When we were clearing out my parent’s house, I found the few aerograms that I had written over a number of trips to India in my Dad’s office. I have decided to transcribe these, without editing them. At times I think that what my younger self wrote was quite insightful. However, as you would expect, I do not always agree with my observations and comments in these letters.
What I wrote in these letters was very selective as they were for my parents. In retrospect, I am sure that they deduced more than I imagined when I wrote these letters. This is my first letter from my first trip to India, and is the only letter that I found from this particular trip. I cannot recall whether I wrote any other letters from later on this trip, and they have subsequently got lost.
I travelled for about 8 months from sometime in late 1979. I would have been 24 years old. I initially took a 3-day bus trip to Greece, where I spent about 3 weeks before catching the flight to Bombay (now Mumbai).
I also have added what photographs that I have. I have very few images from these early travels, as this pre digital photography. As I had very little money, I bought very few rolls of film with me, and I have also lost some photographs. I did consider adding images from the web to illustrate these letters, but have decided to only use my images, though at times I will use images from later trips.
This first letter was written from the Buffalo Chai Shop on Anjuna Beach in Goa in November or early December 1979
Sorry it has been a while for this letter to come together, but it is very difficult to write whilst on the road. If you received my postcard, you will know that I was in Greece. Grey skies and dismal weather pursued us relentlessly across France, Italy and Yugoslavia. (I didn’t really see anything of these countries travelling non-stop through on the coach). Crossing the final border into Greece, the weather seems to clear. There has been little communication with our fellow passengers, but now the bus echoes as we sympathise with our companions mutual discomfort (3 days on the bus) and vaguely plan our exploration of Greece.
Arrival in Athens, an interesting and bustling place, but still the city and we all feel the need for some space. (Five of us have decided to travel together – Mick and Jo who are musicians from London, Ross from Ireland, myself and Fran a friend who I set out with from Nottingham). So we head out to the island of Samos, near the Turkish coast. We stay near the village of Pythagoria, where Pythagoras was born. There is a ring of tourists around the coast, but if you go inland up into the mountains it is really beautiful and peaceful. From Samos we go to the island of Ikaria (where Icarus is said to have fallen to his death). Lazy days on the beach. From there, back to Athens where our ways part.
I manage to get a flight to Bombay with no problems. Arrival. After one has passed the airport formalities, you’re instantly transported into another world. The local population are attracted to new arrivals from the West like magnets. Before I am truly aware of what’s happening, I find myself heading south to the province of Goa. The train journey was like a travelling carnival. At every station vendors invade the train chanting their wares – everything from boiled sweets to newspapers, hot sweet tea and nibbles of all sorts.
I am now staying at the Buffalo Chai Shop on Anjuna Beach. An array of shacks and houses dotted amongst the coconut palms on the shores of the Arabian Sea. A complete change in lifestyle. My room can be no more than 10ft square, the door looks out to the sea. There is no window, a hard stone floor and merely a mat to sleep on. Days spent walking, lying on the beach and swimming. Sitting quietly in front of the house in the evening watching the most incredible sunsets. Palm trees silhouetted against an ever changing canopy of light and colour. Run out of space, so all the best. Love and Peace Steve.
I am pretty certain that the Westerner who is smoking was my travelling companion who accompanied me down to Mysore before we parted ways.
Reflection
This first trip, although I did not know it at the time changed my life. I fell in love with India and became endlessly fascinated with all aspects of Indian culture. This first venture into India was purely serendipitous. As I indicated in an earlier post, I was in Athens on my own after all my travelling companions had gone their separate way. I was not that keen on staying in Greece, but was not yet ready to return home. I wandered passed a travel agent that had a sign outside with flights to Bombay advertised for a very low price (I think it was about £90). I recalled that a very good friend of mine had been to India, and although she had not really talked about the details of her trip, she had had a fantastic time. So without thinking I just walked in to this travel agent and a short time later emerged with a one-way ticket to Bombay. The flight did not leave for a couple of days so I wandered around Athens in a slightly dazed state wondering what I was doing flying to a country that I knew nothing about.
