India: See It, Smell It, Taste It, Love It, Hate It... 1

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Intellectual Property Rights Bryce James 2018

The right of Bryce James to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

This insight into my life is dedicated to my child.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Contents Page

1. Footsteps on the Long Road 2. Our first night at Curlies 3. A bit of a shitty night 4. A day at the beach and two likeable lads from Leeds 5. The beach and the bugs, world war fucking three!! 6. Salt water, sweet water 7. Easy riders 8. Getting to Colomb Cove 9. Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, Delhi!!! 10. Strangers to fill my heart 11. Life’s choices 12. The day before Shimla 13. To a great little town called Kalka 14. The toy train 15. The rolling road to Dharamsala 16. You have to have new trainers to be on the run 17. Delhi, take two 18. Five star luxury 19. Rang! 20. Jaipur and the very poor 21. Agra and the Taj Mahal 22. The road to Varanasi 23. Varanasi and Mother Ganga 24. Bruce – The man, the legend 25. Breakin’ the law 26. The road to Pokhara 27. We’re not in Kansas anymore Toto

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Footsteps on the Long Road Heathrow airport. It’s not too bad really. Check in can be done online these days so you don’t even really have to queue. You can just stick ya’ nose in a good book, tune out and look forward to the holiday that you’re already on your way to. That is until the new phone you’ve bought from a small street-side phone shop on the Green Lanes in London is swabbed and stuck inside some machine which turns out to have yellow flashing lights and a blaring siren. No matter how clean you are, your asshole always puckers up at an airport when shit like that happens.

Louise was already disappearing into the crowd and I tried to ignore the bead of sweat that had started to trickle down the right side of my forehead. What would two grams of fish-scale cocaine, two one gram rocks of MDs, six of hash and four Hoffman acid trips being trafficked to India get you in a prison these days? What a hell of a noise the machine was making, I couldn’t believe. And it’s flashing yellow light said it all. But what was it on the phone that had set it off? Drugs? Explosives? Fuck knows? A very disappointed looking lady with square shoulders and her mouse brown hair tied back came over to me from behind the counter. She pulled a blue pair of powderless rubber gloves on as she looked me in the eye. ‘What’s ya’ name love?’ her gaze never faltered. ‘Bryce.’ ‘Full name please?’ ‘Bryce W James.’ The bead of sweat now reached my cheek and burned there like a guilty itch I could never scratch. ‘Right Bryce W James, where are you flying to today?’ ‘Goa, India.’ ‘Fine, fill out this form for me please?’ The form only asked for my name and destination, and reason of travel. Nothing else. Where were the policemen? The dogs? Was I about to be shot down in the street by the police like Jean Charles de Menezes ‘cause the guy who’d owned the phone before was a suspected terrorist? I did have a beard. I pulled out my passport to hand it to the lady. ‘No that’s fine,’ she said, waving it away. ‘Here’s your phone back, enjoy your flight.’ Eh? Don’t think just walk dude. Act disinterested and just walk the fuck away. Maybe I should ask some questions though? I have just set an alarm off at an airport security counter; surely it would be more suspicious to say nothing? To not enquire to what it was, and explain that I had only bought the phone the day before. Shut the fuck up, say nothing, put ya’ phone in ya’ pocket, turn and go find Louise. There she was, my little shnookums, trundling back through the crowd looking out for me with worry on her face and her bright blue eyes shining under the false lighting of Heathrow airport’s security area. ‘What was that?’ she asked.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

‘They swabbed that fuckin’ phone I bought yesterday and whoever the fuck had it before me either made bombs or sold smack or some shit. Fuck knows but they didn’t even wanna see my passport, just had me fill out a form and sent me on my way. Fuckin’ ridiculous! What if I was a terrorist or some shit? Fuck it; let’s go get something to eat.’ Louise said, ‘Let me just try some of the free shots they’re giving out, oh and have a spray of perfume first.’ ‘Oh true, I’ll have me a spray of my Gucci while ya’ at it. I don’t think there’s much point buying booze here it’s gotta be cheaper in Goa.’ So we sprayed and Louise sampled the vodkas and then like a million other Brits on tour we found the Whetherspoons pub in the corner of the airport and got the eggs benedict. I can’t drink before flying any more, I just crawl the walls too much for a cigarette. And after the whole disgrace of getting thrown off the plane trying to leave Colombia, yeash; all I do these days is take a few sleeping tablets and try to pass the whole trip by without paying it any attention. Louise was on holiday too though, and she’d just spent the last year working her hot little ass off in a London hospital. So now for her it was time to relax, have a drink or three, smash a fat bastard meal and plan our next ten weeks in India and Nepal. The plan was simple originally, we were gonna fly into Goa and dance on the beaches. From there, head across the country to Odisha to homestay with one of the local tribes of out there natives that are into facial piercings and tattoos. From there we were gonna avoid the major cities and head up and across the country to Manali and try to track down some of the infamous Manali cream hash. Then we would cross whatever border was nearest and head on into Nepal where we would meet her mum and bestie, Chrissy. The idea was to stay away from the slums and the shit and try and see the national parks and the beautiful side of India instead. The only thing was we couldn’t figure out the online train booking crap. You couldn’t just book a sleeper carriage and get on the fuckin’ train. There was some bollocks about a waiting list and there wasn’t just one train, there were several different companies all with different trainline numbers. The journey from Goa to Odisha varied from thirty hours to sixty three! We only wanted first class, thought fuck it, there’s only twenty quid different in price and everybody said the standard of travel was totally worth the extra bit of cash. Besides, we wanted to copy Rick Stein and try the first class train mutton curry. We’d watched his entire season on travelling through India before we came. Truth to tell we’d spent the last few months watching every documentary and film about the place that we could find. The toy train from Kalka to Shimla was very much on the ‘to do’ list. But just like what we imagined the rest of India to be like the train booking website was a chaotic mess, so after giving it a proper good try, we gave up and figured we’d just sought it out when we got there. Sometimes that’s the best way to travel anyway innit. So at least for now, we weren’t tied down to any dates except one in the end of March when we would pick up Chrissy and Lou’s mum, and another on the fourteenth of April when we flew out of Kathmandu and back to London. For me, the flight from London to India was ya’ usual shit; shit food, shit seats, and only fizzy drinks to be downed. Louise on the other hand loves plane food, and was free from the

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

slavery of tobacco to drink as many gin and tonics as she wanted without the scratching feeling of need and desperation that I get when I drink booze and can’t light a fag. The diazepam did its job anyway and I was asleep most of the way there. We did have to change planes in Mumbai though and as we passed a discounted stack of tequila on our way through the international terminal to get to the domestic one, I grabbed a bottle from duty free just for the sake of it. You never know when a forty ounce of tequila will come in handy. Like the train website the changeover between terminals was hard work too, and after passing through various searches and scanners we were herded onto a bus and driven off into the madness of Mumbai for about ten minutes until we suddenly popped up at what seemed to be a whole new airport. There we followed the pasty coloured English tourists to the next check in desk. We had to go through the whole fuckin’ check in process again. Oh well it gave me time for a fag and it was only forty five minutes to Goa once we were on the plane. Check in was simple enough and soon we were shooting off down the runway once more and heading for paradise. Which is much more than I could say for the slum that we flew over. It was hard to put the size of the slum dwelling into focus as we were rising up and turning away from it, but the fuckin’ thing can’t have been much smaller than London. Millions must have lived there in abject poverty. Their shacks made of discarded grey asbestos sheeting. The hostess was lovely, the odd toasted sandwich things with bloody cooked corn and cheese in them were shit though, and I thought sod it, we’re nearly there so I even got myself a semi cold beer from the trolley. From the first sip I wanted a fag but at least I knew I only had to wait a few minutes until we landed. Louise had another gin and finished off my Indian version of a pizza stick. She thought it tasted bloody marvellous. Nurses huh, they breed them tough in the NHS. The plane landed by the ocean in Vasco de Gama airport, which was a bit of a surprise for me ‘cause for some reason I had it my head the airport was inland. Dunno where that came from but hey ho, it didn’t make fuck all difference anyway did it? The airport was nice though and nothing says holiday better than crawling out of an air-conditioned plane into a hot muggy soup of a day. Ahh, fuckin’ bliss. We got our backpacks easily enough, went through the nothing to declare bit and stepped right into the madness of trying to get a taxi. There was one queue that had hundreds of fuckin’ people pushing and shoving. Bored as, desperate tourists were shoved to the back and ignored by the locals. Which was odd really because right next to it was another taxi booth with a ‘pre-paid’ sign above it and no one there. We’d booked the first three nights using booking.com in Vagator beach ‘cause I had some ol’ hippy friends I’d met on a facebook page called the Goa hippy tribe, who’d lived there in the sixties and seventies. Besides that was the parties we were s’posed to be at. And that was the reason we had come to Goa. To dance with our feet in the sand to the infamous Goa trance music. We were gonna track down the scene that the police had been trying to stamp out and get right the fuck amongst it. That wasn’t going to be too hard though ‘cause my friend Jay was already in Goa doing a record label tour with the Free-Spirit brand he’d founded ten years ago.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Yeah so, we ignored the crazy queue and went up to the window at the empty taxi booth and asked how much it was to Vagator. The guy pointed at a sign that said it was like a thousand rupees for the fifty odd kilometres it took to get there. ‘How long does it take boss?’ ‘It is taking about two hours at this time of day sir.’ ‘Really? Fuckin’ ‘ell, fair enough then, we’ll take it.’ And I handed over the equivalent of ten pounds. So that was us sorted. Some little fulla, came and took Louise’s back pack and with a wave over his shoulder and a waggle of his head, said, ‘Please come with me sir,’ and took off down the ramp away from the airport, past three hungry looking dogs with their hair falling out and over to a car park filled with shitty looking white cars that had varying degrees of bling hanging in their windshields. I lit a fag, and inhaled the satisfaction of quitting my job and flying to Asia deep down into me and with a hug from my shnookums, who already had her sunglasses on, cracked the top of the tequila and took a swig. Our driver friend opened the boot, threw in Louise’s bag then I passed him my back pack. I kept hold of my smaller bag which had my lap top and speakers, fuckin’ slumming it these days when we travel eh. I took another swig of the tequila, flicked my fag into a puddle of god-knows-what and we drove away from the airport and into India herself. The roads weren’t that crazy, not like Vietnam anyway. It’s fuckin’ madness there. We had a few scary over taking moments but our driver wasn’t nearly as reckless as the fucker in front who was always pulling out onto the other side of the road so he could overtake a bus or truck. We came across our first coconut palms and even got a few views of the ocean, but we were soon back in land taking roundabouts and sharp corners as fast as the little car and the traffic would let us. On a couple of occasions we crossed over huge steel bridges that spanned the estuaries of Goa and then passed the turn off sign for Calangute. We’d researched the journey to make sure we weren’t driven in circles for a bit of extra cash, and when we came across the sign for Mapusa, told the driver to take the left there. ‘It is ok sir you pre-pay, I know where I am going. I am a very honest man. If you need taxi driver anywhere in India please call me,’ then he pulled out a business card from the pocket of his shirt and gave it to me. ‘My name is Sabu.’ I took another glug of tequila and started to hang out for a cigarette. ‘Sabu, can I smoke in your car please?’ ‘Only if you are calling me whenever you need a taxi.’ ‘Yeah of course.’ And at that point I had every intention of using Sabu as my main man and driver. Once we got the phones up and running anyway. The phone I’d bought in the Green lanes could hold two sim cards and was ready to use anywhere in the world – most recently a crack den by the looks of what I just went through. Louise had to get hers cracked at the local internet shop before we left. But I wanted us to have phones on us in case we got separated at any point. Let’s face it India had had a bit of a bad rap recently, what with the gang rapes in the papers and all innit. I wanted to buy her a taser as soon as we could but for now we had a switchblade each. The black one was a Black-ops style one about three inches long and the blade was about an inch thick. The other was my treasured eighties New York

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

style blade, which had a polished blue handle and thin chrome blade finish. As they say, it’s always better to have a knife and not need it than to need a knife and not have it. We turned off the main road, passed Mapusa and came out on a road that drove through open green fields lined with palm trees. On the side of the road every now and then we would pass some guy selling sugar cane juice and his grubby juicing machine. ‘It is not far to Vagator now sir, do you know where you are staying? I have a friend—’ ‘No, none of ya’ friends dude,’ I said with a laugh. ‘Here, we’ve got a map.’ and passed it over to him. ‘It’s just next to the Mango Tree bar.’ It was still a bit of a struggle for us to find the place, but after a few directions from local shop owners we were soon parked out the front of the hotel beside a great big fuckin’ cow lying on the edge of the road. The room was simple but for what we paid online it seemed a bargain. There was a big bed, bathroom, balcony and shuttered windows with no glass, but at least had insect netting. The hot water in the shower worked once we figured out you had to flick a switch on the wall and the front door had a sturdy lock. What more did we need? And with no tv it was the opposite of London, fuckin’ perfect. I went to the toilet, dropped my pants, squatted over the useful bucket in the corner and took a shit. Oh it fuckin’ stinks when you don’t shit into water dunnit? But I find this the best way to sift through for ya’ drugs. You don’t wanna fuckin’ sit on the actual toilet and try and catch it as it flies past your hands do you? What if you miss and it ends up one of those ghost turds, and when you check in the bowl the toilet’s empty? Drug trafficked for nothing? So I shat in the little red bucket turned the shower on and proceeded to break the turd down enough for the packages to separate and start floating around. You gotta get in there with your fingers a bit to mush it all up, but hey, small sacrifice compared with the fat line of pure cocaine that was on its way. The hash came out so I had smoke and two of the bullet shaped white plastic wraps but I wouldn’t know if it was the MDs or the coke until I cut them open. Please don’t just be the MD, that was for the parties, and the coke was for the celebration of what we were doing. It was to make our good time better. I gave the three packages that had come out a good wash, and then Lou gave me the hand sanitizer so I could keep the germs away. We were in India after all and if I was going to get poisoned by something I didn’t want it to be from my own faeces on the first night, good grief. There were still two more wraps inside me somewhere and there’s no hurrying up the process you’ve just gotta let it ride as ya’ body processes it through. Everything was cleaned up and Louise had the lap top out and playing some Booka Shade. ‘Did you get them out?’ ‘Only three of them. I definitely got the smoke and I’ve got two white ones, hopefully one's coke.’ ‘Yeah, fuck that I don’t want any MD yet.’ We checked the window shutters were closed and pulled the table over, flicked the blue handled blade out and I cut into the first pack. There was about two millimetres of clingfilm wrapped around whatever was inside and as I sliced through it and bent it open, some brown crystals fell out onto the table top. ‘MD, fuck it. Ok, don’t panic, let’s try the next one.’

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Like when Charlie was opening the Willy Wonka’s chocolate bars we licked our lips and lent forward to peer in. The blade slid into the clingfilm and as we got almost right through, a cream of white powder spilled out the seams. Ka-ching!!! Jackpot!!! ‘You chop up lover girl, while I get this fuckin’ acid out the bottom hem of my jeans.’ ‘What size should I make them?’ ‘We-quit-our-jobs-and-flew-to-Goa sized lines shnookums.’ To find the acid I had to feel around the edge of the jeans until I came across the little hard patch. Then used the special-ops switch blade, cut open the hem and slid the little mad bastards out. I’d put sellotape over either side to protect them. I’d actually lost the Hoffman’s a year or so earlier and only found them in the back of a photo album a few days before we left for India. Yeah we were tired from the flight, and it was getting dark again, yada, yada, yada, but the coke would soon sort that out. So I took another swig of tequila, and passed it over to my lover, who said, ‘Fuck it why not.’ and knocked back a glug of it too. Then she hoovered up a monstrous first line in India sized rail and then I smashed one too, left nostril all the way. The last swallow of tequila was a bit much really, and with it burning all the way down and the peppery after taste, it sure as shit was beer o’clock. The Mango Tree was only a hundred metres away, up the street on the right, so we locked up, hid the coke and MDs under one of the wooden slats under the mattress, the hash on top of the dresser and off we went for a beer. Next door was a Chinese restaurant, three dogs lying in the road and on the other side of them was a tourist agent who said he could sort us out with sim cards for our phones tomorrow, easy as. The road ‘T’d off at the end and on our corner was a taxi shack, across the road was a scooter rental shop and on the other side, straight ahead was beer. Sweet fuckin’ nectar. The coke was just starting to make my front right tooth numb, and the rush of it as it sank into my blood stream was smooth and enlivening. Woke me the fuck up anyway. I took Lou’s hand and we crossed over and took a seat at the bar. It was only sixty rupees (sixty pence) for an icy cold beer, fuckin’ shweet!! ‘What’s the plans then lover girl?’ ‘Well I reckon, we drink these and go down to the beach and have a cocktail or gin and tonic down there.’ ‘You’re the beauty and the brains of this relationship love. I’m just the feeder.’ We hugged and cheers’d to our first beer in India. In London all they sell in the curry houses is Cobra beer, so I was looking forward to trying it in India, but the barman hadn’t heard of it, and he fed us a beer called Kingfisher instead. It was alright, cold, fizzy and tasted of beer, so who’s complaining? Sure as shit not me. We smashed those quick as fuck, and then the barman gave us directions down the hill to the to the left of our hotel’s street if we were walking out of it, and told us to keep on going for about ten minutes. He said we could take a few beers with us for the walk as long as we brought the bottles back, fuckin’ genius and a gentleman he was. So all excited as fuck we took each other’s hand, I checked the switchblade in my pocket, turned on the torch and we headed off into the darkness of India. I’d bought a big heavy torch ‘cause one of my facebook friends Alathea who’d lived here in the early seventies had told me the dogs could be fuckin’ dangerous at night if they packed up. I’d smash the cunts on the

