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A visit to Germany was nothing if not overdue, since I was born there and hadn’t been back for 37 years. This effectively meant that I knew nothing of the country, which had reportedly changed completely since I had my face ground in the schoolyard dust at age eight, by a blonde Aryan prototype called Torsten.
The way to go was obviously Economy Class. I mean, nobody was watching to see in what style I left India or arrived in Germany – Lufthansa could therefore take a wet hike. I picked FinnAir. The Mumbai-Berlin / Berlin-Mumbai ticket cost me 28,000 Indian rupees, and I was going to get to see Helsinki in Finland, too. That’s where I would be cooling my heels for six hours while I waited for my connecting flight to Berlin.
I was on my own, and not a little a scared… I was leaving Indian soil for the first time since I’d arrived almost four decades ago, and had a serious case of atavistic heebie-jeebies about it all. Icy xenophobia had filled my spine and made itself at home there, from the moment I arrived at Mumbai’s international airport. It was 11.30 p.m.
I had something like 300 Euros on me, and I wasn’t sure of my constitutional right about spending it ‘over there’. What if some pasty-faced ‘gora’ took one look at my Indian hands holding his country’s precious currency and called the cops, denouncing me as an infidel impostor? (I had yet to learn that money talks a universal language, and that people in Europe aren’t too choosy about whom they speak it with…)
I paid attention to the pre-takeoff drill as I’d never done before, expecting some drastically important additions to the usual ho-hum stuff because this was an international flight. I needn’t have bothered – same old drill, the performing Finnish stewardess looked as ready to chuck her job in mortification as any of the Indian ones I’d ever seen.
Once the flight took off, things became increasingly chilled out – many passengers stretched out over empty seat rows and went to sleep as though flying to another land was of no great import. It wasn’t, of course, but you’d have been telling that to the wrong guy, if you’d told it to me.
Maybe an hour and a half later, we were flying over Afghanistan. I work in real estate, and seeing those huge expanses of craggy land going waste made my bowels hitch and my heart ache. Afghanistan from the air looks like the skin of a weathered old crone in the last stages of dehydration. It went on for miles… and miles, and miles. Finally, I dropped off to sleep and awoke to the sight of an amazing green carpet of brown-tipped pine trees, with occasional specks of civilization scattered there like debris. We were about to land in Helsinki, Finland.
The air outside was cold, bracing and disconcertingly clean. Aren’t human beings supposed to spread the stink of technology as soon as they descend on any hapless location? The Finns don’t seem to have understood the true message of progress as yet. Vantaa Airport is amazingly modern, yet outrageously spotless. Pedestrian conveyor belts whisk in-transit passengers from point to point within this mind-blowing microcosm of steel, chrome and glass. The overall accent, of course, is on retail. There’s stuff on sale all over, including food with names that make the most merciless South Indian cuisine sound like amateur nursery rhymes.
Timidly, I took out my wallet and handed over a five-Euro note to buy coffee and a sandwich that may have contained elk meat, I’m not sure. I was ready to defend the fact that Indians are bonafide human beings and have the right to wield foreign exchange. The waitress handed me my change and didn’t call the cops. I was officially an accepted member of the international tourist sucker tribe! My heart swelled with pride and my gait assumed a cocky cant as I ambled over to the lounge near my departure gate.
The connecting flight to Berlin would arrive in four hours. Did I choose to sleep for the duration? Well, let me ask you this – you’re in a Sci Fi airport in a strange land. Nobody knows you, you know nobody. You have 300 Euros and a passport. You’re brown, everyone else is white and occasionally yellow.
Would you sleep? I took out a novel and kidded myself that I was reading.
x x x
The flight to Berlin was over before I knew it - of course, the different time zones screw with one’s mind. One shouldn’t harp on that fact too much, though. Jetlag is a very pretentious version of plain old disorientation, sort of like a migraine is a headache with attitude.
Flughafen (airport) Tegel glittered like a frosty diamond necklace in the night below. I was about to land in the country of my birth, but felt like a tawdry sightseer for all the difference it made deep in my guts, where it really matters…
The cold hit me like a runaway deep freezer. It suffused every pore and percolated down into my bones, proceeding to ice my marrow, and then my soul. It was August… an Indian should never have to be confronted by such cold, and definitely not in August. Jetlag? This was CLIMATE lag. My skin crawled but had nowhere to hide. And then, as I walked to the airport bus, something happened.
