Photos pending...

Due to our computer incompetence, we have no photos to show at present. We'll put some on in the next few days. For now though, we have four new written sections to be getting on with.

Day 123: Our final day...

That's it. All done. Complete. It feels like an eternity has passed since we arrived here in Kolkata and it has made such a difference finishing this trip where we started it, allowing us to reflect on the time, places and experiences in-between. The city almost feels comforting now, like an old friend and it feels right that we should return and give her one last handshake before we leave. After all, it was she who gave us our deepest insight into the extremes and contradictions of Indian life.

It's difficult for me to try and sum up our time in India. I think when you're travelling in a topsy-turvy country that is home to twenty-two states, one billion people, several of the world's great faiths, eighteen major languages and more than one thousand minor languages and dialects it's pretty hard to come to an all-inclusive conclusion. We've only seen a fingernail scraping of the country and we've only seen it in a fingernail scraping of time but already I feel packed full of contradictory images, emotions and thoughts.

India: one of the most materialistic and power-hungry societies on the planet and yet a timeless and compelling wonderland. India: a nation wrought with irreversible corruption and deceit yet a holy and peaceful country where the Buddah lived and taught. India: the second-largest producer of computer software in the world, with it's own satellites and nuclear weapons yet home to the worlds biggest slum settlements, the largest number of malnourished children, uneducated women and homes without access to clean water and waste disposal.

I've felt frustrated, amazed, harassed, inspired, belittled, overwhelmed, in awe, deeply saddened,
deeply privileged and a little like I've been tugged at from every limb and now it's time to go home and try to make sense of it all. I can only hope that India and all of it's experiences will stay with me for years to come and colour my life along the way. (And Jonny's)

As I've found it hard to come up with an ideal sum-up of the country, I shall leave you with a quote from one of the travel writers in our guidebook. Thank you for listening.

"Intricate and worn, it's distinctive patina - the stream of life in it's crowded bazaars, the ubiquitous music, the pungent mélange of beedi smoke, cooking spices, dust and cow dung - casts a spell that few forget from the moment they step off a plane. Love it or hate it, India will shift the way you see the world..."

Chilika Lake

On our east-coast dash home from Hampi to Kolkata, we decided to make a brief stop at one of the few places described in our guidebook that attracted our interest: Chilika lake. At 1100 sq km, it is Asia’s largest lagoon and home to great biodiversity, especially its migratory bird populations that, between the months of November and March, number over a million. Flamingoes, ospreys, painted storks, eagles, pelicans and kites fly from Siberia, Iran and the Himalayas and join the indigenous population of egrets, herons and gulls to subsist on the abundance of fish found in the brackish waters. The lagoon is also home to a peculiar looking and widely advertised endangered marine mammal: the Irrawaddy dolphin.

When bringing to mind a dolphin, the image that immediately springs up is of the bottlenose- that swift, playful fellow from Flipper. The Irrawaddy however is markedly different. It has no beak- only a blunt, rounded head; its movement is slow and deliberate, rising slowly to the surface where it rolls, whale-like, to take its breath, then diving deep, its tail fluke coming clean out of the water; and its mature adult size is around a third more than that of an average adult human. Unfortunately for the Irrawaddy, they are adapted to inhabit the resource-rich rivers and shallow coastal marine waters such as Chilika. This means that they come into contact with humans far more than species found in oceans and, in much the same way as the Indus, Ganges and Yangtze dolphins, are consequently on the front line of the battle being waged between man and the natural world. Their demise has been attributed to: water contaminants from industry- heavy metals, etc; agricultural chemicals and industrial fertilizers; fishing that uses drag- and gillnets (or explosives in Vietnam and Thailand where they are also found); collisions with propellers; capture for transfer to oceanariums; and poaching for their oil which is considered aphrodisiacal. They now, after our sustained assault on their population, number about 2,000 in the world. The lake is home to, from the last approximate estimates, a mere 50.

The morning after our arrival, accompanied by one of the hotel staff, we hired a small, paint-flaking blue boat with an outboard motor to venture out into the lake and see if we could find any. The boat was one of many moored to a large jetty. The majority of these crammed vessels, unlike our spacious minnow, were old fishing boats adapted to accommodate up to 40 tourists at a time. Even though it was still early morning, many of these boats were filled with excitable Indian school children and teachers, all of them inexplicably ululating like some warring tribe at the sight of our passing white faces.

We made our way steadily out into the open water- a measure that has evidently been encouraged or imposed upon the tourist boats and fishermen so as to avoid propeller collision- and squinted hard against the reflected sunlight to catch sight of a breaching back. Within a few focused minutes, Lucy squealed as if she’d been bitten and pointed (bloody typical) 180 degrees from where I’d been staring. If it hadn’t been for the passion of her response, I’d swear she was lying.

Ten or so minutes later, a finger pointed across the water to a descending dorsal fin and we altered our course to run alongside its path. Suddenly, two, then three more backs broke clear of the water and spouted their expulsive breaths. It looked as if we’d come across a pod of perhaps four or five. The motor was switched off and we sat in rapt silence as the slow, graceful rolling and watery sputters were repeated mere metres from where we sat. Though practically blind, the dolphins’ echolocation would have sensed the boats presence. The fact that they calmly passed us by without panicking made the sighting all the more meaningful; a touching mutual trust that made the decimation we’d wrought on their species all the more shaming.

