South India, Part II

Don’t take the double meaning of the title of this post the wrong way. After what has now been a full six months traveling abroad, I feel more homeless than I have since my explorations of the western United States in the late 1990s.

But as the saying goes, “Home is where the heart is.” And right now, my heart is in Goa, although a fair bit remains in the small corner of Ohio where I tell people I hail from.

After a full four months of moving around almost constantly, I was tired and needed a rest and I wanted to avoid Ohio for the winter. Who can imagine a better place to rest for the winter than a beach city where it is always in the 70s and 80s (30s to my Celsius friends) and never rains? Plus there is a really good yoga teacher here, great food and lots of cool people.

So this is basically how I have been spending the past six weeks.

A Home for the Holidays

In addition to being really tired from moving around all the time, I was wanting to find a place I could be stationary for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays and Goa offered a perfect opportunity for that.

Not only is the weather here perfect this time of year, but my friend Joanie, who is also one of my yoga teachers from Columbus, Ohio, also arrived in Goa earlier in December and helped me find a cute little place to settle called Selwyn’s Guest House in the seaside town of Anjuna.

As soon as I arrived, I met the owners, Nettie and Sebastian, and their son, Selwyn, along with my neighbors, Steve and Anna. I have had an amazing experience bonding with these people and many others at not only the guest house, but a nearby restaurant called the German Bakery and our yoga class, which I will discuss later in this blog.

While Christmas is not really a big thing in most of India, the state of Goa was a Portuguese colony through the 1950s and the majority of the local population was converted to Catholicism. Coincidentally, Dec. 19, the day I arrived in Goa, was a state holiday marking Goa’s independence from Portuguese rule.

It was kind of weird to see Christmas in this light – the Indian take on the nativity scene, Santa and his elves and Christmas trees. We had a Christmas Eve potluck-style get together at Joanie’s apartment and I took a vegan, gluten-free and alcohol-free Christmas cake with me. Despite the fact that all the “good stuff” was left out, it was really quite nice.

Nettie and Sebastian prepared meals for us on both Christmas and New Year’s Day.

But most importantly, I got to have an online Christmas with my heart family in Ohio. I got to watch as my parents and sister unwrapped the collection of gifts I had sent back during my travels through India. And Stephanie’s Frendh bulldogs, Henry, Ivy and Finn were there for the action as well. It was really quite nice to have this way of sharing with loved ones across the globe that wasn’t available a decade ago.

This will certainly be one of the most memorable adult Christmases of my adult life – right up there with gambling in New Orleans, but with a considerable degree more sentimentality attached.

Getting Goa-ing

Most foreign tourists in Goa rent motorbikes or scooters to get around, but I have neither an international driver’s license nor the original of my U.S. license with me. Not to mention that I had never driven a scooter, let alone in Indian traffic.

Steve let me borrow his for a bit of a test drive and I did mostly fine, but I had a few problems on the startup and takeoff. I felt fairly confident, however; so I set about checking about some prices.

I found a place that would accept the digital copy of my U.S. license and had a fair price for the month. The owner washed off the bike and had me give it a test drive. No sooner did I go to take off and my nerves got the better of me. I gave it too much gas and the bike accelerated and spun out from under me. I think maybe karma was telling me that learning to ride a motorbike in Indian traffic may not be the brightest idea. Needless to say, the owners rescinded the offer to rent to me.

I found a nearby hotel where the proprietor offered to rent me a Rockrider bicycle for 100 rupees a day. It was definitely a fair offer so I took him up on it. I thought I might revisit the scooter issue on this visit, but it seems too fraught with potential risk to tackle that challenge on this trip. Plus, despite the fact that the bicycle is only a single speed, it and my feet have been adequate for getting me around – other than the few rides I have bummed on the backs of others’ motorbikes.

Yoga – Ian-gar Style

I was going to practice Mysore style yoga with Joanie’s teacher but because of a rule that no one who has been vaccinated against coronavirus can practice there, I was excluded. I won’t go into a discussion on the philosophy behind the decision or my negative reactions to this new age form of discrimination, but I was forced to come up with an alternate plan for my daily yoga practice.

My second day in Goa happened to be the winter solstice, so I went down to Anjuna Beach and did 108 sun salutations to mark the celestial event. While this was a good opportunity to kick off my practice in Goa, I can be lazy when it comes to self practice so I knew I had to find a real class.

Steve was practicing Iyengar style yoga with a teacher named Ian Lewis at a resort called Mojigao, which is 7 kilometers from Selwyn’s. I had never practiced Iyengar yoga, but had wanted to give it a try.

The distance is just far enough to generate a good bit of bicycle cardio and warm up my legs before class. And fortunately, it is generally uphill there and downhill on the way back; so that makes the post-class trip return to Anjuna a lot more zen.

I get up most every morning and head out by 7:30 a.m., which gives me enough time to have a small Americano with Steve and Ian and any other classmates who show up early enough to join us.

The class is anything but a typical yoga class. There is no pomp to start the class – no chanting or dep breathing or anything to signal the start of class – Ian just calls out an asana or position to start in and those students who are ready to start practicing get into that pose. There are usually still students shuffling into class and getting their mats into position a few minutes into the practice.

And Ian’s sense of humor and lack of political correctness is off the rails. If he doesn’t remember a student’s name, he usually refers to her or him by the country of origin and his longtime friend and daily practitioner Nirmal endures the brunt of his teasing. And to close class, he prompts us out of svasana and says “Well done. See you tomorrow.” No chanting. No rubbing the hands together and placing them over the eyes. And no namaste, which is not really used much at all in India.

Ian is quite unlike the stories I have heard of the notorious Iyengar teacher Usha Devi, who I plan to visit in March in Rishikesh. She is known for her intensity and biting criticism of students’ alignments but I hear she has softened up a little.

