What Just Hit Me In Goa?

I'm sitting on Tiger Beach in Goa wondering what just hit me, I feel like I'm a merman washed up on the shore and waving my flippers at the red ball of the sunset. Oh yeah, the New Years Eve party at the Hilltop Hotel, the Master of all Psy-trance, Goa Gill, wove his magic and took us all down a kaleidoscopic tunnel, our collective mind relentlessly fractured and fractal, the nirvana of dance sweeping us away.

A young Indian woman died while attending a dance party down at Calolim Beach, she was hallucinating badly and went into a coma, she probably hyperventilated and stopped breathing. It was at a three day festival called Sunburn, these days THEY have moved the trance scene away from Vagatore to the more controllable urban area of Candolim, THEY flew in the world's NO.1 DJ Armin van Buren (?) to mix the beats, and keep it all straight, who voted for him I don't know as I think Goa Gill is the best as far as I'm concerned. The Indian casualty was a sufferer of Bi-polar disorder and supposedly stopped taking her medication, then her mania led her to take an overdose of Ecstasy, so the authorities say, although THEY also insist no drugs made it into the festival.


Yeah, sure! The whole fucking crowed of 10,000 was off their faces, tripping out of their brains, but not only on Ecstasy, a new batch of Acid has hit the 2010 generation. The young seem to want their high more radical, more mind-blowing, Ecstasy is too soft and nice, they are over it, given world history lately where it all might come unstuck with a terrorist strike, cyclone or nuclear meltdown, they want to live fast and hard with the doors to alternative perceptions cracked wide open, the angels and demons of the Unconscious invited in.

The authorities, and mums and dads, don't seem to know about this new wave of drug-fuckedness, it's brought in on blotting paper and is virtually undetectable. Many travelers wander into Goa looking for the mythic hippie wonderland of old, they've heard of the attempt at Utopia in the late 'sixties and early 'seventies where we all lived in the nude, had no money, smoked hash in chillum circles, ate communally, slept in grass huts, indulged in free (?) sex and took the acid test of LSD to achieve the ultimate high or low, depending on one's constitution.



But those days are long over, there probably isn't an isolated beach anywhere in the world where a tribe can hide and live out their dreams of freedom and bliss: urbanisation, police and money have creeped over every square inch. (I know there's far-off beaches in Auz where one can swim in the nude for a few hours but it wouldn't take long for some fuckwit like a cop, rubber-necker or hawker to show up with their 2 cents worth of prohibition to spoil the fun.)



And that definitely goes for Goa, Money is the god here and struggle is the by-word, for everyone. A few punters I talked to moaned how they hated Goa, they found the parties empty, but what did they expect to find, the answers to life's problems? And Goans are unfriendly? Yeah well, we all have to make a living, the Goans only get three months of the year in which to do it, and it is a drag that they try to gouge it out of us hapless tourists but all tourist traps are the same.



One law student from Melbourne hated all the music, the beats were wrong, the crowd desultory, the DJs backward, nothing compared to the parties in Melbourne. I'm told bulletin boards on the WEB about Goa are full of bitching about how Goa is dead, not happening anymore, suitable only for 1 star tourists from Russia who are the new invaders, the huge Israeli mobs having split the scene, too many terrorist threats and drug O/Ds, their govt will no longer issue visas willy-nilly, they have to earn them by doing army service first.

To my stupefied mind there are 7 good reasons the crowds of international punters "aint going to Goa no more", (this is from the view of 2010, things may change in the future, Vagatore seems to be holding its breath, as if waiting for something, the hotels and restaurants empty but hopeful, they've heard whispers on the wind, a few more years and things will pick up. In the meantime, these are the worries. These seven suppositions are hearsay, beach folklore and apocryphal so one should take them in with a sharp brain.

1) the terrorist threats = for all the soldiers guarding the roads it would be so easy to lob a hand-grenade over the wall of any venue.

