"I've Never Feared for my Life at Breakfast Before"

Palolem
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Palolem, Goa: Our near death experience by coconut

The beach at Palolem, our beacn in Goa, is lined with little restaurants that serve every kind of food you’d want. Though I don’t know why you’d want to order tacos in India, you can…and they all serve breakfast, which is what we were attempting to eat at one of them this morning when we heard a crash and it was like the sky was falling…but it was coconuts falling instead. We looked up and just above us was a small Indian man clinging to a palm tree and hacking free hundreds of coconuts. Now, these things are about the size of a bowling ball and nearly as heavy, so one would think that they’d warn tourists when they were about to be falling from 30 feet above nearly onto said tourists’ heads…but no. Another one came crashing down and we yelped and jumped up, moving to another table as the workers just laughed and pointed. So we thought we were safe until we saw the little man climb a different tree, and yep, coconuts start falling nearly on us again. We moved a total of 4 times! They didn’t care at all! Seriously, I hear that like 7 people die here a year from coconuts. At least we weren’t the guys in the hut directly under where most of these trees were—they stuck their heads out the door and other tourists in the café told them in no uncertain terms to go back inside, and quick.

Cow on the Beach
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Besides homicidal coconut harvesters, Goa is awesome. It is a complete 180 from Mumbai—there we only had to worry about getting killed by cars! J

In Palolem, we stayed in a little hut on stilts right off of the beach. It was definition of rustic besides the somewhat modern toilet we opted to get, in case we got the Bombay Belly and had to spend a lot to time around the toilet we didn’t want to be in the nasty communal bathroom. Our hotel was full of many huts and had a very communal atmosphere. We were across from a Israeli guy, an Aussie and a French Canadian who we all made friends with. We entertained the thought of renting a scooter but decided that for our health and safety it would be best if we stayed away from behind the steering wheel. While there wasn’t much to do in Palolem besides laying on the beach, it was a nice relaxing place that we could have spent a lot more time. But seeing how we had come to India to see the country and not just become lazy hippies, we decided to move on and see another part of Goa. So after our second day in Palolem, we took a cab through the mountains to another beach north of where we were called Colva.

Cartwheel at Colva at Sunset
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The cab ride was an adventure. The roads here are a whole journal entry to themselves. Suffice it to say that our little cab was sharing a road that shouldn’t have even been two lanes with other cars, rickshaws, big trucks, buses, scooters, pedestrians, cows, dogs, goats…etc etc. Each of these things feels that it has the right to the road, and passes anything going even slightly slower than it at any moment. Literally. On a blind curve? Eh, no prob. Huge bus bearing down on that tiny scooter in its lane? No big deal. The brakes here must be amazing, because as many near accidents as we’ve seen, we haven’t seen any actual collisions yet (knock on wood!) We did talk to some people who were in a cab that a scooter ran into and took off its mirror, and the cab didn’t even stop. Apparently they don’t here. I guess if an accident is your fault, people will drag you out of the car and beat the crap out of you, so drivers just drive right on if they hit someone or something.

So with that happy knowledge, we took a cab for the hour ride to Colva. I usually wouldn’t take many cabs, but the bus system here is both difficult to understand and very poor safety wise, so the $15 or so we had to pay for over an hour of cab ride didn’t look too bad. We made it to Colva in one piece, and started to wander the beach looking for more friendly little shacks like we’d stayed in in Palolem. It was difficult. The places in Colva were strangely expensive, and there weren’t many of them. We finally arrived at one dripping sweat (it is freakin hot here. And humid.) and then took another long, sweaty walk into the actual town. Didn’t love the town. After friendly little Palolem, it was kind of big and dirty, without much of interest to us. The beach was different too, but nice. Instead of being a little cove fringed by palm trees, it was a huge stretch of open beach, stretching for miles. The tourists were different too—lots of Indian families and middle aged Euro couples. It was really fun to sit out at sunset and watch the world go by on the beach.