place we just stayed at during our transit day from Laos via Bangkok.
Because of this or something else, I started wigging out. I was feeling negative about everything, depression spiking out of nowhere. Camille took great care of me. She found a restaurant for us to try, and took up the burden of ordering. Here, we tried our first chili chicken – what would be one of our favorite Goan dishes. She found us an ice cream parlor to go to after. I got kesar pista, a cardamom/pistachio ice cream that was my and my grandmother’s favorite. We went to bed early.
Camille woke up in the middle of the night to welcome my cousin, Meera, into our hotel. She helped her get a key to the room. Before we went to bed, we texted her a guide to get to the hotel, as well as how to navigate Goa Miles.
So begins three weeks of traveling as three.
Saturday, March 2, 2024
When Cam and I woke up, we found out that the airline had lost Meera’s bag. She had only what was on her back for our first day in town together. Luckily, our clothes fit her well (I lent her my sneakers and Cam lent her a dress).
We found breakfast at the Caravela Cafe. Service was a bit different than we were used to — slower and not necessarily on a first-come, first-serve basis. (Maybe, the norm for asserting oneself is different than the politeness-or-death sensibilities of Southern California.) This would take getting used to for me. The food was delicious. We ate Goan cuisine: pan, chorizo and a delectable cold coffee. There is no Michelin guide in India, but this place was voted one of the best coffee shops in the country by the Architectural Digest.
After breakfast, we explored downtown. We might as well have been in Lisbon, the buildings were so colorful and European. We soon found ourselves at Ambedkar Park. In the park, Meera educated us about B. R. Ambedkar, someone she looks up to. He was a founder of the Indian constitution after the country gained independence. Originally born a Dalit (low caste) he would go on to get doctorates at Colombia University and the London School of Economics. He ensured that caste wouldn’t be codified into the new Indian constitution. A advocate for the destruction of the caste system, he led a movement to convert fifty thousand Dalits to Buddhism, rejecting the hierarchical nature inherent to Hinduism. Most of the Buddhists in India today are because of Ambedkar.
After exploring the park, which had beautiful flowers and signs with sayings of wisdom, we headed for other sights in Panaji. We found the Church of Immaculate Conception. The church area was closed off, but we enjoyed viewing what we could from the steps below the entrance. It was a sight to behold.
All through the morning, I had been on my phone. I was trying to find a way to get more of a critical medicine I was running low on. This is a medication that I take every day whose consequences would be dire if I stopped. Without a change, I would run out of this med on April 17, only a couple days after leaving India. All morning, I was trying to schedule a telehealth visit with an Indian doctor to see if I could get a prescription for the medicine, so I could buy it at a pharmacy. In the US, the non-generic version of this drug costs the same as a month’s rent. (Well, maybe before inflation.) I was hoping that the drug would be a manageable price in Asia.
On the steps of the church, I was WhatsApping doctors, Googling furiously. Stressed about gaining access, we changed the plans of our day to try to find my medicine. We walked around several pharmacies in downtown Panaji, pill bottles in my pocket and doctor’s note on my phone. I was getting desperate.
Then, lo and behold, we found a pharmacy where we could get my meds! They didn’t have the exact right dose, but I was able to get a 90 day supply. They also had some of Camille’s medicines that were hard for her to find. The countdown timer of our trip was extended another quarter, where we definitely would be able to acquire the meds from the US. I was so, so relieved!
Access to medical care — specifically, to medicine — is a constant challenge. It’s a significant enough of a concern that we’d make seeking out medicine part of our agenda for each country we visit. Though we haven’t spoken about much, it was significant to have solved this puzzle for this stretch of time.
Having searched a lot of shops, heat weighing down on us, we returned home and planned.
When we were ready to go out again, we went to a little boutique clothing store called Sacha’s Shop. We would spend tons of time buying clothes in this country. It really offers a shopping experience like no other place. At Sacha’s, Meera almost bought a dress, but decided against it in the end. This restraint would only last so long.
While she and Cam were reviewing outfits, I found a poster on the door of the shop. What are the chances? Can you believe we happened upon a cool art festival happening this very weekend? I fervently looked up the event information in the shop.
The sun was getting low. We decided it was time to shift to the lounging part of the day. We ordered a Goa Miles ride to take us to a bar along the waterfront, a place called Black Sheep Bistro. Happy hour sounded excellent.