2) the horrific murders, rapes and robberies over the years, eg. two years ago a 15 year old British girl named Scarlet was left to fend for herself while her mother went to Kerala. The girl got stoned/drunk and passed-out on Anjuna beach, some beach-hut boys decided to gang-rape her where she lay, then the tide came in and drowned her, she was dragged about the rocks and lacerated. She simply drowned, that's the official story, it would've been swept under the carpet only the irate mother returned and kicked in the doors of cops and politicians to get some kind of justice.

3) the corrupt cops/pollies busting the party-goers, mainly for their joy of smoking hashish. "So what?!" I hear you say, "it is illegal", but the low-paid cops' only concern is looting the hapless tourists of ALL their money in bribes, that's their raison d'etre, and the money filters upwards. Some arseholes actually rent cop uniforms so they can get in on ripping the easy dosh, it all makes one paranoid wherever one sits.

4) Goa is getting more expensive every year, it's not the cheap haven it once was. THEY want 3 star tourists and up, backpackers cause too much trouble for little return. The rip-offs are atrocious, eg. a shave is 50 rupees everywhere in India, including Goa, you sit in the barber's chair without asking the price, it's taken for granted. In one shop I visited, after the shave 500 rupees were demanded, the Indian next to me paying only the 50. I don't mind paying twice the going price, but not ten times I refused and had an argument, the greed in the woman's eyes who collected the money irritated me intensely.

5) In 2010 the Indian govt stupidly stopped multiple-entry visas, overnight, stranding lots of travelers across Asia and turning off anyone contemplating using Mumbai as a hub to go elsewhere. Like me who was going to Africa for 3 weeks but now can't as they wont let me back in for my return flight home, the trip all paid for by a friend and ticket non-refundable, my African dream up in smoke. It is infuriating as it's supposed to stop terrorists from planning their strikes but the Mumbai-massacre demons didn't have any visas at all, they came in from the sea.

 (Yeah, yeah, the David Headley affair where he used multiple entries to do surveillance for the Mumbai attacks = now the psychopath bastards will just do it on single entry visas!) The bureaucrats were not doing their jobs properly in the first place, like not having their coast protected, now THEY take it out on us ordinary travelers to cover THEIR fat hairy arses, and have the nerve to say, "How dare you firangis complain, you're just trying to manipulate the system to suit your own wants!" Such stupidity will stop many visitors from coming to India.

6) The Russian invasion is a turn-off, most of them don't speak English, they are distant and estranged, their new-found riches and freedoms have them pushing others out of the way in their eagerness to consume the world, mobs of them surround you everywhere, and apart from prostitution with hard blonds, have little to offer us freaks. (Okay, I'm being too harsh, if they spoke English I'm sure we'd make friends but the only contact I had with them was when a handsome ice-blond pimp tried to introduce me to his stable of hookers. Being mad for music and dance, at some of the gigs Russian beauties got up and did exotic belly-dances or classic traditional Indian dance, better than the natives, so Russians do have culture to contribute.)

(Sad to report, the Russians are now also experiencing the downside of visiting a tropical paradise: a nine year old Russian girl was raped recently by an Indian named Aman in the water of the fresh-water lake at Arrambool while his mate distracted her mother. This is the inordinate lust of the Indian male for the "other" i.e. European/white, (whities equally have it for the dark "other" too), that seems out of control at the parties and is a tiny fraction of the horrific crimes going on around India towards women and children. The men here need radical sexual education! It doesn't help any that European women bathe topless, gorgeous tits swinging provocatively, the dumb hicks think it's a come-on.)