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

heads if they got within distance. One fuckin’ bite and you gotta spend the next four weeks having ya’ rabies shots or else you might fuckin’ die in the most awful mind-diseased way. We kept walking on down the hill which just got steeper and quieter as we left the small corner of town behind. Every now and then white people would fly past on scooters, or cars full of Indian guys would drive by but otherwise it was just us out there. The beach was starting to feel a long way away, and I was starting to feel that maybe we should try again tomorrow in the day light. But Lou was determined and confident we’d find something, so we walked until we got to the end of the road, and then we could hear it. That beautiful sound of waves crashing on the sand. In the darkness the ocean pounded and the wind whipped the sand in our face. There was one building at the end of the road and it was closed, no one else was around. What a fuckin’ let down. Where were all these famous Goan party bars? Ah fuck it, we turned to walk back and another car full of Indian guys pulled up at the car park we were standing in. ‘Do you know where the bars are around here?’ I asked. ‘Yes just down that road, but there are no lights and it can be a bit of a walk at night.’ ‘Oh well, thank you anyway.’ And that was that. We’d try again tomorrow. The legend of Goa couldn’t stay away forever. So we went back up to the Mango Tree, had a beer there and then took a few with us so we could play cards out on our balcony. We smoked a pipe of the Lebanese I’d brought with me off a coke can, and Louise proceeded to kick my ass at Bastard, the world’s number 1 card game. We were up one level from the ground and the mosquitoes weren’t too bad for once in my life. We finished the beers and went to bed. But as soon as the lights were out the fuckin’ dogs next door started barking at fuck knows what, and ‘cause we had no glass in our windows it was like the noisy cunts were right there in the room with us. We had to listen to the pricks all night.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Our first night at Curlies We crawled out of bed around three in the afternoon with a new found hatred for dogs, and made our way up to the Mango Tree. It was Indian breakfast all the way. Back in London we’d been eating fuckin’ pizza and fried chicken way too much lately and it was healthy food time. Besides, we love Indian food and I gave it a go to eat that shit right on through until we landed back in London. Indian breakfast consists of a stack of chapatti bread, some zesty lime salsa and a yoghurt dip. The chapattis were drowning in grease but fuck it, I tore into them dipping the bread in the salsa and the yoghurt and smashing it down. My lover girl had an egg biryani which was like no biryani we’d ever had before. Usually they’re just some crappy dry rice dish, but this came in a copper pot with fragrant yellow and red rice that had been coloured with turmeric and paprika. Normally it’d just be rice in the biryani but the Mango Tree guys had put a deep rich sauce in the bottom of the copper pot with a boiled egg floating on it, then they’d covered it all with the rice and the whole thing was one of the greatest curry dishes we’d ever eaten. By the time we’d finished breakfast and ordered a beer it was dark again. So much for the fuckin’ beach eh? So we dropped our sim cards off at the guy next to our place, and ordered a taxi to take us to the infamous Curlies down on Anjuna beach. It was facebook friend Alathea who first put me in touch with Curlies and we even looked at some of the flash accommodation they had. It was like forty quid a night though so we ditched that idea. But, it was s’posed to be a party place so we thought we’d head there and see if we could find a party. The guys at Mango Tree sorted us a taxi. Armed with only a bit of smoke we headed off into the wilderness. The guy drove us for about five minutes up and down bumpy roads and swerving round tight corners in to nowhere. He pulled up where a couple of other taxi guys were waiting and was like. ‘Ok mister, you go down that road there and that will be leading you to Curlies. Here is my number, call me later and I will come pick you up.’ He said it was two hundred rupees, we gave him five and like every taxi driver in any corner of the world, he didn’t have change. ‘So sorry sir, I will give you one hundred rupees later when I pick you up sir,’ and gave a trusting little waggle of his head. Fair enough. As long as we got home safe it didn’t matter. There was a low rumble of bass coming from somewhere off to the right but we stuck with the road, which was a small gravel dirt track that had a brick wall on the left side and fuck knows what on the right. It was a bit of a walk, and I tried to take the right when we got to the end of it, but some local girls pointed us the other way and Curlies was just up around the corner. There wasn’t much to it really. A bit of sand and an open decked two storey bar with empty chairs and tables everywhere. There was no music, just us and a few milling groups of Indian guys who looked shifty and ignored us. A beer cost fuckin’ a hundred rupees at Curlies! A pound for a beer?! Madness! We went for a nosey about to see what was happening and just outside opposite where we came in, was an empty and silent proper trancefloor. It had all ya’ weird hanging shit which would look great if it was lit up and some tunes were pounding but it wasn’t and there weren’t.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Me and my lover moseyed about, drank a few beers, smoked a joint and played cards until we got bored. The guy behind the bar called our taxi and passed me over the phone. ‘Oh hello mister, my friend is coming to get you. Please wait at the bar and he will call them when he gets there.’ Give him his dues, the guy showed up faster than a London mini-cab company, usually those fuckers have you sitting around for hours. This fulla had pulled right up around the back of Curlies so we didn’t even have to walk down the track. We got back to ours, gave him two hundred rupees, and we went upstairs for a line then realised we’d forgotten his mate still owed us from the way there. Ahh ripped off three quid the bastards. We sat on our little balcony again as we waited for the line to wear down a bit and played cards. I still hadn’t won a game. Woof.... woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof. Bark, bark, bark, woof,woof, woof, woof, woof! ‘Faaaaarrrkin shut up you fuckin’ mongrels!!!!!’ All night until the sun came up the fuckin’ dogs were barking! I passed out once Mr sun finally clocked in for the day and the bastards went to sleep. Day three and we were movin’ outta this place fuck that. We managed to get up around two-ish, went next door to the Chinese to see who the fuck it was that had kept us up all night. From the noise we expected some big fuckin’ Cujo thing, but no. All there was was the fat mumma dog and her puppies. She must have just been a bit jumpy at night. She was one of those cute white mongrels you see in places like this with the sagging boobs of a woman who’s spent most her life either pregnant or giving birth, and was the mixed breed of every dog in India. The fulla who ran the place wouldn’t just let us leave so we sat there and had a coke and an omelette before seeing what the score was next door with the sim cards. We’d have to wait another day. Oh well. Me and Lou went looking for a new place to stay away from the noise of motorbikes and barking dogs. We took the left at the top of the T junction by Mango Tree and headed down towards Vagator. We found one place a few hundred metres down on the left with a chill out area and cushions and shit. Perfect. But a group of Slovakians had booked the whole place out. But just down a bit more on the right, about half way to the beach we came across the Pizza Place and asked the Thai looking full behind the counter there. He took us to the reception and a tough looking Indian lady came out and seeing potential customers broke into a smile and had a chat. Yes she had rooms away from the street. No, dogs didn’t bark all night and yes, the rooms were only a thousand rupees and came with hot water shower, tv, fan and a double bed. We put down a deposit starting from the next morning. If it was quiet we would stay. She said we could come anytime. Champion! The room was well back from the road, was tiled throughout and cool inside even though it was hot as fuck outside. All sorted fuck yeah! We went back up to Mango Tree, celebrated with a Kingfisher and Facebook called Jay to see what he was up to. ‘Yeah I’m down at the Fishbone cafe on Small Vagator,’ he said. ‘Where the fuck is that? We went down to the beach and there was fuck all there.’ ‘No I think you guys were down at big Vagator, just down by the fort right?’

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

‘Yeah, just beneath it.’ We could see the old ruined red brick fort up on the hill from our new room. ‘Ok I see now, what you need to do is, when you get to the fork in the road that leads down to the beach, take the left, at the end there’s a big car park, and down below you is Small Vagator, it’s got a few bars and shit here. Anyway, don’t worry about that for now. There’s a party next door to Curlies tonight, we’re all heading to Anjuna for dinner soon. Stay at the Mango Tree I’ll pick you up, and we can go from there. Cool?’ ‘Cool as fuck dude.’ ‘He’s coming’ to pick us up from here lover and we’re gonna head off to a party.’ ‘Really. Fuck yeah!’ So we ordered a couple of beers and played some cards while we waited for Jay to show up. It wasn’t long. He came through into the open bar, with a smile, a hug and a, ’Brother! Here we are again, another continent, another party!’ Free Spirit, his label had been going strong back in London and I’d helped him set up a party earlier in January. So after Brazil and London, India was the third continent I’d boogied on down with this fulla. It’s not like I follow him around, we just seem to have the same paths in life every now and then. ‘Hey espresso, here please?’ he said with a click of his fingers to the waiter walking past. ‘They have the best espresso in Goa here. The best. Hey where are you guys staying?’ And we gave him the saga of where we were and the hopes we had for where we were going. Jay was staying at some trance producer's studio /house back up towards Mapusa and was putting some tunes together with him. Anyway, they were off to get a kebab at the best Indian in town before the party and he said to follow him on his bike. ‘Ah we haven’t got a bike dude, we’ll call a taxi, just give us the address. Besides we gotta have a line first if we’re goin’ to a party.’ And I said with a sly smile, ‘You wanna line of coke?’ ‘You have coke?’ ‘Only the best.’ ‘Fuck yeah! I’ll follow you then. So we called the taxi from his phone, told the fulla to meet us at the guest house and went back to smash a We’re-in-Goa-with-Jay-and-about-to- go-to-a-party sized line of London’s purest Charlie, and off we went. We got to the restaurant out in Anjuna and met up with a couple of Jay’s mates. A skinny young Israeli fulla called Gael, and an older grey bearded English fulla called Bruce, he woulda been in his late forties. Louise didn’t have a line so she ordered a Butter Chicken which was more tomato than butter, and Jay lectured me about the dangers of drinking Kingfisher beer. ‘It has glycerine in it man. That shit’s bad for you. You have to drink the more expensive beers.’ And he ordered me some crappy short, stubby bottled beer I only just managed to get down. Yurck it was more coffee than beer. I’d stick with my Kingfisher. Glycerine or not. Couldn’t be any worse than Chang in Thailand. We got another taxi and followed the guys down to the party. The driver told us on the way, down by the shore, that they held the famous Anjuna flea market here as we drove past. Just at the edge of that is where we were dropped off, again we took the right down the path

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... where the night before we’d walked on our own. This time the guys drove their bikes where Lou and I had walked and there were Indians selling glowsticks, bubble gum, drinks and food. And then I saw it. The infamous, ‘Where is 8 finger?’ sign. It’s on the left as you’re walking down to the beach. Just a little black sign the size of a number plate, with gold writing on it. It’s sat beneath a small blue and white tiled sign that states the famous line from Cheech and Chong, ‘Dave’s not here’. Alathea and her friends put the sign up as a memorial to the friend Amsterdam Dave, or later Hieroglyphic Dave. He’d passed away from Liver failure some time ago and the site where the sign is today was an old volley ball court he used to love. From what I’ve gathered from watching and talking to this community on line, Eight Finger Eddie is one the people of legend in regards to the Goa Hippy culture. He sometimes sang in the Big Dipper band with Goa Gil on the bass back in the seventies. He was one of the founding fathers of the Goa Hippy movement. Eddie was born in Algeria with only three fingers on his left hand. Although that didn’t seem to have slowed him down. My ol’ friends talk about him online as a person who was always there to help. A down to earth force of calm in the wild that was Goa in the seventies. Although unlike Gil, Eddie never became part of the trance movement that’s exploded from those small beaches in this far off place. His earlier organisation and part in the community can’t be ignored and a story on Goa can’t be fully realised without the mention of Eddie. The guys on the Goa Hippie Tribe facebook page, all knew him and I had mourned their loss with him when he passed. Now I was here, in Goa, in front of this tiny, silent shrine to a monument of the man so I did what any self respectin’ cowboy would these days and took a selfie. We caught up with the others and followed them around to the party. The bass was pounding but Curlies was empty and so was the trance floor next to it. But the bar just up from there was lit up like a Christmas tree and hundreds of people were crowded inside and along the beach front. The music dooga, dooged and raaped and raaped. Bruce met us with a hug and we cheers’d me and Lou’s first beach party in Goa. We kicked our shoes off and got our feet in the sand. Me and Louise broke out the MD’s and we all took a hit. They were smooth, subtle and strong. Strong in the way that you just have a real good time. Like what MD’s is s’posed to make ya’ do. I rolled a joint of the Lebanese – Kimmy had sorted for me back in London – up, and Bruce skinned up some Charas with papers he’d just bought from a stall. He reckoned good skins were hard to get. Young Indian kids went through the crowds offering red dot blessings on people’s foreheads for money and everyone just danced in the sand. Up past the bar, trying to get to the toilets was chaos and everyone was fucked up as they squished their way through the place trying to get to wherever it was they were going. I gave up in the end and just pissed out by the ocean with the music and masses behind me and the Arabian sea in front. Another party, another continent. We got chattin’ with a couple of American kids and one asked if we knew where to buy any drugs, which I didn’t. No one was walking around selling them like I thought they would be. It wasn’t like Brazil, England or Europe where people just have, drugs for sale signs out. I

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

was a bit surprised really, and was stoked that we’d brought our own. I woulda been well pissed off if I’d saved up all year to come raving in Goa and spent the whole time on the piss tryin’ to buy drugs and gettin’ ripped off. I felt for the two fullas and offered some MD’s. One said he would love to but gets drug tested at work back in the States. But the one who’d asked earlier was keen as, so I checked to see how much he’d drunk, and gave him enough for a good time but without it messing him up too much. The bar itself was pretty much blacked out with only a few coloured LEDs spiralling from the first floor down to the beach. Up top was all picnic benches rammed with people smokin’ up a storm. Where we were on the sand was a mix of hippies, young and old, and smart dressed Indian guys. With the obligatory dogs of course. Looking towards the bar, over on the right you had a line of stalls with adult Indians selling fried eggs, two minute noodles, that type of shit. While I guess it was their kids that mingled through the crowd selling blessings or just plain begging for cash. It was a bit of an odd mix, but fair enough, it was a trance party and a good one is never just like a rave in a club. A real trance party is a weird affair with all kinds of fuckers involved. ‘Cause no matter what you call it, how hard you try, a rave in a club with security, five pound beers and outdoor smoking areas is just that. Loud music, with flashing lights and controls put all over you. Whereas outside under the stars with your feet in the dirt and all the problems of the world somewhere else, that’s where trance was invented and that is where it’s always at its best. Where it’s most felt. It came from these very beaches here in India and thirty years later it was still in full swing. It was my first time travelling with a girl – with someone who I loved as much as my Shnookums – to a third world place like this and I was well worried that I would lead her out here into trouble. So that first night every time Louise went to the toilet I went with her too. Ever thoughtful of the black-ops switch blade in my right front pocket, just above the knee. My shnookums had the blue eighties style one in her purse. There was no trouble though, it was just laughter hugs and friendship that night on the sand and around four-ish, me and Lou decided to call it a night ‘cause we were moving house in a few hours time. We paid five hundred rupees for the ten minute taxi ride home, packed up all our shit, remembered the drugs that were hidden, had a fat line and played cards until the sun came up and the fuckin’ dog next door stopped barking so we could get some sleep. Ten am sharp we were up, showered, homes on our backs and moving to our new place just on the way to Vagator. I’d forgotten me flip flops when we’d packed, and had been wearing my sturdy workman’s boots that I’d had the NHS buy me before I left. Might as well get something out of the cash free-for-all the government was doing to our NHS before all the money was gone ya’ know. So on the way out the door I’d gotten myself a good pair of boots to hike the Himalayas and kick the fearful Indian rabid dogs away with. We slept a bit more and then it was time to get up, get ready, find some open reasonable footwear and it was on to the next party. Turned out my new two hundred rupee pair of NEKI’s weren’t very good and they tore the skin off my poor ol’ toes. Jay was playing the sunset slot at the Chronicle just down on small Vagator. We still hadn’t even been there yet. The earliest we’d gotten out of bed was today and that was ‘cause

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

we’d been up most of the night. We finally picked up the new sim cards and booked another taxi to take us straight there. The sim cards had been a hassle. We’d had to wait days while our passport and visa details were approved. Your details all had to be approved. It was from the fall out of the shootings in Mumbai a few years earlier. But for five hundred rupees we pretty much had unlimited calls and internet the whole time we were in India. When we met with Jay he said the cost is really only three hundred but hey, fuck it, we were sorted and it was only a few quid to have someone take care of it all for us. Meh, first world problems. So we finally got to Small Vagator. For a hundred rupees the taxi dropped us at the top of the cliff and we followed the signs to the bar. I stuck a twistedtraveltales.com sticker on the hand rail of the path leading down to the bar. The place was massive. Empty but massive. And at three hundred rupees a beer I wasn’t surprised. You can make a place flash as you like but if you’ve built it for the wrong crowd of people they just aint gonna come. Simple. Getting three hundred rupees out of a hippy for beer would be like trying to get water up a frog’s arsehole. Fuck; I was hard pushed to pay it. But hey fuck it we weren’t there for the beer, we were there to watch Jay play his Journey set live! Jay has released all kinds of different trance under different names, Journey is his full-on music, Omsphere his more chilled and he’s got a few collaborations going on too, like his Wayfarers stuff with Imry. But in Goa it has to be full-on all the way. Well to be honest I was surprised it wasn’t that crazy Goa trance stuff I’d heard Laughing Buddha play that time at Universo Paralello, but that shit is loony and I guess the drugs and therefore scene have changed a bit as time’s gone on. From the little I’d seen, things were more commercial these days. So it was me and my lover, Gael, Bruce and Jay, popping E’s that Bruce assured us were made of the highest quality MDMA, sweating it out in the late afternoon sun. The bar was terraced, about three levels down and the main dancefloor was set in a great little walled-off alcove that really bounced the music out at ya’. Jay set up and me and Lou dished out lines of coke for us all behind the back drop on the small stage. Back stage again at the party doin’ cocaine. It’s the only way to go. Why would you do it any other way?! Jay ramped up his tunes and we got on down to that as the sun began to set in a fat orange blob on the horizon behind us. Me and Lou were havin’ another line ever fearful of getting caught when a spotlight was shone right in our face and I panicked thinking how much have I got in the bank, and how much would getting caught with cocaine in India cost. And with that panicked look we were both about to bolt when a laughing security guy said, ‘Are you with him?’ pointing at Jay with his thumb, ‘Then it’s cool.’ We still didn’t feel too cool, so went and got Jay, fed him another, then Lou stashed the shit down her pants. Jay’s tunes were great as always and after an hour when the next fulla hadn’t shown up the organiser asked him if he could keep on charging it. So we all celebrated that with a bomb of MD, smoked a joint and got on down. It was great, like we’d rented the place out just for ourselves. Free beer from Jay’s tab, cocaine backstage and all done with our feet in the warm Indian sand. What more could you want? Mr Sun was off for the night and the stars came out to say hello. By the time Jay wrapped up there were a few more people dancing about, rich hippies with expensive clothes and sun glasses on their heads. That type of shit. Still no one selling drugs though.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

A fenced club, three hundred rupee beers and an entrance fee for the common folk. Was this still the old Goa? The place that began a million dreams? The place that spawned an era? The place that had taken it’s fair and firm foothold in the changes of humanity towards the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty first? Anyway, Jay was finished and booze was cheaper two doors over. It was happy hour down at the Fish Tail cafe apparently so we took the beach exit, were given a wrist band on the way, and finally touched down on Small Vagator beach herself. We were at that stage where you know your eyes are wide and you finger tips are a bit tingly, but we weren’t just high from the drugs, we were high from the atmosphere of our group too. We were all in the same headset and over at Fish Tail we felt like royalty as the guys all knew Jay and cleared a table for us. As we sat down the waiter gave us an extensive menu of cocktails cheaper than the beer at the rave next door. I was Mojitos all the way while my Shnookums had a Pinacolada followed by a Mint Daiquiri. Should we be worried about the ice in a place like this? ‘Nah it’s cool,’ we were told. Jay was on that crappy beer of his and we got into the poison of Kingfisher again. Bruce ordered a vanilla ice cream and a bottle of coke. ‘See, if you get an ice cream soda it’s two hundred and fifty rupees. But if you get a whole order of ice cream and a bottle of coke, you get twice as much for half the price,’ and he showed us the menu, so we could check for ourselves. ‘It’s India man, you’ve just gotta work it out.’ They figured out this was our first time in India and that we were flying straight in Delhi in ten day’s time. The guys had a laugh and said, don’t think the rest is like this. The rest of India aint like Goa at all. After a bit Jay got a call and had to take off to meet someone about a party at Curlies the next night and we got talking with Bruce. He was a nurse that works six months of the year and takes six months off. He reckoned the old Goa could be found a few hours south near a place called Om Beach where he was staying. He was just up taking a holiday from his holiday to see Jay play. We talked about the ten year anniversary world tour Jay was doing and how he was going from India back to London for a few weeks then it was off again to South Africa and then Brazil. I said about how often it is, like tonight, people organise these raves thinking, ‘build it and they will come’, but they’re not successful. How does he get paid then? Bruce said usually it’s all contracts and shit but somethings you can’t help. Besides how much can you expect to get paid at party on a beach in India? Jay puts a lot of work into Free Spirit and has some excellent signings on his label, but even with the Tribal Village parties he holds in London and all the touring, Bruce reckoned if it wasn’t from the support of his wife Bridget, Jay could never do it. Or more not maintain the level of lifestyle he was living. It’s just the reality of the passion for your art over real life. Me? I’ve never gotten paid. I work as much as I can and save up to do this. The fact is, Jay although successful, still can only survive in this lifestyle through the support of a good woman... As he gallivants around the world. We moseyed to the party, and it was filling up. Well, there were a hundred or so people milling about the place. I snuck up to the toilets to have a cheeky one. The cubicle was walled up around you but when I looked up, there was great big fuckin’ coconut tree right above me. I got paranoid that it would be me of all people that one of the cunts would decide to drop and

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

smash on the head. And there I would be found, with Cocaine, MDMA Lebanese hash, and would be paying off the cops big time. Even just for them not to tell the insurance company or else I wouldn’t get paid out. Those cunts will find any reason not to pay your medical bills innit. Someone was playing and they were alright, but ol’ Bruce looked over and goes, ‘I bet they wish they had Jay playing now eh!’ He was fuckin’ too right. This person was a bit wishy-washy and didn’t even really build up the music, it was just one long droning, wooga, wooga, wooga, wooga with no ups or downs or anything. Jay came back and I passed the water. I’d decided I wasn’t gonna pay three hundred rupees a beer, no matter how much money I had. And the fucker took a big mouthful and whale sprayed it all over me and my lover girl! ‘What the fuck?’ outta shear confusion. His eyes went wide as fuck and you could see him trying to piece everything together. ‘Woah, sorry guys, I thought it was vodka, and took a big swallow, then I realised it wasn’t and I panicked and spat it out. I didn’t reli... I’m sorry Louise, man, I must be too fucked up. Anyway Bryce, why are you drinking water? Hey let me go get you some beers.’ And that was it, he was off. Bruce was laughing and goes, ‘I gave him some LSD 50 before, it’s double strength acid. I’ve taken some too. Do you want any?’ ‘Not really actually.’ Even I was surprised at myself, but hey, we had our own if the right feeling came about but tonight wasn’t the place. And besides, I haven’t been in any rush to take acid for a while now. I was still smashing it after Ozora when I got back amongst those I loved, but eventually it just got the better of us all. Too many of us had screamed at some point because of it. The innocence of LSD was long gone. I had taken too much of that shit to be in any rush to expand my mind further. My mind has been expanded enough thank you very much. We drank the beers and talked some shit in between alright tunes, and Jay disappeared again. I found him up by the bar talking with some dude and he introduced me as a writer, which was pretty cool. Although I may have written a few books I’ve never made any money out of it and consider myself a worker like everyone else. I sure as fuck aint no artist that got rich from his habit. ‘This dude writes the most fucked up shit,’ he said. ‘He goes around the world to parties takes loads of drugs and writes about it. I’m in his Brazil story at Universo Paralello and he has this chapter about rolling me this massive cocaine spliff. It’s fuckin’ funny as.’ So I gave the dude one the stickers I’ve had made up with my website and shit on it, and then Jay got us a couple of beers on his tab. He told the barman that our drinks were free all night and all was awesome. The party carried on, we got tired and called it a night. We had no idea how to get home, so ended up paying some laughing taxi driver cunt six hundred rupees for the three minute drive. Back home, we started on the Futurama box set that I had and took swigs of tequila until we both passed out.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