We arrived near the bistro. There was a shop right next door called FabIndia. Little did we know we would be popping in and out of FabIndias in every city we visited. (The textiles in India are second to none.) We shopped for a little bit, but realized quickly that we were too tired. We headed around the corner to the bar.
We drank down three cocktails and ate some chi chi appetizers. Over our tasty morsels, we decided to go to the art show tomorrow. Decision made and sun setting soon, we left for the waterfront.
We enjoyed the orange sky and party-boat filled bay from the beach.
Eventually, we found a dinner spot called Mum’s. Every item on the menu was some mother’s home recipe. It was spectacular food, and notably Goan.
By now, we had a big day. We wanted to go home, but summoned the energy to see one more place that night. We headed for a cool dive bar called Miski.
At the corner dive, the walls had portraits of revolutionaries, like Ché and Marx. We each drank what became our favorite beer in the country — the People’s Lager, a rice beer brewed in Goa. What a great way to end our first day together.
Sunday, March 3, 2024
We ate breakfast at a place with small portions and slow service. At least it had a cool atmosphere. Cam and I didn’t eat enough, but we weren’t going to delay the day by ordering more.
We went to a clothing shop that Cam found out about via a flier. (She reports now she thought it looked cool when we passed it the day prior). The shop was called Good Life, and boy did it have the goods. The garments were so fab, we all got something. Cam picked out her 31st birthday gift — a jacket made from a recycled sari with a traditional Gujarati design. Meera picked out a killer yellow dress she would wear throughout our trip. I got a Rajasthani style short-sleeve, button-down shirt.
Shopped out, we found a restaurant with extremely Portuguese interiors and ordered three thalis: two fish and one veggie. Thalis (for those not in the know) are sampler platters, something like Indian bento boxes.
The art show was on the schedule for the day, located an hour away from where we were staying. We also wanted to visit an art museum nearby. Instead of rallying and going to the museum, we went back to the room to nap.
Cam and Meera napped while I worked on a side project. No one remembered to set timers. Coding for the first time in a long time, I got lost in a fugue state. I only remembered to check the time at an hour past when we said we wanted to leave. I felt incredibly guilty about this. We waffled between not going (eating the cost of the tickets) or just going to the museum. Eventually, we decided it was worth it to see some part of the event we paid for. We embarked on the 40 minute drive to the soundscape grounds.
Once we got there and learned what the deal was, we were glad to have arrived late. We got wristbands and beer tickets on entry, and walked into a garden area with ambient noise music, a pool with children splashing about, people hanging on grass eyeing their children sipping drinks, and a grand river past the grounds. We entered a chill hangout that was a cooldown from last night’s party. We found out there would be another show and dancing tonight and that our wristbands would get us in. For the time being, we enjoyed a beer tasting (I made friends with the brewer) and talking with locals.
We took in the scene. We met a whirling dervish dancer who was collecting wishes on paper. She would add them to her dress so when she would spin later on, they would be submitted to the divine.
We watched the sun set by the river. Once it was dark, we started making plans to go to the show. We went to the cafe by the entrance to see how we would get a ride. This was a remoteish part of Goa. There weren’t cabs to hail like the city center we were just in. Show aside, we were worried how we would get home.
We asked the cafe staff if they knew how to order a cab here. Eventually, we spoke to the owner of the restaurant. He took great care of us, ordering us a taxi to the show and having it wait to take us all the way back home. He insisted we should eat first, that we have plenty of time. We ate and drank a few cocktails — one the brewer I met earlier recommended that featured arak, a fermented spirit made with Goan cashews.
We went on to the event a bit after it started. It turned out not to be a dance party, but an avant garde art show. It featured a Russian Jewish woman MC, who had Mel Brooks “The Producers” energy. We watched horny showtunes, an androgynous drag strip tease, a haircut and a woman who performed a skit in a straight jacket. Oh, what good, strange art! I liked that it wasn’t all hip young folk at the show. It seemed like whole families — aunties and grandmas — were in the audience. We left before dancing started as we grew tired.
Monday, March 4, 2024
We started the day with a cooking class! We found a really good one called Rita’s Gourmet, specializing in Goan cuisine. Since our hotel had a 9 am checkout (!!) and Rita’s was on the way to our next place, we made sure to be packed up and ready to go early in the morning.
