Global Nomad Travel

India to Qatar to Goa

04/12/10

Fifteen hours awake…

Our day started the earliest time possible at midnight. There was no point in sleeping with a flight at 4:30 a.m. It was a cruel day of traveling, almost a joke that only the backpacker gods understood, like feeding an illiterate child alphabet soup. We had no choice, but to fly at this horrid hour. The cheapest way to go from Goa, India to Cairo, Egypt was with a long stopover in Doha, Qatar that left somewhere between the middle of the night, the morning and confusing random objects for pillows.

We jumped into a taxi and headed to the airport at 1 a.m. Out the window, stray dogs ruled the streets, walking in packs and marking their territory, which explained the smell in some villages. We breathed in the hair dryer hot wind from outside, passing mosques and temples drenched in lights. Our caramel-smooth driver switched gears unnoticed, while bobbing his head to American hip hop. He was the first Indian we met who wasn’t bumpin’ Bollywood’s favourite hits, which confused me, even more so than when I found out bird seeds do not grow birds.

Nearing the airport, the center line turned red with light reflecting squares. Our one-hour drive was stopped by Goa’s airport security check that involved turning on the interior light for two seconds to a man who did not even pretend to look inside. He simply waved us along. I could have been pointing a bazooka at his head and he would not have noticed. I should have pretended to milk myself. Parked out front, I asked the driver to help me with our bags - a little tactic we used to keep drivers from pulling off with our luggage, which is something other backpackers had witnessed and heard stories about. I know, a little paranoid, but it never failed us.

Seventeen hours awake…

I believe in equality for everyone, except for lazy airport staff. They should be banned from voting and buying toilet paper so people can smell what they are full of. They do, however, have an amazing ability to look blank faced at plants, walls and computer screens. I have been to many airports and Goa was the worst one on out trip - and that’s a 100 Proof strong statement without a chaser, homeslice. One employee, in particular, appeared to be hiding behind a cabinet instead of opening up another check-in point. It was as if he was planning to yell “Surprise!” but missed the opportunity, so instead, he stayed behind the cabinet wondering at which point his failure would result in stalking his co-workers.

After watching our bags being wrapped in a wiry white ribbon, we waited in an unorganized lineup and felt a strong déjà vu from our experience at Chinese train stations. The customs causeway was a big wide mess located next to a smoking room that leaked a cancer fog into the cue. In front of us, a group of Russians split an entire 40 pounder of rum while waiting in line (I know! I was surprised people from the Motherland weren’t drinking Vodka, too!). Beyond them, airport officials waved another person up every five minutes or so. In a lineup of maybe 25 people in front of us, we waited an hour and half. The worst part for us was there was no money exchange, no Tim Horton’s coffee and it was still illegal to headbutt airport staff. I did what I always did in these half-dreamt, barely sane moments when I’m about to lose my mind: I just write a few ideas down for random strangers and then feel better about myself. You are welcome. Now keep reading.

It was finally our turn to meet employees who could have been emos or goths in their spare time, when it happened - a young English woman skipped to the front of the lineup on a wheel chair passed us. Laughing. Boxie-boo refused to let her amused walking friend also pass. I wanted to call her on her potential con, but what if I was wrong and threw a paralyzed person out of a wheelchair? We later saw the fake handicap girl standing up during a security check before continuing to walk to the waiting area. In moments like these, everybody believes in Karma, and by Karma I mean an accident that involves a toaster, an outhouse and a rain storm.

We thought the worst was over until we entered another lineup for the baggage and body scan. In front of Boxie-boo, the heat from a packed cue in 35 Degrees Celsius made a middle-aged woman ghost white. She stumbled dizzy towards a railing, then puked into a plastic bag. We felt so sorry for her, to feel that way before a flight, but also sorry for ourselves when we inhaled the scent she left behind. By the time it was my turn to be checked for bombs, the metal detector screamed each time it paused over my man beans. We had seen a fake handicap person, a puker, boozers pounding rum, but this was when things became very awkward.

“I swear I don’t have any implants,” I joked to the security staff. I tried to encourage Boxie-boo to laugh by giving her an exaggerated smile. She instead sighed and shook her head, while my genital region was scanned once more. It again beeped, causing his eyebrows to rise slightly. His response, “They have pillows on plane.” I was glad we were on the same page. Perhaps he thought I had a really strong hard-on that needed a pillow for resting.

Ninteen hours awake…

Finally, and I mean finally with every single letter fired out of a shotgun, I passed customs after two hours with only a maximum of only 30 people in front of us. I watched the slow paced lineup, waiting for Boxie-boo to be checked behind the women’s divider for privacy. I took a seat beside an older English man who seemed ready to strangle airport staff. If he were a monkey, he would have been throwing feces. I was sure to match his same depressed body language. He knew we were on the same page before we even started talking.

“I’ve been traveling a lot since I was your age and this is the worst airport I have ever been to,” He said. I told you guys, but you don’t listen. However, you do smell terrific so I’ll let it go.

As usual, I boarded the plane hoping to make knowing eye contact with the person sent to kill me, but did not spot my assassin this time around. And there we were, witnessing the most difficult task known to man: Boarding a plane, putting away the carry-on luggage and aligning an ass with an airplane seat. Even in the modern world, a surprising amount of people do not have the cognitive skills to sit in the right airplane seat on the first try. It is as if their bootae alignment throws off their vision and their ability to read basic seat letters.

Nineteen and a half hours awake…

We were onboard. We were flying now. We had finally relaxed and began preparing ourselves to get some much needed shuteye. I have always felt that tiny airplane pillows were made to amuse pilots who secretly watch passengers trying to use them through security cameras. Look at these fools! Surprisingly, the only turbulence on Qatar Airlines came from the seat behind me. As soon as I found a somewhat comfortable position at about 5 a.m., a pompous English woman began shaking my chair.

“Exxcaaoooze me Siiir,” she said like she was courting Shakepeare’s Golden Retriever. It turned out she was extremely offended someone would move their seat back the couple inches available. For some strange too-polite-Canadian reason - and looking back I want to slap myself in the face for doing this - I obliged and moved my seat forward, then spent an hour angry until I saw her fall asleep, then moved my seat back. The amount of space a declined seat takes up only stops someone from shadow boxing and she wasn’t in good enough shape to even play videogames.

Twenty-three hours awake…

We landed in Doha, Qatar and boarded an electric bus into the airport of the future made of one giant skylight. Qatar has the third largest gas reserve in the world and has the highest GDP per capita. The place is loaded, which was easy to notice in an airport selling lottery tickets to high-end cars at the Duty Free Shop(note the above photo). I knew we were in the Middle East when Muslim women dressed in all black like death. They looked at Boxie-boo like she was an alien for revealing her elbow. This examination, now by women, was something she would have to get used to. It was a good thing she decided not to wear her bikini on the plane or she might have given them all heart attacks. While they examined our clothing, some pointing us at us, we could not help but feel sorry for them.

Our boring eight-hour stopover was interrupted when I saw many guys dressed in MotoGP jackets, representative of the fastest motorcycle racing league in the world. Boxie-boo was thrilled, showing her excitement by yawning. I excitedly told her I wanted to go talk to one. She seemed too thrilled to even respond. Yet, managed to yawn again. I had a quick chat with Rizla Suzuki team rookie Alvaro Bautista from Spain. He was a smaller man jacked with muscle, perfect for motorcycle racing, and super friendly. The words “It must be so cool to race motorcycles” likely translated to him as “this guy is an idiot,” so he sat back and answered my questions, appearing completely entertained.

I told him he should beat Valentino Rossi, the reigning world champion at the time, and he laughed it off, telling me it was his rookie year and he’ll work his way up to that goal. I wished the Spaniard good luck. He smiled and said thank you. I told Boxie-boo all this when I came back to the able, mimicking for a high-five she was too excited to return. I later learned how unlucky me wishing someone luck can be. Rossi won the race and Bautista crashed on the final lap of the Grand Prix of Qatar.

Thirty-one hours awake…

On our flight to Cairo we had another incident with declining our seats, this time for Boxie-boo. A woman in a tradtional Muslim gown began banging her chair while screaming near hysterically. Luckily, an airline attendant was walking by during that moment and explained to her that everyone has the right to decline their seats after the meal service was completed. Thank you, Qatar Airlines. Not only do they have comfortable seats and touch-screen TVs in the backrests, they have great employees. But still, tiny pillows.

Thirty-four and a half hours awake…

The airport in Cairo was relaxed. The only problem was their money exchange counters would not take our Indian Rupees, but they would sell us Egyptian Visas for $15 U.S. without having to fill out any paperwork. We were both a little confused by our declaration forms. Lucky for us, Egyptian officials did not even look at our half-empty documentation and were the first people not confused by the clean shaven, short-hair gentleman in my passport photo. The two officials simply talked to each other, stamped our forms, only stopping to smile and welcome us to Cairo.
Outside the airport, we could not believe how calm it was. Not one person offered us a cab and nobody was yelling at us. It was so quiet, Boxie-boo began uncontrollably laughing. It was nice to be outside Asia. Although we loved the experience, the aggressive salespeople in places like Bangkok and Mumbai were overbearing.

Thirty-six hours awake…

We bartered down a ride to the Nubian Hostel downtown to discover a staircase covered in garbage and nobody in sight. It looked like a movie set that would lead to a crack house. Instead, we walked over to the low budget Tulip Hotel and got a decent room with a shoebox-sized TV that did not work. It was clean, quiet at night until the traffic began and our balcony overlooked the a busy roundabout known as the Harb Square.

Thirty-nine hours awake…

We fought hard to stay up decently late to help battle jetlag. I slide into the bed giving my boxer shorts the opportunity to explore areas of my body normalized reserved for a person with qualifications. I tried to write and stay focused until at least 9 p.m. I don’t remember conking out, only dreaming about a laughing English girl crashing her wheelchair into the pyramids and exploding. I passed out mid-sentence and woke hours later to use the bathroom, discovering pen marks on my face in the mirror.

That’s all for now.

Thank you for visiting Page59.com.