7) Last but not least, in 20210 there are not many parties anymore, the police and govt have stopped them, venues have to pay bribes of 10,000 rupees per hour to keep the music going. Lost punters whirl about the night in packs on their motorbikes looking for the non-parties, after 10pm there is a curfew and nowhere to go and nothing to do, and techno-parties are what Goa is famous for. (Who would've thought us hippies back in the '60s/'70s would start this whole shlemozzle of wall-to-wall hotels, marauding thugs and package tours of over-weight mid-class gronks looking for a quick suntan and a cheap fuck?)(And the biggest turn-off of all are the mobs of drunken men, Indian and foreign, who swamp the few parties to molest any women brave enough to attend the gig. Half the crowd are cool, there for the music and dancing fantastically, many with their girlfriends, spending half their time trying to protect them, but the other half, the drunks, wander thru the crowd like buffoons, bumping into whoever and feeling them up.)

If you're not a fly-by-night tourist and get to know the Goans over many years like me you will find them to be sincerely friendly, hard-working, strong, resolute, out-front, no bullshit good people who put up with a tidal wave of shit from the tourists just to try and please everyone. I still love the place, lying back on the beach, swimming, eating sea-food, laughing with my Indian friends, discussing philosophy with strangers from all around the world who call in at the chai-shack on the beach, the loosening up of muscles dancing at the rare parties, and the trip through wild India just to get there. I'm not looking for anything or anyone, I'm over IT, I've been there, done that, I don't expect anything and leave it up to chance and have a great time whatever, it's all in the attitude, even the supposed bad music doesn't faze me, I can get off on the "thunk thunk" of a ceiling-fan.

While I love to chill on Vagatore Beach revisiting my youth where I frolicked in the nude and found the strength in my self, I don't really look backwards, I love NOW and where we're all heading, into the FUTURE. Goa has moved on from being a hippie wonderland, it's now cyberpunk edgy with designer drugs, techno music, cable TV, jet skis and paragliding, fast motorbikes and satellite phones, organ trading and Bollywood movie-stars, tsunamis and cyclones, very science fiction and as engrossing as any Utopianist back-to-nature grunginess, to my mind anyway.

At the New Years Eve party I just had to find out what the youth were up to, I wouldn't be the intrepid writer/traveler if I didn't take risks, so I took a paper of Acid just to see, I haven't taken the crap for 25 years and it's lucky I'm a hardened tripper of old as it was full-on radical stuff, really melted down my brain, I thought I was going mad and that I would never come out of it, but I knew time and strength would deliver me so I rode it like a psycho-killer, ducking the phantom slasher's knife, foiling the gang of young toughs who tried to pick a fight with me as the party peaked, for all their expensive designer clothes they were still oafs, middle-class brats from deep Mumbai. I tried protecting a woman from their groping mitts, telling them in snooty tones I'd sick the security guards onto them and have their arses dumped from the party, to which they pissed off quick. I started hyperventilating, I couldn't even dance, I had to sit down and breathe slowly, my spirit was going way too fast for my body, like I was lifting off, I centered myself, saw the "white light", knew who I was, strong and bright, all trashy thoughts washing off me. My vision split into fractals, the crowd seemed done up in elaborate ancient Mayan costumes, with feathers and face masks, and jewels glittered upon every edge.

The party-crowd felt to be getting out of control. Goa Gill had played 6 hours straight, really primeval sounds that were relentless, taking us down into the Underworld, further, further, further, to some atavistic depths where the animal may be set loose, rapine and mayhem seemed about to explode, the drunken Indian men particularly getting out of control, grabbing at the tits of the white women, their dancing too erotic for the unsophisticated yobs. Just as I felt I might be able to stand and dance up a storm suddenly the party was shut down, Goa Gill marched off and everyone was told to go home and cool off, I couldn't figure out what was going on, why the crowd was thinning out and why the music had gone down-beat.

I thought the silence was beautiful music, I couldn't see straight sitting there like a fool under a coconut palm, the last idiot left drooling, eventually I had to be led to my room by my best mate, my vision scattered, prismatic, dream-like, all objects melted into each other as if hot lava flowed through my brain-cells. Whatever had just hit me, it sure was a lot of fun, too much, I won't be doing that again for awhile. Mums and dads better look out, the kids sure are up to something wild and strange here in 2010.