We made it out of our hotel with all our stuff bright and early. We even had time to visit a local chai shop. I ordered the Goa Miles ride just in time to make it to the class with some buffer. Because of the ill designed app and miscommunication with the driver, we ended up pretty late to Rita’s class.
The class took place in Rita and her husband’s house on the coast. They had a gorgeous house that came with an outdoor, roofed kitchen designed for cooking classes. Rita and her husband were understanding of our lateness and quite accommodating in general.
We were due to leave for a market tour. Before we did, Rita’s husband gave us a chai making lesson. Over the chai we made, they fed us a quick breakfast and after, we went with Rita and her personal driver to the local market.
We found the market charming. It was similar to many of the markets we’ve found in Asia, but featuring goods local to South India. This was Meera’s first market experience, and she seemed enthralled. Rita did such an excellent job explaining what type of produce and spices were there, where they came from, and their cultural context. We admired that for all the stalls she visited, she would only buy from other women.
Arriving in the kitchen with our fresh produce, we were enveloped in smoke. Rita’s neighbor was burning yard waste – a normal practice in India. The thick, white smoke hit us quite hard. Eventually, the smoke lessened and we adapted to it.
We thoroughly enjoyed cooking with Rita. We made chicken vindaloo, samoas, chili squid, a coconut pie, and a fresh green papaya salad. Towards the end of cooking the meal, when we were knee deep in the heat of our woks, Rita’s husband rolled in and offered us cold local beer. We so admired the husband’s role here. He just makes chai and drops by with beer, and he’s done.
By three in the afternoon, we had finished cooking and eating. From there, we got a ride all the way down to South Goa. From that night on, we spent our time in Palolem, one of the nicest beaches in the state if not all of India.
We were tired when we got to our room. As fate would have it, we all got an email that announced that our flight to Sri Lanka was canceled. Cam, the best noticer I know, pointed it out, and I volunteered to call the airline to sort it out. I called the support number on the porch. While talking, our neighbor noticed that I had an American accent – he did, too. After the call, I met a retired gentleman named Ignacio – a character that I will describe soon enough. He seemed gregarious and interesting, so I made dinner plans with the four of us for the next day. Who doesn’t love meeting a character?
Beach time finally within our grasp, we took a walk on the shore. We walked the length of the beach as the sun was starting to set. Along the way, Cam met a nice crab.
At the end of the beach, we found a cool bar: the Cozy Nook. In fact, we realized it was attached to a hotel that our guidebook recommended staying at. All of us drank a cold beer. At the end, we walked back and called it a day.
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Meera woke up before Cam and I; we slept in. She tells us that she did a morning yoga class; good for her.
Together, we found breakfast at a New Zealand brunch spot called The Mill. We enjoyed this breakfast (smoothie bowls). Cam found it amusing that they considered apples “tropical fruit”. We leisurely spent the morning there. Here, we spotted a flier for a voice activation class. It promised to help you “find your voice” using yogic practices. It was run by a hippie-dippy woman from Scandinavia. Instead of being critical, we signed up for class with an open mind.
Leaving breakfast, we had three hours before activating our voices. We decided to grab things to plan for the next part of our trip – Kerala and Sri Lanka – and head back to the Cozy Nook. We read our paper guide books and plotted on paper. Somehow with all this slack, we found ourselves in a rush to get to the voice activation class!
We hustled over there and still were one of the first people to arrive at the class. The next three to four hours were like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It was one of the highlights of our time in India for each of us.
We drank a cacao concoction to increase our serotonin. We began the class by answering why we wanted to discover our voices, all of us getting really vulnerable. The trend of the group was the desire to overcome our deep senses of shame. We moved around, shared ourselves, welcomed our peers, sat in a circle, chanted, and sang. One of the most intense portions involved each member of the group taking turns sitting in the center of the circle. For two minutes each, everyone else would sing their name continuously. Some people cried when they were serenaded, the experience was so overwhelming.
At the end, we all had a high, giddy energy. Since it was so powerful, the class ran an hour longer than expected. This felt good at the moment, but unfortunately we had promised to have dinner with the neighbor we met the other day.
We rushed across the beach to the Art Resort restaurant where we would meet Igancio. We apologized profusely upon arrival – he had been sitting there at a big table in a crowded restaurant for an hour. There was a live band playing, and he had to defend our seats against people who came to see the show. He didn’t have a phone, so he didn’t see our messages informing him that we’d be very late. We felt terrible.