Overall, during the course of the 90 minutes, we made at least twenty sightings (there must have been a number of repeat ones) and returned to the jetty, elated at the fact that we’d glimpsed a fragment of these unassuming creatures’ lives and heartened at the certainty of their continued existence. Our elation soon turned to perturbation as we chugged up to the jetty. Several of the big boats bobbed in our wake. We glanced along the line of cheering Indian passengers, some of them, in some instances, screaming and flailing uncontrollably, and wondered at their reasons for coming out here at all. Admittedly, many were school kids and the excursion would have offered the same sort of thrill as any school trip would. The intentions of the teachers may be admirable- perhaps to draw their students’ attention to their natural heritage and encourage its conservation. But this tourist traffic: round-tripping, day-in, day-out, propeller blades driving deep into the water, oil being dribbled from every motor, plastic drinks cartons floating colourfully by- is the ‘awareness’ it provides of any real benefit? Is it, in the long-term, actually benefiting this now critically endangered species? Or is it just one more way for the local human population to extort a few quid from another natural resource that will, in time, be driven ever closer to extinction?

Day 106 to 114: Mysore to Chilika Lake

The city of Mysore was next on the list and once again we hired bicycles to get the most out of the place and to get the least out of the hassling rickshaw and taxi drivers. Mysore had a different feel to most of the other cities that we had visited, more like a large and relaxed town as opposed to a non-stop, hectic and racy metropolis and therefore riding around on our two-wheelers proved as easy as ever.

Bright and early on our first morning we visited the dominating Maharaja’s Palace which, from a distance, resembles Buckingham Palace as it has a similar shape and layout. However, after a closer inspection I decided that no Queen of England would allow her home to fall prey to damp walls and crumbling concrete in dire need of a whitewash. The palace was completed in 1912 for the twenty-fourth Maharaja of Karnataka on the site of the old wooden palace which had been destroyed by a fire in 1897 but it seems that since partition when, all over India, most of the properties of Indias Maharajas were handed over to the state Government, the royal palaces, holiday homes and gardens have fallen into decay.

During the time of the Empire, the Maharajas of India were kept sweet by the British in order to gain and keep a certain amount of rule over a state. Money, niceties and the honour of mingling amongst the finest of British aristocrats kept the Indian princes happy and the British in command. Each of the palaces usually stood upon vast tracts of green and untouched land teeming with wildlife but after the hunting-obsessed British introduced the sport to the Maharajas and they took it up with just as much (if not more) vigour, the once animal-filled grasses, green plains and jungles of India began to show little signs of life. Many of India’s species were disappearing fast and the old photographs displayed in the Mysore Palace gave us little reason to wonder why.

The Maharaja (usually stood in the centre of the picture) would be dresssed in the most ridiculously fancy and pompous hunting outfit (which appeared to be stifling him from his toes upwards) with three or four little men to his right and another three or four little men to his left. I say ‘little’ men because standing next to this Maharaja, the last ruling prince of Kartanaka, that is what they were. He was massive. Absolutely mammoth in size. The tell-tale signs of him becoming such a whale were even apparent in the childhood photographs; with a rippling belly, jowly chin, greedy eyes and an ever-giving and doting mother lovingly standing by his side- he was set to be a big boy. Anything that little prince wanted, he got. And he (along with most of the Indian princes) wanted to hunt. Infront of the line of men, splayed out on the ground were (in some photographs) upto 200 tiger carcasses piled high like mini, striped mountains. All from one days hunting. It wasn’t uncommon for a ruler to notch up a disgusting tally of 4,000 birds in one day either; the bigger the pile, the bigger the prince’s fat head. Photographs of a days catch, stuffed animals and mounted tusks, horns, antlers and teeth covered the many walls in the many rooms of the palace and gave us no doubt as to the fact that this Prince really liked his ‘sport’. Of course hunting is not only to blame for the depletion of many Indian species, more recently poaching and the increase of human population in rural districts have greatly added to the problem but the trigger-happy British and Maharajas certainly played their part. They completely eradicated the Indian cheetah and brought the Asiatic lion to the brink of extinction. Only recently, off the back of the lions decline, a Maharaja in one of the northern states (as if to redeem himself) turned his land into a conservation park for the animal. It’s still teetering on the edge but numbers are slowly rising. Elephants, rhinos, snow leopards, swamp deer, spotted deer, musk deer, barking deer, the Himalayan hog deer, the Kashmir stag and the wild Ass of the Rann of Kutch are all living on the edge but don’t worry, if they do disappear from this land forever you can always visit one of the royal palaces to see a stuffed one. But the saddest story of all has to be that of the tiger. Maybe it’s because of the mystery surrounding the tiger, the fear, the respect, the myths or the adoration that commands such universal fascination, but few other animals seem to hold such power over man and as a Maharaja, bagging yourself a few hundred deer with the odd cheetah thrown in bares no comparison to tiger hunting; the “sport of kings”. As recently as the turn of the last century, up to 100,000 tigers still roamed wild around India but after decades of hunting, poaching (a whole tiger can fetch up to $100,000 on the black market) and forest clearing for farming- depriving the large carnivores of their main source of game and the cover they need to hunt- the numbers have dropped dramatically to around 1,000. Experts today claim that at the current rate of depletion, India’s most exotic animal could be extinct by the end of the decade.