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Jungle Djiin.

The city of Delhi is about 7 thousand years old and is known colloquially as "the city of djiins", those fiery elementals that can insert themselves into your soul and lead you to damnation and ecstasy. As my feet hit the ground of this psycho-city I found myself yet again lost in the labyrnth of the Dark Unconscious, the frenetic swirl of Main Bazar, Paha Grunge, teeming humanity trying to sell, buy, ogle, steal, hustle, beg, befriend, betray, so many smiling djiins at every step whispering one's sweet desires, hand over heart the pagan warrior monk has to make it thru unscathed, smart, resolute and compassionate.

At the freak's pool-hall restaurant, surrounded by a tribe of Israeli hipsters who only have eyes for themselves, an old Japanese freak dressed in tatty Indian peasant garb went ape-shit yelling in incomprehensible English that he'd been cheated by the fat German Bakery cake-wallah who had given him change for Rs.100 yet he swore he'd given him a Rs.500 note. The caterwauling went on and on, nobody could understand what the Jap hippie was saying, except that it had to do with money, money, money. "You've been smoking too much!" snarled the baggy-eyed cake-wallah. Over the decades they've seen much foolishness in this cavern-like cafe, naked madmen drugged and run amok, sex-scapades out of control, the Indians have a deadpan blase response, "Stupid Fucking Hippies!"

All firangis beware, there was a riot in the city center the day before by the Shiv Sena, right-wing Hindu fundamentalists who decry all things progressive as besmirching the Hindu way of doing things, Hindvata. They clambered into Jantar Mantar gardens and in their irrational fury damaged the medieval Astronomical monument. Then espying some white foreign women walking nearby, charged over and tore their clothes off, demonic lust hiding behind their avowed puritanism.

Watching my arse I wandered lost thru the back-alleyways and ancient gardens, my best mate had stood me up, he was to travel with me as my minder but Indians can be fickle and flaky, he says he's too sad to travel as one of his friends had just been murdered horribly, his body thrown on the street. I knew this guy, a mad Muslim named Jhaved, he was a proper bastard, stole from everyone, he must've pushed his luck, still it gave me the willies and I wondered if there wasn't more anti-Muslim aggro about since the Mumbai massacre.

So I'm alone as ever, the dharma bum on the open road, missing companionship, except I've got Kerouac with me to whisper about life, adventure and longing to my heart late at night, at least I'm now free and open to experiences, old and new. Sitting in a park a beautiful young gay man approached me, he only liked white guys and wanted to be with me but there was nowhere we could go to liase, no bathhouses or sex-shops here, and no visitors allowed in hotel rooms for fear of robbery and murder. Gay Lib had finally come to India recently, but only in the limited environs of Delhi City/State, and the right-wing were appealing it. He told me that there were many hundreds of thousands of gays in the city but they were still third-class citizens, lost and abused on street-corner pissoirs. Antipathy ruled, family and the rearing of children the sacrosanct lifestyle, the business of India is business, Family business, ignoring the egregious population explosion, it provided a great pool of cheap slave labour and herd-mentality consumers.

The only way to be an open homosexual here was to have one's balls cut off and go about dressed in bad Indian drag, clapping the hands, thwump thwump, to tell everyone you've had them cut off, begging for small change as Hijra do. I commiserated with the gorgeous guy, we parted, frustrated, as if we'd missed the love-train, love and caressing of humans worse than war and murder it seems, anyway, I'm too old for it, harried groping in dark alcoves a bore for me.

I went to Keventer's milk bar for my drug of choice, flavoured milk. Old man Keventer was sitting at the till as always, lugubrious eyes viewing the world stoically. He's made a fortune with his watered-down milk, not that it did him any good, seven years ago some goondas kidnapped his old wife and held her for ransom, the family found her body stuffed in a tin-chest weeks later, after the money was paid. (Yes, I know, murder, murder, murder. In a country of around 1200 million souls, it's not all spiritual Om Shanti Om.)

As I drank my vanilla milk a craggy old granny emerged from the dust, all wrinkles in a frayed sari, and asked me to buy her some milk. What can one do when confronted by Mother India in need, you have to meet her demands? "What flavour?" I graciously asked. "Chocolate," she sighed, as of her fondest wish had just been granted. So I got back in the queue and tediously waited forever for her precious chocolate milk to be handed thru the magic curtain, then I proudly presented it to her watched by the crowd of middle-class Indians, me the generous Maharaja.

She took one look at it and croaked in Hindi, "No! It's not what I want." I thrust it at her and yelled, "It's this or nothing!" "No!" she shrieked, "I dont want it! I want something better!" "Lelo, take it!" I put it in her grasping claws and marched off, she stormed over to old man Keventer and yelled how she didn't want the milk, she wanted the money instead. The old milk-wallah had seen it all in his day and told her to drink the milk and be satisfied. She set up a howling din, cursing him outrageously, the crowd looked at me and we all laughed, I left them to their haggling, so much for playing Mother Theresa to a Mother Theresa lookalike.

When I have days to fill in Delhi I always go to the many Mughal monuments, like Jamma Majiid near Red Fort, where the British in 1857 slaughtered many thousands of Indians in retaliation for the Uprising of the natives. I take my Muslim mate to Humayam's magnificent Tomb and tell him of his own people'shistory, which nobody has taught him, of how the last Mughal emporer fled here with his court and was cornered by the British and then sent to Burma in exile. But my mate didn't show up and alone I went to my favourite place, Lodhi Gardens, free entry and no one hassles you there, it's full of ruined Mughal mausoleums and palaces to wander about in.

And while sitting there drawing a fabulous domed structure I dreamt of ancient times, the Great Khan's court in all it's sumptuous pageantry, playing, lolling, flirting in the heavely gardens. I hallucinated djiins on magic carpets flying in from celestial regions to grant my any wish, and beautiful houris, male and female, dressed in diaphonous gowns, making love in the bushes. But I also felt the lash of the whip and the burn of chains around my ankles, the darkness of dungeons and the toil of building the edifices by hand, we cant all be princesses in this topsy-turvy world.

I struggled back to Main Bazar, and ran the gauntlet of the handsome Kashmiri men who all tried to lure me into their shops to buy whatever but at 60 and world-weary I'm virtually impervious to the global hustle and sick of shedding money like sweat. I lived in Kashmir many years ago and love the Kashmiri people very much, knowing them well, it was like paradise back then and now when I look into their appealing faces I see the deep sadness of twenty years of stupid religious terror. I met a blue-eyed Kashmiri guy who I knew and trusted and he made me chai and got me high.

Thru all the shit and mud and flesh and madness I struggled with my many bags, it's derigour these days for cyberpunk wanderers to carry laptops with their backpacks, MP3 plugged in, I made it to the interstate bus terminal and got my front-seat for the harrowing journey to the Himalayas, all traffic coming at me like a 3D horror movie. Now I'm in the jungle, talking with the wildlife, appeasing the jungle-djiins, hoping to meet Bhjageera the black panther and take my soul for a questing ride thru the Underworld. Life is a blast if you've got the guts for it!

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If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

The Falling Angel.

For most of my life I have had flying dreams, at first just learning to take off, ascend, somersault, eventually choose a direction and head there, over continents and oceans, espying mystic landmarks below to guide me like temples, towers, serpentine river and guardian mountain, then land in the labyrinth dark jungle of the Universal Unconscious, on some crazed quest, trying to find my Self, (yes, I love hippie psycho-babble.)