Ignacio was understanding. We went on to learn all about him. Igancio talked about his life and anything else that came across his mind. We learned that he was originally from Guam, he is a US military veteran, he’s lived in the US, Hungary, Spain and now just moved into the hotel room next to us in Goa for an indefinite amount of time. He had an interesting blend of politics (anti-Obama, pro-Trump, yet still anti-fascist in Hungary and the EU). He was on his third(?) wife and still friends with his exes; we could tell he caused a lot of grief for his kids. The lesson I took from our dinner with Igancio: Sometimes when you meet a character, you’re gonna hear a soliloquy.
Now late, we went home.
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
Another morning, another solo adventure for Meera, another sleep-in for Cam and I. This time while we were snoozing, Meera went to the beach and bought some anklets from a street (sand?) vendor.
We enjoyed the NZ breakfast place from yesterday enough that we tried going again today. Since it was closed, we found another cafe called Cleo’s. Meera invited her friend Sam to join us for breakfast, someone she met while traveling in Mexico. Since he happened to be in Goa at the same time as us, we thought it would be cool to meet up.
We ate a leisurely brunch at Cleo’s from ten ‘til two in the afternoon, learning all about Sam. He is a chef and had previously worked at David Chang’s Ssam Bar. This was quite a coincidence; I happened to be reading David Chang’s memoir Eat a Peach right at that time. I had a fun time getting to know him.
The four of us went to the beach in the afternoon to soak in the water and soak up the sun. While we were there, we got hassled by vendors selling us shawles, bangles, drums, and the like. We did our best to shake them off. I understood now how Meera got her morning anklets.
In the evening, we went to a killer vegetarian restaurant that happened to be putting on a mushroom festival. The four of us ate dinner together and enjoyed a variety of mushroom-based food and drink. I chatted up with the owner of the restaurant a bunch, fawning over his sense of style and taste. (Around this time in the trip, I had started fantasizing over a life plan of opening up a restaurant. It would be a fusion Indian and Jewish place. Imagine a NYC-style delicatessen whose latke’s “applesauce and sour cream” was green apple achar and raita. I picked Sam’s brain about how I would make this dream a reality.) The owner let me know that he was hosting a music performance the next day around dinner time if we wanted to come by.
After dinner, we walked around the main shopping area down from the beach and found a gelato place. I ordered a sugar-free cardamom and date gelato. The four of us talked as we ate our ice cream and gazed upon the plethora of cows on the side of the road. We followed a Hebrew sign all the way to a Synagogue! We made plans to take a trip to a waterfall in the mountains the next day. This evening, Cam was starting to feel under the weather, so it was up in the air if she would come.
Thursday, March 7, 2024
The four of us met for breakfast at the German Bakery, a restaurant Ignacio recommended. After our meal, the group split into two. Cam stayed home since she was feeling too sick to hike (fortunately, she wasn’t alone; an orange cat kept her company). The rest of us left for the hour drive into the mountains.
Sam, Meera, and I left for an hour drive to the Savri Waterfall. Our driver tried to stop at a few places we weren’t interested in seeing along the way. Other than that, we talked nearly the whole way there.
We discovered that the hike to the waterfalls in the mountains was disappointingly short. Luckily, the waterfall area was really beautiful. There was a group of domestic tourists there, and they showed us the ropes on how to have the wild fish in the water eat the skin on our feet. Meera was the only one to do this, and her exasperated giggles conveyed the extent of how ticklish it was. The three of us hung out downstream of the waterfall for a while in the shade, taking in the scene. We played a creative writing game that my friend Adam McDonald and I invented on a long car drive once: given a random topic and two minutes to prepare, make up and tell a story. All of us took turns sharing our stories, maybe going through three rounds of the game.
Around this time, we started seeing monkeys. Sam counted 11 monkeys around us at one point, but there could have been 20. This was Meera’s first monkey experience in India. Her first impression: wild monkeys are an 11/10. Baby monkeys clung to their mothers; many would climb and jump about trees and rocks surrounding us. They made their way from the forest past the waterfall to the steep hill on the other side of the river, in the maniacal way only known to monkeys.
It was starting to get hot, so we headed back to our car. We were talking the whole way, focused on what one of us was saying. We were so distracted that we walked right past the entrance to the car area. We walked down hill maybe 15 minutes before I got the feeling that something was amiss. We got our bearings and walked back up the hill to the entrance. We ended up getting the long hike that we wanted after all.
