Travels – Page 2 – Laurens Traveling

Goa

There is alot of hype about Goa.
Many tales go around and live in the whispers of travelers.

Unfortunately, I got to experience a different reality.

This old ‘Goa’, this paradise of naked hippies raving on the beaches, peace for everyone, eternal festival, this place where one can escape from the madness of India and relax, feel home, bond with people, it seemed to me that only the story of this remains.
The story of a Goa that died.

Many things must have changed, from hordes of russian tourists coming with chartered flights that are all canceled since one year ago, to the sudden strictness of the motorbikes having a plate and the drivers having a license.

It might be just that I arrived at the wrong time, but what I found there, was the opposite of what I expected.

The hotels seemed to abuse the reputation and asked for prices too high; motorbike rental stalls were very much available, in fact they were all over the place, however the prices were so as well.

And a single foreigner I did not see. I ended up spending ~5 days in Goa, and only saw Indian tourists.
Yes, this did imply that the streets were extremely dirty. Touristy Indians throw more trash on the ground than Indians at home.
Or maybe it were the cows on the beach opening up the few trash cans that were there…

For the Indian tourists, Goa is now a place where you can walk around on the street with a beer in your hand. In many places in India this is not allowed, only drinking in private would be allowed, and in some places a total ban would be in place.
So here they can ‘go wild’ and drink a beer while walking on the street.

While I was having a coffee on the beach, a random Indian guy came and asked me for money, because the day before he was going wild and fell asleep on the beach, where a thief in the night took all his rupees and his Samsung Galaxy phone.

I was a little bit in doubt, for a multitude of reasons.
1. I’m very frustrated with all Indian people thinking I am rich. I worked for this and lived in great sobriety to save every euro I could, I’m using all my money, and might very well have given up a good old day, just to make this travel happen.
2. I don’t like giving random people money. If I give to one, it’s injustice to all the rest.
3. I don’t have money to spare, and every rupee I give I certainly will not get back. As friendly and nice as many Indian people are, they would not give me money or treat me.
4. If I give money to people asking for it, I’m supporting a begging system. It is a capitalistic society after all, which means that every bit of money one spends, goes into the support of what you are spending it on.
5. He spoke Inglish. It was extremely hard to figure out if he was actually in trouble or just spouting out some nonsense to get free money.
6. There was a friend next to him who didn’t say anything the whole time. And they both still had their backpacks.

So, dear reader, what would you have done?
I ended up giving him money for the bus, and letting him make a call to his father.
He could then take the bus to the next city where a friend of his father could borrow him some money to get home.

However, the same night, I saw him again, that friend of his father wasn’t home.
Now it was getting even more fishy. Am I just treating this guy free beers or is he even more in trouble than he was?
Anyway I took him to a restaurant for some food and gave him a bit more money. But this was enough.

His name was Raj. And he lived in Mumbai.

After a day or two I did settle down and just relaxed. Took some walks on the beach and did enjoy the sea very much.
It was a bit of a special sea, the waves were very bright and white, and they randomly flooded very close or far from the sea.

So I could enjoy the place, but in general I must admit it was a bit of a disappointment.
Though lesson iterated: Expectations can diminish or even crush our experiences.

Fort Kochi (Cochin) & Munnar – Sliding into planlessness

Here begins the following 1.5 months where I wouldn’t meet a foreigner nor have any form of decent conversation.

In Kochi, I was mainly relaxing. The place was pretty interesting, being a big city, an island with an airport and another island called ‘Fort Kochi’, where I spent my time.

Didn’t quite know what to do from here, as this is where all the airline issues popped up – the outcome of this obviously would impact my further travel plans.

I headed up to Munnar, a beautiful hill station drenched in fields of tea bushes.
It was quite a unique sight, to see hilltops with these flat, dark green fields.

It is here in Munnar that I had my first big stroke of homesickness.
The colder climat, grey clouds and rainy weather at that day, reminded me a lot of home sweet old Belgium.
That, combined with being tired and I don’t know what else, made me very mellow and longing for home, already I’d experienced more than enough to make this travel worthwhile.

I took a bus up the hill instead of the ‘tour rikshaw’, for about 90 rupees instead of 1000, and enjoyed a magnificent view.

This must be one of the unique features of India, the incredible differences in landscape.
This country simply has it all, from huge rivers with coconut trees bending down on them, a dawning sun reflecting gloriously on the waters, to grand fields filled with trees, from beautiful flowers aside the road to the Himalayas.

Truly amazing to experience. Even just taking a 10 hour train ride is an experience of which most people don’t realize it should be on their ‘must do before I die’ checklist.

Just 5-6 hours on a bus, and from a huge city with a beach side, I was up in a totally different climate, up in the mountains. Crazy huh?

The most epic church I've ever seen — The most epic church I’ve ever seen

Back to Kochi, had time to kill so stepped in a tuktuk that would drive me all around the place if I go and visit some shops, where he gains tokens and in return petrol for his tuktuk.
A normally terribly deal and extremely annoying hassle, but I had time, the sun was shining, and wanted to see a few more sides of this place.

To Goa!
Although that excitement might not be justified…

Kuzhur (/’Kulur’) – A hidden side of India

Undeservingly, randomly given this opportunity, to live in, experience and explore a true local village in India: Kuzhur.

Brought by an Indian poet -Kuzhur Wilson- that I had come to meet in Varkala;
Once I heard we were taking the same train to Kochi and requested him to travel together, I simply got invited to his house. In the West, this sort of invitation occurs once in a lifetime, so I gladly accepted the invitation in surprised fashion.

Wilson and a river. Stopped the car on a bridge.

