Happy Man is here, anyways and the train adventure south...

Ah, Goa. What can you say: cresent shaped beaches pushed up to the bathwater-warm Arabian Sea by millions of gracefully arched palm trees. This tourists' heaven is compounded by the relative permissiveness of the culture of the only state that was never colonized by the Brits and is now a classic easy going southern mixture of Portuguese Christianity, some Hindus and Muslims, and pervasive catering to the whims of the tourist culture (i.e. the regular Indian modesty expected of women is seemingly on hold here where white women go freely on the beach in their bikinis or even topless). Michael and I found a cheap flight from Delhi and on arrival quickly made our way through the dense humid heat to Palolem, one of the southern most beach towns in Goa, that I had been to with Emily two years ago. We checked ourselves into a palm frond hut with a balcony up in the branches of the jungle, and possessing the two necessitities of a high powered fan next to the bed and airy mosquito net. From that first evening on through the next week, the days and evenings seem, now in hindsight, an indistinguishable and thoroughly pleasant haze of swimming and catching waves for hours in the warm ocean, wandering the beach, napping in the shade, languidly drinking fresh tropic fruit juices, punctuated only by our nightly dinners at the place we discovered the first night where we were offered "the coldest beer on the beach" (which we found out not only to be true but also turned out, delightfully, to be the cheapest) by a Himachali man named Pani, who prefered to be known as Happy Man. We couldn't help going back every night to sit with our feet in the sand both facing the ocean at a low table and drink cold beer with the fresh seafood. Our long, relaxed conversations peppered with little visits from the waiter who would wrap up most interactions by saying "Happy Man is here, anyways!"









faced comatose 'station master' lolling with his feet up in front of a television that we were on our own. Then on the train platform we made friends with a young Indian yoga instructor on his way to Kerala who assured us that we just had to get on the train and he'd help us sort out the rest. But the ways of the Indian railway system are forever mercurial and inscrutable: when the train did appear on the dark track it stopped for only a minute, in which we ran down the length in disbelief tryingAfter a week of beach and sun and the tourist bubble, our skin brown and starting to get a little used to the heat, we were ready to move south to Kerala where my uncle lives in Kochi. We had booked train tickets a week before, but the day we were supposed to leave our spots where still waitlisted at around 56 and 57. After a bit of research and some thoroughly vague advice from a travel agent we decided to just get on the train and just work it out with the conductor if we were not able to get seats in the sleeper class we were hoping for. We took a rickshaw around 10pm to the sleepy little railway station in Cancona a few miles away after a last beer at Happy Man's hoping to get more information. It became clear as soon as we approached the puffy to open one locked door after another before it started up again leaving the lot of us huffing and puffing, looking at the tail end of the train disappear into the night. Now it's the middle of the night, we are sleepy and still cheerfully relaxed from our week at the beach and we take the advice from our young friend and the apparently lobatomized 'station master' to catch the next train coming through which would at least take us to Mangalore. And take us to Mangalore it did. We jumped on when it came, only to find each car packed full with sleeping bodies, a few on each berth and the rest on every available floor space... except at the end of the cars next to the ripe and rancid toilets! So that's where we spent 6 hours, intermittently sitting propped on our bags with scarves over our assaulted noses or standing in the open door of the train watching the slightly lit curve of the train lead its way down the track, the hot southern air and thick tropical vegetation rolling past in the moonlight. The rest of the time I wheedled and argued with the hassled conductor, bargaining our way out of a fine for having no ticket. Our Indian friend ended up being just argumentative but no help, but after a night of cajoling and demanding, in the early morning light as we finally rolled into Mangalore, the conductor sat down with us and told us about his family, his love-marriage and decided not to charge us anything at all, after all. In Mangalore, 100 rupees bought us both tickets on the slow trains down to Kochi (one with seats by the window, one spent mosty up in the luggage rack) and we arrived hotter, more tired, stickier than any other time on this entire trip, and also some how still thoroughly cheerful. [We didn't find out until later that our original waitlisted tickets were never accepted so we were refunded that amount, which means that we ended up paying only 100 rupees ($2 USD) to travel over 400 miles and almost 20 hours.]