Our train from Palolem to Gokarna, although short, is a struggle. It's jam-packed and there are people spilling out from every seat, with people sneakily taking pictures of us (looking burnt and hideous, I might add!) Though, by now, this is just standard India.
Although Gokarna is 'beachy', it's a bit off the tourist trail and considered to be a very spiritual and sacred place in India. We arrive early evening and share a rickshaw form the station to Gokarna town with Marlise and Gaya, a Dutch mother-and-daughter who are living in Goa, but taking their Diwali holidays in Gokarna. We arrive in the town and fins the first 'decent' looking hotel possible. Which turns out to be the biggest rat-pit going. (I swear the concentration camp I visited earlier this year looked more comfortable...) Nonetheless we take the room, and suffer a very uncomfortable night sans fan. We leave quick-sharp in the morning and take a rickshaw to Kudlee beach, near the town, where we check in to a yoga lodge for a few nights (though I can assure you that no actual yoga took place during our stay there... Far too many dreadlocked neo pseudo hippies milling about for us to even attempt it right now...)
The yoga lodge is set in a tropical forest on a clifftop above the beach, and takes about 10 minutes to walk down to the sand, along a very rocky and very dark path. The practicalities of this do not strike us until later in our stay though, when we are having dinner at a restaurant right on the beach. We sit for hours, chatting, eating and reading, and as we are about to leave around 11 pm, we realise that the tide has come in. Right to the steps leading to the restaurant. And it's high; too high to walk in, especially as it's pitch black and the beach is deserted. Problem...
We decide to wait it out for an hour or so, and sit with a couple of Israeli guys who are staying in the accommodation next door. When they offer us a bed at theirs for the night (to spare us certain death-by-drowning), for some utterly inexplicable reason, we politely decline. Why, I have no idea. They are Hot Israeli Babes for one, and have a fuckload of ganga for two. (NB, 'Fuckload'; the technical term of copious amounts of cannabis. Equivalent of 2-3 ounces, at least).
Stubbornly, we decide that cos-we're-scottish-and-therefore-fucking-hardocre, we can make it back.
This turns out to be a hugely naive decision, and half way along the beach, we realise that we are definitely not going to make it back the hotel. The sensible thing to do is to admit defeat and turn back. Only we can't. The sea has surrounded us in such as way that we are now essentially stranded on a sandbar, on a beach in India, in the middle of the night. A little bit stoned.
Well, c'est la vie! Luckily, it's a beautiful night, and after my crabbitness subsides, the shooting stars that pierce the black sky, the lightning storms on the horizon and the lazy fireflies that drift past us more than make up for the waiting game we're playing.
About 4am, we do our best Bear Grylls impressions and brave the hike home. Success! And hopefully, lesson learned. Must not be so thick in future...
We manage an epic sleep, and all seems to be going just swimmingly again until we come back from the beach one night to discover a mass infestation of ants, mostly in and around Lisa's bag. They are swarming everywhere, and it takes a fair effort to get rid of them. Ok, so I know they're not exactly poisonous or particularly harmful. But they're a pain in the ass! Sadly though, this is just the start of many ant nightmares in India.
Bag cleared of creepy-crawlies, we pack up our lives again and get ready to go to Mysore in Southern Karnataka. It's city-time again, though only because it's fairly impossible to enjoy the beach with such bad sunburn....
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