Benemma

Now, writing this, it is 21:00, mid-April in Northern Ireland and the sun has just set on a mild day. When we first arrived back, England was damp and chilling to the bone. We acclimatised ourselves slowly, taking a lazy week at Mum’s place, followed by a long weekend in London with our friends. All that time the honeymoon wasn’t quite over, as we were still living out of our bags. We were pathetically under-clothed for the cold waits at rainy bus stops in London. It was only when we walked through the front door of Emma’s parents’ house in Northern Ireland that the train finally stopped for us. We emptied our bags, showered and dressed in clean, smart, western clothes. People asked us how it felt to be back and we could offer little besides, “A bit weird”.

Now, looking back, our trip is telescoping into an ever-shorter timeframe. It already feels normal to be here. It is interesting to note that we did not have to suffer the anticlimax of returning to a life unchanged from our absence, as we are now living in a new country, starting everything from scratch. It is hard to discern what specific lessons we have brought home with us, what new perspectives we have gathered, but somehow we know we have gained greatly. Of all the places we visited, India and Nepal surely made the deepest impression on us. Now they are no longer in our skin, though they will forever be somewhere in our hearts.

EMMA IN MUM'S CLOTHES KEEPING OUT OF THE COLD

Now, finally completing this blog, I wonder if we will read it in later years. I wonder if it will evoke the memory of our travels enough that we will once more smell and feel the highest and lowest times from the trip. It may serve as little more than an exercise in writing, as well as entertainment for its small, committed audience. Hearing that anyone at all was giving time to this rather long-winded journal was a powerful fuel to keep writing it. For that, we owe you our thanks and hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. Maybe just once you’ve felt close enough to reach out and touch a distant place, as seen through our eyes. If so, all that writing was worth it.

Part I: The Party of the North

The train from Mangalore stopped six hours later in Margao, the second city of the tiny coastal state of Goa. Goa, not really India, the old stronghold of the Portugese and their Catholicism. Good old Goa, party capital of India, beach capital of India, booze capital, tourist hot-spot, richest of all the states; not really India yet still inescapably Indian. Our final stop after five months on the lam. Avoiding Goa’s famously expensive cabs, we asked a rickshaw driver to take us from Margao station to our friend Pubali’s house in Anjuna. We had to steal ourselves to accept the shocking price of 600 rupees (about seven quid) for the hour-and-a-half rickshaw ride, although a cab would have been outrageous at about 800 Rs, such was the level of pedantry we had reached. What’s more, taking the slow way across Goa gave us a deeper view of its beauty than we had got the first time we were there, back in November. Being a Sunday, Christian weddings were blooming everywhere and our driver insisted on stopping at several of them so we could peek through their gateways, into festival gardens full of lights and the energy of celebration and family.

Fumbling through clouded memories of our last visit, we guessed our way to the path leading to Pubali and Matt’s house, buried deep in the palms, on the edge of impassable jungle. The night air was heavy with cicadas and sweat. Far back in the loaming we could see the light from the living room. Then, closer, an explosion of fur as the two familiar bundles of Pubali’s pet spaniels, Sherlock and Diva, burst onto the veranda to snuffle at our ankles and welcome us back, back to the tropical coast of India.

ANJUNA SUNSET

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