A bit of a shitty night Now we knew where Small Vagator and all the local bars were it was time hit the beach and get some sun. The shame was we woke up at three in the afternoon, again! Ahh fuck we couldn’t help it. The first night we just sat on the balcony sniffing away at the coke until fuck knows o’clock and we’d been out and partying ever since. Today was going to be no exception. But Louise was determined to get a bit of sun time, so we pulled our shit on, dodged all the clothing, rugs, blankets, pipes, bongs, lighters, Buddha statues, fridge magnets and incense sellers and made our way down to the bottom of the hill and Vagator beach. There were hundreds of Indian tourists walking about the place, the girls dressed more western in jeans and long sleeve shirts while the older ladies covered themselves with Saris that showed their flabby midriffs which exploded out of the tightly wound cloth like sweaty cottage cheese in a school lunch box. There were more Indian tourists than there was Western for sure. Up on the right at the top of a dry and desolate hill, the orange crumbling walls of Chapora fort stood out against the pale blue sky. People scuttled about beneath them like an army of ants in the sun. A couple of kite surfers ploughed back and forth across the edge of the foaming waves and fat brown cows lay around on the beach without a care in the world; gods in a world filled with human servants. There was a bit of a wind and the temperature was starting to drop so instead of a swim my shnookums and me walked hand in hand past the groups of staring Indians and lacklustre cows. With Chapora Fort behind us we trawled left around the pathway beneath the carpark on the hill above following the cobbled path we had been told on our first night was a bit dodgy in the dark. We came across four or five small wooden blue fishing boats, more like big canoes. As two fishermen repaired a net, tourists clambered out over the sharp rocks so they could selfie with the setting sun. We got ‘round the corner when Small Vagator opened up for us for the first time in daylight. Finally we got to take in what everyone had been talking about for so many decades. Small Vagator was the heart and soul of the movement which has shaped our culture. Now it was all tall palm trees and blue tarpaulin covered bars with beer signs and deck chairs out the front. Closest to us was a guesthouse with outdoor beds and tables which had white curtains around them so you could shut yourself off. There was no one there to listen to the cheesy house music they were playing. At the far end Chronicle slid down the hillside like an overpriced sore, and above that an expensive hotel joined the masses of companies trying to cash in on the reputation of a bygone time. In the far distance another orange spit stuck out into the ocean completing the crescent moon shape of the cove. My online friends had all lived here on this beach or roundabouts some fifty years earlier in pointed tipis and shacks built from whatever material they could salvage. How had they survived with no fresh water or obvious place to buy food? No wonder they’re all skinny as rakes when you go through their photos of the time. All except Georgette who managed to stay the most beautiful woman of her era. Christ even with all that, even if food and water weren’t problems, how did they deal with the bugs and snakes and all sorts of fuckin’ creepy crawly shit that lived there too? But I’d rather all that than be drafted into a murderous war campaign like the yanks were up to in Vietnam. Kill for the

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

State or go to prison. What fuckin’ choices are those in a democratic world that was s’posed to be fighting for freedom and equality for all? We found the Fish Tail bar and as we walked up the waiter from last night recognised us, dusted off a couple of seats and a table just off the beach and brought out the cocktail menus. It was Mojito time. Next to us a fulla with combat shorts and no shirt on was eating a massive vegetable thali with rice, chapattis, peas, cauliflower, mango chutney and lime pickle. We got talking away about our trip – like every time ya’ meet someone when ya’ travellin’. But this guy was different though. He gave us some solid advice and we chose to ignore it. Maybe it was ‘cause he looked like he’d been livin’ here a bit too long? Expats can get a bit funny ya’ know. A look in their eye. Maybe it was ‘cause of the all the thali flyin’ outta ‘is mouth when he talked?’ Maybe nothing was gonna’ stop us headin’ up to see the Dalai Lama? With his bits of rice and bread spittin’ everywhere he was like, ‘Nah, don’t do it. You’re goin’ the wrong way. There’s no point goin’ up the mountains now. It’ll be freezin’. It’ll take you ages to get there. Then you’ll end up sittin’ doin’ nothin’ for three days reading a book around a fire drinkin’ hot chocolate, then comin’ back.’ He said with a laugh, ‘Go anywhere but there.’ And with a shake of his head, ‘You got the whole of India.’ ‘No man we gotta go. We gonna follow Rick Stein man and take the toy train, then figure out a way to Dharamsala.’ He was still shakin’ his head and shovellin’ the thali down. ‘Well good luck to ya’s. You bring any warm clothes?’ ‘Nope.’ He just carried on eating, with a laugh and a smile to himself, shakin’ his head like we were mad. The young American fullas we’d met at the party next to Curlies showed up, joined us for a drink and asked where the next party was. I told them Jay was playing at Curlies tonight but when some girl came around handing out flyers I got all confused and ended up sending them to her one in Chapora instead. We nearly went there too but later Jay rang up and told us it was all on for tonight at Curlies over in Anjuna. The boys had a room up at the flash hotel on the hillside and they reckoned it was awesome, the views were all ocean and sunset. The only problem was they’d had to listen to the noise from Chronicle all night long. Which is fine if ya’ partying but if ya’ wanted a bit of peace and quiet you were fucked. With another party coming up in a few hours I made the effort to have a fat as fuck feed. So I ordered the most expensive fish dish they did. A sizzler plate with all kinds of shit on it. Thing was though they covered it with a green sauce that was garlicky and salty as fuck. There was a piece of mackerel on it that didn’t look too shit hot either. But I thought fuck it, I’ll either be sick or I won’t and chowed that shit down after posting pictures on facebook of me lording it with my seafood. We were all cocktails and sunset on the beach; waiting for the next rave while everyone in London were all like, coats, scarves, gloves and woolly hats. Even after Mr Sun clocked out of his shift for the night it was shirt off and shorts weather. I had me red New York baseball cap that my mate Roberto had scored for me on a recent trip there, my crappy old shorts, my wallet in my left pocket, and my black-ops switch blade, right front pocket, just above the knee. I’ve got glasses on these days ‘cause I’ve spent the

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... last few years sittin’ in front of a computer for a job. I properly managed to bullshit my way off the tools and specialise in healthcare building services compliance, interesting shit eh. My hair was scruffy and greasy and I had a three month old beard that looked more like curly pubic hair than nice flowing beard. Hey that’s me though. There was s’posed to be another iconic hippy monument here in Small Vagator, the face of Shiva carved into a rock at the end of the beach somewhere near the front of Chronicle. It was dark now but we had a few hours to kill, so we paid up and went to have a nosey for it. Arm in arm we walked up the beach without a fuck in the world. On our right the ocean crashed in white flowing waves and on our left the hill side was strewn with the coloured lights of dozens of bungalows, apartments and guesthouses. There were a few people sat around the bars on the beach and Chronicle stood empty – with its three quid beers – up above us. Beneath there we found a small bar with a pool table and a couple of well dressed Indian guys. One opened the hundred and fifty rupee Kingfishers and the other set up the pool table at fifty rupees a go. A pound fifty a beer and fifty ‘p a game of pool? What was this? Crazy! Oh well fuck it, we were on holiday we could afford a few luxuries ya’ know. Still though, they were only sixty p’ up at the Mango Tree. The guys were great and one of them had papers so I could roll a joint. I asked them about the carving and Mr Pool said it was right out the front. So he took me around and lit it up with his torch for me. The carving was about three foot round and made out of the sandstone that makes up the end of the beach. Like the Sphinx the nose had come away a bit but in general it was in good condition, and even in the dark, I could see some detail in the hair. But time and the ocean had worn away at the skull earrings that were s’posed to be there too. It was still loved though and a fresh chain of yellow flowers had been left on top of Shiva’s forehead. It was fuckin’ pitch black out now, and we had no torch on us, but the fullas at the bar said to wait around while they packed it up and they’d show us the best way off the beach. Well dunno if it was the best way, it was certainly the fuckin’ steepest ‘cause they lead us right up the hillside past the big hotel and out to a different carpark and road we hadn’t seen before. They told us to just take a left and follow the road around. We took a few wrong turns but it was cool to see a new part of where we were living and some of the more, off the main road, guesthouses. Even packs of cigarettes were cheaper out this way. We grabbed a beer for the walk and after a few directions from local shop owners that were sitting around in the sweaty evening heat. After a few close calls with cars that were being driven way too fast for the dark bending roads we found ourselves walking by our old place and the Chinese restaurant with its barking piggy dog. Mr Sun had checked out around six and it was just after seven. We were just walking down the hill towards Vagator and the Pizza Place guesthouse when Jay rang. He was on at Curlies at eight. Fuck we’d better get a move on. There was just time for a fat, Woo hoo- we’re-off-to-see-Jay-play sized line of the ever diminishing Charlie, make up a wrap of MDs big enough to dab away at all night, take a swig of tequila, and simple as that, it was party time. The lady at reception’s name was Lakshmi and she ordered us a cab while we went out and had a beer with the Thai looking fulla behind the bar.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

‘Hey how’s it,’ he said as we grabbed a seat. ‘You guys wanna plug in your tunes while you wait?’ and we listened to a little Booka Shade to get us in the mood. The cab came and we got dropped off up the back of Curlies with a few teeth still numb from the coke and a warm beer in my hand. It was the only way to go. We were a bit a late but that’s the fashion innit. Jay was up on the trance floor stage between Curlies and the place we’d partied a few nights earlier. It was lit up with UV now though and was well impressive. It looked like Jay was playing from inside a tangle of fluorescent green and purple vines, while behind him a blurred video of him played back live mixed with psychedelic shades. Above the screen a huge blue and green swirl looked like a crashing wave and off to either side stretched, the always fuckin’ present, but always fun to see what people can make with it, stretchy glow in the dark material that laddered out into the darkness. Above us giant green and orange vines capped off the trance floor with the ocean and beach below and behind us. Bruce was there with his ever present smile and when he went to hug us a happy hello, I saw he’d had an Om symbol tattooed on the palm of his right hand. His eyes shone like always and the crows feet around those eyes were side effects of a lifetime spent grinning. Gael was there too, and he hugged us a big fat hello and passed his beer over to share. What could be better? There were loads of Indian fullas around at the party, way more than the hippy westerners I expected. They were dressed well and to me seemed out of place a bit in their shiny shoes and flashy watches at an outdoor trance party. But they were friendly enough. We passed around the MDs for a dab and as it was sinking in we kicked all our footwear into a pile in the middle of us. I’d taped up me toes ‘cause my NEKI flip flops were murderous and had taken the skin off them the night before around the toe bit. We were gettin’ on down to the trance of Jay’s Journey tunes, right uplifting shit it was. Real hands in the air at times. Ya’ know it’d build up over a bit of time until everyone there was hootin’ and hollerin’. Bruce shuffled on over, said he was off the next day back down south to Om Beach and asked if I wanted to take the last of his hash off his hands so he didn’t have to risk taking it on the train. Said the police look out for long haired people to search for a bit of bribery money. Or baksheesh as the locals call it. He had four cubes of it. ‘Each one is a half tola,’ he told me. ‘A fuckin’ what?’ ‘A half tola,’ he laughed with and rubbed my shoulders. ‘A tola is ten grams-ish, depending on who you know and how much they like ya’.’ ‘Fuck yeah how much you want for them?’ ‘Pfff I dunno? A hundred rupees a gram ok?’ ‘What a pound a gram? And there’s twenty grams here, so you want two thousand rupees?’ Jay was ramping up the sounds. ‘Only if you’re happy with that. It is really good charas, I got it up in Rishikesh. I have a friend up there who makes it,’ Bruce yelled over the thumping bass lines as Jay built up the crowd again. And although we were deep in the talk we still shuffled our bare feet in the dirt. ‘Yeah every year I go up there when I first get to India and they bring out all the different hashes for me to sample, and every year he reckons I manage to pick the same hash from the same farmer in the same valley up near Parvati. It’s nice, not too dry but not too sticky either, got a wonderful taste.’ And he lit up a joint. ‘See,’ and passed it over as pungent thick blue clouds of smoke cut through the salty air.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

I added it all up in my head. An ounce of this quality charas would cost about two hundred odd quid in London, about seven pound a gram, and ol’ Bruce here only wanted a quid each. Fuck it, I gave him two and a half thousand. I counted the money out then fucked off to the bar to get a beer each for me and Gael, Louise a gin and tonic and a bottle of water for Bruce. A couple of their other mates showed up from down Om Beach way, their holiday was nearly over and they were heading back to real life in the UK. Urgh fuck that, ours was only just beginning. We were on the fifth night and the third party and although starting to feel a bit drained we were looking forward to the next couple of months out of London with its shitty winters and overcrowded tubes. Jay finished his storming set and left the trance floor in the safe hands of some chick trance maker and we all went upstairs at Curlies for a sit down and a spliff. We got up the top and the waiters sat us at a low table with cushions around it, just up above and on the left of the dance floor. It was beers and gins all round along with a fanta for Bruce. I showed him the Lebanese I’d brought with me, and he was like, ‘Nah I only smoke stuff where I know where it’s come from.’ ‘What? Wha’da’ya’ mean?’ You cold mother fucker. It took a lot of effort to get this to India. ‘This is the finest pollen the mountains could produce.’ And I went off into the story about how I’d met my ol’ friend Kimmy up in the mountains of Lebanon and he’d taken me to homelands of the shit. I’d been out in the fields watching it grow and had gotten involved with the workers pulling out the male plants and dumping them in piles. Being in a stinky green field of marijuana had been a life dream accomplished. I told Bruce how me and Louise went back about eight months later at harvest time and were given the option of about ten different hashes the first day. Thing was though, none of them weren’t that good. Kimmy was like, ‘They are testing you man. Never buy anything from them on the first day.’ Then the Lebanese guys pulled out three other types of hash the next day, and said with a smile, ‘Then I think it’s one of these ones you want then.’ The choices were Jamaican, which was black and rubbery tasting but got ya’ well stoned, the Lebanese which was yellower and you could smoke all day without getting that wasted. That’s what Kimmy smoked nonstop. And finally the Mexican, which was just right. A nice heady but lazy and easy high, with a flavour that would beat any caramel fudge cake. Back in India. ‘Oh,’ Bruce said. The story had finally managed to swindle him into trying it. ‘That does taste nice. So you brought that from Lebanon to India? Why would you do that? I bet that’s the only bit of Lebanese hash in the whole of India at the moment.’ He stopped for a minute, then, ‘Let me have another go on it,’ and he took a long drag savouring the flavours like rich fucks do cigars. He carried on, ‘That is good, when you first showed me I thought, that is the worst imitation of charas I’ve ever seen. Who sold that to these poor fuckers? But I understand now. It’s pollen not charas.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘this is made by shaking the dried crystals off the dead plant when it’s all frozen in winter and you can shake the crystals off. Ya’ charas is made by people rubbing their hands on the buds of the living plant during the sticky hot days of summer innit.’ We finished off our drinks, ordered another round to take with us and Jay being the gentleman he is chucked the whole lot on his tab. ‘Help ya’self at the bar,’ he said. ‘Just tell them they’re for me.’

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Well fuckin’ thank you very much sir. ‘Dab of MD’s anyone?’ and waved around the little wrap I’d made up. We got down to the dancefloor as we were finishing off the latest spliff and a big group of Indian guys in their early twenties started dancing around us. One of them came up and with his hands in the prayer shape, he waggled his head, smiled and asked if he could have a puff. ‘Course he could, it tasted mostly of tobacco by now anyway, but besides that I was in India and still really hadn’t had a chance to hang out with Indians yet. He took a great big dramatic drag, puffing his chest out while he did it, and went to pass it back. ‘Fuck it, keep it dude.’ And all his mates squealed like little girls and gathered around him, the toughest pushed his way to the front of them get the next hit. Next thing I knew the fulla wanted a photo with me. Fair enough I s’pose so we posed for a picture. ‘Please one more with my friends in it too. But you in the middle with me. Oh now you must take a picture with my friend here,’ and the one who’d bullied his way through them for the dragged ends of the joint came up put his arm around me and posed for a photo. ‘Now with your wife please? Now one with her and my friends.’ And another and another. After being in about twenty fuckin’ photos I got a bit sick of it, and dragged Louise back over to Bruce and the others. The guys were really friendly and were chatting with all the different westerners and it seemed a good mix of Indians and tourists was beginning to happen. Then another group of about five or six Indian guys showed up with no shirts on and started dancing around and posing and flexing their muscles. Some new DJ fulla came on stage and started to play some dirty full-on trance while he went nuts on a didgeridoo. It was great, real raw and dark sounding. He could get that thing to whhoooooo and waarrrrrrr in awesome time with the dooga, dooga, dooga, dooga of the basslines. Meanwhile we noticed the last group of guys were starting to try and pull some of the hippy girls that were there. They’d sorta walk up right in front of them, stare them in the eyes and shuffle about a bit, not really dancing. The hippies around were trying to ignore them and the girls were trying with difficulty to avoid eye contact with these fullas that were almost stalking them now. They kept getting closer and closer to a girl, until she would finally just give up and walk off the dance floor. Another guy just circled the girls and would flex his biceps right in front of them and his friends would come up, put their arms around him and point at them. Like he was king awesome or something. You could see some girls were a bit afraid by the whole scene; quite a few left. Me and Bruce had like a silent little nod at each other across the floor and he came over and said, ‘You gotta watch it a bit when it gets like this. The Indian girls won’t have sex with them outside of marriage and the rich Indian guys all think that they can come down to Goa and fuck the white western chicks. They think well, if she’s with this guy and not married, she must be fucking him, and I’m muscled and rich so she will fuck me too.’ ‘What the fuck? That’s exactly how they’re acting too the cunts?’ ‘Yeah they’ll go back and show all their friends how cool they were hanging out with the hippies in Goa. These guys are all rich Indian tourists. The Goans are completely different. Way more laid back.’ And he sorta shrugged his shoulders. Louise needed to go to the toilet, so I went up with her, I didn’t think it was cool or safe to let her go walking off at this rave party on the beach. This imagined slice of heaven that was

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

in the heart of a million dreams. This dirty seedy club with its unwanted cunts taking advantage of our western need to be polite to those around us. I made sure she had the blue switch blade in her purse too. We got back to the dance floor and the guy I’d passed the spliff to earlier came up and put his arms around me again, ‘Just one more photo for my friend please?’ ‘No.’ ‘May I have a cigarette then please?’ ‘Ok,’ fuck it why not? I still wanted to chat with these fullas. Where ever I travel I try and make a point to hang out with the locals at some point, try and learn their language ya’ know. Next thing though I look up for Louise and she’s got four dudes around getting photos and flexing their muscles to her and shit. I was starting to get wound up. I wasn’t feeling to shit hot either. To tell the truth I was feeling real drained and a bit queasy. The last dab of MDs hadn’t seen me right at all. Maybe I’d just taken too much. I let Louise know then went for a sit down at the side of the dance floor and some European fulla asked if I was ok, then gave me a sip of his water. I gave him a dab of MDs as a thank you. He wanted to know if I was selling it. ‘No.’ There were still no drug dealers walking around and I thanked fuck that I had brought my own drugs to India. Man if we’d saved all fuckin’ year, quit our jobs and come here, and not been able to buy any drugs in the homeland of psychedelic trance and full moon parties, I woulda been well pissed. Yes alright we’d been able to get sorted through Jay and Bruce but still. That would only have been what they were able to give us, and we wouldn’t have been free to do as we fuckin’ wanted when we fuckin’ wanted. We woulda been living hand to mouth. The trance the didgeridoo guy was playing was in full Goan swing, it was good original Goa trance. Louise was fine with Bruce and the others, I was feeling a bit funny but didn’t wanna go through the crowds up to the toilet, so I took a walk down onto the beach and along the hundred or so metres to the end to take a slash in the ocean. On the way back a group of eastern European sounding fullas were smoking bongs. Maybe a fat bong would sort me out? So I asked the fulla packing them if he’d swap a bong for a dab. He didn’t believe it was actual MD’s until I picked out a nice crystal for myself and took it. Then he packed that bong good and tight and we made the trade. He asked if he could buy some, but I wasn’t selling. We only had enough for us. We talked about how surprised we were that you couldn’t actually buy any drugs at these raves in Goa. And that maybe the dream of the movement that started on these very beaches all those decades ago was over. That freedom from society we are all searching for and which spawned a scene and generation all of its own. Maybe that was done now, and all this shit and these clubs were just here cashing in on the back of that dream? Maybe the Goa Hippy Tribe was no more? There sure as shit wasn’t anyone sleeping in tipis or anything around Vagator and Anjuna these days. Well not that I knew of anyway. I got back up to the trance floor and the old didgeridoo man was goin’ berserk up there, it would, wiiiiible and woooooble and wooooo, woooo, wooo, in time with the beats. It was real great stuff. Original, weird. Ol’ scum bag muscles had latched onto some blonde bird while three of his mates kept the guy she was with busy. One of his other mates plied her with drinks and we all gave each