Despite the fact that he does not have a certificate naming him as a “registered” Iyengar teacher, Ian studied at least 20 years under BKS Iyengar and has been doing yoga since the early 1960s. He goes back well before the whole certification issue even became a thing.

Regardless, he both figuratively and literally knows the ropes and all the other props that are the hallmark of Iyengar practice. While I won’t get a certificate for my participation, it has been an extremely educational experience in the practice of yoga.

Because of its uniqueness, I have taken to given it a special name – Ian-gar.

Readin’ and Writin’

I can blame laziness or procrastination, but there are a couple of legitimate reasons I haven’t written anything for my blog since I’ve been in Goa.

The first is that sometime in early December – I think it was at a cafe called Lazania in Sarnath – that I lost my travel journal. I know I was using it there to put together a blog post about that leg of the Buddhist pilgrimage path.

I remember I was so proud that I had actually nearly filled the journal, which was a gift from my yoga teacher Teresa before I left. In all my other travels, the journals are not even half full. So it was a bummer when I lost this one.

Regardless, I took it upon myself to reconstruct the first five months of my travels from memory and with the aid of my photo galleries, WhatsApp messages and other sources of documentation, while also keeping up documenting my time in Goa. I’m proud to say I did accomplish that task and, to avoid future losses, will likely send this new notebook back home in my next package to the states before I leave Goa in just over a week.

In addition to recreating the lost journal, I have been reading voraciously since I’ve been in Goa – specifically the popular Indian author Amish Tripathi’s Ram Chandra series. I finished the first book of the series en route to Goa and then read three of the four remaining books since I have been here. It’s a nice retelling of the Indian mythological and religious classic, the Ramayana, the original of which I plan to read in a much more scholarly fashion when I return home.

I have also been reading yogic texts and philosophical works. This trip has brought out the love of knowledge that bloomed in me as a 20-year-old Ohio State student. It feels like life is cyclical in that way. Engineer, philosopher, traveler, writer – repeat.

Maybe this time around, I can write something more meaningful than some newspaper articles, random poetry and travel blogs. Perhaps I can finish the Rees Fontana diaries or the piece about the old kung fu master Lao Mei. Or I was thinking in yoga class today that maybe it is time to tackle the metaphysics.

But then it occurs to me that nothing ever happened anyway. Maybe I should just meditate on the cliffs of Goa as the sun sets on another evening.

People, Places and Things

Obviously, I’ve also met lots of people who are coming and going from this area, like my neighbor Steve and our yoga teacher Ian; Joanie, who helped get me here; Anna and Rodi, also my neighbors at Selwyn’s; the Spanish duo, Maria and Meri; the Scottish and Edmonton sort-of-couple Sadie and Brett; the German Michael and his buddy Krishna; the ping-pong champions Zaira of the Canary Islands and Mossimo of San Martin, sort of Italy; Mara, Alexandra, Peepal; Seina and Daniela, who were in my yoga teacher training course in Rishikesh; and all the others whose memories fail to bubble to the surface at this writing.

And then there is Ganga Puri Rox. When I set out on this adventure to India, I wanted to find a guru and of all the people I met, he may be the closest to fitting that bill. His late father Santosh Puri certainly was a baba, or guru, but I don’t think Ganga considers himself there yet.

Despite the fact that he is a few years younger than me, his knowledge of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and all the complex building blocks of the yogic and ayurvedic philosophies is comprehensive. Not to mention, his uncanny ability to sit in meditation.

Ganga is far from the all serious guru type though. Among our adventures here, we made our way to Arambol on two occasions for a music circle, a hike up to a banyan tree, early morning yoga on the beach and an ecstatic dance party.

I plan to take my newly acquired copy of Iyengar’s interpretation of the Yoga Sutras up to Ganga’s ashram in Hardiwar and do some study as my time in India draws to a close.

In addition to these people, I found a recovery family here in Goa. I made it to a Thursday evening in-person meeting in the town of Arpora on my first week in town and learned there is at least one meeting a day, every day of the week. Some are a little too far to get to on my bicycle, but I have been hitting at least two a week.

The meetings here in Goa are a mix of both westerners here on holiday and the locals – both long-timers and newcomers – and there are at least three languages spoken at meetings, English, some Hindi and the local tongue Konkani. It’s really quite refreshing to see the program is practiced here just like it is in Ohio or countless other places throughout the world.

Besides meetings and the cafes and beaches where I hang out and read and write, there is a really nice music and market scene here. Most outdoor markets have lots of vendors, live music and plenty of places to eat. I’ve been buying random gifts and novelties to ship back and give away on my return at the Wednesday afternoon flea market, the Friday and Saturday night markets at Hilltop and Arpora. I don’t know who will get what yet, but I hope I have enough random stuff to pass out to my close friends when I get back.

On the music scene, my yoga classmate Paco plays sitar in a outfit called Kundalini Airport and a young Indian couple called Bee Jee plays sitar and guitar at the German Bakery, which is where we hang out probably at least five nights a week. The sound of the sitar – a stringed instrument native to India – is really quite haunting and ethereal.

I also got a meet and hear a psi-trance “superstar” named Tristan play at a post-New Year’s party at Hilltop. A far cry from the Grateful Dead and Phish shows I was watching with Robert and Dave O back in the states, but I try not to paint myself into a musical box either.

Next Up

As of the posting of this, I only have one more week left in Goa before I head on to a yoga workshop in Bangalore and this I plan to explore the Isha Foundation at Coimbatore, Kochin on the seaside coast of Kerala and back to Bangalore for a “happiness program” at the Art of Living International Center. Then I will fly north as the winter in the foothills of the Himalayas starts to give way to warm weather again.