After a one-night-boozey-stop-off in Bangalore our path took us to the old ruins of Hampi. This is the name of the main local village but the whole settlement spills out over twenty six square kilometres of surreal landscape littered with giant, golden-brown granite boulders and leafy banana fields; somewhat similar to a ‘Flintstones’ movie set. The weird rocks (some balanced in perilous arches, others heaped in colossal, hill-sized piles) are said to have been flung down by the armies of the age-old monkey kings (Bali and Sugriva) who ruled Hampi when time began. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, this was the most powerful Hindu capital in the land and travellers reported tales of markets full of silks and precious gems, beautiful bejewelled courtesans, ornate palaces and joyous festivities. However, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the wealthy and dazzling city was devestated by a six-month Muslim seige. Only stone and brick survived the attack so all that’s left to see now is monolithic deities, crumbling houses and an abundance of abandoned temples. What remains is simply extaordianary.

The ruins of Hampi transported us to another time in another world. Granted, the Muslim onslaught left the monuments in disappointingly poor shape, seemingly much older than their four or five- hundred years but the serene setting and the unbelievable vastness of the site; home to palaces, royal baths, public baths, elephant stables, pavilions, guardhouses, countless temples, and halls of justice, each intricately carved out of stone, left me feeling slightly bewitched. I couldn’t even begin to imagine this magical place in it’s hey-day; queens taking a dip in the royal baths, people worshipping the god’s in the spookily eerie underground temples, elephants housing the long and beautiful stables and kings parading around the palaces, looking down from their many towers on the magnificent and monumental Hampi. Walking around the site I felt like time had stopped. It really was one of the most unusual places we’d visited.

Day 94 to 105: Mangalore to Mysore

Well, we’ve finally come full circle and here we find ourselves back in the grip of the almighty and intoxicating Kolkata. With only eight days to go till our feet are once again placed firm on English soil, I’m starting to feel giddier than your average kipper. Our train pulled into Howrah station this morning at five o’clock and we haven’t really done too much since but (although I never thought I’d say it) it’s really nice to be back in this city. Just being in a familiar place where we know the streets, the restaurants, the hotels and even some of the people is a huge relief and allows for a little, well-needed breathing space. So, to pick up from where we left off...

After fleeing from Goa and all of its delights we found ourselves racing south on a train to Mangalore, a coastal city in the state of Karnataka. Although we spent three days in Mangalore, I’m unable to say much about the place as we spent all of our time there writing and updating the blog and only ventured out of the internet shop at feeding times. Now I could have just jumped straight to our next stop, the Coorg, and overlooked Mangalore but I do have one tale to tell, a little story which will enable me to remember the city in years to come.

We spent the three nights in a rather nice hotel, probably the nicest hotel of the trip and the staff were exceptionally friendly and helpful. On the second morning we gave the young and eager laundry lads our bag of washing to deal with which was full of stinky and sandy clothes from the Goan beaches and on the morning of our departure the bag was brought back with each item fresh smelling, spotless and ironed.

Once we were at the bus station and wearing his now gleaming trousers, Jonny had a feel in his back pockets in search of his wallet so that he could pay the conductor. He pulled the wallet out of his right back pocket but said that he couldn’t get his hand in the left one as it seemed closed. After we’d got onto the bus I had a look and sure enough it was sewn tight. Jonny started yelping and saying that someone had, ridiculously, sewn up his back pocket. I told him not to be silly as it had probably always been like that and was supposed to be more of a fashion accessory rather than an actual, practical pocket.

We arrived in the Coorg (our next and a most enjoyable stop) later that evening and once we were in our hotel Jonny took of his trousers and turned them inside out. Where Jonny insisted there should have been a pocket, only the fringes of a hacked-at piece of material could be found. Amazingly, he was right! Not only had someone sewn the pocket up but they’d chopped it off aswell! This caused great amusement: who would want to steal a pocket? And why!? We had visions of one of the hotel staff running around waving the pocket in the air, shouting to everyone that he had managed to pinch a pocket made from special, breathable material (the theft was from his all-weather North Face walking trousers) and laughing at how the white man had never even noticed.

As no explanation could be found, after a few days the incident started to blur into the background and we had to leave the case unsolved. Then one morning, Jonny noticed that the bottom of each of his trouser legs looked different from one another; the right leg was definitely made from slightly lighter material. On closer inspection we realised that the bottom part of the right leg was actually made up of a seperate piece of material from the rest. A kind of patch- a pocket patch! There was the missing pocket! Sewn onto the bottom of his right leg! But once again, why? We only had to turn the trouser leg up to find for ourselves the incriminating evidence and a pocket pinching explanation. The original part of the trouser leg was in tatters, a shred of which was scorched...with the tip of an iron print. So, whilst ensuring that we got our washing back in the cleanest and crispest of fashoins, the young laundry lads from the hotel must have had the iron turned up a little too hot and burnt right through Jonny’s trouser leg. Then to make sure that they wouldn’t get a beating from their boss and to make sure that they got their money, they must have ran to a tailors (I like to imagine them running) where he would have chopped off the left back pocket and proceeded to sew it over the evidence AND probably recieved a handsome sum himself. Very clever. So the mystery of the missing pocket was explained and we could get back to our travels.

We were then in the green and mountainous Coorg. The Coorg is a vast area of steep hills and valleys and home to coffee, tea and cardomom plantations, pepper vines and ginger roots. The best way to appreciate the beauty of the place is on foot so we hired a guide and experienced a two day trek in the south Indian countryside, spending our nights with a farming family in their home in one of the remote villages. It is a shame that with these sorts of ventures you have to hire someone else to come along and show you the way; it would be ideal to be able to just set off and find your own path but it just doesn’t seem to work like that out here. Our guide was quite young and he talked incessantly, pausing only to point out and name every single thing from each and every “spider” to each and every “aeroplane” flying overhead. This was as annoying as it sounds so two days with him was definitely enough but the countryside itself provided a lush and tranquil escape and I could have happily stayed with the family and their many animals just a little longer. If only for some more of that homemade lime and mango pickle.