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

other a look. I thought fuck it. I’ll fuckin’ waste these cunts if they say anything to me, and I went up to the girl, stood between her and the guy and said, ‘You need to be a bit more careful girl. These guys have no good intentions here for you man.’ She sorta went, ‘Pfff...’ at me and waved me off with a flick of her hand. Fuck her then. Louise wanted the toilet again, but was like, ‘Don’t worry I got the knife, I’ll fuckin’ stab ‘em if they try any shit on me.’ This wasn’t the essence of Trance. The essence of Trance has dogs running around, powerful and free women, dreadlocks and hopefully somewhere to swim. It shows up in worn out caravans, not lowered hatchbacks with tinted windows that’s acid techno. I didn’t really wanna leave her to walk off on her own at Curlies, but there were other hippy chicks kickin’ about and Louise is a tough cookie. She is a nurse after all. My lover girl came back not long later with a new beer and sad look. ‘Cut myself with the knife in the toilet didn’t I? Fuckin’ ‘ell.’ And she showed me the razor thin line down her palm. It wasn’t really bleeding, ‘How the fuck did you do that?’ and laughed. The first dude from earlier must have drunk up more courage or something ‘cause he came back up to us again and now started to dance between me and Louise, he was staring her right in the eyes with that dead pan stare that they must think is smouldering, sexy. My little shnookums was trying to just ignore him, and I thought well, she can look after herself. It’s best I don’t smother her so she can deal with shit like this as the holiday continues. I sorta stood there for a second puffing on a fag, not feeling to healthy, not feeling too happy about this either. His mates came up and started trying to talk to me again, putting their arms around and asking for, ‘Just one puff of your cigarette please sir? Just one more photo?’ Their hands all in the prayer shape and shit and their heads waggling about. I ignored them and patiently watched this cunt make his move on Louise, my little shnookums, my lover girl; right in front of me... Bam!! I snapped. I had enough money in the bank to pay the cops off. I took the black-ops knife out my pocket, left it locked closed, grabbed the cunt by collar, and turned him so he could look me in the eyes with that sexy stare of his while I snarled at him, ‘If you don’t fuck off right now and leave us alone I’m gonna kill you right here on this dance floor, you fuckin’ cuuuuunt!!!’ The bitch turned whiter than I was, you could see the reality snap into overdrive in his brains as his eyes changed from smouldering to terrified. Like a pack of wild dogs with my foot up their arse, he grabbed his mates and they scampered off to under which ever gold plated rock they had crawled out from underneath. I was fuckin’ fuming now and the stupid blonde bitch I tried to warn earlier was twerkin’ her ass all over Mr Muscles, with a smug look on her face, as his group of friends that were spread out around the dance floor kept looking at each other while another mate kept the guy she was with distracted. None of the Indians were drinking alcohol themselves, or if they were six of them were sharing one bottle of beer. It was obvious what the guys were doing now. They were using the excuse of having photos or wanting to just talk, to separate girls from their friends. Then they were giving them drinks while not drinking themselves. They were organised and you

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

could see the silent communications between them all. And ol’ Mr Muscles was lovin’ it. He was obviously their weapon. I had to say something to the fulla that these guys were getting photos with and taking cigarettes from. So I interrupted whatever conversation he was having with the Indian dude that had his arm around him, and said, ‘These aint your friends man. They’ve kept you busy while they’re plying your mate over there with booze and then they’re gonna have their way with her dude.’ ‘Fuck her,’ he said. ‘She knows what she’s doing.’ ‘Really?’ Oh well, learn a lesson. Even other people tried to have a word while these boys strutted about and kept posing in front of any new chick who dared to try and have a good time on the dance floor. Every girl there at some point soon found themselves in different corners of the dance floor from their friends with these dangerous, raping, fucktards giving them the thousand yard stare that must have come from some popular Bollywood flick. I felt really drained all of a sudden and a wave of nauseous heat flushed through my body. ‘Gonna be fuckin’ sick I think. You stay with Bruce.’ I managed to get out to my lover before I tore off the dance floor and ran down to the beach trying not to spew all over the crowd of people as I tried to politely push through them. There were a few deck chairs strewn about the place and I took the only empty one then spewed my guts up all over the beach. I was crippled over, sweat pouring from me, throwing up on a beach filled with people and not one person; not one of the people who’d travelled from all over the world to take their slice of this supposed peace pie, asked if I was ok. Not one! I pulled myself together still thinking it was the drugs, and feeling rubbish as fuck crawled my way back up onto the trance floor. Louise was there with our team, Jay had disappeared an hour or so earlier, reckoned he was going to the dentist in Mapusa in the morning. The blonde girl was gone and so was the entire group of guys that had targeted her. Her mate was still on the dance floor, so I asked him if he knew where she was. ‘Nope,’ and he looked a bit bewildered. ‘I fuckin’ told you man. Now ya’ mate’s pissed off with about ten Indian guys, ‘cause look, they’ve all gone too. Have you been watching the amount of booze they were giving her? No, both of ya’s ignored peoples’ advice and now you’re stood here and she’s fuck knows where, hopefully not bleeding and crying for help! And you’ve only just fuckin’ noticed she’s missing!’ I was fuckin’ angry with the guy. Who knows what was happening. You gotta have ya’ fuckin’ head screwed on a bit better when ya’ travelling for fuck’s sake. Maybe she was a date that had ditched him or some friend that had been cock-blocking him the whole holiday that just went off shagging big buff blokes whenever she was sick of controlling this fucker’s life. Fuck them both, where was the peace and love in this shit hole? Phwoar I felt rough, as an image of the girl being gang raped by that pack of wild dogs flushed through my mind I charged back down to the beach again and hurled my last drink all over the sand. Still no one came to see if I was ok. Except my shnookums obviously, she came down after a few minutes, rubbed my back and held my water for me while I tried to pull myself together. I could see in my mind that poor girl waking up in the morning on the beach somewhere drugged, bloodied and gathering her clothes together and unable to cry with those big blue

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

eyes as she fought to breathe and piece together what had happened to her the night before. Would it be something she could tell to anybody or would she keep the shame of being raped through her own arrogance towards even other girls’ advice, and her ignorance to even register the dangers of her own surroundings to herself? ‘Blllaaarrrgggh,’ as I chucked up some stinking bits of rotting curried fish that curled up through my nostrils. The fish! You fuckin’ bastards. ‘Hooooooaaaaaaauuuurrghhh,’ I’m a vocal spewer at the best of times. ‘Lover, those bastards poisoned me with that fish sizzler I think.’ Just the thought of it and I yacked up another lump of yellow bile, and stomach lining. ‘We need to get outta here before I start shitting everywhere.’ So that was it, paradise was over and the scene seemed to be dirty. We gave Bruce a real meaningful hug goodbye and then shared a cab home with Gael. He was staying on the way. Still though, he didn’t offer a single rupee for the eight hundred rupee taxi fare we were charged. Oh well. We got home fuckin’ just in time, it’d never taken so long to unlock a door as I willed my ass cheeks to stay together so that the diarrheic shit wouldn’t explode all down my legs and across the floor. It was every man for himself as I flew past my shnookums, and leapt onto the toilet pulling my pants down in midair on the way. I was still a few inches from the seat when my body won the contest over my mind and shit and puke exploded outta both ends of me at the same time. I was shitting so hard it sounded like I was taking a piss. And spew was powering out me at such a rate it was coming outta every hole in my face, but there was nowhere for it go except all over the floor between my feet. I gotta moment’s lapse and managed to get the bin from under the basin to catch the vomit and thick, sour, stringy bile, which clung to my bottom lip like a fluorescent bungee cord. The toilet and shower area was so thin and laid out in such a way that I could rest my sweat dripping forehead on the wall in front of me so from a distance it may have seemed like I was praying as I called the names of various western gods in between gasps of fresh air, vomit and anal ejaculation. It was a tough eight hours but you have to go through nights like this when you come from our sanitised first world countries to the outback third world ones. You gotta get sick just to build up your good fighting bacteria again. But it was a hard lesson learned.

Don’t eat the fish in India.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

A day at the beach and two likeable lads from Leeds So I’d been fuckin’ sick as a dog for eight hours of power. I spent the next day wallowing in bed drinking water and finished off the first season of Futurama then started on the second. My Snuggles finally got down the beach in time for a swim and came back looking like she was on a beach holiday. The winter worries of London had gone and now she was glowing in her flip flops and sunglasses. Her beach towel was slung over her shoulders. I stared in the mirror and I looked like I’d been partying for days. My skin was white, almost translucent blue from lack of sunlight for months now. My eyes were red and stung, my eyelids feeling like razor blades over my eyeballs. Greasy pimples boiled away just under the surface of my face and a couple of big curly hairs stuck out from my shoulders. My feet scuffed the floor when I walked and I hadn’t put on a pair of pants for twenty four hours. I was deadly afraid to fart too. Anything could happen if I farted. There were risks involved, so every time my guts rumbled I had to go sit on the toilet just to be sure my inside didn’t end up on the outside. But I was confident I would be stronger now. My digestive system had had to fight off some vile rotten ass fish, poisoning bacteria. I had become weak from the sanitised world of London and now I was ready for India. Fuck Indian food though. I was back to Western in a big way. My Lover had read my mind, ‘I ordered a pizza from John up at the bar. He makes them himself.’ She put down a cold bottle of orange fanta for me and as the sun set once more in our little slice of India, me and Louise ate pizza and drank fizzy soft drinks; like were we still back in London. Except it was warmer here. The pizzas were fuckin’ awesome too. We ate another one straight away. Strictly vegetarian though. The next day we were up and about at like nine am. We’d been here nearly a week, and for the first time it was morning in Goa and we weren’t just going to bed. We weren’t even hung over or anything! I felt great. I’d had a day and a half hiding away under my fan in our cool room. We’d watched one of the Futurama films the night before. It was a fucked up concept. Some alien from another dimension sent tentacles through to our universe which attached themselves to people, making all of humanity one shared collective of thought. Anyway, it was beach day finally. I put on my brightest coloured beach shorts, taped up me toes so the flip flops wouldn’t tear the scab off them that had now formed on both feet, put on sunglasses and hat. I grabbed my book, which was called, ‘The Help’, it was about servant maids working in America and they were treated nasty, and off we went. We smashed a fat breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast, grabbed a bottle of water from John behind the bar, passed by two pasty looking fullas who were smoking charas through a pipe next to us, said hello, and received a cheery, ‘Hey up there geezer,’ in return. We were gonna stop for a chat but the fullas waved us on and said, ‘You go down beach now it’s luverly. We’ll still be here when you get back. Quick have a puff of this before you go.’ And they passed over the pipe to us. The temp must have been in the high twenties and as we took a right out of the Pizza Place, we ‘Namaste’d’ the various stall on owners that lined the road down the hill on the way to the beach. I did stop off at one guy who just had a range of pipes sat on some steps and for a hundred rupees, bought myself a little wooden pipe and some mesh to go in it.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Perfect, sorted. We saw a muslim fulla who ran a money exchange at 93 rupees to the pound which was twenty rupees a pound better than the airport, so we, ‘Salaam alaikum’d him and I touched my heart as I did it. I’d learnt some basic Arabic in Lebanon. The usual story, I knew the numbers, hellos, goodbyes, how much, too much and thank you. We took the left at the carpark up above and between Small Vagator and Vagator beaches. Finally, someone offered to sell me hash, a taxi driver on the corner, but it was too late now. I had twenty grams of Bruce’s charas, about four of my Lebanese and even a pipe to smoke it all through. He was way too late. But I did think. Fuckin’ hell man I’ve been in Goa a week, before the first person even tried to sell me drugs. I woulda been well pissed off if I’d had to wait a week for a joint. That’s just not how I roll. We thanked him and hand in hand just carried on walking with my belly poking out from above my shorts and our towels slung over our shoulders. The sky was bright blue and Chapora fort looked just outstanding up on the cliff the other side of Vagator bay. Buses were lined up dropping families of Indians off and we took a steep pathway down to the right, and onto the sand of the main Vagator beach. It was crowded but at least no asshole was trying to charge us nine Euros to sit on a deck chair under an umbrella. I hate that shit. We cruised right up past all the families that were picnicking. And said hello to the odd cow that was moochin’ about floppin’ its big ears. There were a couple of dogs sniffin’ away near an over flowing rubbish can; the kite surfing guys were setting up at the far end. We weren’t sure if it was cool for Louise to be flashing her Western self off in her bikini and stuff. I had my feet in the ocean for the first time since Halong Bay in Vietnam a year before and my swim like a fish tendencies were coming right back at me. We got to the far end where it was a bit quieter, and dumped my shit in the sand and stomped off into the water while my lover girl set herself up. Sometimes you just gotta let girls organise themselves. Guys, we can dump our shit anywhere and go play without a moment’s thought. They say noise travels out over the open water but I think it’s the opposite. It’s so calming for it to be just you and the sound of the waves crashing. It’s like the only time you can really hear yourself breathe. I went out a bit to where the one or two foot waves were crashing and tried my best to body surf along with them but I’m a bit heavy and slow for all that now, more manatee than sailfish. The sun was starting to burn my back. After all this time and effort and only just having got into the sun and ocean after a week of living on the beach, I wasn’t gonna risk getting burned to shit and then not be able to fuckin’ get back in the sun again for another fuckin’ week. So I looked out for my snuggle-muffins and there she was flicking her towel out and going through her bag for something. It was such a perfect scene with the fort above and the trees blowing in the breeze at the bottom of the hill over the wide beach. My eyes followed a couple of hippies that walked past the point at the end of the bay and they disappeared over the rocks and outta sight. A bit closer to me though, was an Indian fulla down on one knee taking shots with his camera. Hang on a second, as I followed his angle. He was taking shots of my lover girl’s ass as she was bent over and still going through her oversized hand bag. ‘Hey, what the fuck are you up to?!’ and he just looked, smiled that childish grin of theirs that is so filled with innocence, waggled his head a bit and carried on down the beach. I was actually quite proud of the man to be honest. Nothing like a good ol’ bit of deviant behaviour

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

to add to your day. I got up to Louise and told her about the fulla. She was like, ‘What?’, and we both had a good laugh as she wiped the factor thirty all over my back, neck and ears. She settled down with her book for a day of sun baking and I went back to the water to lie down, face the beach and people watch. Quite a few people went around the point but I reckoned they were all taking the hefty fuckin’ walk up the steep hill to nosey around the walls of Chapora fort. Fuck that it was way too hot for walking up hills. The temperature must have been getting around the thirty somethings and the kite surfer guys were now set up and one of them was already zig zagging back and forth along the beachfront. Every now and then a boat with one of the floating banana things ya’ tow behind it raced out into the Arab Sea and fully clothed girls and skinny little boys all with life jackets on were dragged all over the place yelling and screaming in pure joy. Time passed too fast and as Mr Sun started the final stretch of his shift I went back in and shook my wet self all over my dozing snuggles and pretended I was going to kick sand on her like any loving boyfriend would do. There were still a few hours of light left so I thought I’d give the new pipe a go. It was a bit windy, so I crossed over the sand until I got to a few trees at the bottom of the hill beneath the fort and found a calm place where I could have a quick smoke. I was always thinking about the cops busting me, and the cocaine and MDs at our place. I found a spot right in a corner where there’d been a fire maybe as recent as the night before. But who ever had been there were messy cunts and hadn’t bothered to take their empty beer bottles or even try and bury the empty strips of pharmaceutical pill packets that were strewn about the place. Yuck, pharmaceuticals, now that shit’s dangerous. I don’t trust nothing that comes in a packet like that except for diazepam and maybe some liquid ketamine if I could track the right pharmacy down. I knew you could get it in pharmacies over here but so far I hadn’t even seen one. Besides I’d looked online and the police were s’posed to have stopped all that shit now. Another documentary we’d watched before coming, besides Rick Stein’s India, was a YouTube doc. called, Last Hippy Standing. During the interview they had with the chief of police he spelled it out quite clearly. ‘These, people, these hippies. They don’t spend any money, so how can that benefit the region. They come to India and try to live as poor as we are. We have enough poor people in India already. Our beaches are more beautiful and cleaner than Thailand and I want the type of tourists that go there to come here. Not these so called,’ and he spat it out, ‘hippies. Besides they never included the local population in anything they ever did. They had their own culture, beliefs and interpretations of our religion. And not once, did they invite us to join them!’ He was fuckin’ bang on right there too. The times, oh how they are a changin’ eh. I finished off a fat bowl of Bruce’s hash and then went to join my shnookums on the towel so I could start my new book, and keep an eye on the lurking leery men with their cameras. I began reading, The Help, it was an interesting book based on a town out in the Midwest of the States somewhere, where the white people kept black people poor so that they didn’t have to cook, clean or raise their children. They just got poorer people to do it for them and paid them just enough to eat but not enough to better themselves. It wasn’t long though before I started talking in my head how the book read. I started to commentate on everything

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

to Louise, with this uneducated fifties American housecleaner voice. Something like, ‘Now Mr Bryce, he be wantin’ one of them cigarettes from Miss Louise, so he was like, “Miss Louise, Miss Louise, can you be passin’ me one of them Marlboros that you be havin’ in yo’ bag please?”. Well now, Miss Louise, she be passin’ Mr Bryce those cigarettes that he bein’ askin’ fo’ and now ev’rybody is happy. Aint that right Miss Louise?’ Once I got the voice in my head I couldn’t shake it. The book was great especially the build up to the, ‘awful nasty’, incident. Fuckin’ brilliant. ‘Miss Louise, Miss Louise, Can you be bein’ passin’ Mr Bryce that lighter contraption thing that folks be usin’ these days please Miss Louise?’ Mr Sun was out of work again for the night, well, nearly anyway, so we packed up our shit, took our rubbish with us, and with all the effort of someone who’s sat in the sun all day, mooched back up the hill to the guesthouse and on to another pizza and a beer. I was so far from eating Indian food now it wasn’t funny. The two English fullas were up there so we washed off and joined them out the front by the bar. They were still choofing away on their little wooden pipe that they were giving a right run for its money. That pipe must have put out more smoke than a steam train. They were brothers from Leads, Danny and Dave. Danny was older but had more hair, and was a bit more talkative but there was keenness in both their eyes that stated intelligence and compassion as soon as you sat with them. ‘Sit down lad,’ Danny said, ‘’ere why don’t you pull over that table and make ya’selves comfortable eh? That’s right.’ As we dragged over a few chairs. ‘You been down that bar at the’ far end of beach like?’ ‘What bar?’ ‘you go right end of beach, over rocks ‘n roun’a bit more and you’ve got a right ol’ funny place down there like. Aint it funny Dave? ‘The bloke runnin’ it’s a good sort, don’t mind us smokin’ down there but there aint ‘alf some odd characters you’ll see down there like. We met some Indian blokes, they were all young doctors and they was smokin’ from a big bag ‘o grass. Lovely guys, but when they tried this hash here they got a bit quiet like. ‘ere get ya’ gob aroun’ that. Go on Davey pass it over.’ And Davey loaded up the pipe and gave it to me. It had a lovely smooth taste and didn’t half whack ya’ about. I had a puff and tried to pass it on round the circle. ‘No, go on finish it,’ Davey said with a grin. I managed to knock the fucker back, and I was like, ok we’re playing this game are we. ‘Excuse me for one minute please gentlemen. I have a few surprises up my sleeve myself actually. And went back to the room and grabbed out a bit of the Lebanese which was suffering in the heat. It was now just a sticky puddle. I had Bruce’s now to smoke myself so the Lebanese was now to share with real hash fiends. I knew I was bound to come across them on our journeys through India so I thought I’d keep it as nice ice breaker and surprise for the marijuana connoisseurs we’d come across. Danny and Davey were right on that list. I came back up with it and gave them the whole Kimmy story up in the mountains near the beautiful blue town of ...... The Lebanese was about a year old now so the flavour had settled in awesome and it had that real pine smell that you get from the true Sativa strain of dope.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