If I was dazed in Athens, landing in the bustle of Bombay (now renamed Mumbai) was disorienting, to say the least. Driving through the streets of Bombay in a taxi the early morning with some other travellers who had been on my flight, I decided that I did not want to be in the city and remembered that my friend had been to a place called Goa. Such was my ignorance that I did not realise that Goa was a state and thought that it was a town by the sea like Blackpool. I somehow managed to get an unreserved third-class ticket to the town of Margao. I have no idea why, but I imagined that the journey would be a couple of hours. Nearly 12 hours later, having been squashed in a corner that at the time seemed little more than the size of a small handkerchief, I arrived in a state of shock at Margao.
Wandering around the centre of the town, I came across an office advertising buses, and I recalled that my friend had stayed at Anjuna Beach. So I popped in and asked if they had a bus running to Anjuna Beach, which they did. What I did not realise at the time was this travel agent was primarily offering day tours of Goa for the Indian tourists, and Anjuna Beach to look at the hippies was one stop. Anyway, having stopped to briefly look at a number of churches and temples, I was dropped off at Anjuna1 and I got a small room behind the Buffalo Chai Shop.
It was just before travellers descended in droves for the Christmas season. I stayed here for about 3 weeks. Although I was having a great time, I realised that I was not really doing anything much different to what I would have been doing back in the UK. Admittedly the hash was cheaper and better, and the setting was glorious. So with another traveller, we set off south with the aim of going to Hampi, which had been the capital of the Vijayanagar Empire (1336 – 1565)2. Somehow, we missed a connection or got on the wrong train, and ended up in the city of Mysore. My companion then left and I stayed in Mysore making friends with some local young men, before carrying on to the temple city of Madurai (see my post on Journeys to Exotic Places for more details of my travels).
After about 8 months of travelling, I was left with only enough funds for a return airfare to the UK. After much deliberation, I decided that although I really wanted to continue exploring India, I felt that I needed to have the security of knowing that I could return home if needed. Consequently, I took a 40 hour train journey north to Delhi, where I was able to get a cheap flight home. Arriving back in the UK was perhaps even more of a culture shock than landing in Bombay. I compared being back in the UK with having to go back to a black and white television after having got used to a coloured set. Overall I felt a bit lost on my return home. Nonetheless, over the next year and half working as a chef in various places I was able to save enough to return to India.
This was a time before the Internet and shortly before the first Lonely Planet guide to India(which came out in 1981 and was called India: A Travel Survival Kit) and the Rough Guide to India (which was first published in 1994). I never saw anyone carrying a guidebook on my first two trips to India. Information about interesting places to visit, where to stay was really through talking to other travellers. I definitely noted that there was much less interaction between travellers once these travel guides became popular.
It was also a time before digital communication, and even international telephone calls were difficult to arrange and expensive. Consequently, the main form of communication was the aerogram, which obviously is a much slower mode of communication. Now it seems that with the development of social media there is a pressure to post almost daily photographs and/or comments on your travels. I think that there was a certain freedom in those pre-guidebook, pre-digital days that is now lacking. There was also a certain naivety amongst many travellers. This naivety had both positive and negative aspects. This naivety was positive because it could mean that travellers were open to new experiences. However, there were some travellers who became too caught up in Goan beach lifestyle, which was very alluring, and were not particularly interested in exploring Indian culture. There was a sort of countercultural colonialism, and I too often heard travellers complaining when they perceived that locals were only interested in money and that this infringed on the enjoyment and freedom of the traveller lifestyle. I also witnessed a few travellers who definitely took too many drugs and subsequently had some mental health issues.
- At that time, Anjuna was probably the most popular beach for travellers ↩︎
- It was not for several trips later that I actually made it to Hampi. However, if you do have a chance to go, it is an amazing place. Ruins of temples and palaces dot the boulder strewn landscape of the banks of the Tungabhadra River. I remember comparing this with a real life version of an Indian Jones film set. It is now a UNESCO world heritage site. Salman Rushdie’s latest novel Victory City is a magical realist account of Vijayanagar. ↩︎