Outcastes

A few people have asked about the caste system here in India: does it still exist? If so, to what extent is it enforced? Are the reports of brutality at all founded? Well, we came across this article a couple of months ago and thought it a good example of what we’d read and heard elsewhere. We were keen to write up a brief summary right away but it was a little too close to the festive season and we didn’t want to depress people with the heavy content. Seeing as we’re well clear of all that, now is as good a time as any.

The publication Tehelka is the hard-hitting, self-proclaimed People’s Paper of India. It aims, as far as I can gather, for a progressive, liberal sort of readership and seems, from its articles, to specialize in muckraking. Other topics included in the issue are: excessive administering of WHO live polio vaccines to rural children; the new defense minister’s agenda for the coming year; and the shortcomings of the juvenile criminal system.

The article stands beneath the banner: India Outraged and has, as its title, DALITS, LIKE FLIES TO FEUDAL LORDS and beneath that, in bold type: A Maharashtra village serves up ‘moral justice’ by gang-raping and lynching a Dalit family. That didn’t merit front page news in 21st-Century-10-percent-growth-rate-India. (A Dalit, by the by, is the substitute term for an Untouchable, or a person of the lowest caste. Maharashtra is a central state of India.)

In essence, the story is as follows…

One day, ‘two acres [of Dalit farmland] had been taken away’ in order ‘to build a road so that neighbouring farmers, who belong to the Powar and Kalar upper castes, could take their tractors across to other villages’. A local police officer, Siddarth Gabjhiye, who was, unusually, also a Dalit, was resisting further attempts made by the village’s upper castes to forcefully appropriate Dalit land for a ‘water pathway’ and applied to appropriate authorities. The villagers spread ‘allegations that he was doing so’ because of his 'sexual relations' with a married Dalit woman Surekha Bhotmange, 45, who tilled a threatened five-acre plot of cotton and rice with her husband, Bhaiyyal.

‘On September 3’ it is written, ‘a mob beat up officer Gajbhiye, the ostensible reason being his alleged illicit relationship with Surekha Bhotmange. Officer Gabjhiye filed a police complaint against 15 of the men, 12 of whom were arrested.’ He identified each of them in a police parade.

A month later, the men were released, ‘taken away in a tractor by their relatives', 'got drunk’ and went looking for the officer and his brother, threatening revenge. Unable to find the man that indicted them, they then went to the Bhotmange’s house.

‘The drunken group…broke down the door’ at 5:40pm as Surekha ‘was preparing the evening meal’. Her husband was not at home but her children were- 17 year-old daughter Priyanka, 23 year-old Roshan and 21 year-old Sudhir. ‘Although Roshan was blind and Sudhir a graduate, they not only helped with the farming’ he writes ‘they also worked as labourers to bring home extra money.’

The mob dragged the four from their hut, not realizing that the husband and his brother were ‘a stone’s throw’ away, watching helplessly. They were taken to the chaupal (village square) to be brought before the village sarpanch (locally elected leader). The details are best left now to the journalist.

‘By now, allegedly 150 men and women [from the upper castes] had collected. Some shouted to the sarpanch to allow them to sexually assault the women. They raped the women and killed all four, even as their women-folk looked on, mute spectators to a form of justice reserved for castes lower than theirs. One woman…reportedly did protest but was slapped into silence. She now says she was never there.

‘Surekha and Priyanka were stripped, paraded naked, beaten black and blue by bicycle chains, axes and bullock cart pokers. They were publicly gang raped until they died. Some raped them even after that, and finally, sticks and rods were shoved into their genitals…’

‘Roshan and Sudhir were beaten up, their genitals mutilated, faces disfigured and their bodies tossed in the air, before they lay dead on the ground.’

‘An hour later, a village meeting was called and a diktat issued: no one was to say a word about the massacre’.

The husband fled to the nearest village to report the incident and see the perpetrators punished but when finally he found a police officer and described the incident, he was not believed. ‘It was only the following day when the police patrol started flashing reports of the discovery of the mutilated dead bodies’ that proper protocol was finally followed.

After many months of corruption in which ‘doctors were managed and the police bribed’, investigations finally found thirty-eight men in jail, as accused. However, ‘some of the main perpetrators are still free due to political pressure’.

This unspeakably brutal act is, you’d imagine, a story from some deeply distant and primitive time. But you’d be wrong. These murders took place in 1996- a mere ten years ago. One can only imagine that incidents such as this continue to take place in rural India, away from the supervising eye of civilization.

Baga Beach

What a topsy-turvy country of staggering extremes! What impossibly opposite lives are led, often one within arm’s reach of the other, and without a single person stopping mid-stride to scream out at the absurdity of it all.

