Om Beach, This Side of Paradise
this is the fourteenth India entry from two years ago.
Tuesday, December 14th, 2004
Well, just a bit of an update while before I get a boat to Paradise Beach. I took a grueling 26 hour bus trip from Ernakulum to Mangalore to Gokarna last night without any sleep and a very wasted constitution. I am now in the last state I will visit here, my days being in the single digit count now. The state name is Karnataka, by the way, and this is beach area outside the main town and beach named Gokarna — the progressively less-commercialized Om, Half-Moon, and Paradise to the south, and the northward “secret” Honey beach, which is probably the place to be, but I’m already too far south to go back now. Besides, I’ve located an out-of-the-way place with less rave listenin’, bong hittin’, dour lookin’ groups of Israelis and more friendly people in a place just past the jagged rocks of Half-Moon beach. Appropriately, it is called Paradise Beach. I plan on being here for a couple of days, and then making my final return to Mumbai for a shopping extravagrancy before I’m back in the U.S.S.A. If you want something in particular here, now’s the time to tell me, people.
Until then, I’ll be living outside the grid, thankfully. I will get back with all you sometime Saturday when I get back after another punishing bus experience from Mangalore to Mumbai for the final Hurrah and Closing of the Circle for my trip. A little caveat on the bus ride directed to Rajiv: I should have listened to your advice and planned my Konkan train ride a month ago– the Goan visitor scene, which is ragin’ for Christmas season and definitely worth avoiding, has caused every single train trip from Ernakulum to Mumbai to be booked — bummer –with a waiting list of up to one hundred in some cases– double bummer. Guess I won’t be taking the train anymore. I’m gonna kinda miss that side-to-side swishing motion.
Well, if traveling by bus and train makes you a little more Indian each time you do it, I reckon I’m about 75% pure Indian now. But I would have liked to have earned that distinction in some other, less kinetic ways I’m sure.
I took a great trek this morning with a horrible choice of footwear (flip-flops, what was I thinking?) up the craggy terrain of the small jutting cliffs that overlook the ocean and ended up far away from the scene of overtoursity Om beach, and at last a place where only real effort or knowlege from the locals would get you there. Paradise even. I should really get out there and start doing nothing, so I’ll talk to you soon.