The next destination after the waterfall was a visit to a nearby spice plantation. It was hot and we were getting hungry. We decided to get lunch there first and take a tour after if we felt like it. In the middle of lunch, the heat really got to Sam – he had a fainting spell and had to lie down on the lunch table bench. We were on the fence if we wanted to take the tour in the first place; this decided that we wouldn’t. I picked up Cam some candied mace from the plantation market and we headed home. On the way back, we stopped at a pharmacy to pick her up some decongestant.
Back beachside, Cam hung out with the orange cat and took a nap. She was woken up in the middle of the day by a cockroach climbing on her face. Gross.
Our group of three got home in the late afternoon. Sam departed to recuperate in his room. Meera and I collected Cam and we went to dinner at the Art Resort, sitting at a table on the beach. We ate some fusion Indian and western food, drank a few drinks and slowly watched the sunset.
After dinner, Meera, Cam and I went back to the vegetarian restaurant to see the show. The restaurant owner that I spoke to the other day was jamming on the guitar and singing lead vocals, playing funky chill indie music. Having just eaten, we ordered kombucha and mushroom beverages and watched for a while. We didn’t stay too long, but enjoyed it nevertheless.
We called it an early night due to our big day and Cam’s unwellness. During the middle of the night, not one but two more cockroaches crawled on top of Camille’s face – what a nightmare. We would later leave a negative review about this accommodation.
Friday, March 8, 2024
In the morning, Meera, Camille and I took shifts packing up our belongings and eating at a health food restaurant. At the end of eating and packing separately, Meera met up with us at the restaurant. This time together was nice to coordinate a plan, as we had separate goals for how to spend our last day in Goa. Meera left for the Cozy Nook to journal. Camille and I went shopping down the street from the restaurant, on the main strip. We found lots of killer boutiques. Meera would later use our shared GPS location to find us and meet us shopping.
After our morning in town, we went to the beach to swim. As the day began to get hot, I got everyone cold Diet Cokes with ice on the beach. We read on the water and journaled. Soon, it was about time for us to leave the beach and get changed for the rest of the day – including our overnight train ride. How were we going to do this without a hotel room? We plotted a solution on the sand.
From the beach, I needed to go to the hotel to get clothes to change in. Meera and Cam went to scope out if we could shower in a nearby spa. Meera and Cam played the part of a hotel guest to steal a shower at the spa before anyone was the wiser. Meanwhile, I talked to our old hotel hosts and found out they had a spare bathroom. I showered there.
Cleaned up and the day growing late, all we needed to do was eat and get to the train station. We figured we’d return to the hotel where we had our voice activation lessons for dinner. Once there, It turned out they served no food (at least, at that time). We got some People’s Beer to tide us over and planned where we would eat. We ended up eating at a Hyderabadi place nearby. It was some of the best Indian food of the trip – mutton biryani, random mixed veg curry, and chili chicken, and naan. They played such good music that I tried to get their Spotify playlist, but I couldn’t because it was just the server’s Liked Songs. The ratio between how good the food was relative to the price felt like getting away with something.
Right after dinner, we got our stuff at the hotel and caught a taxi to the train station. At the station, we sat and charged our phones. A family of six slept in the corner (with two young kids and a grandma). We watched two geckos fight on the ceiling until they knocked each other down to the floor and stopped moving.
During our wait for the 11:30 pm train, we met two older solo travelers. They had recently met each other in Goa and became friends. One of them was a British guy with neck tattoos – he asked us for directions. He was accompanying his Polish friend to her train, which happened to be the same as ours.
With some assistance from the railway station staff (who kind of appeared out of nowhere), we made it onto our midnight train. The cabins were dark, quiet, and narrow. Everyone was sleeping on bunks, snoring or whispering about which bunk they were supposed to be sleeping in.
Two of the beds we booked were in the same bunk, and one was somewhere else. We figured it would be safer if Cam and Meera took the beds on top of each other. When I got to my bed, I found someone else sleeping in it. After some back and forth, I found out that it was a man who was assigned the bed next door; he took my bunk so he could sleep above his mother. Learning all of this, I was happy to accept the other bed, hoping that the conductor wouldn’t kick me out if he asked for my ticket.