First, to consider a life in the city where we began this trip: Kolkata. We were thrown into the thick of commonplace destitution, shocked at the level and extent of people’s penury and stunned at their ability to endure such a bleak existence in the face of such crushing futility. Many of the people we met who slept and begged at Sealdah station for example, will never venture further than that filthy city’s limits, perhaps, for the most part, never daring to roam outside of their known territory: the station’s crowded platforms and dusty concourse. Perhaps entire lives may be spent, of sixty or more years (the results of which we witnessed at Mother Theresa’s house for the dying destitute), without ever escaping that hellish, loveless and unforgiving struggle. Each and every night spent sleeping in corners or doorways on the cold, hard and grubby ground, among dashing feet, open drains and skeletal mutts; waking to the dismal prospect of having to depend on passing strangers’ arbitrary acts of charity in order to buy a meager and never-changing meal of rice and dhal. Never having an opportunity to better your situation and perhaps knowing that this punishing daily cycle may well be your lot until the day you die. An entire life. It’s inconceivable! Even if it was possible for a person born into relative privilege to come close to conceiving this sort of life, I don’t suppose words could ever adequately describe its perspectives.

Lives like this are led by countless people not only in the streets of Kolkata but also in every other major Indian city. An entire third of the citizens of Mumbai, for example, live in slums. Everyone who lives in India is aware of their existence; they all must have an inkling of the suffering borne by so many of their countrymen. It’s this that makes the scene that confronts us now so hard to swallow.

Baga is located on a central area of the Goan coastline famous for its exceptional beauty. Its beaches are enormous: deep and blessed with a soft white-sand and bordered by the swaying fronds of coconut palms that, with their thick, nestled clusters of green fruit, teeter improbably on wiry, lichen-spotted trunks. The lazy waves never roll in at anything over a foot high and, breaking into foamy lines maybe ten or twenty metres before their retreat, crawl forward at a constant, leisurely rush that’s soothing to the ear. In the ocean itself, the marine life is as abundant as it is varied. Small wooden fishing boats bob in the flickering waves as the sun sets over the Arabian Sea. It is as idyllic a beach as one could imagine, the sort of place someone might envisage as their paradisal resting place; or at least they might have done, that is, until the mighty, exploitative forces of commercialism decided to set up camp and render this unassuming little spot into a veritable hell.

All along its vast, nearly 20km length, sun beds, 3, 4 or even 5 deep are spaced at intervals of a metre or so, each with its own multi-coloured parasol, in a manner to rival even the most established European package-holiday resort. The beds, sparsely occupied in the morning whilst tourists sleep off the previous evenings sousing, slowly are filled from noon until they are saturated by cajoling crowds swigging from wine and beer bottles. The seas teem with hundreds if not thousands of bodies: women and young girls bobbing tentatively over the waves, gasping at each rising swell as they venture further out to sea; men and young lads diving into the breaks, shouting and boisterously splashing one another. There’s an almost permanently audible background buzz and aggressive irregular slap from the many jet skis that dart in amongst pleasure boats brimming with orange life-jacketed excursionists expectantly awaiting a glimpse of their promised rarely-seen marine-life in some nearby cove. Banana boats bounce comically between numerous slow-moving floating billboards that parade advertisements for local nightclubs, bars and beer whilst pounding out indiscernible dance music; far off in the distance a parachute lingers in the air like a giant jellyfish, silently suspending the silhouette of a small insect by invisible threads.

Behind the beds, again for the entire 20km stretch, lie a line of bamboo shacks that act as food and drink dispensers to the masses; some the diminutive size deserving of the name ‘shack’ and others better described as something like ‘bamboo complexes’. Most of these are topped or are immediately neighboured by vast, garishly-coloured signs sponsored by large multinationals like Coca-Cola or Smirnoff. Above the thin strip of white that quietly announces the shacks’ name in plain black type, the dominating faces of cosmetically flawless models, grasping their bottle of whatever, laugh and smile with supernatural glee and are accompanied by vague and meaningless slogans exploding through the centre, stating rubbish such as: ‘Life is Calling! Where are you?’

Inside these consistently busy shacks, bodies sit well back and strain the flimsy form of the ever-present, white plastic, all-in-one chairs. They sip at colourful, iced cocktails, chilled white wines and towering bottles of beer dripping with condensation. Most have been lured by the blackboards that are propped outside each and every shack that promise an apparently endless supply of world-famous (and wonderfully cheap!) Goan seafood: Lobster! King Prawn! Baby Shark! Tiger Prawn! Kingfish! Green-Lipped Mussels the Size of Your Fist! In the distance, on the horizon, barely distinguishable in the haze, I count fifteen industrial fishing trawlers, each with four or five cranes poised to drag in the indiscriminate haul that will (mostly) go to feeding all those demanding mouths clamouring on the shore.

Just in case you hadn’t been alerted to these shacks’ ubiquity over the course of the morning and early afternoon, then have no fear: when four o’ clock strikes, you’ll be left in no doubt. Soaring stacks of speakers are brought to the forward corners of each of the bamboo structures, like reinforcements against the swelling crowds, and blast out music; often, in eagerness to outdo their neighbours, at volumes which distort the sound deafeningly. Each of these hundreds of shacks thumps out its own inimitable flavour in the hope of acquiring a particular crowd and the resultant effect is one of utter aural chaos; a messy hotchpotch of beats and swirl of instrument and style: here the latest Indian Bollywood song; there Shania Twain; here now some hard-pumping techno.

For anyone reading this at home and imagining the inhabitants of this scene, it’s possible that you may well be imagining swathes of pasty or lobster-red Brits with ‘I Love Goa’ t-shirts straining over their bloated bellies, or maybe tight-briefed, leathery-looking Germans all enjoying their cut-price break in the Christmas sun. If you are, I’m afraid you’ll have to scrap the imagined mob and replace at least four-fifths of them with an entirely different breed altogether. Let’s call them, for want of an official title: ‘The Newly Affluent Indians’.