I filled up their pipe good and proper for them and handed it over to them. John came up with the pizza at the same time. ‘John my friend, you’re a scholar and a gentleman.’ He offered to take an order for another round of drinks, so Louise, was all over a G&T, I had a beer, and offered to buy the other guys one, but Davey was like, ‘Noooo, fook that lad, I can’t fookin’ smoke this shite and drink beer too, that’ll fook me righ’ up it will.’ ‘Ahhh come on man.’ ‘No, a coke would be great though please?’ ‘And I’ll have a fanta please John,’ said Danny. John was back in a minute with the drinks, ‘We’ve got steak on the menu today if you guys want it?’ I was vegetables only, fuck that shit. ‘Oh yeah,’ Davey goes, ‘I’ll have the steak with pepper sauce please?’ We ordered another pizza, with peppers and olives and shit on it. I waited for John to walk off. ‘You’re fuckin’ brave eating meat in India aren’t ya’? Oh god just thinkin’ about it’s making feel sick again. I had the fish down at the Fish tail bar—’ ‘What that cocktail place down on Small Vagator, t’ beach with all t’ hotels on it?’ ‘Yeah that’s the fucker. Awesome place, the guys running it are fuckin’ great, the cocktails are fuckin’ great and cheap as fuck. But I ate the fish there man, and was like, it’s a bit strong in the garlic and salt, but smashed the lot anyway. Well I fuckin’ tell you what. When that son of a bitch hit my guts, I nearly shat myself on the dance floor over in Curlies later that night. I was sick as fuck on the beach, no cunt offered to help—’ ‘Eh what about me, I brought you water?’ said Louise. ‘Exactly except for my lover here. Louise always has my back. But what if I was out there by myself poisoned to fuck and no one even asked if I was ok.’ ‘Nah the food here’s sound,’ Davey said. Nowhere else in the fuckin’ world can you get a steak with pepper sauce for four and fifty rupees. What’s that? Four pound fifty for a fookin’ steak? And it’s fuckin’ good too.’ I was not convinced. ‘Nope no fuckin’ way I’m eating meat here man. You don’t know when they bought it? There’s no one else here but us? He might have bought that two weeks ago.’ ‘We’ve both been eating it ev’ry night son,’ Danny said, while waving smoke from out of his face. ‘and I tell you what you wait till you see this come out, I bet you change ya’ mind then.’ And he chuckled away to himself. ‘I know what ya’ mean about fuckin’ ge’in sick though. Our Danny ‘ere ended up in bloody hospital in fookin’ Delhi. What a fookin’ shit hole that place is eh. ‘Ave ya’ been t’ Delhi yet? What a fookin’ place. If I never have to go back t’ Delhi for the rest of my life, it’d still be too soon I’ll tell ya’ that like.’ ‘Nah we haven’t been there yet.’ Louise said while stirring her G&T with her straw. ‘We fly into Delhi in two weeks now.’ Both guys just laughed, Davey was looking like he didn’t believe anybody could be so crazy as to go to Delhi voluntarily. Danny took a big puff of the pipe and started up again. ‘Well I won’t ruin it for ya’ but I will tell ya’, eh Davey. You listen here right. You might think you’ve seen some shit in your life, but I tell you what, you aint seen nuffin’ till you

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

been to that shit hole. Why the fook would anybody wanna go to that toilet, and I mean that bleedin’ literally too. Everywhere you look there’s some guy takin’ a piss, or you can smell it. Dogs and fuckin’ rats; wait, I won’t give too much away. So you’re flyin’ in then, well that would probably be easier, spent eighteen fookin’ hours on the train from Delhi to fookin Goa we did, and I tell you what,’ and he broke into laughter again, choking on the smoke he was trying to hold in his lungs while he near pissed himself at the story in his head. ‘Where was I? Oh yeah the train was sum’fing else. You think you know slums or at least seen shitty towns in the UK, but they don’t go on for half an hour as the train goes by. Like half an hour of a train driving at speed through some of the worst sights you’ll ever see in your life. How the government can just let all these people live like that is beyond me. Criminal like. But the shit you see, and I mean shit. Sorry love for the language.’ And he looked over at Miss Louise who was busy finishin’ off her gin and tonic and wond’rin’ where Mr John was with the next one. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘I’m a nurse, the build us tough in the NHS. I’ve seen some shit too. Usually fuckin’ covered in it as well as spew and blood too by the end of the shift,’ she said and tipped her glass as a cheers, and signal to carry on. ‘Alright as long as you don’t mind love, ‘ere,’ he said, pointing the end of the smoking pipe at me, ‘that must be alright for you travellin’ with your own personal nurse through India, eh mate.’ ‘There’s nothin’ more ruthless than a nurse dude, she’s all like, “I’ve had a seventy five year old lady who’s lost an eyeball to cancer and the socket’s filled with puss, and not one complaint. But you?” There’s never sympathy dude ‘cause they’ve seen worse.’ And I gave my lover a wink and a little nudge on the leg. ‘Oh I s’pose I didn’t look at it like that.’ Danny said. ‘Well where was I? Oh yeah, Delhi proper shite hole. But the whole point was our Davey got crook as fook in Delhi and ended up in hospital, and t’ fookers took his passport and then wouldn’t let him leave. We were gonna get the embassy involved.’ ‘Yeah,’ Davey said, ‘I was only bad for a bit but they wanted to keep me in this fookin’ right ‘orrible, dirty fookin ‘ospital for a week like. I was only sick for a few days. The fookers were after my insurance money, I’m sure. It was just a big fookin’ scam so they could get paid. Once they had my insurance details and passport they had me fooked. It was a free ride for them cunts. I was worried I was gonna lose a fuckin’ kidney or sum’it the way the fookers were acting. ‘So I got my courage up and went to the chief doctor’s office ready give this cunt a right goin’ over and he was fookin’ all over me. Put me right in my place, said he’d call the fookin’ cops on me if I left, and besides, he had my fookin’ passport. I was fooked like.’ He paused to take a massive draw on the pipe. Then Danny was like, ‘Yeah so ya’d never guess but they put ‘im on a day pass. He could go out and do whatever the fook he wanted during the day but had to go back to t’ hospital to sleep like. It was a total fookin’ scam.’ ‘Yeah,’ Davey said, ‘By the third day I was fine as fook, naught wrong like, but, as I was sayin’, those cunts were just cashing in on me. You’d be proper fooked and scared to fook to if something like that happened to ya’ and ya’ were on your own like. ‘Specially if you’re a girl like.’

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

The steaks came and they looked fuckin’ awesome! Thick steak, pepper sauce and fries, all freshly cooked! ‘Wah, see like, you want some of this don’t ya’!’ Danny said waving the plate at me. Good looking steak or not I wasn’t willing to risk the meat yet. ‘Dudes I’ll wait and see if ya’ sick in the morning. And if not then maybe I’ll consider it.’ We stayed at the guesthouse that night drinking and smoking with the boys. Jay came by later for a smoke and whiskey ‘n coke. We sold him on John’s pizzas. The bases were made and rolled fresh every time you ordered one and John cooked them in a wood fire pizza oven beside his bar. Me and Louise were on our third pizza for the night and once Jay got hold of his, he was like, ‘Dude I’m Italian and even to me, these pizzas are awesome!’ and he ordered another one to take with him when he left. I asked Danny and Davey where they got their smoke from and Danny told us they’d scored it from some Kashmiri carpet shop they’d stumbled across on their first day in Goa. Reckoned the place they’d stayed was further out and they’d just wandered down the road trying to find something to do, or shops, anything really, when they saw the Kashmiri carpet place and just went in for a nosey. ‘Next thing like,’ Danny said, ‘the guy behind the counter pulled out a bloody great lump of ‘ash and sold it to us for a couple of quid a gram, probably ripped us off. He also offered us five grams of opium for five thousand rupees but we weren’t sure if we were being robbed or not so we said no t’ ‘im.’ Oh opium my dear friend, and mentally I rubbed my hands together like Mr Burns. ‘Excellent’. Even in Laos I was paying not much less than that in my later journeys there. I wanted some, but then I thought, well this time I’m travelling with my lover, so this time I’ll say no. It was a quick decision but I still toiled on the thought of tracking this fuckin’ place down and getting my hands on a big ball of, ‘lazy do nothing’. ‘Dudes, that’s a fuckin’ good price. Phwoar, I’d pay it. But no, not this holiday. But if ya’ wanna try the stuff that’d be a fair price and the quality would be awesome too, going by the Charas he sold ya’.’ That night in bed me and Louise started talking about getting back on the Long Road and seeing a bit more of Goa. Bruce had sold us on the south and Om beach but it was a bit far for now. Fuck travelling three hours south and then all the way back in a couple of weeks’ time. Besides Jay was playing a last set in a place called the Hilltop bar in four nights’ time. And straight after, Me and Louise had tickets to a three night festival they were having at the Hilltop. But still we thought fuck it; we gotta see a bit more and do something other than just rave. My friend Storm, who’s a chiropractor living in Wales, had been to Arambol in the north of Goa the year before, and he’d recommended checking out the Sweet Lake up around the top of the head of Arambol beach. Said the guys who ran the last bar you come across were really cool and played good tunes all day that you could chill out to. Said they had good gear. The food was s’posed to be good too. So that was it, we let Lakshmi know we were thinking of moving on for a couple of days and asked her to save our room for us for when we got back. Lakshmi got talking about Hampi, the temple complex in Karnataka. My online Goa hippy friends had talked about this place a bit. They always remembered how they’d go out there in

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

the seventies and would live out there on the river for a few days, or even a few weeks, smokin’ it up with some Baba or Sadu. Baba’s and Sadu’s are like the half naked guru guys with their faces painted and massive dreads that wander around India. She said the temples were amazing but it was a bit of a terrifying over night bus ride. The driver kept over taking people on blind corners and at one point, although already full they picked up an entire bus load of people whose overnight bus had broken down. They’d had to try and sleep sitting on the floor, cramped together, stale and sweaty. Once you were there it was real hot too she said, with no shops around or anything. The bus ride story was enough for us not to go. Fuck that, we’ll stick with the beach, which Lakshmi said was amazing up in Arambol. Since we wanted to be away from crowds of people she recommended staying over at Mandrem which was further down the beach from Arambol. Cool, so we booked a taxi and took a ride out there to see what was going on. Lakshmi had organised a guy who charged us a fair rate considering it was a half hour drive each way and that he also waited for us for a couple of hours while me and Louise shopped around at all the guesthouses we saw around Mandrem. When we first got out the fulla’s car we couldn’t see the beach at all, but there was a sign in English that said it was only a hundred metres away. There was also a similar looking sign beneath it in what looked like fuckin’ Russian or something. We went ‘round all the different places, feeling how hard the mattress was, running the shower to see if there was hot water, the lot ya’ know. We’d a good idea of what to expect for ten or twelve quid a night and only offered to pay for one night in advance in case their fuckin’ dogs barked all night. Some places wouldn’t have it, wanted three days rent, which they weren’t fuckin’ gettin’. Some places were full already, another place had basic bungalows and when we went to say hello to some interesting looking girl with a shaved head and piercings she just ignored us, so we thought; fuck staying with these cunts. We’d split up and hit about ten different places. Finally it was through the advice of some hippy lady walking about with her yoga mat under her arm that we ended up at the Beach Front Bungalows. But that place was full too, and the very nice guy running it offered us the only bed he had, which was like a shack for like two quid a night and I was like thank you, but we’re not that hard up. Besides I hate the idea of the bugs and shit creeping around inside the open bungalows they have in some places. A bit deflated by this we thought we’d check out a place called Beach View Guesthouse. It was back from the beach, but was a nice brand new building and when the guy took us up to the top floor to check out a room, as promised, the view of Mandrem beach was amazing. It was all low surf and white sand in both directions until it just disappeared off in the distance. The low roar of the waves could be heard above the whispering of the wind through the coconut trees. Oh yeah, we’d found home. But that bed was a bit hard, and on the floor beneath the shower was being refurbished. However if we wanted we could have the brand new refurbished room on the ground floor with its thick soft mattress. New pillows, white sheets, cable tv, and new fitted bathroom, with small out front seating area sir? Oh yes mister, oh yes indeed! ‘Do you sell food?’ ‘They sell it next door sir. Very good food.’ And he waggled his head.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

‘Do you sell cold beer?’ ‘They sell very cold beer next door and in every shop you can buy very cold beer sir.’ ‘Does your dog bark all night?’ Fuckin’ thing was sleeping over in the shade under a tree. ‘No sir, the dog knows better than to bark at night.’ What the fuck were we doing in Vagator? Fuck it, we paid for three nights and told them we’d be back the next day. The drive back was lush, we’d found an awesome place to stay away from the noise and everyone else. From what we could tell we were the only people in our guesthouse, which was a three storey rectangular block that still smelled of the fresh white paint it was painted in with its red trimmings around the edges and frames. We drove back over a hill covered in coconut trees and around curving embankments with the odd shop, bar or out of the way guesthouse, before the driver took a right just after the massive Chapora River Bridge. It was then he drove through a tangle of small roads that ran along the side of Chapora River and through the town there. We passed by hippies galore in one spot where you had a chai shop on one side and the darkest little pub on the other. Absolutely shit faced people who looked like they hadn’t seen a bed or bath for days stared at us with suspicion when we drove by, or held each other up as they tried to leave the bar. Well it was two in the afternoon ya’ know and I’m a beer for breakfast kinda guy myself. Chapora town seemed like my kinda place. We’d have to go have a nosey when we got back from Mandrem. We got back to the Pizza Place and Lakshmi was happy we’d found a spot that was just what we were after. John tried to sell us some steaks at the bar but until I saw the boys it was pineapple and roasted onion pizza all the way. I paid whenever we ordered a round and told John to keep the change each time. Although it was only twenty or fifty rupees tip – so for me wasn’t much at all – over a whole day we were tipping him between three to five pounds. Which to John I bet was a lot. I earn around forty thousand pounds a year. Like the Lebanese hash, which I was saving for a certain loveable type of dope fiends we would come across, tipping characters who provide more than just food service, ya’ know, become like friends and almost guides to the local town, is my way of sharing something else of what I have with others. Through me travels I’ve come to realise how lucky we are in the West to have been born there. We have financial opportunities that, in the rest of the world, just don’t exist. It was only us there and John encouraged Louise to plug her tunes in. While John rolled out the dough for the pizza we got talking to him. I asked if he was Thai or Burmese? ‘No I’m Indian man,’ he said in his clear voice. ‘You see when the British left India everyone talks about how they carved it up into Pakistan for the Muslims and India for the Hindus. What no one talks about is they also drew a line straight down the side of Burma. My family come from a place near Naga land. We’re about fifty miles from the border with what is now Burma or Myanmar. Whatever you wanna call it. So we’re fucked. ‘Cause we look Burmese the Indians don’t consider us Indian, but I have an Indian passport. So get this, if I was like my cousin who happened to be born on the other side of the Burmese border and came to India, I’d get free university education, housing, clothing. He’s got a nice motorbike and he gets everything given to him by various charities because he’s a poor Burmese farmer that has escaped the regime. It’s the same with the Tibetans, they’ve all got nice motorbikes and clothes too. Me? I was born fifty miles on the wrong side of the border drawn by the

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... colonials and so my whole region is stuck in a country that doesn’t even consider us as citizens. We’re like the lowest of the castes as far as they’re concerned.’ ‘Castes?’ ‘Yeah it’s crazy, so the Brahmins or priests are the top of the food chain and the poorest Brahmin will consider himself better than the richest Vaishya or land owners. And to the rest of India my people are considered only be good enough to be a Shudra which is a servant. It’s not too bad really because at least we are not the Untouchables, which are like toilet cleaners and lepers and shit. You know, people who do the real dirty work.’ ‘Dude I’ve been a toilet cleaner in my day and you can get six or seven hundred pounds a week in London doing that. You know, unblocking toilets.’ ‘No way!’ ‘Yeah man, fuckin’ true.’ ‘Well here, I work eight am until 11pm, seven days a week, and I get seven thousand rupees a month.’ Seventy quid a month? What the fuck is wrong with the world! In my current job I earn that in three hours, and I sit around on my ass in my own office, writing this book most days. I got another beer and left him the change again. Poor fucker. He must have seen both of our faces trying to work this out. So he chipped in, ‘Don’t worry I work here by choice. Lakshmi is a good person to work for. Tough but at least she has respect for the relationship I build with customers like you guys. And I like going down to Anjuna Market on Saturday nights. They have a cool band that plays heavy metal. ‘I change my year up too. When it’s monsoon season here I work up in Manali in the mountains. It’s beautiful and when it cools down up there around Christmas I go home for a month to see my family, and then I come to Goa for the season down here. It’s long hours but it’s easy work and I enjoy it to be honest. ‘I used to work translating medical documents from Hindu to English all day in an office in Delhi but that was too much. Yes I earned a lot more money but I just couldn’t live that lifestyle. They made me cut my hair,’ (he had long hair when we met him) ‘and I was expected to act in a certain way. Even when I wasn’t at work. Like if they found out I listened to heavy metal outside of work I could’ve lost my job. And all around me Burmese and Tibetan guys were rich from all the donations they get from around the world. Everybody loves to donate to Tibet, but my people, who look the same, have also had our homeland confiscated and our language changed. We’re just as poor, but we don’t get shit!’ I couldn’t fuckin’ believe the reality of this, but it’s so true innit. These guys had been through the same shit, the current occupiers of their land, the nation of India had done all these things to them under instruction of the British, and they were just as persecuted as anyone else, but this little forgotten corner of the world were almost worse off than Tibet, Burma or Cambodia, purely because no one even knew. No one donated to these guys man. No one. He carried on, ‘But things are getting better for us now, when the commonwealth games happened we did really well at archery so they had to recognise our people as Indians, ‘cause one of the best archers in the country comes from my village and he competed with an India shirt on. We’re also good at shooting, wrestling and we even have a cricketer in the Indian

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Premiership now. So hey, it could be worse, as I was saying up until now the Indians simply refused to acknowledge us as citizens even though I have an Indian passport. Crazy huh?’ Jay came over that night for more, whiskey, pizza and to help us finish off the Charlie. It wasn’t hard to convince him. He’d been to the fuckin’ dentist that day up in Mapusa and had all his teeth, done. Said the guy wanted to polish them too, but it’d look ridiculous at a rave with all the UV lights if he had whitened teeth. ‘They’d fuckin’ glow in the dark man. Can you imagine it?!’

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

The Beach and the Bugs, World War Fucking Three!! So we packed up our lives and put them on our backs. Over breakfast we told the boys from Leeds to come with us but they were all settled in now. ‘We’re at t’ end of our ‘oliday son. Not t’ beginning like you lucky sods. But we’ll see ya’ in a few days, now go enjoy ya’selves like.’ And that was it. We chucked our shit in the back of the taxi and drove off outta Vagator. It had started to feel oppressive and closed in there, but that may just have been the come down from a week long, MDMA and cocaine bender. Speaking of all that, I had a right moment of panic when I couldn’t find the coke the night before. I always keep things in the same pockets, switch blade, right front pocket, just above knee. Wallet, passport, left front pocket, just above the knee. Drugs, they’d been kept right pocket of small back pack, and when I went to get the gear out so we could have a line with Jay; it was gone! I fuckin’ checked everywhere with a sickening feeling building inside my guts. Finally, just as I’d given up hope, it hit me. Under the fuckin’ TV you stupid shit! Under the fuckin’ TV. Fuck I nearly lost my dinner over the worry. But I’d found them and we’d finished off the last of the cocaine with Jay. We talked a lot of shit as coke makes ya’ do, and then he picked up another pizza to go. ‘I can’t fuckin’ believe these pizzas man. And in India!!!’ he loved it. There we were, off on a new adventure, a week in Vagator had been enough. It’d been a long week too, so many small adventures to remember. We were gonna need scooters when we got back so we could get out and do a bit more. See Chapora village for example. It’s a beautiful drive over Chapora river and around to Arambol. I remember other friends of the Goa Hippy Tribe who used to pay a local fisherman to drive them across the river in the old days. They would party down in Vagator and then be ferried across the river to whatever hut it was they were living in. Those were the good days they reckoned, but I must be a bit softer than them, ‘cause the idea of sharing a space with all the creepy crawlies of India creeps me out. You got fuckin’ cobras, scorpions, other snakes and spiders, let alone the ants and cockroaches. Yurgh, gross! Of all the fuckin’ bugs! I fuckin’ hate cockroaches. We got round to the Beach View Guesthouse and unloaded our new lives in to this temporary home. The room was beautiful, light with lots of space. The manager showed us the clean bathroom with the... ‘What the fuck is that!’ Cockroach! It was dead as a door nail, stuck halfway down the plughole in the sink. But it was size of my thumb! No shit. If the sun shone on this fuckin’ thing, it’d cast a shadow. The manager just laughed and picked the mangled corpse out of the plug hole and threw it out the front. The dog got up had a sniff, looked like it was gonna eat the dead roach, changed its mind and went back under the tree looking pissed off that it’d moved for nothing. I wasn’t happy at all, but the rent was paid and the bug was gone. Sod it, it was beach time. We dumped our stuff and cut the through the beachside bungalows. The waiter guy from the day before said we could use the chairs out on the beach for free and they’d do ocean side service. Hardly slumming it hippies but we were still chasing a dream. Fuckin’ legend. I ordered a beer for me and G&T for my shnookums and we crossed over some shitty looking water with kids playing in it via a dodgy great big walking bridge, made out of rotten ol’ bits of wood, that bounced up and down with each step.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Just on the other side though there was a group of Russians by the sound of their accents and their lack of saying hello. Meh, whatever; we plomped ourselves down on the spare seats. Two minutes later while I was still creaming up my lover’s back, a well dressed waiter guy came out with a frosty Kingfisher and G&T for Louise. We weren’t too worried about the ice to be honest. You could tell it was all pre-packaged tubular cubes. The water in Goa in general did seem clean, it smelled clean when you showered in it, and was crystal clear. We still brushed our teeth with bottled water but I don’t think there was any need to. If you’re showering in it, you may as well fuckin’ drink it as far as I’m concerned, ‘cause it only takes one drop of filth to make you sick. Once inside you the bacteria will grow innit, and of course it gets up your nose and in your mouth when you’re showering. There was just that gentle warm breeze blowing over us as Louise pulled her chair out into the sun to bake. I downed my beer as quick as possible so I could hit the waves. Oh fucking yes! I’m slightly fatter these days than I used to be so I float better than I use to. However I’m not as fit as I was in my youth, so when I hit the warm Arabian sea I only went in about waist deep. Mandrem Beach itself is at least a hundred metres wide, and it’s all light coloured sand lined with coconut trees. Just like paradise on a postcard. The water at Mandrem beach was fuckin’ gorgeous too. It was as blue as the sky above, there was no rubbish in it, and the closest person I could see was about quarter of a mile away. If I was a hippy living in Goa in a tipi, Mandrem would have been the ground I slept on. This is where I woulda made my home. There wasn’t even any real rip in the water trying to pull you out and drown you like there is in New Zealand. Mandrem beach was where it’s at. I splashed about long enough to get thirsty, went up to my lover, and the ever patient waiter was standing there ready to take my order. Champion. Another Kingfisher please boss. In my head I could see Jay shaking his. Pfffh, the other beers tasted yuck, and Kingfisher was fuckin’ awesome. When the waiter came back we tipped him well, and ordered some mixed veg pakoras. It was time to ease our way back into the Indian food. It was a tough morning mixed, with beer, totally fuckin’ amazing pakoras, which are deep fried vegetables coated in an Indian spiced batter. Yum. As afternoon rolled around we were informed it was happy hour so a couple of Pinacoladas and Mojitos couldn’t go wrong. I was well impressed with my book, The Help, and Miss Louise here, well, she being Miss Louise and all, she just baked away in that too hot sun, slurpin’ on her too good cocktails, and in general we sweated out the drugs and the parties of the last full on week. We’d had a great time with Jay, almost felt like executives what with all the free drinks he was getting on his tabs. Cocaine, cocktails, music and Mr Sun, I don’t think anybody disapproves of that. But Vagator beach is just not that impressive, to me a beach was like Mandrem, big, clean and quiet. Whereas Small Vagator was packed with bars, and beach chairs with hotels all over the hillside and Big Vagator was rammed with people, cows, rubbish, jet boats with floating bananas and kite surfers. Here it was just us and a couple of others with great food and drinks on tap. And the water wow. I sold it to my lover and we both went down for a swim while the waiter watched our stuff. We paddled about a bit and if you’re looking out at the ocean, far off on our right we could see people; that must’ve been Arambol all the way up there. But here it was just us lovers in the sunlight.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