Goa with Luxury

04/11/10

I rolled out of bed with the smoothness of a ballerina on an acid trip, flying across the room in an attempt to regain my balance in my half-dreamt state. A night of making up for lost sleep gave me the steadiness of a tranquilized pig and an amazing ability to collide with the walls. I wobbled into the bathroom, but did not oink. In the mirror, there were no insects stuck to my skin. I was hydrated, not dizzy and not drenched in sweat, an immediate improvement.

Boxie-boo told me she would be ready to head out in five minutes. If there is one thing I have learned about women, it is if they say they’ll be ready in five minutes, I know I have just enough time to have 15 showers, capture my own shadow and train a rhino to do sit-ups before we actually leave.

In the bathroom, I concentrated on trimming my patchy beard, shaving my neck and figuring out what to do for the day. If any of you readers have a bathroom sink that looks like this one, you are a gross human being and I am a hypocrite. It appeared to filled with the genital hair of a freshly-shaven orangutan. Little did I know, Boxie-boo already had everything figured out.

By the time I finished brushing my teeth, Boxie-boo had quickly put on her bikini and burrito-wrapped herself in a towel. “Can we stay by the pool today?” she puppy dog whimpered, shocking me with her speed.

I glanced side to side, even though we were completely alone. In a bathroom. I then massaged the freshly-trimmed hair around my chin and looked up to the ceiling, looking to have been analyzing the universe, or perhaps, concentrating to lessen the volume of an incoming fart. I was doing both, I’ll have you know.

“Yes,” I obliged. She giggled and then fist-pumped the air, as if surprised by my response or attempting to help me with my five minutes by knocking out my shadow. In every way, she was right. We had been traveling and sightseeing for many weeks non-stop. I, too, put on my bathing suit and tossed a fresh towel around my waist: We needed do just that. Absolutely nothing. The universe also agreed. The clogging of the sink drain did not.

We left our room many miles behind us and headed to the pool.

Well, several feet, to be more exact.

We spent the morning and afternoon no more productive than two potheads during a one-on-one meeting. I swam around the pool while Boxie-boo tanned with the motivation of a beach umbrella. I played keep-up with a young, talented soccer player from Scotland on vacation with his family, but always returned to the water. The pool was my fountain of youth.

Meanwhile, Boxie-boo was more attracted to her chair than she ever was on the trip to the Ribatron-don. We had made plans to meet the couple from yesterday for lunch and wanted to relax first. What we thought was planned, they obviously felt it was much more of a spontaneous meeting, as neither of them bothered showing up until we randomly bumped into them much later at dinner.

It was, by far, one of the laziest and most uneventful days on the trip. I hardly wrote anything. The most exciting thing was when I borrowed Boxie-boo’s Ipod and placed the left earpiece in my right ear and the right in my left ear, but every punch line I came up for this joke sucked. You are most welcome.

For lunch, we walked to the same café we met the lovely couple a day earlier, where I had collapsed in a chair and avoiding eye contact like a 13-year-old boy does, as if his virginity depended on it. This was our longest journey of the day, only a couple blocks away. When my meal came, it looked completely different from the menu item I had chosen. It was a different colour, included a spoon instead of a fork, and further, the restaurant had even gone to the trouble of having miraculously changed a salad into a soup. I was too content and relaxed to even care. A day earlier, this same mistake would have caused me to slam my face through the table.

I pictured myself how I was yesterday with my arms crossed aggressively, hat tucked over my eyes and slouched in a position that could only be described as slouched – as if I had sleepwalked into a chair and collapsed on it. With my neck bent forward and my chin locked against my chest from exhaustion, I must have appeared to have passed out after trying to undo my zipper with my mind. In every way, I had the body language of an unapproachable asshole, a man who begged to left alone. I was nothing like the playful man I was today, hanging out with the friendly families we met by the pool or smiling happily at the staff member that gave us a discount. I sensed the restaurant staff taken back by my return. If only I had the decency to not turn up for lunch, like the older couple. But I could not blame them. I, too, would not have wanted to have lunch with the man I was yesterday.

I realized that although I was in the exact same setting, in the same restaurant, this time with the wrong meal, I was a completely different person than I was yesterday. You may have realized this for yourself a couple paragraphs before I did, but give me a break, I was confused by sipping my salad with a spoon. Evidently, I am not the best at concentrating at two things at once: Evidently. Focusing on relaxation was, after all, of upmost importance.

We both knew our plane was set to leave the next day at 4 a.m., which meant we would be heading to the airport just after midnight, and therefore, would have a long day of ahead of us with no sleep for at least 36 hours. Instead of sightseeing and being active, we only used energy to digest food, pack our bags, bargain to arrange a taxi to the airport and adjust the temperature on our room’s air conditioner. I knew days like this was something we would have to continue to plan for, to have time set aside for short vacations away from backpacking, especially with our pre-arranged 16-day camping safari from South Africa to Zimbabwe and back, a dream to hike Kilimanjaro and exhausting days in the heat to explore the ancient pyramids of Egypt.

Tomorrow as a big day, a shift in travel from Asia to Africa.

That’s all for now.

Thank you for visiting Page59.com.

The Travel Wall

04/10/10

My narrow breaths dripped and steamed; a chest rattle straining for air. My jaw dropped into the position of a dead man as I awoke in the middle of the night, enslaved by thoughts too deep for tears. Feeling moistened with sweat, yet decaying, I meditated, tasting tongue, palate, dry throat, to the very bottom of my lungs. All my bones were porous and weak as if they had turned to dust in the night and been exhaled from my own lungs. The exhaustion brought the feeling of drowning in my own blood. In a manner governed by madness, I found myself drawn into a silence I had vowed to avoid and placed my head hard against the bathroom mirror. This was, after all, what I wanted – the challenge, the adventure, to vanish from reality, to disappear from home – but I was lost in that corner of the mind that never forgets, where the endless exhilaration, the sleepless nights, the culture shock, weakened me from within my own veins, wounding me from inside outwards, as if cursed by the pull of my own blood.

I could have been looking at myself in the mirror for the first time, looking eye to eye with a madman through grey stained glass. The bathroom was flooding, with no separation from the toilet, shower and sink. The shower head spat its uneven and dripping coughs by my feet with the sound of wet hands clapping. My eyes were a liquid, rippling backwards with sleep deprived lines from another night attempting to rest on a bed damp with perspiration and the feeling of my own body evaporating away in the heat. I felt only able to blow out air. I convinced myself I was alive, watching my wrists drip with sweat into the sink below me. I raised an invisible white flag and turned it into a blindfold, surrendered myself and closed my eyes: An act of meditation.

I did not know Boxie-boo had awoken until I felt her hand on my shoulder. New droplets chiseled down the glass from my sweaty forehead pinned to the mirror, thinning out, before they disappeared. I was trapped in equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion, delusion and confusion, lost thoughts and broken dreams. She asked me how I was doing and by the time I went to respond, I saw her, closer to me now, in the reflection mirror. Her eyes were opened, but she she seemed to look through me. Though she never said it, I know she saw what was building around me, the spray of dust from the stacking of brick, my psychosis, the fading fire of my ambition being squeezed, choked and compressed, only leaving behind the drip and steam, an invisible wall, and this mind, this voice of tin, an exhale from a dead man’s lungs. Had she opened the curtains, she would have seen the lines on the glass, the teardrops also forming from empty eyes, where in them, I too, had disappeared.

Behind us, a ghost danced in the curtains while the ceiling fan again lost power. Everything else was still. Only my eyes moved. I blinked once, looking out at the reflection, realizing she was no longer standing behind me. How long have I been standing here? I did not know. My forehead continued to rest against the mirror, with my eyebrows perched ready to explode like two dogs caged. A mortal object. The curtain. All the music in me was gone. My whole body was heavy as if my shadows were thick blankets weighing me down. With my remaining energy, I fought my misplaced rage to attack the curtain and let it dance, rinsed my body in metal-scented drips, a shower of rust. I then faced her, seeing her own eyes swell, not realizing at the time that her tears were partly for me. We began packing our bags, hardly speaking. It was a moment I remember feeling no closer to life than I did to death.

It was time to move on.

We were set to fly to Egypt at 4 a.m. in less than two days and we both needed one solid night’s sleep in preparation for a foreseeable future without rest. Tonight was our only opportunity.

With cloths damping our foreheads, we found a hotel with air-conditioning online closer to the airport. We got a taxi driver to call for availability and directions, then drove down through swerved villages. Only my nausea was perceived and the wind attempting to thrash my hair lank with sweat. Who I once was, who I had become, had vanished from the Earth and I felt away from myself. I had made way for greater emotions, while the steady stream of the humid air entered my spine, boiling me from the core, trapping me and hated every single second.

The heat had warped my senses into numbness. I vomited into my mouth and swallowed, leaving my taste buds as bitter as my lost soul. It could have been heat stroke. Maybe malaria. Even the beginnings of dengue fever. I saw no beauty, only sickly cracks of light spitting on the ceiling through my haze of vision; the world around me, all of it disgusting, each sight gnawing at my bones. But I knew more was happening. I felt what Boxie-boo may have seen in the bathroom. I had hit the travel wall, similar to the one Boxie-boo overcame in China, turning my backpack beside me into a stray jacket. I Had lost all appreciation for how lucky I was to be traveling around the world.

I sensed Boxie-boo leaning towards my anger - etched on my face like scars running from my eyes, passed my flared nostrils, ending towards my dry mouth - and she placed a kiss beside my nose, leaving a trail for my madness to walk away from. Only her. A woman who always made me feel artistic without a stitch of work. My muse. Beyond all imaginable limits of my flesh, I felt more. I realized all that she was doing. I began to feel her hand massaging mine, her head rested on my shoulder, the swampish hush of her warm breaths sweeping against my stiffened neck. I felt the edge of air again, responding with a quarter lip lift, a smothered gesture of a smile.

The taxi stopped.

We had made it to the Phoenix Inn finally, at which point, we were told they had no rooms by the same woman who talked to our driver on the phone. I did not even have the energy to react. My eyes were without depth or meaning, no generosity or viciousness, holding the ugliest expression I had ever known. There, this poor, foolish front desk clerk who for some reason gave us directions to a hotel that was full, saw a face machined out of metal and painted to give the illusion of humanity. My hatred for this moment galloped like rising thunder into my eyes, scaring the poor girl who apologized with a thin voice, a hidden fear. I felt no remorse. I simply stood there, immobile and silent, until Boxie-boo pulled my hand. I had gone minutes without even blinking.