Before we arrived in Mumbai, we were almost totally unaware of there being many wealthy Indians. Of course, we thought, there must be a few prosperous industrialists and moneyed businessmen what with the burgeoning economy, as well as a small sum of old money enduring in some lines, but surely that’s all there is: a few. Mumbai however, though we were there for only a day and a night, suddenly opened up the possibility of there being rather more than that.

As India’s financial capital and the home of the world’s biggest film industry, Mumbai has evidently spawned some big-earners. Their collective influence can be felt in the city’s arrangement which has a far more European or aspiring American feel to it, albeit with a touch of distinctly Indian disorder and filth. Its central streets, though heavily congested by a higher-than-average quantity of cars (an unfortunate byproduct of increased wealth) are mostly free of the oppressive smell and littered waste of other Indian cities. People seem generally more purposeful and occupied and so there feels to be a smoother flow, less apathy and inertia. But it’s the citizens who seem most to reflect this aspiring Westernisation. We saw, on our wanderings, the sort of people you’d expect to see on a fashionable high-street in London. A mother sauntering through a Waterstones-like bookstore, dressed in tasteful, lightweight designer clothing, casually flicks through a glossy cookery book while her chubby child, dressed in baseball cap and Nike trainers, tugs impatiently on her trousers, whining for something or other. On a street lined with the glittering facades of designer clothes stores, a surly-looking pair of teenage girls clutching mobile phones to their ear in one hand and fiddling with strands of their hair in the other, aimlessly amble in that bored, indifferent way particular to rich adolescent girls, their expressions suggesting a sort of haughty exasperation at the general irritation of it all. Due to the time of these wanderings however- midweek, early evening- we never really saw many men, all of them no doubt hard at work in their offices to bring home the cash and satisfy the rapacious shopping appetites of their spouses and offspring. We needn’t have worried. Baga is awash with them.

Whether from Mumbai or elsewhere, their stories of these revellers must mostly be the same. Most will have made their fortunes within a generation or two. Most will have come from a history of relative deprivation. All will regard themselves as being entitled, in the way that all us successful Westerners have become accustomed, to a slice of the good life. And by golly, they’re really going to go for it.

Swaggering, American-styled Indian men, with basketball vests, combat khakis and unblemished trainers; loud, ostentatious, brash and boorish, demanding sun beds, seafood and booze from their scampering countrymen who cower and acquiesce in a way that relegates their status to that of slaves and elevates the grumpy-looking money-wielders to that of Roman emperors. Some are quieter, emulating the quiet, respectable American family of four: father, dressed in pastel Ralph Lauren polo shirt and cream chinos, a sensible side-parting and wire-rimmed glasses, dutifully leading from the front with a warm and loyal golden Labrador in tow; children and mother puffing away, laden with needless amounts of beach paraphernalia. Others, in younger groups, laze nonchalantly beside one another, so transparently and so risibly self-conscious in their movements, laughter and gaze, with wraparound sunglasses that cover half their face; and the girls determinedly arching their eyebrows with petulant pout, imitating the moodiest-looking models from the Western fashion magazines that lie in their laps.

However, try as these women might to resemble the images of svelte Western models propagated by their glossies, they are woefully let down by something that might reasonably be called the ‘Newly Affluent’s Epidemic’. Nearly every one of these Indian nouveaux is overweight. Some are merely tubby; others titanic. As far as the eye can see: droopy rolls of flab hang over bikini waistbands, men’s breasts bobble as they play Frisbee, cellulite-dappled thighs waddle towards the sea. One man is so round that, when lying on his side, his elbow barely reaches the surface of the sun bed. But this phenomenon is part of something larger. It is a tangible, physical and visible symptom of a broader problem: it feels as if, after a long and complicated history of repression from religious figures, colonialists and the state, a secular, fat-walleted middle-class finally has hold of the reigns and is making up for lost time.

The excitability of this crowd of thousands on the beach has a sense of instability, as if a vast chunk of a population has suddenly won the lottery and wants to start living like stars. They seem to be part of a greater population that’s heedlessly diving headlong into a cycle of conspicuous consumption without much ethical restraint or an environmental conscience- seafood stocks, as just one example, after five years of heavy trawling off this stretch of the Goan coast, are depleted almost to the point of annihilation. After many millions of years of ecological balance and many thousands of years of sustainable fishing by local fishermen, someone out there with the necessary capital as decided, on the back of this economic boom, to bring in his four-craned trawlers and mine the seas of their wealth in a mere blink of five years.

On the surface, it’s easy to argue that the Newly Affluents in these mushrooming economies have every right to enjoy themselves after all their years of relative hardship.
Why not? We have. It would only be hypocritical to suggest anything else. We’ve made mistakes and we’ve learnt from them- let them make their own mistakes and all will be right in the end. I think though, for the most part, people find this line profoundly troubling. In a book I just recently read called The Hidden Connections by a fellow called Fritjof Capra, this rapid development of the Developing World and its sustainability is discussed in some detail. In essence, it states that if the 77 countries considered ‘Developing’ were to achieve the same level of consumption per capita as the US currently achieves, then we’d be getting through 220 times the natural resources used today (as well as emitting 220 times the waste); or the equivalent of three and a half planets. Those in positions of power and influence are well aware of the unsustainability of our current growth rate and yet still it continues to grow, exponentially. The adverts that we see on Indian TVs across the country depicting spacious apartments and glamorous lives, pushing the consumption of their products ever further, fail to mention to their audience of millions that the fantasy they’re peddling simply isn’t possible. And yet those that can, do- as is all too evident here on Baga beach. They may still only be a nominal proportion of the 1 billion population of India but they are leading the way.

