The Pickle Post

by Sandeep Vasudevan on 28 Sep 2009

The adventure: A rickshaw run from Goa to Kathmandu. The Purpose: Remains to be discovered. Some choice excerpts from my notes on the trip.

Goa, September 11 2009 - Goa was balmy but very pleasant, and my friend G2 who’s handling production for the project greeted me with a bearhug. I soon made the acquaintance of Gordon Torbet and Katie Campbell – British and Australian, middle-aged and young, pleasant and attractive respectively. Got in among them quite soon, celebrating the beginning of beautiful friendships with a swig of beer and then preceded to the hotel, on Colva beach in Salcette.

Colva is near Margao in the middle of Goa, one of the less exuberant beaches in the state, a lot quieter and less imbued with the mix-it-up spirit than Baga, Anjuna and Calangute in the north. It’s the beach the Goans go to, so unlike other beaches in the place, you’re likely to find more desis than foreigners. Betal Batim beach just to the north of Colva, though, is a dream. Long, unspoilt stretches of beach with clean sand and surf and nary a shack to bother your imagination.

We found that Shelley Foster, the third presenter whom we were supposed to pick up at the airport had already got herself a cab and arrived at the hotel, so the team eventually got together later in the evening, the two Steves – Moro and French – who were handling camera, the three presenters, Shivanee the intern, bright-eyed and wet behind the ears, G2 and Rohan and Jon Moore the Grand Panjandrum – the director from Singapore and the de facto head of the project (on account of original director Ian Carless having been hit by a car in a pedestrian zone in Delhi) was a short, balding man whose stress levels were going through the roof. We toodled off to the other hotel, where the organisers were staying, had some beers, sorted some basic information and got the docket for the trip and other totally useless literature. We then ended up at our hotel and had a long meeting discussing how to go about this preposterous adventure.

The Rickshaws, September 12 2009 - The rickshaws! We finally got a glimpse of our trusty steed, an orange box on three wheels. And finally met our fellow intrepid adventurers, a bunch of white people who didn’t have any better to do so they thought of riding to Nepal for a lark. The mood was exuberant and everyone really looked keen as mustard to get up and at it. The day was about registering and taking ownership of their rides, pimp them up and take them for a bit of a test ride.

Which brought us to the onerous task of naming the team. After totally ludicrous ideas like Nepal (Nipple) Tuk, Pee Pee Out My Bum Bum, Happy Crapper and others, we decided to pun on the ‘shaw’ from rickshaw with ‘show’ for TV show. I made my first big contribution, one that was most essential to the trip, by contributing The Shaw Must Go On, for which I was clapped on the back heartily and promised riches beyond my wildest dreams.

We turned around after the registration to find that the place looked like something out of a Dali painting – a riot of colours with apparent abandon but no real talent at rickshaw painting. Our friendly neighbourhood cab driver turned up presently with a painter; we commissioned him to pimp up our ride in a typically Bollywood manner – all glitz and kitsch and surrealism thrown into it with stars and cameras and nautch girls and the like.

More and More Goa, September 12-13 2009 - Jon, who was still stressing like it was going out of fashion, wanted to shoot a bit of old Goa with winding alleyways, Portuguese buildings (“Goa is Portuguese, why can’t we find some Portuguese buildings?”) and cobbled streets. Now, I have spent most of my time in Goa either getting high or trying to do so, so the history of the place passed me by. G2 told me that the best place for old Goa buildings would be Vasco Da Gama, so we set off till there. We found a city that was mostly modern buildings with decrepit old style slate-roofed houses. It was then that Jon told me that what he wanted to do was go to Old Goa, not old Goa. The capital was essential because there was a little town off Panaji called Velha Goa, which used to be the old Portuguese administrative capital and everything that Jon was getting off on.

So off we toodled and got to Panaji, where we drove around trying to find le spot juste. I found that there was an area near the Panjim church called Mala which my interlocutor promised was, in a manner of speaking, the Promised Land. I wandered the streets of Panaji, a city that was Goa definitely in ethos, but showed all the trappings of modernity while maintaining its gently wandered around feel. I hurried over and found Panjim church, white, blue and imposingly beautiful in a rather martyred sort of way. But behind it the road narrowed and went past some old low, pillared wooden houses. In between every few of them were these staircases, built of old grey stone and ridden with wet green moss, going this way and that seemingly at random without any concrete thought. The road progressed down the slope to a village of quaint houses of stone, but painted in the most deliciously sumptuous colours, colours that weren’t blindingly bright like in the rest of India but more cool and sophisticated without going all the way to pastel. I was delighted.

The crew was chuffed to find this little nook of Goa’s Portuguese heritage and we got the shoot underway to establish Goa and the presenters living it up there.

I was just contemplating this alternative when I got a call from G2. He was hanging with a friend of his from Goa, a small wiry fellow with a large head lounging around on the sofa in the café outside our hotel. He shot off with G2 n his Honda CBR 600RR as Rohan and I wandered along behind them to Gracio’s pad a little further on. That was when the evening turned the day on its head.

Gracio is officially one of the coolest guys I’ve met. He’s got remote controlled helicopters, ruthlessly efficient firearms, a 10 metre long fishing rod, a harpoon for hauling in sharks, some Scotch and some weed to boot. We took in all the stuff, and imbibed some of the Scotch and weed. Deliciously high, utterly pliant and totally hooked to this laid-back young man who talked of the misspent days of his youth growing up on the beach in Colva and chasing after grown men brandishing swords at the age of 13, we spoke a lot, about everything – kings, cabbages, splitting the atom and cold fusion, the economy and how everything in the world is controlled by the Queen (I assumed he meant Betty II, not random gay person – “US is the soldier boy, China is the manufacturer and India is the back office”) and love and women (there is love love and lurrrrrve love”) while munching on spicy red Goan sausages and beef vindaloo. The day had turned from unmitigated disaster presided over by a jumped up insecure chimpanzee to a highly entertaining, utterly satisfying evening of fun and frolic from someone who knew how to have fun and shared the secret.