Outside, the voices of beggars, salesmen and drivers in front and behind us became one uproar. It rang and clamored; it echoed and broke, reformed and clamored, ringing again, rising and rising as if it would never stop. Gravity and the weight of my backpack propelled me forward, forcing my feet to find balance or fall flat on my face. I walked amidst the rough, familiar pungency of diesel and dust, moving amongst the watchful stillness of every local businessman keen to make a commission by taking us to his “friend’s” hotel. When my wrist was grabbed, I turned only my neck and glowered in their eyes with a threatening silence, saying nothing, until the hand was removed. I acknowledged no one who yelled and bumped into those that tried to block my skeletal struts - a rudeness I am not proud of. I did promise my words would be blunt with honesty. I was a man who walked buried in his own blood, thirsting from freedom from himself and to vanish from the Earth. It was the only time on the trip I wanted desperately to be home.

Hotel after hotel asked us how many nights we would be staying. When we said one, maybe two, we were told they were full. Indian liars. If this was true they would not have asked how many nights at the beginning. They were somehow disengaged by the exhaustion on my face more clear than a cloudless sky. Their lack of hospitality chaffed my nerves, polishing my rage like a well-tuned rifle. I fired back, cursing them with words and body language that dared them to hit me. I was, unknowingly, embarassing not only Boxie-boo, but myself.

In an instant, my ambition turned from acquiring a hotel to a cold drink. On a patio, away from the streets and sales pitches, I still heard the salesmen screaming and the hotel rejections again, a piercing grip like nails dragging against my eardrum, where each voice lingered intact somewhere in the thick, streaming air. It was a feeling as though one match, one ignition of fire, would have engulfed the atmosphere around me into flames.

After seven hotel rejections, we were greeted by a lovely couple from the United Kingdom. They were so positive; reminding me that happiness is one’s disposition, not one’s circumstance. After all, birds always sing, even in sorrow. The couple spoke of a hotel with descriptions normally reserved for the afterlife, and almost motherly, they seemed to care, adding in mouth-watering details of an attached restaurant with just the right amount of flavours. Their words and love for each other brought me away from my pathetic self-pity. I took shelter in the charm of their long love, 28 years married, releasing me of my spell and reminding me of my parents back home.

Love is nothing more and nothing less than magic.

We followed them to the Sunset Beach Resort. Suddenly the landscape was blue around us. Something changed in the atmosphere and the universe seemed to be on our side. Somehow I knew things would work out. At the hotel, a woman with an angelic smile gave us an air-conditioned room at a discount and since we were set to leave at 1 a.m. in two days to catch our flight, she offered us the second night at half price.

In our room, Boxie-boo reacted by doing her Hawaiian-style body sway dance after turning on the shower to discover actual water pressure and heat, without the usual scent of garbage or sewage. Our world was flipped rightside up again. Our two bodies stood together cloaked in the air-conditioner’s cool breeze, allowing our skin a break from sweating for the first time since Udaipur. We sat on our first soft bed since Chengdu, China (over a month and a half ago). Wordlessly our souls danced. Each pat test on the bed and raised hands to the air-conditioner was a kind of talking. There were no bugs, and most importantly, it was a silent setting, whirling my spirit back into life. The cost was $60 Canadian for two nights, expensive by Indian standards and for us, but worth every penny. I was glad Boxie-boo convinced me not to be cheap and to forget our budget, if only for a short time.

I had hit the traveler’s wall and sledge-hammered it down with a short visit in luxury. Around us, suddenly, was the rest of the world and I was refreshed and re-energized to continue exploring our planet. I glanced over at Boxie-boo who’s top lip was visibly moistening. It was 7 p.m., the time I promised we would go for dinner. Our stomachs were alive with hunger, and we agreed, screw it, let’s eat at the resort’s expensive restaurant.

Enjoying a romantic dinner with Boxie-boo, a frozen thought, suddenly thawed.

The day started in the middle of the night where I was awoken, sopping in perspiration and delusional, convinced that our hostel was haunted. It was too hot for Boxie-boo and I to touch beyond locking a couple of our slimy fingers. My arms were covered in bugs I had crushed in my sleep, including two cockroaches that were spread across my lower back. I heard a noise, the sound of water being coughed up and choking, and then smelled the stench of a leaking outhouse. My vision came into focus in the bathroom where I discovered water coming up from the drain in both the sink and the shower, browned and chunky. The water was painted with an unknown paint colour I called Effervescent Diaper Stains. Although the water slowly drained, we could have been sleeping under a giant camel toe. This is how the day began, before the sun had even crossed the face of India. When the day ended, we fell asleep with our stomachs full of excellent food, our bodies drained and our minds rehydrated, cuddling with our arms wrapped around each other, free of sweat and the scent of sewage, which was now replaced with a cooling air-conditioner and freshly-washed sheets.

It is funny how the appearance of things often changes according to our emotions, and when this happens, we again see magic and beauty in things that earlier may have enraged us. Each time I was distressed on the trip, I eventually found a way to see again, not outwards, but deep into myself, where I realized that which I was weeping for was one in the same with what also brought me happiness. I loved the adventures, the sleep deprivation and the culture shock, for it was only in those moments that we really grew, not only as a couple, but also as individuals. The truth was always revealed later, in that silent moment, in the pondering, where I learned that the charm and splendour was never in overcoming bug-infested rooms, culture shock and heatstroke, but was through realizing the beauty and magic we discovered existed within ourselves the entire time.

I thought back to her kiss near my nose in the taxi that she had placed below the reflective eyes of the mind of a madman, how this simple action, became fluid in me. Our minds never rest, even when we feel we are without thought. They are always in motion. We have more than one consciousness and a governing conscience. In heat stroke and sleep deprivation, they are easy to confuse, these altering currents of humanity. Re-connecting with Boxie-boo’s love for me always reintroduced me to my better self, the part of me that is always there, yet never visible, a fluid, like an ocean current that exists in secret at the bottom of the sea, shaping the Earth.

Leaving dinner, we walked through the waterfall of humidity, where this time, I felt comforted by it, embraced and not walled, carressed and not abused, loved instead of hated. As the night diluted the day, the disappearance finally happened, where our shadows became darkened and disappeared before us. In every way, it was beautiful. I followed my uncontrollable urge to kiss her, this time placing the same kiss by her nose, before whispering, “I love you.”

That’s all for now.

Thank you for visiting Page59.com.

Romantic Goa

04/09/10

Far from any city, away from home for long enough now that it seemed distant and abstract, we were finally, completely, unplugged and disconnected, were fully cleansed and freed, unbound and open. The poisons had been neutralized by the bass-sounding ceiling fan, the hushing calm of the humid air, this morning murmur, scarce a sound, I had probably been hearing all night before I even noticed it. Within the sound, I could hear Boxie-boo’s breathing on my shoulder, the same nook she found so long ago in Hawaii. Her eyes were rolling and luminous, then vanishing, opening and closing as she woke, loudly communicating without a sound. Our bodies were beaded with sweat, leaned against a sense of meaningful nothingness, against a prayer, the humidity thick enough to feel weighted, leaving my bones to feel bare, and I saw her smile, felt it inside me like a shrill and frantic uproar. It was all quite familiar until I realized: This was how I once dreamed.

I had no cellphone text messages to check, could have cared less about Facebook or clearing out my email junk mail, I had begun to forget what life back home was like and all the worries that came with it; although, there was a chance now that my obituary may read “Died after failing to send an email chain letter to five friends.” The biggest sovereignty was not necessarily our disappearance, but our disconnection, for I knew the media and advertisers – those voices and images that constantly enter our minds without our permission – no longer had any input in my life. There was nothing conditioning us to act, dress, shop or believe in a certain way of living. We were immersed in new philosophies, new ideas from many countries, from different cultural ideals about lifestyle and values, to traditions about death and belief.

If one day the corporate dream comes true we will all dress the same, look the same, feel the same (never sad or happy, just living on the verge of being satisfied), and, of course, we will never question our reality, our lifestyle, and we will be plugged into our world as if part of some machine. Maybe this machine will be called a corporation; the plug in the point, the cubicle. Scary thought? It should be. Eventually, smart phones may even come with just app that lights your hand on fire the moment you stop staring at it. In the meantime, we do not even know it is happening because we are moving so quickly towards our next shopping experience: Terror is around us. Stay shopping. It is the only safety. It is the only way to beat the fear. Listen to the images on the television - men are dumb, women are annoying sex objects, you are stupid and that is great, penis growth pills, eat this processed food you fat bastard, you’re so alone, build up your credit card points. I used to think this was not me; there was no way I was one of the drones; it must have been the others. I never realized I had been conditioned, until I left long enough to see it.

The truth is, nothing had actually changed physically, other than my location. I was born free, I will live free and I will die free. I am allowed to make my own choices, and, I had done this, I left everything I knew and understood to seek the unfamiliar and to live in uncertainty. It was brilliant. The only changes that existed on this trip were within my own mind. I have always been different, thought outside of the box and pushed the social boundaries of Canada. I have always felt that everybody can scream for joy. We are allowed to smile at people, hug strangers, show love to fellow people, yet many of us have forgotten this and so many other things, and somehow, we have all started to forget how divine and special we all are from the constant reminders of our imperfections we are exposed to on billboards and in magazines. There has not and will never be another you on the planet. The cure is simple – unplugging, releasing yourself, realizing that love is more powerful than any fear and that the revolution to change any control that may exist over our lives begins in our own mind.

I realized this is one of the reasons travel is so popular for people from Western nations: Places where entire worlds have slowly been rebuilt to put advertisers directly in front of us constantly – logos on clothing, bus stops, billboards, newspapers, everywhere. There is no choice but to see it, to soak it in, and yet, what I realize is most important is not to try to avoid it (that would be impossible), but to know it is happening, so you are aware of the outside forces that affect how you think. To travel is to rewind your mind, to take in the sacrament of your own being, to seek and discover what truly matters to yourself is all that really matters to everybody – love, friendship, happiness and health. Everything else is fiction. The problem is the necessary evil of work, of being consumed by these compulsory notions and standards, which have become the means of our survival. If unplugging is not possible, at a minimum, we all must examine our plugs, regardless of where we live.