The day passed in the chapters of a great book, and a lot of cocktails. There was no more coke any more, we’d gone through the two grams of Colombia’s finest cocaine in just over a week. Not a bad effort really considering how much we used to do. There was one point years ago when we were doing a gram of Huey’s Peruvian in fifteen minutes. The Lebanese was put safe away and I choofed away on Bruce’s charas whenever no one was around to see, or if the wind let me. With the day over, blissed out and arm in arm we strolled back to our guesthouse, past the Ayurvedic massage lady who wanted eight pounds an hour for a massage. There’s people in London who don’t earn eight pounds an hour. So it was a bit pricey really, unless of course it came with a happy ending. But none of that these days. I had my lover for all the happy endings I needed. We were heading back to ours for a snooze, when we saw a sign saying, Sunset View Restaurant. ‘Meh, one more cocktail,’ Louise said. ‘Fuck yeah.’ So we followed the driveway past a few bungalows and went up the stairs of a two storey building which turned out to have lazy couches with pillows strewn all about the place and a couple of Russian families sitting around while their kids ran about the place, with tables covered in food and empty beer bottles and glasses. Pah, perfect. We broke out the deck of cards and sipped cocktails, ate amazing biryani with thick cumin spiced sauce on the bottom again and some unhealthy paneer cheese kebabs as a fat as fuck Mr Sun kissed us good night. So with full bellies, a mellow drunk on and no hard drugs twisting up our systems we went to bed early ready to just watch a little Futurama and have a bit of a naughty night. I went to brush my teeth and as I loaded up the brush and took a look in the mirror. The bugs took the first offensive in the great and mighty Cockroach War. ‘Baaahhhhhhhhhhh!!! Jesus fuck!! And I flew out that fuckin’ toilet at a thousand miles an hour, my skin feeling like it was crawling with the giant two and half inch long cockroach mother fucker. There the wee beasty was, up on the mirror, it had only been a foot or so from my face. This cockroach was bigger than the last. Louise was like, ‘Oh my god what?’ as I pulled her in front of me and stuttered out the words, ‘C, C, Cockroach, the size of my hand! Woooaaarrgh!!’ as a shiver ran down my spine. Can’t be that fuckin’ bad,’ Louise said, ‘Cousin Paul’s house use to be full of— Holy shit! Woahhh! What the fuck! Where the fuck has that come from?!’ ‘It must have come out the plug hole in the sink where the last one was. Oh my god Louise you’re gonna have to do something! Kill it! Kill it!’ ‘I’m not killing it. I’ll put it outside.’ And she looked around for something to scoop it off the mirror with. My shnookums went back into the bathroom while I stood on the bed, a brave coward with a flip flop in hand to fight off any invasion with. ‘Kill it! I won’t be able sleep with that fucker in here lover! Kill it now!’ ‘Jesus, you’re s’posed to be the man, you go in there,’ and she swung the door open again and the bastard thing was still sat there looking straight at us. I got the camera out and edged closer to the door way so I could try and get a photo of the fucker. This was as big as those

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

fuckin’ ones the Cambodians eat. I’ve seen bowls full of the fuckers in Cambodia at the bus stops. Louise had spent time in Australia and was used to catching big fuckin’ bugs, but we aint got that shit in New Zealand, and the one year I did spend living in Australia, I never got used to the fuckin’ gargantuan bugs that roamed the country and would show up in ya’ house every now and then. Oh, gross. There was no jar or anything to trap it in, so Louise gave up and armed herself with a flip flop, while I covered her back from way behind. She went, she aimed, drew back her arm, and; SLAP! the sound of the rubber on the mirror cracked like thunder across the room. And this fuckin’ thing moved like lightning. Her first shot missed and it launched straight us. In full screaming hysterical retreat I flew backwards tripping over a chair by the table while Louise held her ground and twacked the mother fucker straight out of the air. It showed the size of the cunt ‘cause you could hear the thud it made when she got it. Crack it hit the wall beside the mirror and fell to the ground, still. She must have launched another shot at it while the big fuckin’ thing was down ‘cause I just saw her feet disappearing into the bathroom from around the corner of the room. Slap! ‘I got it! It’s alright you can calm down. I’ve killed it. Are you happy? It’s dead.’ ‘Let me see.’ And I crept ‘round the side of the door and saw the mangled corpse on the ground under the hand wash basin with bits of it splattered about. We didn’t have a dust pan and brush to clean it up with, so the cunt would have to stay there for now. I took a breath and managed to take a piss while keeping one eye on the corpse from over my shoulder. I smoked a fat pipe to calm my nerves and we chilled in front of the lap top to start on season three of Futurama. Soon life felt like it was coming back to normal. But the battle with the bugs had only just begun. My darling lover went to go to the toilet and as she pushed open the door she let out a, ‘Woah, what the fuck, I think I’m gonna be sick,’ as she reversed back into the room. Her eyes stared straight into the depths of the bathroom from hell, one hand covering her mouth as a light shone out from within. I was up again on the bed watching her step away from the bathroom. ‘Go see,’ she said. ‘Oh my god, oohhhhhh.’ ‘I don’t want too.’ ‘Well you’re gonna have to do something. There’s ants in there now, and they’re—’ and lurched a little bit in her mouth, ‘just be a man will you. What else are we going to do?’ I came around the corner to where the bathroom was and from as far back as I could, I looked through into the bowels of hell, as a million oversized ants carved up this creature of filth, this sole survivor of a nuclear war, and carried it, piece by jagged piece off out a gap in the wall behind the toilet bowl. But that wasn’t all, a relation the dead cockroach had shown up uninvited to the funeral and above the mirror it looked down on us with anger and disgust! ‘Waaaahhhh!’ like the real man I am. ‘What the fuck!’ ‘What the fuck!’ my warrior shnookums agreed. ‘Ok let’s go find the manager and get him to sort this out.’ I tried to reason as I bounced from foot to foot scratching at creatures that weren’t there.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

‘No, he’ll just think we’re stupid tourists, turn the shower on and we’ll wash the cunts down the drain.’ Oh swear words from my shnookums, she must be amped! ‘You do it.’ I could just see the fuckin’ cockroach launching a revenge attack on me if I went in the room. It’d come to it, so I was prepared to sacrifice Louise for the greater good. ‘Oh fuck’s sake then, I’ll be the man then shall I?’ and in she went with flip flop cocked and at the ready. ‘Put the water on hot so we can fry these fuckers.’ ‘Yeah, just keep yelling directions from the room next door. Men, pfff.’ I mumbled a little about being a real man, and she just shushed me. I heard the shower come on and a, ‘wwwooooooaaarrrgggggghhhh,’ come from the bathroom as Louise flew out the door, ‘Is it on me, is it on me?’ I checked her over and no fuckin’ big roach was creeping about on her back or in her hair. ‘It came at me!’ ‘Told you!’ What the fuck, staying well back from the doorway I looked around the edge into the bathroom. The act of genocide we had committed on the battalion of wild ants had been a success and although some clung on the rest were whirl pooling it down the drain in the floor. Where’s the cockroach? ‘Bah!’ there he is, the mother fucker, he was up high on the wall. It was time to be the hunter gatherer in this relationship. So strapping on my steel cap boots, and arming myself with my right NEKI flip flop, I took a deep breath, began to let out a war cry, shut my mouth quickly realising the cockroach could fly in my gaping pie hole, and charged in the room, leapt in the air and, ‘Crack!’ I hit the mother fucker dead. Well that’s what it seemed like, ‘cause his still corpse hit the floor with a thunderous echo which apart from the hot shower water silenced the now steamy room for a moment. I backed out, turned off the tap and the slow drip from the nozzle was all there was to be heard. Proud as a pig in shit I hiked my weapon of choice in the air, protector of my lady, I went out and declared. ‘It’s safe to go in now.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yeah, of course, I just fuckin’ splattered that cunt. I got ya’ back lover.’ Louise went to check, ‘Where is it then?’ With building dread, I turned around, and through the swirling mist, it was gone. I reversed further out of the bathroom. Louise bent over and peered around the back of the door, not there. Under the sink, not there. Behind the toilet brush, THERE! And zoom it was off straight for her, with a yelp, and both feet in the air, my snuggles, pelted down on to that fucker with great vengeance and furious anger her flip flop of doom and smashed that cunt repeatedly until it was broken down a few notches. Right,’ she said, with confidence, ‘you can pick it up with paper and flush it down the toilet.’ ‘Yes ma’am.’ The world was back to right and we were on the bed starting a new Futurama film where three scammers take control of Bender using a virus, this tied in with a tattoo of Bender on Fry’s ass which had magical powers within it. It was odd, imaginative, and great. Every now and then though I would hear what sounded like sand pouring down a tin roof. It was a kind

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... of scratchy whishing sound. I went back to the toilet after the film, and, ‘Bah, sure as fuck there was another big roach on the wall. This one was just behind the door. Now a battle veteran, I kept my eyes on the target, strapped on my boots again, raised my flip flop of choice, jumped into the room, and smacked the cunt one good and proper. Then I hit it again, just to be sure. Then it was a simple matter of loads of tissue to pick it up with, and I granted it a funeral down the toilet. Louise went to the toilet not five minutes later and there was another! By now we had plugged all the entrances into the bathroom with wet tissue. The basin plug, the gap where the ants came in, everywhere, but now we were looking closer, we could tell the windows hadn’t been sealed properly and there were gaps everywhere. What we had noticed though, was there was only ever one cockroach in the room at a time. Maybe they were king of the bathroom, and didn’t share the space with other cockroaches? Maybe they kept out other pests? Maybe you’re better off with the devil you know? ‘Cause it wasn’t like the fuckers moved. Once they had a spot, they’d just sit there, King of all they surveyed. And to be honest as long as you knew where the fucker was it wasn’t as scary. The fright came when you didn’t expect one to be there; and then there was. Maybe it was time for peace? Maybe we could all learn to get along? Accept our differences. ‘Cause after all, this was their land and they would’ve been here before we were and they’d be here once we’d left. So we called a truce, we marked where the latest one was behind the door, agreed to leave it in peace as long as it left us in peace and I slept that night with a pair of Louise’s earplugs (apparently I snore) twisted up and squished into my ears. Have you ever been fucked up by a scary film before? For me there were two movies that took my imagination on a journey through the dark side. One was the Stephen King Classic, IT. About Pennywise the Clown who lived in the sewers and the other was Star Trek 2. The one where they put the bugs in the guys’ helmets and put the helmets on the guys’ heads. Then the bugs went in the guys’ ears and... Oh that’s enough. Even just writing about it leaves my ears feeling hideously exposed to little burrowing creatures of the abyss. Anyway the point is, to this day I still cover my ears when I sleep ‘cause of that fuckin’ film. So I put these plugs in my ears, smoked a pipe and finally fell asleep, ignoring the constant feeling that something or some things were creeping all over me. As normal I woke up in the middle of the night needing the loo. Something wasn’t right though, there was a pressure in my ears. Something is in my ears!!!!!!!!!! ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!’ and I battered at them while Louise bounced up off the bed and switched on the light. ‘My ears!’ as I battered and clawed at my head. Then I saw it; the yellow and pink stripes of the ear plugs as they came loose from my ears and flew across the bed. I sat there for a second breathing heavy. My greatest fear had exploded into my dreams and then like Freddy Kruger my nightmares had materialised into the real world. But it was all ok, it was just the ear plugs I’d shoved in my head and had forgotten. It was just the fucking earplugs! ‘I can’t live like this lover, we’re either gonna have to move or get some hardcore bug spray and take these mother fuckers out.’ I didn’t put the ear plugs back in. Just made sure I had one ear against a pillow and the other fully covered by an arm. Then once the adrenaline ran out, fell asleep again.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Louise woke me up kicking out on the bed, ‘There’s something on here with us!’ And like a brave soldier, I leapt off the bed and made for the door. We checked everywhere and couldn’t see whatever it was, but there was no doubting that we weren’t alone, and as the night went on the whishing sound of sand being poured on a tin roof continued. It came from the bathroom door. A tired morning rolled around fat and sluggish. We were worn out, hungry veterans of the war of the giant bugs. Now it was daylight the cockroach who we’d made the unsettled truce with was gone and we were left to shower in peace. Well as peaceful as that feeling like you’re being watched, allows. Miss Louise was showering, while Mr Bryce was sat outside reading his book, The Help. The voice in Mr Bryce’s head had turned back into that African American Maid again. Well now, The Manager, he came over with a smile and a wag of the head these Indian boys seems to be doin’ and he offered us a tray of tea. Now this weren’t just any ol’ tea, this was your real authentic like, chai tea. It sure was sugary sweet, and you could pick out the flavours he’d added, like, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, all those good flavours you be expectin’ in a chai tea. But this one; maybe it was ‘cause we was bein’, all up in India, seemed to taste extra good. Mmmmm, mmm. Why I wasn’t so sure that this might have been the finest tastin’ chai tea I done eva’ be drinkin’. Miss Louise once she came out the shower, she was bein’ agreein’ this fact with me. This sure was a mighty fine chai tea that the Manager had been making, we sure agreed upon that. I brought up the cockroaches to him, and he didn’t have much English but he took his, flip flop off and swung it at an imaginary roach, like it was nothing and we were just silly tourists. He meant well, but I didn’t think he got quite the severity of the situation.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Salt water, Sweet water We’d done nothing the day before and now both of us were up for getting out a bit, so I packed a fat stash of Bruce’s charas and the pipe. Then we topped up the sun cream, dug out my red New York baseball cap that my mate had given me in London, chucked on the army green Rodriguez shirt and off we went. The mission was to try and find this, Sweet Lake that Storm had told me about a year earlier. ‘Just keep walking right to the end of the beach,’ he’d said, ‘then walk a little further around the cliffs, and when you’ve gone as far as the path goes, you’re there.’ It was all we had to go on and it was all we needed. We thought we’d do a bit of a tiki tour through Mandrem’s back roads on the way to see what was about. There was fuckin’ nothing. A shop that sold ice cream, yep, that sure as shit was something, and the mango fuckin’ ice creams we bought were the shizz. Thick creamy mango sorbet, fuckin’ yeah! So that was breakfast covered. We bought a bottle of water too, it was still morning but it was a hot as fuck thirty-odd degrees already. The sweat made my face scratchy under my pubic hair looking beard that was starting to come on strong. I was quite proud of it, Louise maybe not so. Meh, what can ya’ do? Outside the shop a fat little pig was snuffling through a pile of rubbish. I grabbed a great snap of Louise and a local lady both standing in the same position with knees locked straight, hands on hips and leaning back into it while staring out at nothing. It was great match of cultures that said a lot about our similarities I guess. We were starting to get up near a busy main road that neither of us wanted to walk along, not with all the fuckin’ dodgy gringo drivers around. So we cut down some random path past a bright, shocking pink hotel with, ‘Carina of Mandrem’ written on it. I took a pic’ of that too and later tagged my mate Carina from Portugal in it. There were new buildings going up everywhere, which is fair enough ‘cause Mandrem is such a beautiful beach, but that doesn’t make it right. The peace and calm that makes the place great can only be swallowed whole by the procession of tourists that will come here to find that peace and quiet. It won’t be long before the whole beach is lined with deck chairs that cost three hundred rupees a day to sit on. One of these buildings going up had a great big fuckin’ water tank out the back with a Nazi symbol on it and Swastik written underneath it. It was the brand name of the water tank company. It’s fuckin’ hard to get your head around the different uses of the swastika around the world. Hitler was a cunt and used it as his symbol of hatred and unity, where as to the Hindus and Buddhists it means loads of things, but in general, it’s a symbol to bring good fortune. We got down the end of the path and there was just a broken down old house there, dry orange knee length grass and another fat pig lolling about in the shade. Coconut trees were dotted around the dry field and we followed a worn track tramped down by whoever had walked it before us. The coconut trees were tall as fuck and I tried to stay out from under them in case I got smashed on the head by a falling coconut. After all that fuckin’ walking, the path eventually led us back to the bridge next to our fuckin’ place. Oh well, at least we were somewhere, and getting a little lost in India is way better than being at work in London.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

So we crossed the bridge and started the long walk up towards Arambol and the Sweet Lake somewhere off in the shimmering distance. The ocean waves were crashing on our left and the on our right were the odd long deep hulled wooden fishing boats. Some were white, others were painted bright blue. Every now and then there’d be a flea ridden dog or long eared, lazy cow sleeping in the shadow of one. The further we walked the more the guesthouses and hotels built up on the right of us. They weren’t big hotels or anything, a lot of them were really nice looking modern bungalows, lined up under tall swaying coconut trees. In the distance some flags started to grow closer and as we walked on through late morning sun, they turned out to mark a couple of bars someone had put up on the beach. My lover took her flip flops off so she could splash about in the water so I carried them for her. Bloated white guys with no shirts on lined the beach here and there with their rods in their hands and lines cast out into the Arabian sea. We spotted a busy little cafe and pulled in for a solid breakfast made of the fattest mixed veg’ omelette, and I took the chance to smoke a big pipe and watch the Russian girls next to us, try some hash, some skinny Russian dude, with Thai fishing pants and a bamboo walking stick was rolling up for them. He had dreads that hung down near his ears, and I heard him making a barking sound and then miming out swinging his walking stick at imaginary dogs, so I knew he wasn’t a first timer here. Most of us had left our flip flops down on the sand so we could lay about on triangle shaped, salt crusted and sandy cushions. The cafe had low tables built for lying around and above yellow and red bed sheets provided some shade and blew in the wind. When the omelettes came they were the shit! Massive and filled with a mix of peppers, courgettes, carrots and tomatoes. The food in Goa was becoming outstanding, and I was pissed off that fish had poisoned me or I’d be eating more meat. Although going veg’ and eggatarian was really doing my guts good. I wasn’t getting near the heart burn that I usually suffer and have to take twenty milligram Omaprazole everyday for. It made you be a bit more adventurous with what you were ordering too. It’s too simple to just go, ‘Steak please?’ at a restaurant. All this veg’ was getting us all kinds of interesting dishes, like veg’ pizza, or battered deep fried veg’. Or cheesy skewers like the night before. Feeling large and tired we ordered a couple of chilly bottles of the bright orange fanta that I love so much, smashed them, had another pipe and hit the beach again. I carried both our flip flops as arm in arm we dawdled up the beach like only those on holiday for two more months can. The odd crow flew about and at one point I spotted a hippy lying on his back playing a ukulele in the shallow waters, as the water splashed up around him. I got Louise to stand in front of him and took a photo, but he got all funny and was like, ‘Did you just take a picture of me?’ Dude you’re laying in the water playing a ukulele and it’s not even lunch time yet. Everyone’s taking pictures of you man. ‘No, I took a picture of her.’ and pointed at Louise. Fuck him. A fuckin’ hour or so passed and the cliffs of what I could only imagine as being Arambol started to form out of the haze. More people were in the ocean splashing about. We passed by bars like ASH that I had seen advertised on various facebook pages. ASH comes across as a theatre and percussion music venue that I thought we might go hang out in one night. The funny thing was though, there weren’t really that many dreadlock headed people wandering about. Where were the hippies? The Indians were all dressed well, some where even holding hands, well the groups of boys were anyway. But there was the odd shy couple