The Germanic barbarian (attuned to icy steppes, mammoths and opposing Hun factions) whose persona I’d shed thirty seven years before roused himself awake deep inside me and roared his defiance. He shed the impressions of thirty seven blazing Indian summers, kicked his long-somnolent metabolism into gear and laughed hoarsely at the cold. I was in Germany – and while my brain had been on a tropical vacation, my body suddenly bristled with inner resources of warmth and coping once more. By the time my mother hugged me at the luggage carousel, I was 100% home again.
Read the rest of Achtung Germany here..
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Going by the amount of press Goa beaches get, one could be forgiven for believing that Goa is the Alpha and Omega of Indian beach destinations. This belief is, to some extent, justified – in terms of getting its tourism act together, Goa still rules. However, tourist orientation alone does not a perfect destination make…
Having explored Goa extensively, we decided that it was time to give Kerala – that great, green, soggy coconut-tree-infested armpit that everyone knows of and nobody really understands – a fair try. Destination – Poovar, a resort island adjoining Thiruvanathapuram (as though Trivandrum wasn’t enough of a tongue-twister).
We had what it takes! We had the brochures, we had the suntan lotion, we had two squirmy brats to hold our sanity to ransom. In short, we were tourists - and we meant to prove it. Of course, we also had Club Mahindra telling us that their resort on Poovar Island was booked to the rafters – but hey, we’re from Mumbai. We don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
So there we were at Thiruvanathapuram airport in the middle of a furnace-like April, wondering how it could POSSIBLY get any hotter when summer hit its peak next month. Did I mention ‘tourist orientation’ earlier? Kerala doesn’t have any.
I mean, it has great beaches and one helluva lot of coconut trees, but it isn’t tourist-savvy. Of course, they’re friendly enough at the retail level as long as they see a wallet-bulge in your pants, but it takes more than mercenary friendliness to make you feel welcome there. At the very least, you need to feel that you’re on the same page as they are – and you will never get that reassurance.
Maybe it’s only because they mean well, but can’t communicate the fact to you. Don’t go by Kerala’s literacy level – that may be the highest in India, but it takes English to be tourist-friendly. Correction – it takes COMPREHENSIBLE English.
I believe they do speak the language in Kerala - but for all it sounds like, it could be the rattling of coconut-oil slathered chestnuts in a hollowed-out Webster’s dictionary. It does not compute. Not to Indian ears, and most certainly not to foreign ears.
English as spoken by a native Keralite comes across like an encrypted mix of busted bongo drums, castanets and out-of-tune guitar strings malprocessed through a waa-waa pedal and echo chamber. Foreign tourists have an advantage, though – they’re not averse to making asses of themselves by using sign language.
Anyway, we did manage to get a taxi that took from the airport to the resort’s launch jetty. Along the way, we discovered that we were a mere coconut oil-skid away from Kovalam Beach. We got all excited over that (a mistake in that heat) and vowed to check it out after our four-day stint on Poovar Island.
x x x
The boat ride took us along an amazing, winding waterway where the coconut tree ruled supreme – a relentlessly canopy of green. Along the way, fishermen went about the fisherman-ly business without paying us the slightest attention. I was impressed – this was the first contingent of locals I had seen, that had better things to do than stare and flash their startlingly white teeth at us.
The boat pulled up at a jetty that took the form of an open houseboat fitted out with wooden benches. Beyond this strange, but beautiful, contraption stretched a concrete lane that led to the actual resort.
The lane was uncompromisingly lined with… you guessed it – coconut trees. I had reached a point where I would have given a hundred coconut trees for the sight of one noxious Tata truck or overturned garbage can crawling with hunger-crazed cats.
Checking into the resort was a bit of a challenge. Apart from the decided difference in English language versions, it turned out that they had the wrong rooms booked for us. They had no kitchenettes.
We had been very specific about our requirement of kitchenettes, and had lugged a improbably heavy bag of kitchenettable foodstuff along. This bag was now threatening to become the gastronomic equivalent of a millstone round our necks.
The Mumbai mindset we had brought along refused to dovetail with this, but we were also beginning to latch on to an important lesson in South India tourism – while in Kerala, do as the catatonic comatose do.
x x x
What about Poovar itself, you ask. This is understandable and shall be addressed accordingly.
Poovar is another world. This little island is almost too perfect to be true, which means that it probably is. It would not surprise me to learn that a bunch of gung-ho geologists from Singapore descended in this part of the Kokknut Oyl Bowl of Indya and hacked this little piece of real estate off the mainland with a few truckfuls of napalm.
