Sunday 18th December 1983
Breakfast in the Shangri-La was a treat. We had porridge with fruit and honey followed by an onion omelette. George and I set to with our laundry, drawing water from the well for the task. Martin, worried about the disappearance of his towel, discovered that the Sergeant had taken it in as a precaution against the nightly dhobi thieves. Dhobi (English: "washerman") is a caste group of India. Their traditional occupation was washing clothes. The word dhobi is derived from the Hindi word dhona, which means to wash.
We went down to the beach, but although it was warm, there was about 90% cloud cover and it was extremely humid. We took it in turn to gambol and splash in the breakers for a while before drying off on the beach.
Martin opened negotiations with a fruit seller and got more than he bargained for. The wily old crone could spot a mug at half a mile and our Martin was a cert. Before you could say “Jack Robinson”, by means of the classic “sorry, no change” ploy, Martin had half the Indian banana crop for 1983 and the old hag was cackling as she stuffed a crisp new 5 Indian Rupee note (with the inevitable staple holes in it where it had once been stapled in a wad) into her sari.
A crowd gathered as Martin stuffed bunch after bunch of mini bananas into his bulging bag. All the other roving beach traders wanted to offload their wares onto an obviously naïve soap and George and I giggled along with the triumphant hag at Martin’s demise.
We returned to the Shangri-La for a couple of ginger teas and a dose of music on the café’s massive portable cassette player. As the sun broke through the cloud we returned to the beach and spent another few hours splashing in the surf, playing frisbee and haggling with the beach traders.
We were really relaxed now and enjoying our “holiday”. Only Martin still had a cloud over his head, which took the form of a 51-hour train trip to Delhi. This was the price that he had to pay for pre-booking his flights without thinking out his plans.
We had an excellent supper in the Shangri-La, which we decided was the best restaurant yet. I had superb fish curry which comprised of a whole chunky white fish in onion-saturated sauce. The fruit rice pudding followed to completely bloat me out and provide a rare treat for my taste buds.
Our washing was still damp due to the day being so humid and overcast. We profitably exchanged some books in the Shangri-La library and buggered about in our room as dusk set in. As usual the evening mosquito hordes set in to plague Martin and I, and Martin disappeared under a layer of Boots Pharmacy Anti-Insect Gel.
George was well suntanned, and it seemed that the whiter your skin, the more interested the mosquitos were. They didn’t seem to bother the dark-skinned natives. We locked up our room with our padlock, essential travelling kit in Asia where you were usually provided with a cheap, easily breakable padlock as security for your hotel room.
Back in the Shangri-La the light was better than the waxing and waning lightbulb in our room. I was cheered to hear familiar music blaring from the cassette player, in this case the B52’s first album. Music which brought back memories of past parties and trendy clubs in London and Bournemouth. On 10th April 1982 I had been on the New Romantic pilgrimage from London to Bournemouth which culminated with the band Spandau Ballet headlining at the Winter Gardens.
We sat contentedly in the warm tranquil atmosphere, only lacking cold beer to cap our enjoyment. Unfortunately, one had to venture into Trivandrum for alcoholic drinks as they were not available in Kovalum. We intended to stock up on alcoholic beverages for our Christmas celebrations. Thiruvananthapuram, commonly known by its former name Trivandrum, is the capital of the Indian state of Kerala.
The sun has given me a good going over today, firing it’s sizzling rays from behind the cloud cover like a lurking sniper. My skin is hot and red. We sat for a long while before getting bored enough to venture down to the beach where we found a hippy gathering squatting around an entrenched candle. Hashish smoke and the strains of a strummed acoustic guitar drifted from the hairy group.
We went into a restaurant where the staff bid us choose from their varied menu and then, having made our choices, revealed that they only had eggs and mussels in stock. We ate boiled eggs while a soapy American hippy chick related the “horrors” of an 8-hour Indian bus trip. Eight hours without a square meal – how ghastly!
We returned to our wooden slabs for a surprisingly reasonable night’s sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment