Thursday 15^th November

A recurrent theme on boats is:

• some things float
• most things sink…

Even light-weight state-of-the art VERY expensive glasses…

Poor Pete decided to cast off the ropes from the jetty at Port Arthur while I was faffing around in the kitchen being no help at all.  He flicked a rope jauntily around his ears and…off came his glasses.  Hardly a splash was heard but they disappeared swiftly and neatly never to be seen again, in 3 metres of clear cool water.  Not a hope of finding them.  I did offer to swim around and look but they would have been impossible to find, in the kelp and the green weed.

Pete always has his glasses strapped to his head with a nifty bit of shoelace and some gaffer tape.  Always - but not on this trip.  His insurance policy covered him for this sort of loss while we were out of Australia, but now we are back he can’t recover anything.  $1100 literally down the gurgler.  As well as this he actually needs his glasses to see.  Too sad, too bad.

India #18

Mumbai – Goa:  This was our first train journey, about 12 hours.  We arrived in Margao and immediately got a taxi to take us to the beach area.  This took about an hour and cost about $5 – how can the taxi-drivers do this??  Petrol is fearfully expensive, nearly $1.50 per litre!  We discussed accommodation and the obliging driver took us to the Colmar Beach Resort, which sounds fearfully westernised and expensive and glam.  In fact it was a very pleasant place, not expensive at all, right on the beach, with a pool, and a restaurant right on the beach.  I just looked it up on Google, and it says, “This hotel is having both type of accommodations in Goa, A/C and non A/C.  Hotel Colmar Beach Resort Goa is a budget hotel which suits all pocket.”  Very true!  We stayed here quite happily for about 4 days…I think…maybe it was three, or five.. Anyway we were very happy there, although it poured with rain nearly all the time.  Monsoon was supposed to be well and truly over but no, it was wet wet wet.  Yes I know it was supposed to be a beach holiday, full of sun and sea, but I don’t think any of us cared at all that the sun factor was missing. (sorry about the BOLD-ness...can't get rid of it from this paragraph so it is just a bit shouty...) 

 

We went for walks in the rain, read our books, slept, raised and lowered the hopes of the girls on the beach….

In Columbia it was mainly men on the beaches, with their arms heavily laden with necklaces.  I probably told you about the time Katy, Jeff and I were snorkelling quite far from shore.  We popped up from staring at the underwater world to find a necklace seller was swimming along next to us, arm raised aloft, trying to sell us jewellery.  Jeff felt like saying, “Yes yes!  I have my visacard right here, in my bathers pocket!” 

Well in Goa it is lovely young women, dressed in beautiful colourful saris.  The youngest one was eight, and none would have been older than thirty.  I’m not sure what happens to them after this age; do they starve to death??  Get jobs in shops??  Take up laundry, pounding dirty clothes in the rivers?  I never did find out… They flock some distance from the hotels, restaurants and resorts, because it is illegal for them to be selling on the beach at all, and the restaurants don’t like them coming to pester their patrons.  A very precarious existence they lead, poor things.  They are forever paying bribes to the police, and sometimes they get arrested anyway, and fined 1500 rupees (35 =$1 so 1500 is a huge amount of money for them.)  As well as this, they get all of their stuff confiscated.  They are desperate to sell.  They cluster around, saying, “Remember me, my name is Rose/Shanti/Samara.  Don’t break my heart!” 

We made all of the beach girls happy, just a bit, but never happy enough.  “You did business with Sharon, why not with me??” they would wail.  We bought necklaces, very nice ones, actually, and I bought some sarongs, which came in very handy.  I wore them as skirts, used them as sheets, blankets, towels, and extra modesty covering on the crowded sleepertrains.  But whatever we bought, it was never enough.  Mary made the girls happier than anyone else.  I have photos of her entirely surrounded by girls with their wares spread out on sarongs on the sand, all of them pleading and grasping while she bought yet more things she really didn’t want. 

Rose was one of the girls on the beach.  She spoke very good English, was quick and clever, pretty, resourceful, and only sixteen.  She had been selling on the beach since she was only nine or ten.  Pete and I found her one day some distance from her usual territory, in a café along the beach.  We had gone there ourselves to shelter from the rain.  It had started absolutely pelting, and we rushed into the Boomerang Café (yes, really!  Boomerang de Goa!)  We bought Rose a drink and talked to her.  Pete said, “Rose, you are a clever girl, what would you like to do?  You know, you could get a job in an office, or work for the government.”  She said, very sadly, that she would really like to be a doctor, but that she hasn’t got a chance even to work in a shop – “I can’t read or write,” she said, “I never went to school.”  She very much wanted my things.  “You could give me your sunglasses,” she would say, eyeing them speculatively.  “Or your umbrella.  I like that colour.”  Yes oh dear but so did I like that colour, and I needed my umbrella, and my sunglasses…