I can almost see them unleash a frenzy of high-end landscaping by the light of many full moons, adding the picture-perfect walkways and concrete paths, the self-contained houseboats that probably need to be booked an entire lifetime in advance, the statuary, the ponds and the flower beds.
Man-made or not, Poovar is the very epitome of tranquility. The Poovar Island Resort part of the island features a swimming pool complete with bar, a rather neat gymnasium contained largely by bamboo thatching, and a restaurant that serves out-of-this-world South Indian, continental and Moghlai a la carte and buffet meals.
Stay away from the resort’s store, however – they sold us a Korea-made pair of plastic diving goggles for Rs. 800 and wanted to follow this up with a fake piece of Nepali stoneware that would probably have cost us our mortgage, pension plan and a goodish part of my left arm.
Bring everything you need from wherever you’re coming from and returning to – and I mean EVERYTHING – toilet paper, ciggies, sleeping/birth control pills, booze, T-shirts that say “I LOVE POOVAR” (readily available at Mumbai’s Colaba, Delhi’s Palika Bazaar, Goa’s beach shacks or anywhere else where tourist dross is sold.
Also, expect to do a fair share of sweating while at the Poovar Island Resort. The rooms’ air conditioners seem to have called an uneasy truce with Kerala’s trademark mugginess and work only half the time. Nothing that the somnolent housekeeping guys could do (once we managed to convince them that it would be really nice if they could do something BEFORE we checked out four days later) made much of a difference.
x x x
Our four days on Poovar up, we got ferried back to the mainland, and decided to put on the table, our plan of checking out Kovalam Beach, before we flew back to Mumbai. This cost us three hours of precious lifetime, which will never be replaced.
Take my advice – stay away from Kovalam. Apart from a picturesque lighthouse, there is more charm in the least of Mumbai’s overcrowded beaches than here. It has all the character of a Bangkok flea market, with a comparable retail component. Cheap restaurants, tawdry Kashmiri and Nepali handicraft shacks, touristy keepsake outlets and hostelries of VERY doubtful repute, have Kovalam in an uncompromising death grip.
The ten feet of remaining beach are black with some kind of permanent oil slick, and the sight of pale-skinned Westerners trying gamely to catch a tan on this DMZ-like stretch made me want to cry softly with mortified repulsion. Every intact seashell larger than two centimeters that has ever been retrieved there is being sold five feet up the waterline, as part of some outlandish boardwalk knickknack.
Our Poovar adventure ended at Thiruvananthapuram Airport with an eight-hour wait for an Indian Airlines flight that had already been delayed by seven hours to begin with. This delay, which made it into the papers two days later, apparently was a record of some sort, and I guess we should be proud of having been there to experience it.
While it lasted, it nothing less than grueling, torturous and completely infuriating. The airport authorities were finally forced to put up all stranded passengers in the First Class lounge one floor above.
I arrived back in Mumbai with an hour to spare before hurrying to the office, my mind still a confused daze of coconut trees….
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So, you’re going on a Goa vacation. You’ve made an online booking in what may be the last of the decently priced hotels in Goa, have your flight tickets in your hand and are raring to go. Goa beach culture – here you come!
Good for you. I salute your prudence and good taste. To be sure, there aren’t many options that compare to a Goa vacation. You’ve made an excellent choice. I love Goa, and recommend it highly over India’s other beach-based tourist destinations. Kerala’s Kovalam? Gimme a break. Mumbai’s Juhu? You’ve GOT to be kidding me. Lakshadweep? Hey, I thought you want to be where the ACTION is!!
So, your plane lands at Dabolim Airport. Or your train pulls into Margao Station. Or your bus wheezes to a halt a Panjim. Or you’ve survived a self-driven car journey and are trying to figure out if this IS Panjim or just another of those towns with pseudo-Portuguese names that you’ve passed through.
Read the hoardings and see what area the joints they advertise are at, dummy. Don’t tell me you can’t see all those Dantesque monstrosities that vie for your attention. Eat that lobster platter. Drink that beer. Take that pleasure cruise down the Mandovi River. Move into that Goa resort, because no other resort even comes NEAR in terms of ‘tropical ambience’, hospitality, facilities, cuisine (don’t bother looking for the room rates, though).
You’ve finally arrived at your hotel, dumped your baggage, taken a shower and are now ready to ‘do Goa’. Everyone has been very courteous and helpful. The receptionist has handed you a list of the services available at the hotel and pointed out that the shopping arcade is just behind the bar.
Read the rest of the article: Goa Vacation Survival Guide here.
