Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws by Laura Pedersen

Author:Laura Pedersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Published: 2016-06-27T06:00:00+00:00

Down South

India has forty-seven hundred miles of coastline and the South is the place to enjoy lolling on white sand beaches and canoeing through tropical rainforests that haven’t changed in more than a thousand years. As a matter of fact, some tribal people live in the forest much as they did a century ago, and when the modern-age Department of Forestry encroaches on their resources and lifestyle, they’ll take thirty or forty of them hostage to protest. I was reminded of the toxic chemicals seeping to the surface in Western New York’s Love Canal neighborhood in the seventies and how frustrated locals took a few EPA workers captive. Soon afterward, Love Canal became the first Superfund cleanup site in the nation.

Goa is India’s smallest state and is most famous for being the laid-back hippie hacienda of the sixties. During the Earth Shoe era, every free-thinking, dope-smoking, magic-bus-riding, tie-dyed- and denim-clad hippie in the world seemed to wash up on Goa’s mystical shores for full-moon parties fueled by psychedelic drugs and exceedingly casual sex, much to the horror of its residents. Many died of overdoses or went home when their trusts funds ran out. Some stayed. But now you’re more likely to find HUGs—hippies until college graduation—who will soon shed their L.L.Bean backpacks and become professionals, though possibly with a yen for hashish brownies. The occasional flash of a rusting orange-and-white Volkswagen van abandoned in the jungle still catches the eye, while the Anjuna market, better known as the hippie flea market, keeps the smell of sandalwood incense alive for newcomers.

Goa is the perfect place to get outfitted in colorful loose-fitting clothes and groovy jewelry, acquire some body piercings, visit the dreadlock creator, and tie on some smoky quartz crystals so you’re ready for the techno music trance parties that begin around midnight and rave until dawn. Nearby boutiques and workshops sell wonderful handcrafted cane furniture and hand-painted ceramic tiles. Goa remains a heavily marketed tourist destination around the world, with clever taglines such as “Have fun in Goa” and “Give it a Goa.”

The Portuguese landed in Goa in the early 1500s to seek Christian converts and ply the spice trade (not necessarily in that order), and the area remained a colony until 1961, when Indian troops seized the territory. Goa features European-style buildings with red tile roofs and art nouveau balconies in various states of dilapidation. Among the baroque church courtyards and graceful public squares, which are distinctly lacking in human density for India, old folks still gossip in Portuguese before purchasing the codfish and garlic cloves needed to whip up a batch of bacalhau.

For me, arriving in Goa was like being transported back to the heavily Catholic Buffalo, New York, of the sixties, where a crucifix could be spotted around every corner and throngs of parochial school children wearing uniforms dotted every street corner. Instead of packing everyone in wood-paneled station wagons as we used to do, entire Indian families pile atop motorbikes with book bags flying in the breeze.

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