The distant sound of thunder. The water sunk of stars.

These sounds, the lights, together ricocheted against the falling dusk like some deep prayer from a fallen god bouncing off the sea and hurled back towards the heavens. Lightning appeared to hit from underwater, illuminating the jagged tips of the sea with florescent dark blues. The sun slowly disappeared behind auburn lit clouds. White capped waves broke on the shoreline, surrounding our toes in small bubbles. We walked in front of wooden boats parked on logs filled with green nets and fire-burnt oars. Few people were in sight, just the reflection of our fading shadows on the glassy surface of the water, alone together with the sound of crashing waves.

With each step, darkness fell slowly, turning the ocean into a shadowy curtain, where within it, above and beyond, the silk black and grey sky continued its distinct song, a melody of loosely stringed, enormous guitars, the thunder, causing the stars to beam in motion, in the air, coming towards us. Bright flashes. Falling stars. The distant beach was lighted with candles centered on red table cloths. Her hand in my hand, glowing in the reflection of universe’s thrown confetti entered me, even before it became a memory, this indigo fizzle, the tides foaming at our ankles, devouring us, these two young lovers, the angels’ envy from above, the patten of our moon shadows bisecting, becoming one apparition reaching across the sea to enter the storm. It was a romantic setting, complete with a permanent firework sky.

“It’s Pouch! It’s Pouch!” Boxie-boo exclaimed, spotting one of the dogs we’d befriended in Goa. We love dogs and there are many friendly homeless ones in Goa that survive from the scraps of restaurants. Boxie-boo really love dogs. A puppy could literally bite off her arm and steal her passport and her reaction would still be, “aww!” Some dogs have families, like the puppies in the above photo from God’s Gift Guesthouse. The last time we saw Pouch, he had been chased away by snarling bullies, snapping their jaws at his neck and tail. After a day he spent sitting beside our bags to guard them as we swam, she always felt bad that he was attacked following us into an outdoor restaurant.

“Yay! He’s okay!” she screamed, down on her knees petting his head while he licked her hands.

I suppose I mention this because it is the reason I am the lucky one, to have been able to travel the world with a woman with so much enthusiasm for life. Back holding my arm, smiling upwards towards me, her brown eyes were rollercoaster thrilled. Halfway around the globe, in her eyes, I was home.

That’s all for now.

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Motorcycle and Mail, Goa

04/08/10

“What should we do today?” I asked Boxie-boo, trying hard to hide the fact that I wanted to ride a motorcycle. I managed to hide this well by coughing loudly, then pointing to a group of guys holding a sign that said their motorcycles could be rented.

“Maybe we could Goa-round?” she responded.

She waited for me to react, but having to think in the beaming heat left me to feel outright drained and I looked to be waiting indefinitely for an incoming sneeze.

“Yes,” I responded, blank-faced.

“You know, Goa-round,” she smirked. She turned her hand into closed fists, turning her wrists back and forth as if holding the invisible reigns of a horse.

I smiled. I smiled the way I did when people in China gave me directions while speaking in Mandarin. I then stopped smiling. In all truthfulness, it was not until I re-wrote this story that I finally got Boxie-boo’s joke. Ohhh, she meant ride around Goa! When we were on that dusty road in Arambol I simply thought she wanted us to walk in circles around the neighborhood. I had seen people do this. Many did. Of course, they were children spinning to make themselves dizzy for fun. Perhaps, I should consider calling her up now and begin laughing, so she knows I got her joke.

She pointed at a motorcycle. I remained admittedly confused, but nodded anyways, then circled the bike checking out its tires and brakes. We were, after all, not sure what to do with ourselves.

“So should we rent one?” I asked. She laughed in response. I laughed too, but out of confusion.

Arriving in Goa yesterday over night from Mumbai without sleep had still taken a toll on my body. We relaxed the day before at the beach and it was our second day in a row we spent trying to rejuvenate ourselves without having to travel anywhere in India. A night spent in a room sauna hot with crawling insects brought little sleep. Looking back, I had no idea how sleep deprived I had become and how close I was to hitting the travel wall. The result was we had no real plans, but did know that we needed to find a post office – and with that in mind, we jumped aboard a 200cc Suzuki Avenger, finding our way through tight pathways, dodging pigs and ducking under overhanging branches while aimlessly riding a motorcycle and hoping we did not get lost. The main roads were smooth and winding. We rode for hours from one Goan village to another with no real destination in mind. It was brilliant.

In-between villages, we passed fields with blue tarp tents, home to the area’s poorest people who lived without electricity or running water. Sometimes the roadside was lit up with the bonfire flames of garbage. Other times, we slowly passed villagers relaxed and drinking tea, all who glowered steadily at Boxie-boo. I imagined they thought they saw a crazy Indian girl riding on the back of a foreigner’s motorcycle.

Compared with our recent experience in Nepal, riding a motorcycle in small towns in India was a breeze. The roads were in better condition, with little rocks and were always paved. Few cows made it onto the road and drivers were more relaxed compared to rest of India. Although, I did find myself plugging my nose in areas that smelt like garbage boiling in a pot of liquid fish and amused by passing elephants.

Although we sent our winter jackets home that my backpack was carrying, and other large items back in Kathmandu, my bag had again grown heavy enough to attract a male hippo. Before our bus ride to Goa, a man offered to throw my backpack into the storage compartment for me, which resulted in him falling flat on his butt onto the concrete. We needed to send some more presents home, but this didn’t stop Boxie-boo from shopping. Nothing would in a country where dresses can be bought for less than $5 Canadian, not even death. She’d find a way, trust me.

“Remember how you promised we would go dress shopping in Goa?” She asked, bumping her helmet into mine and pointing to a roadside shop.

I had forgotten, of course, but pulled over anyways.

She had picked the perfect street. It was covered in dress stores. On both sides. Watching Boxie-boo dance for joy at each dress she spotted gave me amnesia and déjà vu, something beautiful and horrifying that I must have tried to forget. My old Boxie-boo was back, ready to excitedly try on a good 25 near identical dresses and giggle in my ear about how great they are minutes later on a motorcycle. She did find a gorgeous silk dress that I wanted to see her wear and it was time for bartering. She looked to me for backup like she was entering a fight. It was go time.

“What is your country, good sir?” The young saleswoman asked, her first pricing tactic.

“Brazil,” I responded. I realized a long time ago that salespeople only asked us where we were from to try to figure out how wealthy we were. Canada equaled professional athlete rich. Anyone can look Brazilian and I’ve found saying I’m from Brazil started the bartering process off with lower prices. When the prices did not drop far enough, we tried the old walkaway tactic, which rarely failed us.

By the time we reached the post office after a day shopping, Boxie-boo and I had bought multiple presents for family and friends back home, including a new dress, bikini and t-shirt for her, all at about a third of the asking price or less. We were officially bartering pros, but we’d be stupid to presume we were paying local price.

Entering the Indian Post Office, I quickly realized their service department was about as helpful as my diarrhea insomnia was for spotting wild tigers. They did not have any boxes, no tape, no pens, but a strong supply of broken English. They asked me for a photocopy of my passport photo and they had no photocopier. The post office was borderline useless and did not need to exist. They could have improved their customer service but punching me in the nuts the moment I walked through the door. It was 2:30 p.m. and they told me I had to come with a prepared box by 3 p.m.

We were lucky for multiple reasons - I had my passport on me, we found a photocopier machine at a nearby corner store (the first one I’d seen in India) and we met a lady willing to package our items for 95 Rupees.

After carefully places our items in a box, this woman – who can only be described as a “mail tailor” - duct taped it closed before starting to sew with a hand powered machine. I figured she was working on something else, so I went to take the box inside. She told me she was not finished. She created a white pillowcase and pulled it around the box, before stitching the open side closed with a thick enough string to lasso a walrus.

It turned out, the Indian government was under the impression that mail can only be sent in boxes wrapped in perfectly sewn pillow cases to give the world the impression that they sleep on the job. I suppose this would allow for nap breaks for postal workers. In the end, our mail looked like an elementary student’s art project. It was only missing red ribbon and a poorly drawn dinosaur. What started out as a mail package could have been a couch cushion.

“Is it ready?” I asked Boxie-boo, who looked quizzically at the pillow. She had a strange look at her face. I thought she might begin to add sprinkles or draw a rainbow across the box.

“You need to write a return address,” the woman responded.

“We’re backpackers. We have no home here,” I said. Boxie-boo then confused the tailor by writing our email addresses on the cloth.

Exhausted from a day riding in the heat, we returned the motorcycle after our Goa-round and walked along the beach in search of food and drinks. It is said that the more you drink the higher your tolerance is, but that cannot be true, because Boxie-boo got hammered still hated the bugs we found crawling along the walls of our room. We capped off our night watching the sunset at a local bar with some young men from England who shared their elaborate plan of sponsoring their way home by smuggling drugs. Even on a day with no real plans, there is never a dull moment backpacking in India. We ended the night hoping, almost praying, for a good night’s sleep.

That’s all for now.

Thank you for visiting Page59.com.

Doing Nothing Day, Goa

04/07/10

The first sound in the morning was the fan sending its bassy rhythm throughout the ceiling, cooling the walls and not our bed. Awake almost all night again, my morning reactions were so slow from lack of sleep I could have been hit by a car being pushed uphill. This frustrated Boxie-boo each time she tried to pass me the room key, and I missed, slapping at my chest five seconds after it had bounced off me onto the floor. She was grumpier with me than the time I was when I ate a raisin disguised as a chocolate chip inside a cookie. She was keen to lay by the beach, to do nothing as planned. Goa was a prearranged rest stop even before we left Canada. This for us was entirely essential after a crammed tour of East India.