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

too. And the Westerners were all families with kids, speaking Russian I guess. There was no trance blaring and doogering away. There were a few young people but they weren’t what you’d call a hippy by looking at them, didn’t mean they weren’t a hippy at heart. As we got right up to what we presumed to be Arambol, the ocean became more polluted with plastic and other shit. Birds and dogs picked at rubbish that some assholes had thrown on the beach, and a thin creek that cut across the sand didn’t smell too nice either. Saying that though, the small beach front of Arambol town was interesting enough. High rises had been avoided and there were a dozen or so small bars lined up along the shore front framed with coconut trees and happy hour signs. It was all very inviting. But we were on a mission to find the Sweet Lake. The beach ended and a path led up and around the cliff front so we took the five steps up and began to follow it around to the left. The pathway market stalls were selling all the Indian crap you could ever want to wear or fill your home up with. For the girls, there were woven leather bracelets and bangles, or fine cheap jewellery was made out of intricate pieces of steel and stones. All probably made by little hands in big sweat shops. For a hundred and fifty rupees I bought a pipe with a six inch stem on it which I thought had to be better than the little nose burning mother fucker I had. Then I thought I might save it for back in London and never used the fuckin’ thing in the end. Most of the shit for sale was for girls and most of it was beautiful, but Louise was worried about looking like a fresh off the boat, middle class yoga girl, so she stayed away from the Thai fishing pants and Tie-dye dresses. Instead she only bought a few tops and a couple of the small steel and stone bracelets for friends back home. We carried on around the cliff face with the ocean still on our left and the market stalls becoming actual shops with a thousand printed t-shirts and dresses all the same in them. The stall holders at least left us alone to walk around rather than hassle you every time you walked past like in Vagator. ‘Woah shit! Watch out!’ and I grabbed my lover and pulled her away from a massive soft brown curled up human shit that was in the middle of the footpath covered in flies. The sweet, tangy smell hit us and all the flies took off at once as we walked by. I dreaded any of the little cunts landing on my skin, or face and swatted ‘em away with my hands as we rushed on holding our breaths and keeping our mouths tight shut in case one flew in. What the fuck? India eh? We carried on around the far end of the cliff and started to curl back in towards whatever was on the other side. The market stalls were on both sides of us now, and there were some fantastic blankets for sale with pictures of Ganesh and other hippy Hindu gods drawn on them with every colour of the, in fashion, tie-dye patterns in the background. And just like that, the shops, stalls and pathway ended. There were about ten steps down and then we were back on the sand. Up ahead we could see a small beach of white sand, lined with, sure as fuck, three rows of deck chairs. What the fuck? Oh well, so we walked towards them and I looked out for the last bar, which Storm had told us about. Turned out it was the only bar, but not to take that away from them, it was sat just above a small lake with about ten or fifteen people splashing about it. It didn’t really make much sense. You had the ocean on one side of a thirty metre wide beach and a clean fresh water lake that was about fifty metres diameter on the other. There was a flap like wind in a loose sail, and a, ‘Watch out!’ from above. Next thing we knew some dude crash landed down on to the sand beside us, his

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

parachute gathered up by a teenage Indian fulla. Up on the hill top at the far end of the beach, another paraglider took off and flew among the eagles that floated on the warm breeze. Nice! The edge of the lake nearest the beach had a small palm grove, with a few chairs lying about with lazy people getting lake side service from a smiling young fulla. Around the edge of that on the left on the green hillside leading up to the paragliders was a big Om sign, the same as the one tattooed on Bruce’s palm, painted on a large rock that hung out half way up the cliff. As the lake curved back around you it was framed by mangrove type trees and you could see the river that fed it. After getting used to the landscape being a reddish brown with coconut trees, it was a proper fuckin’ sight to see so much green tucked away right at the northern tip of Goa. On the right were a few shack-like bungalows that came with the best view in the world and just below them in the lush growth, a big white heron lookin’ bird stood out on a branch above the lake looking for fresh fish I guess.. We were fuckin’ steaming hot and covered in sweat, so we ignored the bar and headed to the lake edge where the young Indian fulla, gave us a deck chair to share and brought over a couple of ice cold beers. It’s so much better swimming in fresh clean water rather than the salty crap that is the ocean. There was some smokin’ hot Russian girl getting modelling photos done I guess, ‘cause she had one dude splashing water up over her while she posed, and another guy took pic’s with an over sized camera. Speakin’ of smokin’ hot, my lover took off her shirt and got her bikini ready. Then she downed her beer in a few big swallows and plunged right into the fuckin’ lake. I was right in behind her. The clear fresh water felt cleaner than the plastic ridden salty water on the other side of the sand, and the water was just the right temperature. A bit warm on the top and chilly as fuck on the bottom. My snuggles, swam up and wrapped her legs around my waist, put her arms around my head and kissed me as we floated in that paradise, I wanted to pull her bikini bottoms aside a bit and slip my cock in but, there were a few too many people around. Besides, it was India and there were things like crocodiles to consider. Some English lads showed up with some bird, and the boys wrestled each other for her attention. They were charming enough and we had a bit of a giggle as we hugged, and people-watched. All the time, my dick was trying to push through my shorts and her bikini, so it could sit in its favourite warm place deep inside her. We must have floated about like that for an hour or so, as paragliders soared over head. On the other side of the lake some kids were taking turns to jump off a big boulder and as the lunch time turned in to afternoon my need for a beer and some food came on too. Louise got out and ordered a beer, I’d have to give it five minutes while my cock calmed down. We paid up the kid at some point around mid afternoon I guess, and then went over to the infamous bar that Storm had talked about. It had to be the right one, there wasn’t any other apart from the kid who’d served us beer on the lakeside. Didn’t fuckin’ really matter anyway, they were playing Jimi Hendrix, and that’s all it really takes for me to want to sit down, smoke some dope, drink a beer and generally lay about being a lazy cunt. There wasn’t much to the place, just a few wooden tables with plastic chairs and a swarm of flies. The roof was made from woven palm leaves or something and the frame holding it up was bamboo. The floor of the bar was cement painted blue and the hand rail around the

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... edge was yellow painted poles of wood. We ordered a couple of Kingfishers from the fulla who showed up after about five minutes, and scored a pack of red L&M fags too. We chilled out and read our books for a bit, I was all over the Help book, and kept talking to Miss Louise in my best American fifties maid voice. We played cards as the afternoon carried on towards the end of the day, and at one point the waiter guy was gone for a while. When he finally showed up he apologised and said to just help myself to the fridge and tell him how many beers I’d drank. He said it was fine to smoke my charas if I wanted to as well. He had a nosey and said it was good stuff. I was having my ass kicked again, as usual by my shnookums at Bastard. After choking on a fat bowl of smoke, I nearly barfed all over the floor when I felt what could only be a drowned fly go down the back of my throat when I took a swig of beer. Through strings of bile I managed to cough the fucker back up into my hand, and totally grossed out, prayed it wasn’t when of the ones that had lived on the soft glistening human turd back up on the pathway. By now I was feeling quite comfortable in the place, it was my kind of joint, so I helped myself to another beer and some tissues, to plug the top of the bottle with. I always love an honesty bar. You had them throughout Cambodia, beer fridges would be left unlocked, and there would just be a book to fill out every time you have a drink. People just expected you to be truthful, they didn’t even consider that you would lie. And when I’m treated with that kind of respect, I love it. It’s the good heart still left on the Long Road. I went to kitchen and asked the cook for some fries and a bowl of pakora veg’, Me and my snuggles just couldn’t get enough of it. Maybe it’s the fish and chip lovin’ Britishness in us? But you batter something and deep fry it, it just keeps you coming back for more. The Scots are famous for deep frying Mars bars innit. You just gotta have a thick batter and then roll the Mars bar in sugar and cinnamon when it’s cooked. A couple of English fullas came in and had a chat with the waiter fulla and listening to them talk he was selling them a tola of smoke for five thousand rupees. For India five quid a gram is probably quite pricey. But in English terms it’s still half the price of the UK, and hey if I had no smoke I’d pay it. They tried to talk him down but he wasn’t having any of it, said it was out of season and had to come all the way from Parvati valley and shit. Once they’d gone and he brought our food over, I asked for a nosey, and it was good smoke. Ya’ better off paying too much for good gear than getting sold fake shit for cheap. At least at the end of the day, you’re still gonna get high. Next thing he’s pulled out some pills, a couple of trips and some MD. I wasn’t interested in buying any of it, but had a nosey anyway. The pills looked like pills, and the trips were square bits of paper so the only way is to take it and see, but the MD’s were a white powder. I laughed and told him I’d bring him some real stuff to try the next day. There was still a bit of raving to do, but we hadn’t even finished the first gram, and to be honest I wasn’t in any rush to finish the second. I can only take so much MD at a time, or for so many days in a row before I end up feeling sick and with the shits. I still had the four Hoffman trips too, but the right feeling wasn’t really there for it, and Louise wasn’t really interested. Besides I wanted to stay on the same wave length as her as much as I could. I was enjoying travelling a woman with who I got a long with too. Usually boys on tour can do whatever the fuck they want and have no issues, but couples can end up second guessing each other all the time and next thing ya’ know you’ve got some whingeing fuckin’ teary eyed cunt crying on the beach in paradise

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

with every one watching. Whole holiday ruined. But Louise wasn’t like that. She’s a strong enough woman to do what she wants. Do what she wants, and love who she wants. If I wanted to drop acid and spend the day buzzing out in my own little world, she’d let me, and if she got sick of it, she’d leave. I liked that, and I loved her, so I wasn’t really that bothered about dropping. Aint no one can say I haven’t takin’ my fair share of LSD in my life, and I sure as shit aint missing out on any mind expansion by not taking it. The food was fuckin’ great again! After the whole fish experience I was at a loss over what we were gonna do about eating, but apart from that one night of anally and orally exploding mayhem, it had just been solid, superb food the whole time in Goa. Mr Sun had checked out for the night and I must have sunk a bottle of king fisher every fifteen to twenty minutes over the last few hours. I hadn’t won a single hand of cards, and Louise had even changed games to last card to try and give me a break. She still kicked my ass, even though both games were my rules. There was no one left around the Sweet Lake, which would make it fuckin’ perfect to stay in. But any way, for us it was a long fuckin’ walk home to the land of the cockroach army, so we decided to get back around the other side of the pathway over by Arambol. We dodged the shit, bought some more fags, ‘cause I’d smoked most of a packet that afternoon, and then found some place doing two for one cocktails. Giddee up. We mixed things up and got some pakoras from this place but they weren’t as good as the fullas at the Sweet Lake or the miles down the beach where Mandrem was. We moved on and as we passed one shop, they had a whole shelf of bug spray, so we grabbed a can of that shit and felt a little more prepared for the hell that we were drinking our way out of worrying about. It was dark now and the beach looked amazing, the whole front of Arambol was lined with tables and candles and waiters ran about the place trying to drag everyone into their restaurant. Slumming it in India, we found a nice Italian and shared bruschetta and a fat bowl of creamy carbonara before getting a taxi and heading home to face the bugs once more. It was well into the night by the time we got home and it was us or them. We got into the room, put our bags on the bed, took a flip flop each, pointed the cockroach spray under the bottom of the bathroom door and let rip. Phwoash; there was a scratching sound like nails down a blackboard, and then they scattered, like rats from a sinking ship. The gigantic cockroaches exploded from out of the door in full force, ‘Waaaahh’, slap, slap, slap, ‘Woooooooaaaaahhhh, slap, slap, slap, bam, bam, bam!!! Ten of them came straight at us, the last charge of the light brigade, I swept the spray across them and the force of it blew half of them back into the bathroom, Louise was on the ones who still pushed forward, crack, crack, crack, crack, with her flip flop. I pulled her in front of me and we surged forward. Another tried to make a break for the small corner table, but she pounced on it and with one solid, blam! of her flip flop, it’s crumpled form lay there twitching. The manager stuck his head in the door from outside, concerned about the noise. I think he was still, silly tourist scared of a cockroach, but as he saw the mounting pile of casualties, he called out and came in flip flop in hand and took out one that had gotten past us and was heading for the door.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

His mate came in and they took over us on the front line, finishing off the final few as they materialised out from within the door. He looked over at us, and with and apologetic waggle of his head, sent his mate to get the dust pan and brush, and came back himself with a cup of perfect sweet chai. The battle had been won, but we’d broken the Geneva conventions and used chemical warfare to succeed, and when I woke the next morning my throat, lungs and nose were raw from the toxic fumes that must have been circling the room while we slept. We were up early in the morning coughing and choking from the terrible spray, so we sat outside, to get some fresh air on our burning lungs, and the manager brought over more of his chai, we could pick out ginger, cinnamon and cardamom, along with the sweetness of it. The day was already hot so we made the decision to walk back up to the sweet lake for one final day of peace up in Arambol before heading back to Vagator and the raves. I took a bit of MD with me and gave it to the waiter of the bar and Louise and me spent the day, swimming in the lake, smoking spliffs, playing cards, reading books and eating the best pakoras around. It was easy feeling, stress free holiday bliss. Although I was coughing up a lot of mucus as my tender lungs tried to heal themselves. That night as the tables were put out along Arambol beach I thought fuck it, and ordered a fuckin’ awesome steak with garlic butter, eggs and chips for only a few quid. Then arm in arm me and my shnookums went for a wander around the markets that make up Arambol. I stuck a few twisted travel tales stickers about the place and we pulled into a few trinket stores so my lover could buy some fridge magnets and bracelets. In one shop some Russian fulla, was arguing with the store guy over the price of a hand painted coffee cup, he didn’t wanna pay eighty rupees he’d only pay fifty. The shop guy had reached his bottom price and the dude ended up abusing him and storming out. In the end he had made a scene and left over ten pence. What a cunt. We got chatting with the shop keeper and he said he’d been there since eight in the morning and it was well past eight at night now. We asked him how much for a couple of fridge magnets, and he said we could have them both for fifty rupees, we ended up settling on eighty. Fuck it, I earn over twenty pounds an hour in London, I didn’t mind giving him thirty pence more than he wanted. We paid a price that we thought was fair, maybe he’d be able to shut the shop and go home to his wife and kids. With a full belly and a happy bliss about us we got a good night’s sleep. In the morning we said a teary good bye to the manager and left the wonderful calm of Mandrem and got a taxi back to the pizza place. If you just wanna sit back, smoke joints, read books and unwind from a hectic life style, Mandrem, Arambol and the sweet lake, are just the places to do it.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Easy Riders We got back and the boys were still in the same chairs as when we left them three days earlier. ‘You were right,’ Danny said, we shoulda done sumfing but it’s a bit late now. We leave in two days. We’ve been sat here for two weeks now trying to smoke all this ‘ash. Bloody good stuff, ‘ere ‘ave a go.’ He passed it over and took a sip of his fanta. The boys were a bit redder than when we left them and they said it was ‘cause they mucked up and got caught by the sun the day before. They’d been taking the bus everywhere, reckoned it were great. Cheap as chips and safer than a bleedin’ moto’bike. I was keen on gettin’ a couple of scooters though and getting out and seeing more of the local area. The fulla up opposite the Mango Tree rented them out for a couple hundred rupees a day which was way cheaper than taxiing about the place. Louise had never ridden one before but I’m old hack to it, so we got one each and took a test drive down past our old place and towards the hilltop bar where we’d be going for the festival in a few days time. My moped was fine but Louise’s kept cutting out whenever we stopped. We took a nice easy cruise. As you head back down the hill towards ours, just on the right is the street that takes you to Chapora, the guy running the moped shop had told us to stay off the main roads because of the police taking baksheesh from tourists with no licence so we kept to the Chapora river side of Vagator and Anjuna. Just as you start to go down the hill, there’s a great big banyan tree that looked beautiful and perfect for a place to stop off and have a smoke at on the way back once I had a bit more confidence in what I was doing. We followed the road signs up to Chapora fort thinking we’d have a nosey around there and maybe get a few snaps on the camera. It was a thin concrete path up to where all the bikes were parked, Louise’s bike cut out at the wrong moment and without me seeing she rolled backwards and nearly three feet down into a ditch. Luckily two guys happened to just be walking by and caught her and the bike just before she went over. With a drop like that, and no helmet own it could have been quite a nasty accident with the moped on top of her and the exhaust pipe burning a hole in her leg. It was fuckin’ hot, and there was still a bit of a walk up the hill to get to the fort, so we thought fuck it, went back, swapped bikes and made our way to Chapora town to stop off for a drink. On a better bike that didn’t cut out all the time Louise was a bit more happy, although I think she was little shaken by her near miss. We got down to the town and there were just a few hippies looking at us with suspicion, so fuck them, like Easy Rider we carried on down the road. I hate fuckin’ hippies like that! Born to be wild baby!!! The half mile wide river was on our left and we rode along it not much faster than running pace, until eventually we came up at the turn off to the bridge across the river to Arambol. So we turned around and cruised back. We found a place with a view of the river and a juice sign out the front, so we pulled up and went to see if they sold beer. It was a gorgeous building that must have been used for raves in the old days. The young Spanish couple that had bought it were still painting the place up and had just had the main building strengthened. Their whole world consisted of this beautiful venue that had been

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... forgotten and run into the ground, which they were now beginning to breathe life back into with a coat of paint and some good building work. They were living in a dome tent up on the second level of the main bar and had a couple of couches set up just on the corner where we could watch a fat bastard lazy ass Mr Sun wallow off from his day’s work while I drank cold Kingfisher and tried some local homemade spirit called feni. Alathea and the rest of the hippy tribe had talked about it every now and then on the facebook page, so as soon as I saw it on the menu I ordered a straight large one with no ice. The girl running the place, was a bit, ‘are you sure?’ but hey, after the shit I’ve drunk around the world and the crazy shit the Laos and Vietnamese make out of rice, I was at least willing to give it a go. Tasted no worse than the shit I made for myself in my dodgy pressure cooker contraption back in London. My lover was drinking gin and tonic when we got a call from Jay, he was playing another party tonight, a warm up one before the hill top festival started. So not ones to shy away from a challenge we put our rave hats on and headed home. We wanted to get there before it was too dark anyway. Walking out the front I looked back at the gate. The place we’d just experienced a huge Chapora sun set was named Kolbasa, the same name as a friend of ours we’d just lost from this life. He joined me in my mind for a moment. A warm smile for a sad memory, and then we were off. It was Jay’s last night in India, he was heading back to London for a break for a few weeks and then he was off again to South Africa to tour. Thinking about it, it must be difficult on a relationship being away from home that much. Jay met us at the Pizza Place, where we had a drink, a steak with pepper sauce, and a bit of MDs for dessert. Then we took a taxi up to the Hill Top bar. It was just a restaurant really with a DJ playing in one corner in an alcove. The manager had put together a load of canapés which took us by surprise, and when they first came out everybody sort of had a sniff about but I don’t think anyone was keen to get stuck in to some Indian food that had been sat out on a table. Until one girl tried a couple and was like, ‘Oh my god! These are amazing!’ Then she loaded up a plate and took them over to her mates. Jay got us a round of beers from the bar, and I rolled a fat joint and started to pick away at the food. They were like, smoked salmon and caviar and devilled eggs on croutons, they were awesome. Apart from the dodgy fish that time, the food in Goa had been unbelievable so far, and this was even better. I think it won’t be long until it becomes known as a foodie destination; I’m surprised they don’t have a big annual food festival to be honest. No matter what people might say about India, in Goa the water out the showers was clean, the ice was fine to have in your drinks and the food was exceptional. Goa was amazing. Jay got behind the decks and started blasting his tunes, he’d told the bartender that we were with him, so drinks were free once again, although I tipped the bartender fifty rupees each time we got a round. Fuck it’s only fifty p’ and it made their night. It was getting around midnight, Jay had finished his set and was finishing his last beer in India before getting a taxi home and then on to the airport, he was flying out in around eight hours time. Poor fucker, back to London and the cold. We were still only just getting started in our holiday really. We’d only been here two weeks, and already we were in the swing of things, not stressed about anything, no rush to be anywhere, and ten weeks to do what the fuck we wanted whenever the fuck we wanted. Life was good, the dude running the place was well impressed with Jay’s tunes and offered him last minute to stay and play the Hill Top