But besides this question of how long our increasingly global party can go on for, there’s the humanistic issue that surrounds these grossly distanced lives, lives that exist both in India and the whole world. It’s impossible, in contemplating the mindless excess that exists here in Goa, not to be taken back to when we began this trip in Kolkata. Everyone who lazes here on Baga beach knows of the existence of the pitiful lives we saw and yet they continue to party like there’s no tomorrow, frittering more money in a week than maybe some of their fellow Indians will ever see in a lifetime. It's difficult to attribute blame but it all seems so wrong.

Anjuna's colourful flea market...

A beautiful Goan bug the size of a small dog...

Jonny had managed to munch his way down the list of desserts but hadn't yet plucked up the courage to ask for the last...

Once a nobber, always a nobber...

Lucia Bella (how apt! says Lucy) our bunker retreat from the rowdy rabble of Baga Beach.

A Very Merry Christmas (he, he, he...)

Giddy Christmas Kippers clutching their cliched coconut cocktails...

Our venue for the 25th...

Christmas Day only hours away...

Christmas Eve green-lipped mussels. We left the shells out for Father Christmas.

Our peaceful little stretch of sand outside Sami's...

Our cocohut at Sami's Place on Agonda beach.

Day 90- New Year's Day: Goa.

And then two days worth of travelling down the west coast to Goa: the party place of India. Where in the north one can watch the hedonistic hippies swing their foisty locks freely on the sands and the hardcore Israelis thumping and pumping the night away around fluorescent painted palm trees; or take a trip south to witness the loud, staggering, belching English folk drink their way through the holiday. And then there are the people in-between like us: just having a nice time. We did read these kinds of descriptions about the state before we stepped off our train and a few of the people and places we came across certainly did live up to the books.

We (the nice timers) took our chance with a quiet option and made our way to a peaceful and tucked away village, set behind a delightful beach, called Agonda. The houses and shops (there were very few) are generally made from either bamboo or cow dung and surround the centre piece of the village which is a rather imposing Christian church. After spending so long surrounded by Hindus and their everlasting, three-or-four-times-a-month-occurring festivals, it was very strange to witness and stay amongst a strong Christian community but still be on Indian soil. Scraggy tinsel, Santa effigies looking a little more like daylight robbers and masses of bright, paper stars adorned people's homes, trees, backyards and the palm trees which surrounded us. On Christmas Eve whilst sipping our cocktails (out of coconuts of course) we were made audience to some of the village's youngsters as they traipsed from bar to bar singing carols. I have to say that they did a pretty poor job and the Santa mask which one of them wore was really quite frightening but we paid up and thanked them. And on passing the church one afternoon we saw a bride in the full white, fairy cake dress making her way into the church with her father.

Our home for the first week was a delightful bamboo hut on stilts at Sami's Place and the tiny little resort (made up of only thirteen huts around a small bar and restaurant) proved to be as tranquil and peaceful as our guidebook suggested. We spent the days frolicking in the sea (frolicking= Jonny dive bombing me, Jonny dunking me and Jonny dragging me along the sea bed by my feet leaving me with salt water up my nose and sand in my pants) and playing on the beach (playing= burying Jonny in the sand so that he became only a nodding head).

Ten kilometers south lay the next resort of Palolem and it's here that literally thousands gather during peak season to drink, dance and worship the sun on Palolem's famous palm tree lined picture-perfect beach. Although it's actually rather difficult to appreciate the beauty of the place as people, huts, shops and bars are literally squeezed and crammed into every available space and after an afternoon there it began to feel a little more like a concentration camp than an Indian beauty spot. Saying that, the couple of evenings we spent in the restaurants and bars there were great, fun-fueled with Goan port and seriously tasty mussels, each the size of a small crab.

Palolem was also the setting for our Christmas dinner. We arrived brushed, scrubbed and polished (it has been quite difficult to keep on top of personal hygiene and clothes washing whilst being on the move. Many nights have been spent racing through India on trains with only a communal sink and tap to wash at) and dressed in our new Indian garments. Jonny in a smart blue and white checked shirt ordered and made at one of the many tailors in Kolkata; and me in a red sari suit I had made in the market place there. We enjoyed a really delicious three course meal (with cocktails and nibbles on arrival) at Ciarans restaurant right on the beach front.

It was a set dinner and everybody sat down around sixish to eat which gave the day the shared celebratory feel it deserved. The owners had made a startling effort with the set-up and our candlelit table was in the middle of the garden by a finely decorated Christmas tree overlooking the fairy lit bar and the sea beyond. Frank Sinatra poured warm honey into our ears as we slowly and delicately made our way through pumpkin and blue cheese crepes and chiili and ginger prawns followed by a mixed seafood platter comprised of squid stuffed with spicy leaves, mini creamy coconut fishcakes, a few of those memorable mussels, a small dressed crab, lobster and potato salad and a portion of nutty saffron rice. Yes, it was bloody good and no, the turkey wasn't missed. Christmas pudding and a slice of a traditional Goan rice cake made up our desert and by the time we left at nine o'clock Jonny had grown a small snout and I a curly tail: Two Little Piggies. Needless to say we then drank far too much and after doing so well over the last few months with managing to keep hold of all wallets, cameras, cards and phones, I lost my sandals. Very boring.