To date, we had seen dead puppies, stepped through broken glass and shattered tiles, immensely surrendered our emotions from the overwhelming and all-consuming sights. Riding on the idly wheels of decrepit buses – 12 hours, 15 straight, overnight again to Goa, rides without sleep – with the caked on grime, staining our skin black, the sucked up sweat from our pores, soaking us into the impenetrable, all-encompassing hotness, boiling our lungs from the inside outwards, these thorny bindings of the sun, all the while the eyes remained focused on us, waiting for us to exit the bus, the foreigners. Beggars had followed us, the power went out often, jealous locals who thought a white man was with an Indian woman continuously scowled, their deviant and taunting gestures; our skin always drenched in sweat, walking by men casually urinating and through the rising dust that stuck to our skin. The bruise on Boxie-boo’s arm was still there from the old woman who pinched her, myself yelling honk to fit in while wearing earplugs, both our bodies battered from elbow-to-elbow battles on an off-roading bus, the weighed down feeling of being trapped, to have to be alert always in this exhaustion, amongst the madness, weary for pick pockets and cons. India had, in every single way, lived up to its reputation.

What an adventure, slick with the spray of camel urine, the mild dust of Udaipur’s starlit roads, the wheeling on of the constellations across idyllic Lake Pichola, a wild tiger, the meeting of locals at the holy pilgrimage site of Galtaji, to bonding with India, to have pissed amongst a long line of men against a shared roadside wall. We learned to yell “Jao!” and “Nahi!”We had walked out of front of the curved sandstone walls of the Agra Fort, through the Great Gate of Buland Barwaza, revealing gazelles and Langur monkeys, the quiet and peaceful grazing to the borrowed sensations of the dead. History was everywhere - the Tomb of Emperor Humayun, the strongholds of the Mughal Empire, the universe landing point called the Taj Mahal with its moonlike marble surfaces, the old cold of stone that spilled with light. “We saved a puppy hay hay hay hay!”

We had another night with little sleep from the over 40 Degrees of heat in the sloppy hot dampness. Boxie-boo was content to switch from God’s Gift Guesthouse to Ivon’s, in the hopes being nearer to the ocean would result in a cooling sea breeze and more sleep. I was two with Goa in the early morning - I could understand the universe, but was laughed at by pigs as I leaned against walls for balance during our early walk between guesthouses. Ivon’s was a bit more expensive, costing us 300 Rupees (about $7.50 Canadian/US). Looking back, I had no idea how close I was to hitting the travel wall.

By the water, we sat under the bamboo roof of a family-owned restaurant and had two bowls of salad each. We relaxed and scarcely even stirred in our seats. Our bodies fell wherever gravity had taken them as no more effort was available. It was amazing how much I enjoyed the humble cucumber, lettuce and tomato salad with balsamic oil and vinegar. Almost all veggies we consumed in India to date tasted spicy or with some sort of curry flavour. It was nice to solely eat something and have it taste simply the way nature had intended.

We found ourselves beach chairs owned by a restaurant and ordered some soda waters. Boxie-boo was content to relax and sit still, while I needed to cool myself, so I continuously ran back and forth between our chairs and the Arabian Sea, my feet burning in the sand. The water was so hot, it actually did little to cool me off, but it didn’t stop me from peeing in the ocean. Don’t judge me, everybody does. Returning after meeting a dog we called Pooch, I discovered Boxie-boo was surrounded.

“You guys are going to get me in trouble!” Boxie-boo said. Two saleswomen were setting up camp in front of her. They had already stretched a good 50 necklaces, along with about a 25 shalls.

“Who is that? Your husband?” Saleswoman One asked.

“Yes, he is my husband,” Boxie-boo responded with a smile usually reserved as part of her post-fart statement. We realized a long time ago in India it was easier to lie and say we were married than it was to explain how it was possible for two people to travel together, while dating, unmarried. This common practice by westerners made about as much sense to Indians as eating cows. It was also a lie we had to state to get a room together with one bed.

“Hello White boy,” one of them said.

“I’m not white. I’m African. The sun just has the opposite effect on me,” I said, hoping for a laugh, but instead received blank stares.

“You are very lucky to travel to India with an Indian woman,” the other saleswoman said.

“I get it all the time, but I am not Indian,” Boxie-boo said. They didn’t believe her. In the end, they wanted 500 Rupees per shall. We bought three for 300 and probably still overpaid. I also talked down a bracelet from 250 Rupees to 50, and again, surely overpaid.

At dinner, I had a chance to reflect on our first full day by the sea. Goa was an interesting place that can only be described as a retirement community for hippies. Old men and women, both with hairy armpits, smoked joints by the beach while the sun further aged their stretched tattoos; the elderly white men with dreads, Santa Claus beards, massive gold earrings and Aladdin-style pants, made them appear like pirates that lacked motivation, keen to do nothing beyond sitting still, maintaining their high and playing cards. They rarely spoke. A part of me felt some of them could be famous philosophers or masters of the human psyche and I knew I needed to test them. I mentally asked them to raise my hand. The hippies failed me.

When Boxie-boo went to our room to read, I stayed to finish writing and have another vodka soda. The remaining patrons and I all glanced at each other occasionally, in silence – a young French girl, an old pirate and me, the strange foreigner. I wondered what locals who never left Goa thought of people from places like Europe and North America. A group of Indian men had told us that they find it offensive when foreigners dress so poorly in their attempt to fit in as it made them feel insulted, seeing them in their unfitted and baggy pajama outfits, cheap and poorly made to the point that these men told us they would be ashamed to walk around in such garments. Meanwhile, these same backpackers they witnessed dress poorly spent mad money on overpriced booze, which could have easily have been spent on clothing that fit. On the beach, many backpackers walked around naked, shocking locals in a country where public affection and handholding only happens between heterosexual male friends; a place where women are covered in lengthy colorful shawls, where men, even the poorest, often wore collared shirts. Judging the West by Goa standards, locals would come to think that people from New York to London spent their days living like common cows - naked, smelly and unmoved, simply waiting to be fed with no motivation beyond eating or being mounted by a bull.

Sitting alone, I looked to be the classic struggling writer. I was wearing the same battered hat I bought in Cairns, a pen hung just below the rim rested on my ear and I reached for it often, stopped, then reached for it again, placing it back over my ear between sentences. There was nobody left in the bar except the three of us. With my right hand rubbing over my eyebrows, scrunching them together, my eyes closed, opened up when I thought of the right word, before they closed again when I tried to think of a second word. Once enough words were thought of, I scrawled energetically into my notebook – broken and taped together, battered and pealing – before being lost, eyeing openly to the stars, gawking at nothing in particular, my way of asking myself what was worth putting into the story and what was worth removing, while my lengthy and wild hair bent with the bending pages, wandering in the reach of the lone fan. I was, after all, writing my first draft of what you are reading now. Unknowingly to me, this persona was attracting the French girl: The writer, traveling around the world…of course, she did not know that one of my most recent stories involved pooping my pants.

She had seen me eating dinner with Boxie-boo, seen us together holding hands, she must have known we were traveling together and more than that, she must have known we were lovers. For this reason, I felt no concern when she asked to join me at my table, although she was beautiful, in her early 20s with a slender build, with long defined legs, a pretty smile, wavy light brown hair and a fit figure. She was either very tanned from Goa, or perhaps, she had recently rolled in Doritos. She was, however, wearing those massive sunglasses, so there was still a chance that she was a 300-pound sumo-wrestler.

“What are you writing?” she asked, removing her glasses, and thus, proving to me that she was, in fact, not a sumo-wrestler.

“A book,” I responded. She asked me to be more specific. I suppose telling someone you are writing a book is rather vague. The more I told her, the more she seemed to lean in closer to me. She was wearing a long dress with light fabric, when once seated, she had pulled up well above her knees, a loose tank top, her legs crossed towards me, rubbing her hands up and down her thighs, before moving her hair aside, massaging her newly revealed neck with her eyes closed, softly exhaling through her mouth. Her name was Amelia. This was when she told me she was from France. In Goa, her friends called her Lily Flower. She went to India to improve her yoga and her flexibility, she explained, but has stayed longer once she became fascinated with learning how to meditate.

“It really frees your mind and your body,” she said, her legs still crossed, the top leg bouncing up and down, closer and closer to me, eventually nudging against the bottom of my shorts. She reached across my arm, touching my wrist gently, by mistake I presumed, while reaching for my notebook. I never know what to say when people talk about freeing themselves, though admitted, all my philosophical thoughts meant I had understood her wavelength. I nodded in response. “It leaves you to believe that you have met your own soul, not literally, but in the sense of talking to your inner self,” she added, turning the pages of my notebook, yet ignoring my scribbles, looking me straight in the eyes. I needed to show her that I understood, to let know that I did not really think she’d met her soul or talked to her organs. I again nodded in response, this time more slowly, to make it seem that I was genuinely considering her statements.

“Tell me more about your book,” she said, tilting directly over my lap, her baggy tank top dropping, and though I controlled my urge to glance downwards, it was very apparent she had on no bra, especially when she leaned back and stretched her arms behind her shoulder blades, breathing heavy each time she shifted her position, almost moaning. Ordinarily, I felt quite at ease telling backpackers about my book, but I was felt very uneasy around her. I never thought I would be uncomfortable around someone named Lily Flower. Her flirting could only have been more obvious if she had asked the server for an ice cube to rub directly on her nipples.

“My drink is done so I should get back…” I tried to finish, but she interrupted me.

“I have a bottle of rum in my room if you would like to join me,” she offered, looking at me deadly serious, her eyes unblinking, biting her lip, before placing her hand by my knee.

“Err…” I mumbled instantaneously, stood up too fast and bashed my knee against the bottom of the table, knocking over my empty glass and causing my hat to fall to the ground. If there was ever a time for an “err” and a knee bang, this was it. “…I got to get back to my girlfriend.” I speed walked away, and, turning around a corner, once I knew I was out of her sight, I literally began running up the stairs to our room. There are few scenarios more uncomfortable for a man in a relationship than having a good looking woman offer sex to you. This is how slutty hostels can be, where travelers away from home and the social rules that guide them, are more open to literally “freeing” their bodies with strangers. I had come across men who openly talked about visiting prostitutes; men who I knew would never do such things where they were from. Peoples’ morals often shift the moment they receive a stamp on their passport and they leave customs.

