8: Impressions of Goa an Class Travel(Ruth)

July 5.th 2007

I am utterly fascinated by India. And still Goa is "India light", a more western oriented part of the country, strongly influenced by Portugese culture, with a rather large Christian population and many churches. Taj Exotica is a 5 star hotel at the beaches of Benaulim, where we arrived the first day after a long international flight from Mauritius to Bombay and a nightly transit to a local flight for Goa. We quickly understand that we are in the rainy season, the Monsun period. Every now and then heavy rain starts and pours down for some minutes. Everyone runs to the nearest shelter and the hotel has battery vehicles to drive guests between their bungalows and and main building. Air humidity is 90 % and temperature around 29 degrees Celsius in the shadow. Big waves roll over the beaches and during this period no one is allowed to swim there because the waves may swallow you and bring you away from the beach. In the rainy season you hardly see the sun here. But nowadays glimpses of sum are seen now an then. Some people here thing this is due to global warming. Again we feel kind of embarrasment to see all the local people here working for low wages and we notice that the prices inside the hotel are 10 times higher than elsewhere.

Our way of traveling is a very special one. We are constantly going up and down between top class hotels and simple living as couch surfers or in cheap private lodgings. This repeated kind of "class journey" teach us a lot about global politics. We have "known" these things before on one level, but it is something else to experience it, repeatedly.

Everywhere in the top hotels the guests are western, australians and some times japanese. Often the tourists in the hotels seem to be closed up in their own being, we find it hard to come into contact. The local people are working for low wages and poor working conditions. They are easy to get contact with and the work is a possibility for learning about other cultures and for stimulation.

Taj Exotica in Goa has an outside swimming pool, an outside checkers with units as big as a child. A golf area is between the main building and the sea. Coconut palms are everywhere and we are treated with fresh coconut milk from the nut itself when we arrive. There are very few guests since this time of the year is totally out of season, so in the yoga class there is only two persons participating. A few guests gather around the Salsa show in the foyer and in the other restaurant a local Goan orchestra is playing. We hear a mixture of Indian and Southern European folk and pop music with some latin musical spices. What a mixed music tradition is this? We are curious and during the break we talk to the leader of the orchestra, Emilio, a local star in this region. He has a big smile and treats the mandolin as well as the fiddle with a lot of musicality and skill. The orchestra sounds good. Emiliano tells us that he has studied music in a conservatory in Goa and he has contributed to the local musical mix by creating different nice orchestras and composing popular songs. For centuries Portugese and Italian musical influences have mixed with local Indian way of singing and Indian rhythms. When we tell Emiliano that we are interested in learning about local musical traditions he invites us to his home the next day. We feel very happy to meet Emilio and receiving such a warm welcome - once again.

We find out that we like being here in Goa, during the monsun period. In this way we see the other side of tourism and how the local communities around the large western hotels are functioning when so much of the activity is closed down. It is rather sad sight on one hand and on the other life is rather slow and the population is not so much busy serving the tourists. They have more time for their own life and their family.

The second day in India we move to a cheap room in the house of a local family, still in the area of Benaulim Beach. We feel happy to talk to the family and communicate with their lovely two year old daughter. We are happy to know that our payment will be used in supporting their private economy for a few days. It doesn't matter that the fan in the first room is very noisy and we feel extremely hot. It is really hard to sleep, but who cares. We have this nearly endlessly long holiday. How wonderful.

The next day we go to visit the musician Emiliano in his beautiful home. Nearly everyone in Goa seem to know or know about Emiliano around here. We are warmly welcomed by the whole family and treated with homemade food an fruitjuice. Emiliano shows us around in his house with his big, loving smile and enjoyment of life. His old mother is nearly 88, sitting quietly in a chair. When passing her his hand touches her face in a warm gesture. We listen to music he had composed in the Goan mixed style, nice popular tunes, quite a few of them are hits around here. Proudly he gives us a cassette and a CD. We also have a little jazzy "jam session" on "Desafinado", Mari sings the voicing, A pupil of Emiliano living with him plays the keyboard, I make some voice improvisations and the keyboard performs the bossa nova rhythms, it is a most wonderful situation. Mari is invited to work with his orchestra in a tourist season is Goa. Emiliano is partly a musician and partly a farmer. He takes a lot of pride in his cows and pigs and we are shown around in the animal houses. Some gas for cooking is developed from the shit of the animals, the farm is ecologically oriented. I enjoy Emilianos two sides, the well rooted farmer and the skilled musician and composer. Thank you very much Emiliano for our time together with you and your family in Goa.
We leave the house in a taxi that takes us to BIG FOOT MUSEUM, showing Goan culture and traditions in a very nice and lively way with figures of people in differetn situations of life. We also see the Portugese mansion, the house of a family in their colonial wealthy times. We can't help seeing this haouse and its function from the side of the local workes, who often worked for the portugese family for a liftime only for food and clothes.