After a week in Agonda we'd just about had our fill of quietness so we packed our bags once more and headed to the far north to a village called Arambol, described as the alternative side of Goa where many of the long-term hippies congregate for months at a time.

Now, I like to think of myself and Jonny as open-minded, free-thinking individuals with the ability to mix, mingle and understand most people. But, my god, was I to be proved wrong. The people of Arambol and the place itself we just couldn't get. Both categories ticked the dirty, seedy and dark boxes and both categories had stale and stagnant auras (I think the people of Arambol would be pleased with me for using the word aura). Hippies- real, full-on hippies with weathered faces and glazed eyes descend upon Arambol from all around the globe, filling its rather beautiful beach around October time and then drifting off again towards the end of March. Some practice yoga in embarrassingly skimpy briefs; some seem to spend their days juggling and throwing fire; some lie around naked (I felt really uncomfortable seeing this in India- the arrogance of it!); and a lot literally spend their time on another planet. At a few of the shacks we called in on when looking for a place to stay, the people there were so out of it they didn't understand what we were saying and just pointed and waved their arms around with frightened eyes. I've never felt so straight and normal in my life.

As we walked down the beach, Jonny dressed in his practical, khaki, knee-length shorts with their many zip pockets, his oxford blue, short-sleeved shirt, his sturdy, velcro-fastening walking sandals and carrying his Berghaus rucksack looked like Mr Palin reporting on some lost and forgotten civilisation. Tie-dyed bits of cloth and scarves, beads, floaty strips of silk, glittering sandals, hessian sacks, tattoos, piercings, knitted items, scruffy rags, massive hair (all colours) and a drifty, no rush attitude made up the people of Arambol. Anything else just didn't fit. Posters sellotaped to the walls of the numerous dingy shacks advertised meetings held by people like 'Reena' (from her photograph she looked about sixty) where you could go to enjoy a supportive atmosphere whilst finding your inner being and discovering self-realisation. The meetings were held each Tuesday under the swaying palms (which swaying palms?) or if you wanted a one-on-one session with Reena you could find her in her hut on top of the cliff. We just couldn't get it. So, instead of spending the four days there as planned including New Year, we wearily picked up the book once more in order to try and find somewhere suitable.

Well, suitable is the wrong word. We both knew that staying anywhere along the coast wasn't going to be ideal. Although we had a lovely and relaxing Christmas, we did find it hard to really relish the 'holiday atmosphere'. After seeing all we have, I found it quite difficult to suddenly stop in a beach resort and slip into care-free mode. The poverty still surrounded us, it was just better hidden. This way the consciences of the holidaying Westerners are kept clean and they keep returning to spend their money. But you only have to take a look behind the bars and holiday huts lining each beach to see the cramped and dirty conditions most of the locals live in. People try to do their best with regards to litter-disposal but with no real waste system, a good deal of the thousands of plastic and glass bottles used each day find their way into these people's living areas. And really they have no choice but to grit their teeth and watch their once quiet and undisturbed villages become second homes to lots of white faces who really know how to fling their money about. Most of the locals have turned to tourism; nearly every home has an attached guesthouse or a room to rent. Many people sell food, clothes and jewellery on the beach; we even saw the pitiful sight of small children dancing for money. It’s awkward and difficult to justify any sort of excess. Due to the sheer economic imbalance of the world and the geographical lottery that has landed me in the West, I'm the one who can laze on a sun bed and spend more in one week than the women trawling the beach all day desperate for buyers of their clothes will earn in a year. But, awkwardness aside, the Goan resorts are still interesting and elp to inform our whole collective outlook on India. Watching the locals, the holidaying Indians and Westerners' behaviour in these hotchpotch resorts is anything but banal.

‘Banging Baga’ was our next stop. Jonny's written about this particular place so I shall leave it to him- apart from a quick word about New Year (I don't think he's got round to writing about it). We managed to escape the hoards and booked a meal at 'La Terrace', a wonderfully camp but classy, top-notch roofless French restaurant run by Thierry and Guillaume- a super-stylish gay ex-pat couple from Paris. The tables, the decor and the building itself were slick black and white; water flowing down tall black slabs into pools of floating petals; and tall trees dripping with fairy lights growing from between smooth grey paving, giving the whole place a sort of magical forest feel. The food was great, the owners charming (I received a complimentary red rose before the first course- oh la la!) and, as the icing on the cake, the perfectionist pair had invited one of their French friends to come along and sing in the style of Edith Piaf. Perfect.

Midnight was spent on the beach with the other couple of thousand people watching the fireworks. They don't have firework 'displays' in India, people simply buy their own and let them off. It was interesting trying to keep an eye on our backsides for wayward rockets whilst trying to enjoy the enormous amount of explosions occuring right above our heads.

They're real.

The sorriest looking mutt yet seen. Poor old bugger...

Built in 1439, the entire temple, supported by 1440 of these pillars, took over 50 years to construct. The detail of the marble carving is astounding.

Jain temple, Ranakpur.

A camel toe.

Our thirsty friends replenish their humps

Never again will either of us sleep in such close proximity to a camel...

Sunset over the Thar...

Dunes at last...

Lucy's love of Madonna drives her to follow in the popstar's footsteps and adopt her very own desert baby.

A brief pit-stop at a desert village draws out some inquisitive little-ones...

'Trousers riding high, our brave adventurer endures many more ball-flattening hours before they reach the elusive dunes...'

Tuggers takes the reigns...