I never told Boxie-boo this story. It was the second time on the trip I was hit on, the first being in Fiji by another woman who must have also known I was with a girlfriend. In both situations, I left immediately. I had to. This was not to say that the woman was more attractive than Boxie-boo or that I was not far enough in love with her; if anything, the opposite was true: Boxie-boo was my one and only and I never came close to cheating on her. Regardless, the only solution for a man is to run away.

If I told Boxie-boo the woman was beautiful and how good of a boyfriend I was for leaving right away, she would not have necessarily shared my impressiveness. Simply put, men and women are built differently. Women can get hit on by handsome, charming and muscular men, reject them, and still feel comfortable – this is likely because it happens to them all the time. Growing up with three sisters, I knew I was a man because of one talent I did not have: The ability to hear any sentence and reinterpret it in every single way to make it horrible. She would not have been impressed. She would have been mad. She had, after all, been hit on well over a 100 times in Mumbai alone and been completely comfortable rejecting all of them (though sometimes angry). She would have been furious even though I had done nothing wrong. But in a female mind I had done something wrong. I had allowed myself to allow a woman to make me feel uncomfortable. I know any woman reading this is now nodding in response. To the men reading, I know, it makes no sense.

Instead of her and I have having a celebratory romance about my faithfulness, we capped off the evening with violence. I learned our bed was covered in small ants and made the mistake of showing Boxie-boo. She reacted the way I would respond if I discovered my crouch was on fire and began slapping at her shorts with open hands. “Eww, baby, eww!” she screamed, doing her I-got-to-pee dance – bouncing on her toes with her knees knocking together – that I had become familiar with on this trip. I flipped over the mattress to discover a small colony living on top of the hardwood. She held her sandals like a hatchet and smashed at the wood while screaming “Yar.” I suppose she spent too much time around pirate-looking hippies today.

She was the most beautiful pirate I had ever seen. All jokes aside, the truth is a Bollywood supermodel could have hit on me and it would not have mattered. My attraction to Boxie-boo was more than emotional, more than physical, more than even spiritual. She was my backpacker partner, my survival, my compass point, with me through all the trials and tribulations of this trip. She had pulled me back from a fight in Jaipur, made jokes to ease our pain, comforted me, vented and let out her rage, shared her deepest thoughts and released her inhibitions in my presence. Only she had the eyes, the golden brown, the mainspring of my being where I emptied myself and disappeared. Romance and perverts, sleep deprivation and history, meals within the domes and minarets of faded temples, the weighing down of humidity and reckless driving: Her always, with me. We craved together the long seconds without sounds, found the amusement and matching rage; we predicted each other’s reactions and felt each other’s thoughts, while it happened, her growing toughness, her backpacker innocence taken by the core of India, the halfway point of our trip around the world. No woman, no beauty, no angel from heaven, could compete. “We saved a puppy hay hay hay hay!”

That’s all for now.

Thank you for visiting Page59.com.

Arrival in Goa

04/06/10

When “No thank you” and “Please” failed us in India, there were two go-to words I used instead – “nahi” (no) and “jao” (go). Like other poor countries, sometimes the only solution to avoid harassment from aggressive salespeople was to walk away and ignore them, although I always hated being so rude. I’m very Canadian in this way. I even feel guilty declining an airplane seat, but never guilty watching Team Canada murder rival hockey teams.

Arriving at the Goa bus station, resistance was futile. Even pooping my pants wouldn’t have fazed these professionals. Looking out the window, Boxie-boo exclaimed “!#@$ my life!” after seeing over 20 businessmen spot me, the only blatant white passenger onboard. I knew “no thank you” would fail us and we prepared ourselves to go on the jao attack, partly for my own amusement, knowing in a couple seconds I would have to walk along the bus to grab our bags from the storage compartment. Leaving our seats, my legs moved in this early morning, before my brain even knew it was still awake. I began the day removing a horrifying wedgie I was too tired to notice.

Leaving the bus, I held an open tube of Oreo cookies in my left hand. In the distance, far away from the salesmen who crowded us, I saw an old man sit on a bench shaking his head side to side, in full disgust of my Oreo breakfast. We got them on sale so long ago that we forgot which country we bought them in. They remained hidden in the bottom of my bag. Once discovered, I had no choice but to pour them into my mouth as my hands were needed to protect from potential pickpockets, making me chew upwards. This gave me the look of a feeding baby bird. The old man continued to watch me. And I did this maintaining eye contact with the old man, while we were instantly surrounded.

I had been awake overnight, felt slightly nauseous from motion sickness on the 12-hour bus ride and was light-headed from dehydration. Meanwhile, we were being followed by more than a dozen businessmen competing for our business and I hadn’t even had my morning fart.

“Jao ja ja ja jao the rigidity raw, to the jao jao jao ja jao,” I sang out, completely circled by salesmen and taxi drivers. I began to cough up Oreo crumbs.

“My friend, my friend,” one driver yelled.

“Jao.”

The eye contact continued as I leaned forward, coughed up more cookies, my eyes rolling as I stared into his eyes and finally released my morning fart.

“What is your good country, sir?” another screamed, selling bracelets.

“Shibity plow to tha rigidity jao.”

“You take my taxi.”

“Jao jao jao.”

Eventually, all the yells became one incomprehensible belt of random screaming. I scanned those following and stopped counting once I reached 17. I said to myself the same Boxie-boo said before we got out of the bus.

Sitting down on the concrete after running away from the bus station, I could see the old man through the legs of all the salesmen who towered around us. I wondered what he thought. Maybe, “I must’ve looked so bizarre this morning I caused a man to spit out cookies and uncontrollably pass gas.” He then broke eye contact, looked at Boxie-boo and shook his head again. I had become so obsessed with the cookies I managed to live momentarily in a world without racism. He was pissed for other reasons, not because of my cookies. He thought he saw a white man with a local girl.

It wasn’t all bad. I did save the most aggressive, shoulder pulling taxi driver from being attacked. I controlled myself. Barely.

I felt like Brad Pitt with Angelina Jolie surrounded by paparazzi, except I was better looking. I tried giving them the silent treatment after my jao attack failed, even speed walking away with both our large bags. It was like pooping in the ocean, no matter how hard I tried to swim away, the more my body language dragged in the crap and these guys were following with invisible pooper scoopers. My walkaway’s only accomplishment was lessening the group slightly. I gave up and bartered down a taxi to take us to Arambol, a place with a reputation for being a quieter section of beach in Goa. The whole ordeal and my weak bartering with the taxi driver left me feeling dirty and ashamed, like being booed by a peeping tom at a urinal.

Arriving in Arambol, the trail to the beach disappointed me with its garbage. On the sand, we sloppily walked with our giant bags directly in the heat looking for the salvation of food and water, happy to notice the seaside was clear of rubbish. We threw our bags down under the bamboo roof at Samara Beach “Resort”. Its huts cost only 300 Rupees per night right on the beach, but the rooms resembled beds thrown into dusty sheds. Boxie-boo gave me her puppy dog look, begging us to keep looking, so we moved on. I massaged my neck before my next decision – adding Boxie-boo’s bag to the front of my body, because I like to keep my body guessing whether I hate or love it.

Luckily, we found an even better hostel called God’s Gift Guesthouse for only 200 Rupees a night (About $5 Canadian/US) that had a fan and a private bathroom - all we needed, although air-conditioning would have been nice. I was keen to save some money after expensive Udaipur and Mumbai. We spent the rest of the day swimming and relaxing, while examining the cadavers we found on the beach - a sea snake, two sting rays and a baby shark. Knowing these predators had trouble surviving out there, I realized I should have packed my water wings.

We - and by that statement I mean Boxie-boo - decided that since we saved money on a room, we should treat ourselves to a fancy dinner, our reward after a day spent doing pretty much nothing. We headed to the Relax Inn Restaurant and Bar that was recommended to us for great seafood. Boxie-boo order the pasta with clams and I order the seafood pasta that had fish, clams and prawns. If you ever head to Goa and you like seafood, check out the Relax Inn’s restaurant. I’m not a big fan of curry, so this was the first meal I enjoyed in India. It was a bit expensive by Indian standards and cost us 450 Rupees with multiple bottles of soda water, but worth every penny. And there she stood, dancing when her food came, doing her Hawaiian moves in celebration, just what I hoped to see two days earlier. My Boxie-boo was back and in full force. I, however, needed sleep more than anything.

If someone watched a video of this day backwards, the highlights would include destroying my back and shoulders with our bags, massaging my neck, farting, then screaming “No! Go!” in Hindi running towards salesmen, capping off my day by making eye contact with an old man while eating spat up Oreo cookies from my shirt, before sitting on a bus seat and giving myself a wedgie.

Having hardly slept for days, I’m glad Boxie-boo did not record a video of me trying to get into my sleeper bag. A toddler would have an easier time with calculus. I eventually passed out only halfway in, face down, more immobile than a beached whale.

That’s all for now.

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Mumbai to Goa

04/05/10

Boxie-boo stood in the small gap between a pile of bags and the road where drainage collected pooling piles of trash, within that middle hour, between sleep and consciousness, tasting what we all consumed – the humid air, the cough of diesel exhaust, searing her tongue and palate, down her throat to the bottom of her lungs. Each of her mangled nerve ends attached to nothing familiar. Her fingers reached downwards and crashed at her sides and she walked with a stiff and ruthless limp through a line of bags. The sun had fallen hours earlier. Her expression was unnatural, set against the stars smothered by pollution without a face or depth; black, flattened and expressionless, as if cut from iron slabs. She was animal-like, as if tasting her own blood in preparation for a kill. In every way, she wore the bandages of battle in her body language, the loss of heaven and the pain of hell, the ruins of contaminated lust, where it all tumbled from the lips of perversion, giving us both a rallying cry.

With their lower jaws forward, eyes in a mid-dreaming, rolled back and drowsy position, a group of men pointed at Boxie-boo while blatantly grabbing their crouches. Backfiring tuk tuks banged through discarded cans and bags of trash, then stopped, yelling at us for rides. It was hot as always, and although she was not shivering, she was shaking slow, steady and hard, as if her discomfort wobbled loosely from the core of her being. Looking away from the men she glanced in my direction. She reached forward towards me, her palms flattened in front of her waist, as if offering an invisible blanket; her face black now by the shadows cast by street lamps. Yet I knew the expression remained: Unnatural and cut from iron slabs, a face enraged by the lurching and plodding gazes. It was an awe-inspiring moment for me as I felt the artistic urge to re-arrange their faces with my fist. She wore a tank top with her shoulders exposed, which by Indian standards meant she was dressed prostitute revealing.

