2024 India – Panjim
4th January 2024
Our driver picked us up at 6 a.m. for our drive to the airport. It took an hour along winding mountain roads and I was surprised to find myself feeling sick which was very unusual for me. We checked in and sat in the airport lounge with me feeling very hungry and nauseous at the same time. The thought of food was almost as bad as the thought of not eating. I eventually gave in and had a sandwich but soon regretted it and felt bad for the rest of the day. We had to wait three hours in New Delhi for our flight to Goa and I managed to eat some biscuits but it didn’t help. My general discomfort wasn’t helped by the number of people using speakerphones which seemed to be getting worse every year. Some watching videos, kids playing games and this new addiction of holding conversations on speakerphone. Years ago, we used to complain about people speaking loudly on phones in public places but now nearly everyone does it, and we can hear the amplified voice of the person they are talking to as well. It was really getting me down and I was seriously thinking of travelling with ear defenders like the type workmen use with pneumatic drills.
We were staying at the excellent Vivanta Hotel in Panjim. It was our third visit to the city and we liked it so much on our last visit we decided to stay for three nights this time. The hotel was overpriced but the great thing about those big, soulless corporate hotels is that everything works and the staff are well trained. There was a huge selection of diverse things for breakfast which even included one of my favourites, Eggs Florentine. For such a well-run hotel it was strange that despite being the middle of January they were still playing non-stop Christmas music and there were decorations everywhere. Most people love Christmas music when they first hear it each year and by Boxing Day they never want to hear it ever again. I was amazed to learn that the hotel was going to keep the Christmas theme until the end of January.
We had already done all the tourist stuff in Panjim on our previous visits so this was just a general strolling-around trip and who doesn’t enjoy strolling without much to do? We both needed new prescription glasses but with only two days in town, there didn’t seem much chance of getting them made in time. I found an optician in Google Maps with the kind of reviews that were so good that if it were not for the sheer number of them I would have doubted they were genuine. I was irritated that the super-efficient young girl refused to talk about prices unless we told her what our total order would be and had their free eye tests. After messing around for an hour I was dreading being told it would cost more than in the UK and we had wasted our time but to my surprise, they were half the price. She started clicking away on her tablet and attacking us with special offers and before we knew it we had ordered five pairs between us. They would be delivered within a few days to our next hotel and if there was a problem, the girl would travel to us personally to sort it out. I seriously doubted that would happen but sometimes you just have to take a chance. We paid up and left the shop slightly shell-shocked.
During shopping trips, I get a lot of time to sit around but with the advent of mobile phones, it was no longer a chore. Sometimes I just sat there and pondered on the meaning of life and it was during one of those ponders that I started to consider the lyrics of the incredibly loud song that was being rammed into my ear by a bass drum. The lyrics were:
Give it to me I’m worth it
Baby I’m worth it
Just do me, I’m worth it
Ah ha, I’m worth it
Certainly, no room for ambiguity there.
It always surprised me in India how all signs and notices were written in English only, not English and Indian. A lot of the time Indians will talk to each other in English but even when they don’t it is often a mixture i.e. “ham gae to the cinema lekin aisa nahin tha very good lekin ham phir bhee enjoyed it.”
We both like travelling in tuk-tuks but through the years I was finding it harder and harder to get in and out of them. The instinct is to get in as we do a car, with our bottom first but in a tuk-tuk, I always bashed my head on the top of the small tin door. I had a breakthrough in Panjim when I started entering tuk-tuks headfirst so I no longer had to consider the purchase of a crash helmet.
People constantly trying to sell us things we didn’t want was one of the irritations of India but usually we could decline and walk on. We were in a large shop in the middle of Panjim called Bombay Bazaar selling a wide selection of items and as Federika needed to buy quite a few things I was a captive audience and couldn’t walk on. After bouncing from one rejected salesman to another it became surreal when I was accosted by a man standing behind a small counter wanting to sell me magic tricks. Being taken by surprise I made the mistake of hesitating and before I knew it, he had taken out all his magic tricks and started going through them one by one. Another mistake I made was buying one in the hope it would keep him quiet but that only made him more determined. He even started showing me videos of his hero Paul Daniels. I finally managed to get away from him but being disoriented I walked straight into the path of an oncoming shoe salesman who sold me three pairs of flip-flops although I must admit I did want one of them.
We rarely watched television on holiday but as we had been walking all day we were happy to sit in our room and watch the excellent film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I was surprised to see that every time someone was smoking there was a large banner at the bottom of the screen saying, “Smoking Kills” and when it was drugs the message was “Drugs Kill.” On top of that, they muted all the swear words. You don’t realise how much swearing there is in a film until you find half of the dialogue is missing. It struck me that if they took all the money that was spent on censorship and put it towards free healthcare how many more people would benefit? I doubted there was a person on the planet that didn’t know that smoking killed but unlike the destitute mother trying to feed her children, smokers and drug abusers had a choice.
Sunday 7th January
On our last morning, we got up early and walked around town. Despite being Sunday there were lots of men were working on the roads and I was struck by their lack of equipment. There were six young men down a hole of about two cubic metres, digging it out by hand. A boy at the bottom was scooping out the thick wet clay with some kind of hand trowel and putting it into a metal bowl. That was passed up three levels on a human chain till it reached the top where several older men in suits stood around directing. The boys had no protection whatsoever and I doubt if it occurred to anyone that they needed it. 
I remember when some workmen were doing an extension for my parents in Worthing and they told me they were not allowed to wear shorts or work without gloves and a high-visibility jacket.
I was in the hotel reception checking out when there was some commotion. It turned out that a couple had checked out earlier saying that they had not taken anything from the bar when in fact they had cleared it out. This was an expensive hotel so the guests had money and I can only think that they were not aware that the money would come out of the staff’s meagre wages and not from the hotel owners. How on earth can people behave like that?
We had an excellent sea bass for lunch in the hotel which featured a duo playing live music. Bizarrely, they stopped playing for half an hour while they had lunch themselves. Of course, I would expect them to be fed but it was normal for musicians to eat when the customers have gone. The helpings were always so big that at the end of every meal we vowed we would only order one main course and share it but we never did get around to it so it was scandalous how much we left on our plates. Considering the amount of waste that must have been generated in such a big hotel we wondered what they did with it in a country with so much poverty and no benefit system. The waiter told us that they used to give it to poor people but a few hotels had problems when lawyers got people to say they had food poisoning from the hotel food. The hotels were sued and since then they have thrown all their waste food away.
2024 Nepal and India