The village

It was the house of his parents, and it -together with many things in the village- reminded me of my grandparents and a few memories I have from long ago – remnants of the life from a few generations before me.
How my parents grew up as a child must have been similar in many ways to this village.

The people knew each other. I could vividly see the roots of the Indian non-individual culture.

Here in India, so vastly different from the Western world, you can just start talking to someone (from our perspective ‘out of nowhere’) and they will reply.
Conversations do not have beginnings and endings, they just happen everywhere at random – ‘Streets alive’.

Talking to someone, asking someone something, is not a personal offense, will not be answered with a frustrated look, will not be regarded as privacy attack. More than that, it is possible, as people are not hiding themselves from existence in their houses or cars. Are humans really capable of this? Apparently so.

Every day in Kuhzur, I got introduced to 10-20 people, and the usual Indian questions popped up every time: Where am I from, what do I do, what is my family status like?

Quite funny to explain this in the ‘Inglish’ (a very simplified form of English, lacking verb conjugations and mostly sentence subjects), and hearing it go around in Malayalam (the language of this province) while I am literally still standing there.
After a while in India I can understand the conversations from only the occasional words I need to understand (‘Bell-gee-um’).

I don’t know if it’s a good thing that I’ve got used to people having an obvious conversation about me while I am right next to them?

Me and Rameshbabu - an awesome guy ready to cheer anyone up — Me and Rameshbabu – an awesome guy ready to cheer anyone up

So I got to be a little bit of a local celebrity, as every time mr. Wilson took me to some place, we made at least 10 stops to make sure every single person that he knew in the village got to meet me.

Now, I got to experience the local village life, the life that very much still exists in a great part of India, though hidden from tourist eyes.

We even visited a sort of ‘tribe’, an even smaller village where people of a very old bloodline lived – sort of ‘aboriginals’ of India. The real ones.

A proud family of an old bloodline - ever so friendly — A proud family of an old bloodline – ever so friendly

Wilson took me to some really amazing places.
The middle of nowhere, surrounded by nature, grass fields, coconut trees, big rivers, and orchestras of crickets every night.

Wilson's daughter at an amazing scenery — Wilson’s daughter at an amazing scenery

People invited me without hesitation into their house, and presented me food and/or tea with great joy. Some ran to their garden to get me a fresh piece of fruit.
Their hospitality was out of this world.

Every single family was so generous and friendly, and pulled out their best Inglish to get to know me. It’s like I was some kind of mystery.

Coming to a shop of one of Wilson’s friends, he proudly presented me delicious samosa’s and a cup of chai, just like that! Try that at your local Starbucks…

He fought against the government and planted lots of trees.

I stayed in the village for 5 or 6 days, and could just stay in Wilson’s house free of charge.

“East & West”

The Western world can take a few lessons from this.
This is the kind of thing we lost a long time ago, and India is also losing, in pursuit of the Western materialism.
It’s like the rich culture of India, thousands of years old, just can’t go together with the modern material world.

Young people in the big Indian cities wearing jeans and making business calls with iPhones rushing by, and here I am, away from that place they desire, in a hand made cotton shirt doing ancient yoga practices, fleeing from that mentally cracked material individualistic world.

It was a great opportunity to experience the village life. A chance not given to most foreigners or tourists.
I got to look into these people’s lives, I got to see their aspirations, their thoughts, their problems.
I got to look back in time, to compare two worlds of a different era.

What one had, the other was missing.
Where one thrived, the other faltered.

The reader has heard the story, but he hasn’t seen it.
We’ve heard it from far away, but it remains a story that happens to have the ‘is real’ checkmark attached to it. But what do we care?
We would not go back to this.
But we could learn from it. There is much that we have forgotten.

Not to condemn the Western world though.
If anything is to be condemned it is our carelessness and how we take it for granted and even suffer it.
People getting so lost in their own madness, living in the greatest comfort anyone in the history of human kind has ever known, and yet suffering it.

We made great sacrifices to shape the world around us like this, basically killing the planet, how disrespectful can we be by not even enjoying it!

That river again - but how could you get enough of it? — That river again – but how could you get enough of it?

A lot of people

Now, for my intuitions on understanding the different culture:
In general, the basis of India is its massive population, things are quite optimized around that.
Personal space, physically and mentally, as well as privacy of your thoughts and emotions, these things are just not so vibrant here, it’s basically not possible to have them to the extent that we have in the West.

For most people that makes India a tough country to visit, and I won’t deny I haven’t had a few tough moments myself.
However, being forced out of my physical comfort zone, back to basics, being forced out of my mental comfort zone, will definitely have its impact, and if I may guess it will be for the better. Most people in the West actually just suffer this anyway.

Here, if you have a need, we will look how to fix it. Anyone around you will help you fix it, and if it’s fixed it’s fixed. No need to make a drama out of it.

Also, there’s no point in wanting things that are way out of reach. People take their responsibility and seem to have a much more clear perspective on their lives.
Things like the caste system and the importance of family are simply logical if you look at the context.
The person in the position to (only) sell mango’s for all is life, will gladly do so and take his responsibility for it.

A taste of a different world.
An insight to the roots of today.

People taking the time to sit and speak, offering fruits and tea or whatever they can, praying for their loved ones, living in touch with nature, working hard, knowing each other, being proud of their accomplishments, humble and inviting, yet exuberant in the games, some enjoying it while it lasts, some feeling stuck and longing for advancement, some have seen enough, some are hungry for more, this experience was something else, another book of wisdom shoved in my face, another checkmarked story that became a reality, that cannot be unseen or unexperienced, another memory and rewiring of things that I thought I knew: Kuzhur.