“When will it end?” Boxie-boo said, as she moved to stand behind me to show we were together, while we waited for our night bus from Mumbai to Goa. I reached up, massaging her hands now on my shoulders. Dozing before us, their eyes remained dreary and stirred. The unshaven jawbones. Their elbows nudging before pointing. The sidewalk stained with spat out tobacco and covered with flattened garbage. I did my boyfriend duty. I sat on the ground focused on the men that made her uncomfortable. It was my job to glare back at them – one by one, my eyes threatening them - until they looked away. The problem was, I was completely outnumbered by crouch grabbing perverts and there were no other foreigner women in sight. I would have given anything to see a zipper malfunction.

“Just ignore them and sit close to me,” I said, patting the sidewalk beside me, turning my hand black. Bad move on my part.

“Are you kidding me? Look at those guys spitting tobacco. I’m not sitting in spit,” she replied, her hands on her hips in lecture position, as I heard the sound, the chewing, before tobacco was spat out aimlessly to the ground. Boxie-boo is a bit of a germaphobe and Mumbai was a bad place for germaphobia, but according to signs everywhere, it was a great place to catch tuberculosis.

I knew her frustration and discomfort was from more than this moment. It was a culmination of everything we had been through to date, yet there we were, set for another overnight bus without sleep.

We had already visited multiple islands in Fiji, the East of Australia, and Japan, trekked overland from Thailand into Cambodia and back, across five provinces in China, through the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal, before we even entered India: New Delhi, Agra, Ramthambore, Jaipur, Udaipur, Mumbia and now we headed to go Goa. We had become too drained to comprehend our discomforts, caught in the altering currents of heat stroke and dizziness, the plummeting jaws and Hindi cat calls, our breaths dripping and steaming, fearing for our emotional well-being.

Everything came in waves, the children’s arms digging wrist deep into mounds of garbage, the tears stained unaltered by a loving touch, the blending of it all, faces shaved in street puddles, naked children, cockroaches running along the walls, one gloom. We had bashed into each other for 15 hours straight on a sleeper bus, battled attempted cons from guesthouse staff and drivers, our bowels churning butter, my diarrhea insomnia; I had even pooped down to my own socks and had my genitals fried by Tiger Balm.

It was in this moment, in the darkness when Boxie-boo reminded me that we would relax in Goa. I agreed, before she sat on my lap and I lost my balance, slipping my hands accidentally into a mound of spit. That was it for Boxie-boo. “Ew!” she yelled, bringing more attention to herself by mistake. More eyes noticed her. More body scans. She stood up immediately, scowled at all those perving at her one by one, then glared at me and boarded the bus. Looking in the window, I watched her put on her sunglasses, turn her face away from the window, blocking the world around her.

Before boarding the bus, I waited as usual for the storage compartment to close, confusing the driver’s assistant who didn’t speak English who kept mimicking for me to board with his hands. Unlike the rest of India we had been to, English was quite rare in Mumbai, but crouch grabs were extra abundant. I never entered a bus without watching the luggage compartment close.

We wanted again to take a train, but they were sold out for days and we had no time to wait. We preferred the cheaper bus with seats in comparison to the sleeper that left us battered and bruised. We might not have been able to lie down, but we did not have to worry about accidentally elbowing each other in the face. Little sleep was had, of course (none by me), which was irrelevant to us as we had control of our air-conditioning vent and our bodies were never smashed into metal walls, so we thought of it as an improvement and focused on enjoying the ride.

This trip also provided me an opportunity to experience being an Indian traveler. At one rest stop at about 4 a.m., I was pointed to walk towards men who were dropping their pants. I nodded and walked confidentially, trying to give the impression that I knew where this going. This rest stop was simply a large, roadside wall. There I found a line of men, some facing the wall, others towards the bus. I looked back at the driver. He pointed between two men who nodded to me. I knew what I had to do and unbuckled my belt.

And there I stood, surely making my father proud, standing in a line the length of the bus getting ready to piss next to a good 10 other men. I made sure to leave a meter of space on both sides of me. I tried hard to make it look like I had no friends in the hopes nobody would make this event anymore awkward. While I began to urinate, a young man stood on my right, close enough for our shoulders to touch and began taking a piss, while another, approximately 50, squatted down on my right within a foot of me with his back to the wall and began to poo, smiling up towards me. At first, I avoided eye contact as if my manhood depended on it.

Unsure what to do, I scanned left and right, before uncontrollably laughing. Other men squatted along this long line of feces and piss. A few managed the no-hander maneuver, standing casually with their pants around their ankles as they talked on cellphones. I then noticed the squatting man beside me was laughing too. I looked down. I smiled back. I had another new experience. I had never smiled downwards at a man before while holding my junk. It was a beautiful display of international bonding, if only we held hands or crossed swords. When he was finished, he held up his left hand for assistance standing and I pulled him, where he later stood, shaking the rest off with his right hand, smiling and still laughing. While shaking his junk. Still making eye contact with me. It was safe to say I re-entered the bus more awake than a baby on Redbull.

I suddenly realized why the old man was laughing.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told Boxie-boo, sitting down, before she even said a word. I simply reached below her feet, grabbed our carry-on bag and covered my palms in enough handsanitzer to overflow onto my pants. Indian men do not always use toilet paper, and often, they wipe their asses with their bare hand. The left hand.

That’s all for now.

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Mumbai with a Celebrity

04/04/10

If Boxie-boo instantly died on this day and somehow went straight to hell (highly unlikely), it would probably take her at least three days to realize she was not in Mumbai anymore. At least this was true in at the Gateway of India. There we were on the shores of the Arabian Ocean, walking in the heart of Mumbai and smelt the sea for the first time since Australia. We’re from the coastal city of Vancouver back home and the scent was glorious, overpowering the smell of sweaty jockstraps that circulates other areas of the city. The streets were lined with shimmering, Cinderella-like carriages and it was nice to not be the only tourists in sight; although this did not matter. Boxie-boo was the number one attraction.

We sat on steps in front of the Gateway of India, shaded by trees and drenched in sweat. We were still in India, so beggars came and pulled at my shorts, while men continuously stopped and starred gawk-eyed at Boxie-boo, many giving out their Hindi cat calls, still confusing her for an Indian girl. The poverty in Mumbai - or Bombay as it was known until 1996 - was harsh in a city where slums resided by the swamp-ridden coast, home to over 16 million people. Crowded and hot, the rare open spaces filled with fumes, so the coastal air was extra refreshing, while the streets nearby were tight and busy – a gas chamber ready to burst at the seams.

We hoped holding hands would make it apparent that she was in relationship, keeping the male harassment to a minimum, but we were wrong. Instead, we people watched the endless crowds that moved like ants on a discarded apple and did our best to ignore the watchful men. Mumbai is home to the biggest urban sprawl on the planet, the biggest film industry and a third of the country’s wealth. It is a city where Indian refugees who dreamed of a better future come high on the wings of hope, only to find the squalor of some of Asia’s biggest slums and day jobs spent begging to closed windows at traffic lights.

Salesmen sold the most random items, from colourful hand held wind mills, to baby rhino-sized balloons. Had I bought them both, I could have had India’s most pathetic sail boat. Although there were many other tourists in sight, the first time since the Taj Mahal, this did not matter. While I was distracted, Boxie-boo’s blood boiled to a temperature where she was able to melt her chest hair, if only she had some. She was ogled by 75% of the men aged 15-35, yelled at 20 times, caused five collisions to people who gawked at her instead of watching where they walked, and, most importantly, had caused Viagra stocks to drop 15 points on the Indian stock exchange. All this is true, I have Excel.

Meanwhile, I had entered a staring contest with a stray dog for so long that I forgot which one of us had heatstroke. Boxie-boo, surely finding my brain dead expression annoying, made me aware of the stares and cat calls by head-butting me in the chest while whispering to my armpit, “Make it stop, already.” This was when I mentally created my Excel spreadsheet. Boxie-boo, frowning, had become a prophet of doom, pleading with the pervert god for mercy.

We decided to stay focused on what we were visiting, ignoring the men stopping, nudging their buddies and then pointing at Boxie-boo. We were at Mumbai’s defining landmark, the Gateway of India, trying to take it all in, which was challenging to say the least. The gateway commemorates the arrival and good riddance of British occupation. Built in 1924, the “Arc de Triomphe” marked the visit of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911. Today it represents the opposite. On February 28, 1948 the last battalion of British troops marched under the arch to board the waiting ships back to Tilbury.

We could only stay so long. The beggars, perverts and salesmen were relentless, so we moved on while being poked by the giant rhino-sized balloons, through crowds, poked and tapped on our shoulders and wrists, all the while, yelled chariot ride offers by a minimum of five drivers at once. They all gave me fascinating information on what it’s like to crawl less than one kilometer an hour behind a pooping horse. It was very interesting, so much so that I added to the list of information that I could care less about. As my ears pierced from the screams, some within a foot of my face, Boxie-boo tried to hide behind her sunglasses as she was continuously examined by India’s bachelor. Had she been wearing a bikini, she was liable to start a civil war.

Throughout our time in India, I hoped to capture two things on camera - the pinky finger holding of male friends and the fascination men have with Boxie-boo. I managed to reach one goal in Mumbai.

Watching a local woman receive the temporary tattoo art of henna, Boxie-boo waited for her turn. Nobody watched the Indian woman; she was simply alone with the salesmen while commuters walked by without notice. We watched her pay 20 Rupees when finished, at which point we were asked to pay 80.

“Come on, man, we just saw her pay 20. If she likes it, we’ll give you 30,” I said, which was about 75 cents Canadian/US. As a backpacker, I always felt proud to pay local price the rare time I knew it and I usually would refuse to pay extra at all, but it was less than a dollar. The salesman said no, so we walked away. He then yelled back “okay” to his new “friends.” In India, we learned to this very quickly. We had become programmed to do the same thing: Laugh at the first price and if they do not drop drastically, walk away – and this tactic almost always worked. He nodded and Boxie-boo crouched on the sidewalk in front of him.