The last few years I haven't had these dreams as I now have become an expert at actually, physically, flying wherever I will. Tho how tedious it was to fly Malaysian, 2 days, endless waiting in the airports, from now on I go Singapore Airlines, they get me to Delhi, India inside of one day, I arrive the day I left, and they serve any favored booze all along the way, not just halfway, with no movies, like I just boringly did with Malay. But flying into night-time India was miraculous, the darkness below lit up by star-bursts of countless cities, like frozen fire-works, the awesome beauty of the Other had begun.

I have been to Indhira Ghandi Airport many times, once there was a riot out the front and I couldn't get my luggage thru the squalling rabble and into the turbulent departure lounge but my arrival this year takes the crumby cake for chaos, frayed nerves and suffocating crush. We were made to wait an extra half-hour in the plane with no oxygn, I had "Final Destinaton" fears, flames sweeping thru and me trampled in the panic, but eventually we were unceremoniously dumped onto the tarmac, where creaky buses picked up the multitudes and ferried us around and around the landing fields, all of us patient and resigned, we'd now arrived in India, it was to be expected, weaving in and about endless baggage-trains, backed-up planes, convoys of buses, trucks, machines, cars all stacked up and dragged about willly-nilly with an army of worker ants marching in between waving their arms like antennas, and countless befuddled passengers herded about like refugees from "2012", finally we were ejected at a doorway in the bowels of the terminus: what the hell was going on?

Oh, it was an "Avian Flu" scare, for high-tech India there were no infra-red cameras on gangways to detect the feverish like there was in Kuala Lumpur, here just a crabby doctor and dinky nurse sitting at a table to face the thousands of arrivals crowding in from many planes, so overwhelmed and dumbfounded they'd let their requisite face-masks slip below their chins. We were all made to fill out forms declaring we felt OK and designating our seat number, which I'd forgotten and just wrote whatever came to mind. The nurse didn't even look at me or my form when she stamped it, she was distracted by someone further down the convulsive line. I staggered thru the hordes, made it thru customs in a flash, unlike the Indians who took forever to get their passports checked, the stern old stamp-wallah just glancing at me and muttering, "Chello!" as if he knew an incorrigible India-freak when he saw one.

As if the cyclone that had just missed Mumbai had instead centred on Indhira Ghandi Air terminus, the halls were in an uproar, all the baggage carousels had wailing luggageless travelers clambering upon them, as per usual my cheap bag was the last one thru the curtain, but at least it came. I fell down the dreaded escalator, remembering the horror of a few years previous when a crowd of arrivals stampeded down it and pushed those ahead into a carelessly left-open hatch, the machinery below mangling one old man's legs but totally tearing to bits a poor little girl, no one thinking to rush over and pres the OFF button at the base of the escalator rail. Yes, the awful finale to "The Final Destination in 3D" was a true incident, ripped from the front pages of Indian newspapers.

When I finally made it out the front exit, it had been 2 hours since my plane touched down, and the riot continued for many more miles, traffic banked up and horns honking, Indians wandering dazed in mobs and falling under the merciless wheels, some beat-up taxi had broken down in a heap in the middle of the entrance and nobody was bothering to push it out of the way.

My taxi driver had a boy sitting next to him and I asked who he was, telling him I knew about the hideous murder of an Australian women seven years earlier who'd allowed a second man to enter the car with her when she left the airport, she was taken out the back, ghastly raped, killed and robbed. "This is my little brother and that killer was not a true taxi driver!" "Yeah, I trust you, your brother looks little enough." He was teaching his brother to drive and roared onto the freeway heading into New Delhi with the kid changing gears for him and, while steering with his knees, he hospitably rolled a joint of charas to ease my tension, shared his water with me and beedis to smoke furiously after my aeroplane abstinence.

We zoomed past lots of great architecture, medieval Mughal, British Colonial and funky Post-modern. I was high and happy, like Lucifer the fallen angel arriving in the garden of earthly paradise. Oh yes, I've landed, this is India, maybe collapsing under her own great weight, but how I love her!

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If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

Roslyn Street Transience.