I kept closely-scribed diaries for the totality of my backpacking. I never intended to transcribe them and I won't start now. They remain intensely embarrassing reading but an interesting insight into Me Then.
I arrived in Bombay airport around, I think, seven hours early. This was before the days of email and text messaging and my arrangement with J to meet was therefore seven hours out of date.
So there I was, mulling over a tricky and painful goodbye with U, an extraordinary Summer, a flight filled with paranoid dreams of spending the next five months on my own whilst everyone else paired off and had the most wonderful of times and doggedly refusing to drink any water - in Bombay airport. Each fly that landed on me filled me with malarial dread and I moved from plastic seat to plastic seat, ploughing my way through Erica Jong's "How to Save your Own Life".
And then J turned up three hours early, announcing that he'd been here all night.....
And so the adventure began. J had already been in the country for a few weeks and, seeing that this was his second visit, he was the expert. Expert in haggling with an Indian accent, smoking weed and planning the next leg of the trip, three days in advance, at knock-down pricing.
Bombay was utterly ghastly. The slums, the con-artists, the crowds, the drunks and dope-fiends. Very little to see or do (apart from an art gallery dedicated, rather, to Rajiv Ghandi and a Dhobi Ghat not worth the hour's drive) and very little opportunity for escape as our first bus tickets out of town were double-booked.
The eventual bus journey to Goa was doubly ghastly. It took, my diary reminds me, three hours to get out of Bombay ('If making money is a sin, welcome to hell'). The roads were so bad that your head would hit the ceiling when you went over a bump. I was starting to seriously regret my decision to come to India and to chose J as my travelling companion.
Things picked up a little in Goa. J, it transpired, was something of a backpacker lethario. And Goa was full of similar types and overly tanned women. Excessive drinking and smoking was done at a place on the beach called 'Pasta Hut' and the recovery was one in a concrete hut on a street upon which fish dried in the sun. The mosquito net would glower down on you during the night and the travellers tales were recounted, for good and bad, into the night. The famous 'ear cleaners' prowled the beaches and I reminded myself that I didn't want to come back from my travels hating my travelling companion, like my brother did. I started to relax a little and accept J's ways and India's many many ways.
Eight days in.