The salesman placed stencil paper on her wrist, then rubbed a muddy texture on top that smelt like chai tea. Within 20 seconds, a pedestrian traffic jam hit the sidewalk by four men who stopped, mid step, bumping into each other to stare at Boxie-boo. It was as if they spotted the reincarnation of Gandhi himself. By the time the last stencil paper was placed on her finger, more than 15 men watched, near blocking the entire sidewalk.

“Look,” I said, overly excited, proud of myself for capturing this photo by blocking traffic in the street. Boxie-boo turned her head for only half a second.

“I’m used to it,” she replied, completely unfazed. I suppose had I been paying more attention earlier in the day, I also would not have been so shocked. The whole event reminded me of a post-soccer-game ritual back home - the men were my teammates and Boxie-boo was a cooler full of beer.

“I thought I was happy, but then he yelled at me and whistled, before drooling while examining my breasts. In that moment, I realized he was what was missing in my life,” said by no girl, ever. This thankfully meant Boxie-boo did not leave me for an Indian man.

Our night ended with a taxi driver complaining about being paid 350 Rupees for taking us to one restaurant, waiting for us to eat, before dropping us off at our hotel. Our taxi from our hotel down to the Gateway of India cost us 200 Rupees. The extra 150 was a good deal for both parties, especially considering we found his taxi parked on a side street with him asleep in the backseat. He wasn’t exactly a go-getter, but like I said, I aimed to give my business to people that did not scream at me. I thought about giving him an award for his laziness, but I realized he would have to find someone to accept it on his behalf.

The highlight of the night was watching a cat and a dog enter the restaurant, almost cartoon-like. The dog walked in first, began licking its ass and the cat seemed to take this as a challenge and followed suit. Both of them forgot to buy drinks. This was our dinner entertainment, courtesy of Mumbai, until one of the servers began belting them with brooms.

When we got back in the taxi, he was pissed off about the price we agreed to 30 minutes earlier.

“400 Rupees!” he yelled. I could tell by his tone of voice that he had not recently seen a cat and dog enter a restaurant to go down on themselves.

“Not happening, homeslice,” I said. “We both know 350 is way more than a local would pay and it was your choice to agree to it. If you are unhappy, we’ll take another taxi.”

He jabbed his gearbox into first and pointed at his already running meter.

Although it was an agreed, off-the-meter charge, I suppose that was some attempt of his to make us feel guilty and pay him more. He did everything he could to ring up the meter, stopping at two corner stores on the way to pick up chewing tobacco, swerving up and down side streets, avoiding major roads. The entire ride was more awkward than a conversation during a prostate examination. If he was my doctor, he would have checked me long enough to know what I was thinking, if you catch my drift.

In front of the hotel, he screamed for 400 Rupees and I looked at his meter, pointed, as it never exceeded 250. And to think, this guy originally tried to charge us over 500. Perhaps, there was something to be said for the salesmen whose business tactic involved hysterically screaming.

Little did I know at the time that my patience was growing thin. What I did know was that Boxie-boo needed a break from it all. The perverts, the beggars, the salesmen, the smells, the shouting and backfiring vehicles, the jam-packed streets and pissed-on walls. I was glad we’d soon be away from the cities, staying on the outskirts of a small town in Goa, far from the chaos and the crowds. It seemed to me that something, I did not now what exactly, was beginning; had already begun.

All I wanted was my old Boxie-boo back: The girl who would pretend her hoodie sleeves are elephant trunks, do a happy-Hawaiian-sway dance post poop or before a meal, joke about killing people for a Slurpee, add much needed comic relief during stressful times at places like ticket booths, giggle into my ear behind me on motorcycles, excitedly shout when she spotted creatures like sea turtles, her flirtatious teasing of me, her affection, her smile, and yes, I even missed her most bizarre travel tradition - to excitedly try on 25 near identical dresses (though I never admitted this to her, her happiness when she found the right dress was always worth the wait). After everything we had been through in India, the extra taunting in Mumbai had taken a toll on my one-and-only Boxie-boo who seemed overcome with homesickness and discomfort. Goa, I hoped, would be the solution.

That’s all for now.

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Udaipur to Mumbai = Frustration Day

04/03/10

“That will be 6,900 Rupees,” the front desk clerk said to us as we checked out of the Vishupriya Hotel. Simple calculation of 1,500 Rupees per night times three nights equaled 4,500, plus maybe a bit more for one breakfast and a bottle of water. It’s one thing to try to rip off foreigners by a hundred or two, but come on - this was ridiculous.

Here we go again, I thought.

“How about we do that math together,” I said to the clerk, revealing a bill of approximately 4,750 Rupees.

What followed suit made about as much sense as a divorce following a game of Monopoly. Her body language threatened to eat my first-born child, while her voice steamrolled, heated enough to turn her spit into pure acid. “You pay now,” she yelled, slapping the adjusted bill onto the counter. She got mad at me for busting her in her lies. In the words of Cheerios cereal, “OOOOOOOO” snap. Awkward.

“Please don’t yell, I’m a foot away,” I said in an exaggerated whisper while my eyes squinted out of the fear of flying spit. She gave me an angry glare, as if trying to center her eyes in the middle of her forehead. It was such a scary sight, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night just thinking about it.

“You pay now!” she screamed louder, then looked away, her index finger pointing at the bill, arched and rigid, with one hand rested on her hip like she was taking a break from jogging. Her lips rolled back, a half Elvis impersonated with the added attack formation of teeth that appeared like army Chiclet’s ready for battle.

“Yes, I know. That would be why I came to the front desk at checkout with my wallet,” I said, adding an amount of cheekiness that was somehow left over from my teen years. I was relieving my youth, I suppose, without worrying about popping a no-reason erection in public. Unfortunately, I was entering an argument with idiot who had dragged me down to her level, able to beat me with experience. The last thing I wanted to do was cause a larger confrontation, but it was still on my to-do list, so I pulled out my money slowly.

“That bill sure is a lot cheaper,” I said. I had been working hard this entire trip with constant bartering, and I suppose after over three months in, I had grown impatient with any lies – and I often had to complete these tasks without a calculator. I felt able to relate to slugs, they do all the hard work of snails, but without helmets.

Boxie-boo began rubbing my arm, knowing my temper was a few degrees away from full eruption. The Ribatron-don does not like to be yelled at, especially by someone who just tried to rip him off. The clerk seemed to have acquired her customer relations skills from a spitting camel and Cruella De Ville. Our visit at the Vishupriya Hotel ended with me counting the returned bills, smiling cheeky enough to fart from my nostrils.

I must note that although the hotel sucked, we did love Udaipur. Udaipur was by far the most honest city we went to for tuk tuk drivers. We always asked locals what they pay for rides, from restaurant staff to internet cafe owners, and we never had one tuk tuk ask for even 10 Rupees above the going price. Udaipur was an honest city, just not at the Vishupriya Hotel.

Over the course of the last three months, I had gotten used to bartering. Almost daily, we were forced into the same routine - offer one third the price or less (depending on how high they start), then if they don’t come back at 50 per cent or less, we walked away, before hearing “Okay, my friend my friend. I give you good deal. You’re my first customer of the day.” We were always their best friends, their first customers, supposedly always paid local price and they are always going out of business. If you believe that, you deserve to be conned in India.

I thought the worst was over…then we boarded a sleeper bus headed towards Mumbai.
We were the only foreigners in sight, except that everybody thought Boxie-boo was Indian again, which offended some local men to see a white man with a motherland babe. We found our reserved bed in the back right corner, directly over the rear tires on the second level. Although the photos at the tourist office showed blankets and pillows, this room’s only added comfort was a mattress reserved for military bunkers that was only a couple centimeters thick. In tough traveling situations like these, my best contribution was not making it any worse.

The bus driver switched lanes constantly, as if trying to dodge his air freshener that dangled from his rearview mirror. I originally sat upright against the wall, until the bus bounced up and smashed my head into the ceiling, causing a large bump to form on the top of my head. Lying down, I realized I was about half a foot too tall and my legs were too long to fit comfortably. It felt like we were lying on a blanket on top of a two-by-four of cedar, riding on a racing speed boat. Our whole bodies continuously vibrated belligerently, a body movement normally caused by seizures as if we were fighting evil demons or the attack of an invisible monster that never stopped tickling us. Occasionally, the bounces were able to lift sections my body off the ground, smashing us into each other. This lasted overnight. For 15 hours. No exaggeration. The experience would not have been much different if they had put is in a monster truck tire and bounced us into Mumbai.

Within a couple minutes, the air-conditioner turned our room into a freezer. The bus driver turned it off briefly when we asked, then back on causing us both to shiver. I never thought I would be cold in India. The result was a 15-hour overnight ride, the two of us snuggling for health instead of romance, but at the same time, the more we snuggled, the more we hurt each other. We repetitively bounced back and forth bashing into each other, accidentally elbowed and kneed one another. Our bodies were left battered and bruised from each other and also from banging into the mattress, the ceiling and the walls. The late breaking left my face with rug burns and another bump, this time on the back of my head. I quiver to think of the jokes my soccer buddies will say to that. One thing was for certain: No matter how many times I travel again, regardless of where my life takes me, the only way I will be ever lay on a bed traveling on top four tires again, is if I am kidnapped by a mattress salesman.

To make matters worse, we were sleep deprived and shivering, before being dropped off on a highway overpass. No Indians left the bus with us. I imagine they were dropped off at the bus depot. We found one tuk tuk driver with zero English who nodded when we showed him our hotel’s name. It was 5 a.m., we hadn’t slept, and this guy had no idea where he was going, driving around aimlessly for about 45 minutes, stopping on each street corner to ask other tuk tuk drivers for directions.

We arrived at the Pearl Hotel where a staff member wanted to charge us double for arriving too early. There we were, exhausted and in a financial debate. We hadn’t slept for 24 hours and we were forced to play the game and do the bluff walk out of the hotel, which worked, just sucked to constantly have to play that card. Turns out we met another “friend” who was happy to break the “rules” for us.

That’s all for now.

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