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... festival over the next few days, but it too late now. He was on his way out the door. Jay was gutted too, it would have been big set in front of a massive crowd. Oh well, can’t have it all in life can ya’. Besides you could tell he was missing Bridgette, so it was an easy choice for him really. He downed his beer, slung his pack on his back and disappeared off into the Indian night for the last time of this holiday; his free-Spirit label ten year anniversary tour of India completed. The party carried on and there were about fifty people all getting down to the tunes. A couple of spaced out Indian boys that I thought I recognised from running that bar down in Vagator near the rock carving were boogying down in front of the speakers and others came and went and drank, and picked at the canapés, which were always being replaced with fresh ones every half hour or so. Three big drunk Indian boys came and tried the thousand yard stare at a few chicks, and the mood dampened for a bit as they threw themselves around the place, but the manager soon had a couple of lads come and have talk with them, they were happy to leave without any hassle. Louise didn’t really think it was fair that they were asked to go, ‘cause in reality they hadn’t actually hurt anyone and were generally keeping to themselves, but they had altered the feeling around the place and I guess if the manager hadn’t sorted them out the crowd would have started leaving. People on party drugs are fuckin’ useless like that, they shy away from confrontation so much they’d let one asshole ruin the night for a hundred people rather than just saying something to them. Oh well, I s’pose that’s what I like about recreational drugs too. We got a taxi home at some point and watched a few episodes of the season three of Futurama, then made love like lovers in paradise do. Louise wasn’t too keen to keep on riding a moped so we dropped off her one. We drove back towards Chapora but instead of heading through the town with its grumpy paranoid freaks, we took a left and ended up at a small ferry port where they were selling fish and prawns as they came off the boat. I was all over it, oh how I would have loved to have had my own kitchen. Too be able to be let loose in a kitchen with all the great ingredients around would have made our awesome holiday even betterer. We were at the head of Chapora river where it met the ocean. I guess the fort would have been up above us on the hill. Just before the dock there was a great little guesthouse that had set up some loungey chair things raised up quite a bit and had a table set between the chairs. I smoked a pipe, ordered some hummus, olives and bread and generally we slummed it like that all afternoon, drinking cold beers until it was time to head home before it got too dark. We smashed a pizza before the Hill Top Festival started. Hill Top Festival was pretty much an evening gig. Started late afternoon and finished at eleven at night, It was good really, we could eat, drink, dance and just as we were getting tired it would be over and we could go home and relax with a bit of tv and a beer. Or if we wanted we could stop off up at the Mango Tree which ran most nights until about three or so in the morning. Perfect. The first night was actual live music, and when we got there it was packed out. We got our wrist bands for all three nights, grabbed a beer at the bar we were in the night before, pissed off that now we had to pay a pound fifty each. A hundred and fifty rupees, day light robbery I

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

tell ya’. We followed a crowd of people around a corner and who should we see walking out on the stage? The didgeridoo fulla from the night down at Curlies. He was with a group called the Highlight Tribe and they played this really great, uplifting music with influences from all over the world. One tune was an American Indian chanting song that picked volume and tempo as it went on until by the end the crowd was chanting along with them and stamping their feet in the dirt. I checked a fulla in a fluorescent orange baseball cap standing beside me and recognised him as Raja Ram, a Godfather amongst the psychedelic scene. He was also in Shpongle that crazy group I’d put myself through so much brain melting to get to see at Ozora years before. I think his first step into stardom was as a member of the band Quicksilver. I had a spare copy of my £700 and a one way ticket to Amsterdam on me which I was s’posed to be editing and I thought about giving it to him, ‘well the story of Shpongle is the driving force for part of the book, and I thought he might appreciate it. Lucky I didn’t though ‘cause I completely rewrote the whole fuckin’ thing in the end. The Highlight Tribe were brilliant and left the party goers screaming out for more, but it was closing time. Since we were still wired on MDs my lover and me, thought sod paying for a taxi and walked the twenty minutes down the dark road to the Mango Tree for a night cap then home for a bit of nookie. Lush. The next day rolled around nice and easy, but we both woke up a bit sick of Vagator, we’d been here, we’d partied and we were a bit pooped. We wanted to be like back in Mandrem where we had a beach right at our front door, so I told Louise about a place called Colomb Cove some fulla I’d bought some hash off in London had told me about. His exact words were, ‘If you get sick and tired of it all, and just wanna chill out on a beautiful beach, go to Colomb Cove, it’s a couple of hours drive south from Vasco de’ Gama Airport.’ We had a week left before we flew to Delhi, so made a plan to just do it. We let the Lakshmi know and took the bike for a last spin around to the beautiful place we’d hung out in the day before, and ordered up the fresh prawns, and I smoked a fat bowl while we watched ol’ Mr Sun check out for the last time over the beautiful expanse of Chapora river. We rode back just after it was dark, dropped off the bike, and went for a drink at the Mango Tree before going down to the Festival to check Raja Ram play. It was a bit quiet in there and there was some fulla arguing with one of the managers. He was like saying like, sit down, I want to explain to you,’ and the manager – Indian fulla close to fifty – wasn’t interested, he was like, ‘I’m not interested, I don’t want to sit down, you just need to pay your bill and leave.’ But the guy was obviously out of his fuckin’ head and kept on repeating himself, ‘Just sit down and let me explain.’ The manager was like, ‘Just pay and go will you!’ The conversation was going nowhere and they dude just never got round to the point of what he was wanting to say. The manager finally snapped when the hippy cunt touched him, the manger pushed the guy down into his chair and yelled over at the watching bar staff to call the police, they could sort the guy out. But then the hippy cunt just got mouthy and that was a fuckin’ big mistake. I always say this, and here’s a point to prove how true it is. Never fuck with the locals! Never! So this fulla’s still not pulled out his wallet to pay, he’s out of his box and doesn’t realise how pissed off the manager is and is still going on about, ‘just sit down so I can talk to you

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... maaaaannn.’ The manager turns back to the bar guys, ‘Actually, don’t call the police.’ And he disappeared out the back for a second before coming back out with the other manager, the short, fat, Thai-lookin’-guy. Louise had talked with him quite a bit. He was always wandering about in one of his many Hawaiian shirts half done up checking on everyone and saying hello. Well this dude was followed by about fifteen other dudes, and it all went a bit quiet in the Mango Tree. No one really wanted to see this guy get beaten up while they were having dinner, but he was really pushing for it. You could see he was about to repeat the same fuckin’ thing again, and I nearly fuckin’ paid his bill for him, just to save his ass. It can’t have been much, fuck a beer was only sixty rupees. I’ll give the guy his dues though, just as the whole bunch of lads took a step towards him, he had a moment of clarity, and changed his whole tone to, ‘Shanti, shanti,’ and put his hands together in the prayer way like they do out in Asia. He was fuckin’ sorry alright, ‘Shanti, shanti, shanti,’ as he backed himself into a corner. Then from outta nowhere a mate of his who must have known the managers, just happened to have walked by and seen this. He jumped between the guy and the fifteen dudes from the kitchen, pulling out his wallet at the same time. He paid the manager, apologised for his friend, and led him out the door; by the skin of his fuckin’ teeth I tell ya’. That guy was two minutes from being dumped out the back in the trees somewhere. Oh well it was a laugh, but you’d never’ve guessed so many dudes were out the back of the Mango Tree. Fuckin’ hell, that was proper gangster shit, but fuck they could cook. The food at the Mango Tree was stellar as well, that egg biryani was the best we’ve ever had. And they served cold beer with a smile for sixty rupees in the Mango tree. The place livened up again, and we went down to check out Raja Ram. He was alright, Louise thought his music was a bit commercial, which says a lot coming from her, but I guess he’s just playing his favourite party tunes, it was still a good laugh.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Getting to Colomb Cove Fuck the third night of the Hill Top Festival, I couldn’t have been less interested, besides two days of MDMA had given me the shits again, well something had anyway. I woke up with stomach cramps and an exploding asshole but I wasn’t puking my guts up everywhere at least. My body was toughening up even as I was weakening it with MDs. We had a final breakfast with Danny and Davie and we had right laugh about their journey to the Taj Mahal. The train was eighteen hours late, some drunkin’ fucker tried to steal their train tickets and then they had some tuk tuk driver following them around for days and they couldn’t get rid of him. Danny finished with, ‘Why the fook, would anyone ever wanna go there? It just blows my mind. It’s just such a shite hole. Well don’t you kids let me put you off, ya’ have to see it for ya’self to believe it.’ The taxi south came and with a rolling gut and three squirty shits during breakfast we gave the guys, John and the Lakshmi a big hug each and with a deep sigh of relief, although we’d had a great time, we put Vagator behind us and moved on to our next adventure. I’d given the last of the bottle of tequila to John to have on his next Saturday night out. Me, tequila and MDMA were not talking to each other at the moment. It was an hour or so back to the airport and another hour or so further south to Colomb Cove. We passed through the odd chaotic town or city but most of the journey was rolling hillsides or paddy fields with a lone sleeping buffalo. We pulled up at Palolem Beach and the dude said this was as far as he’d take us. We only had to take a left at the ocean and walk to the end, follow the rocks around and we were there. Fuck that though, I had to shit something bad. So while my lover paid, I leapt out the cab and half doubled over, ran past the dudes trying to get me to stay at their guesthouse. I managed to miss a random coconut that fell from a tree way above me and hit the ground with a head splitting crack. I saw the first restaurant I could come across, dove inside found the toilet, no one was in there, thank fuck or I would have shit myself, and like last time, jumped through the air, dropped my pants and sprayed foul brown water all over that poor fuckin’ bowl. ‘Oooooooohhhhh,’ that was all I could say, happy that my haemorrhoids hadn’t fuckin’ started fighting their way back out of my asshole again. When we went Vegas for Electric Daisy Carnival they nearly hospitalised me. Anyway, all I had was a case of the shits and a come down from two days of MDs. Me and Louise had eaten exactly the same food from the same plates and my snuggles was fine. So it can’t have come from that. The place was Italian, so we ordered a carbonara to share so I could get some stodge in me. What is it with India and Italian food? They did Italian food better in Goa than I’d had in Italy. There was a wood fired pizza oven, even bigger than John’s and the chef was pulling them out one after the other while in between he was proofing and kneading doe. Thin cheese covered pizzas, with fresh tomato base, olives, peppers and onions were flying out and when our massive bowl of creamy carbonara came it was seasoned to perfection and had a good amount of parmesan on it. The food in Goa was amazing. With the pasta and a couple of bright orange fizzy fantas in me I was ready to face the final challenge and get to Colomb Cove. I wasn’t really up for walking though ‘cause it was about one in the afternoon now and was hot as fuck out there. With the heat, the shits, and all the guys who were gonna hassle me

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... as I walked fuck knows how far up the beach with my back pack on I might have snapped. My lover sorted us another taxi and for a few hundred rupees he drove us around the back, dropped us off on the side of the road and pointed us down a sandy alley saying Colomb Cove was just at the end. I was crumbling. I felt drained to fuck and just wanted to take the first place we could find. So I pulled in at the first stop took a look at its last available shitty bungalow that was right back from the beach and said, ‘As long as it comes with a toilet we’ll take it.’ ‘Hang on,’ Louise said, ‘let me at least check a few more and see if we can get one with a view of the ocean.’ It was a fair call although I was grumpy about not getting my own way. I looked after the stuff and had a cup of tea while Louise checked she had the knife and then went for a walk about. The place had a nice chill out bar area with the opening matches of the cricket world cup on. There was some Aussie fulla sat on a couch with a beer in one hand and spliff burning away in the ash tray. The place had everything I needed, but I’m travelling with someone I love now so we had to try and keep the balance of our relationship alive. She was back ten minutes later excited as fuck, ‘Yep, found us a place. I feel a bit bad though, ‘cause one lady was like, my place only eight hundred rupees, but it was still back from the ocean so I carried on, and she dropped the price to six hundred. Doesn’t matter though, I found us a great beach shack for a thousand rupees a night. You won’t believe the beach when you see it, come on let’s go.’ So I paid for me cup of tea and followed my lover around a sandy pathway, across a few gigantic boulders and onto the white powder sand of Colomb Cove. ‘Ok four hundred rupee,’ the now irate lady yelled at Louise as we went by. We weren’t that poor though so if it was a difference between four quid for no view and ten quid for an ocean view, sod it. We were taking the ocean view. The cove was only about five metres wide and about fifty metres long. It had about five fancy places with sliding glass doors in the middle. Our guesthouse, was piled up at the far end on the Palolem side. There was a small restaurant and bar area to chill out in. But I was fucked, we chucked our shit down in the shack, Louise put on some lotion for the sun and I lay down on the bed to feel sorry for myself. I was stoked the parties were over to be honest, I was pooped and sick again. I’m sure it was the MDs it always happens when I take it over a few days. That shit’s fuckin’ poison I tell ya’. Not like ketamine, I was gonna have to track some down, after all buying ketamine was one of the reasons I was here in India. We hadn’t been able to get fuck all of it over the last year or so, and I was determined to have a bender on the shit ya’ know, nothin’ quite like curling up with a big pile of k’ and sniffin’ ya’ way to life’s bliss. My stomach cramped again so I charged to the toilet and sprayed out the cup of tea I’d had at the other guesthouse fifteen minutes earlier. There was nothin’ to do except lie on the bed under the mosquito net with fan blowing on me while I rode it out. I’d had a bit of feedback from people that my last book £700 and a one way ticket to Amsterdam was riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, so I’d brought that copy with me – which I nearly gave to Raja ram – for just such an occasion. Man I was blown away by how bad it was. I’m at least gonna throw in a few excuses but really there’s

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

none for releasing something you’ve worked on for nearly two years that’s so badly put together.

Excuse numero uno – Thinking all was ok after proof reading the book three times, I rushed the book out just before we flew to Las Vegas for my brother’s wedding. So thinking all was ok I didn’t look at the story again until that day in India.

Excuse numero dos – Around the hundred thousandth word, I was writing at work and I googled the word for tourist information in Portuguese during the, Where the wild things are chapter, and that changed my spell check to Portuguese. When I got home and tried to carry on writing my laptop didn’t have Portuguese spell check so I only ever received a pop-up telling me I had none. Proof reading a hundred and twenty five thousand words without spell check is harder than it sounds.

Excuse numero tres – I used a free online pdf converter and that was shit!!! In over two hundred and fifty places it had missed the gap out between two words andmade themone likethis.

You need to step away from your book for like a year until you’ve forgotten what’s in it. Otherwise when you’re proof reading it, words that are missing or spelt wrong will be impregnated in your head and you won’t see the mistakes. Or a sentence makes sense in your head, ‘cause you’re able to justify it, but until someone you don’t know queries it you don’t realise it makes no sense. One example was during the Berlin Love Parade chapter where it was just me and Alycia, but I mentioned buying shirts for me, Alycia and Paul. Some people wanted to know who this Paul was. In my head he was the Paul back in London, but others didn’t get it. I dropped the line out the story eventually. I lay in my princess’s bed drinking as much water as possible, editing my book with a highlighter and a pen for the whole day. My shnookums bathed in the water and drank G&T’s, popping in every now and then to say hello. The book was shit, it needed a lot of work, luckily I had a lot of time, the story was fine but there was no flow to it. I spent the day and night reading through it and crossing shit out here and adding new stuff there. My snuggles came to bed with a happy drunken glow on her, curled up and passed out. I spent the night kept awake by barking dogs, a gurgling asshole and that feeling of not being particularly tired ‘cause you’ve spent all day in bed. The ocean came right up underneath the bungalow and the soft sound of the ebbing waves was beautiful until I went to the toilet and realised it must have reached the bottom of the drain under the bathroom and was pushing the cockroaches up with it. I had those fuckers number though, and with the confidence of the American army shitting all over some back water fuck hole I rained down on those bastards the devastating cockroach spray that we now kept for our time on the Long Road. It was some full on shit and I never saw another bug in the bungalow again. Those fuckin’ dogs though; that sounded like they were right in bed with us. All night the cunts went on, bark, bark, bark, bark, until finally when the tide was on her way back out and Mr Sun was checking in for the day shift, I snapped. I couldn’t take it any longer; I grabbed the broom

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... from the corner of the room and ran outside to beat them with it. The guys running the place got the fright of their lives as I charged out the door with only a towel wrapped around my waist and broom stick in full swing, with a war cry of, ‘Shut the fuck up you faaarrrrking mongrels!!!!!!’ There was about three of the fullas straightening up the place, and they all froze as I charged towards the pack of dogs fighting outside our front door. I took a swing at them, but they were way ahead of the game and I missed by a good metre or so. I looked up at the fullas, a bit embarrassed about being busted losing it, but those fuckin’ dogs hadn’t shut up all night. I got three waggily heads and a, ‘So sorry sir, the people up the beach brought their own dog with them and left it outside all night. It attacked one of ours quite terribly and now the others are angry. But it is a very big dog.’ ‘Just please shut these fuckin’ things up or I’m gonna fuckin’ kill something.’ ‘Oh you are feeling very sick, sir, have you not slept all night sir?’ ‘No, dude, no I haven’t.’ ‘Please, sir, go back to bed, I will bring you and your lady friend chai tea when it is ready.’ ‘Ok.’ And calmed I went to lay down under my mosquito net, and dozed until our chai came. After a sweet drink of that awesome cinnamon and cardamom flavoured goodness, I slept well through the rest of the morning. Louise woke me up with all my favourites in hand, chai, fanta and omelette on toast, she was a fuckin’ beauty. There was a group of English people there who were all Thomas Cook Airline staff and they were out the front and left of our porch flying kites, throwing a frisbee and swimming about the place. A few more were sat up in the eating area playing cards and my shnookums sat down with me so we could share breakfast together. The guy next door was out on his balcony which he had shaded with some big blankets with an Om symbol and shit. He was on a phone talking with one of his friends about the stay, and then mentioned, ‘No I’ve managed to avoid the hippies so far, but one of them showed up yesterday, and oh my life, this morning he just screamed at the dogs. How shameful.’ Ha, ha, me and Louise looked at each other buckling up in silent laughter. He was slagging me off to someone. Fair enough, I wasn’t pretty in the morning. I needed to sort my guts out, I was shitting every drop of water out of me like some form of biological water pistol as soon as it had a chance to pass through my body. One of the fullas from the cafe called a cab for me and showed us how to walk up through the back of the bungalows and cut through some other guesthouses out onto the road behind. The taxi was waiting and we were soon being driven off to find a chemist. The country side was beautiful out here, it looked like Goa but was just that little less busy. The driver pulled up at a place and I went inside to have a chat with the pharmacist. He reckoned the last thing I needed was antibiotics, what I needed was an old tried and tested method for him, but totally new to me. Charcoal tablets and probiotics. The charcoal he reckoned would just soak up all the bad shit and the probiotics – now they were and odd one, the list of ingredients was terrifying, they contained staphylococcus and ecoli faeces. Egads, but hey, fuck it, I wasn’t the first sick westerner to walk through this guy’s door. And hey they turned out to be a fuckin’ amazing choice.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Within a few hours the shits stopped and I felt better, I’ve never come across such a simple way to treat a case of the shits, pulled my poo right back together it did. Un-fuckin- believable. I’d spent two months with the shits when I was in South East Asia that first time, and all it took this time ‘round was burnt wood and an extra dose of bacteria. Brilliant. I was back on the beers in no time. In fact, it turned out beer wasn’t the best option here. I know I know, relax, it’s still me, I hadn’t finally flipped on drugs... Again. No these guys sold you a large gin and tonic for a hundred and fifty rupees, and as the week went on there got more and more gin in the glasses. By the end, a small bottle of tonic water would last three glasses filled with clean ice and gin. And holy shit balls these guys could cook. Like I’d thought I’d had good cheese pakoras up in Northern Goa, but these dudes, had the lightest, crispest batter, with a creamy homemade paneer. They had the cheese, batter, bite ratio perfect. And when they started bringing out thali’s, veg biryanis, and fresh naan’s made in the oven in front of our hut, it just blew me away. I was back on food baby, and after a proper swim in the ocean around the rocks just off the bay, I decided it was time to sort myself out proper and went for a haircut and a shave. The dude even threw in a facial scrub for an extra few quid. Fuck it, why not? I hadn’t had a haircut or a shave in well over three months, and I was one scruffy looking mother fucker beforehand. When I got back the guys didn’t recognise me at first and it was only when I took off my shirt and they recognised my tattoos and fat gut that they relaxed about who this strange man was who was talking to the lady friend of the angry man in the bungalow. The dogs barked again during the day and it was obvious now it wasn’t their fault. Some person who never came down to say hello, had rented out one of the villas at the other end of the cove and had brought some pit-bull cross thing. It was a savage prick that attacked any of the other dogs if given half a chance. Eventually they were all just bunched up for their own protection. There were about five dogs that belonged to our bungalows, but three of them were puppies, not much more than a foot high. One was the nursing mother, and the last one was a beautiful mongrel with Doberman colouring and a placid nature. All our lot wanted to do was sleep in the shade all day and run around after each other when it cooled a bit. The other asshole would show up every now and then when one was on its own and attack it. The owners did nothing to stop it, they were assholes too. The air stewards all left at the end of the second day and me and my lover pretty much had Colomb Cove to ourselves. When the tide came in late afternoon we were sealed off from the rest of Palolem and the thousands of tourists staying there. During the day, one or two adventurous groups would come across the path over the rocks to our cove, and join us lounging about in our cafe. ‘How’s the food here?’ they’d ask, ‘Holy shit, you’re in for a treat, we’d reply. ‘May we also recommend the Gin and Tonics here. They’re finest in India.’ Louise would say, and she’d know too ‘cause my lover was a G&T connoisseur. People would be gutted with the noisy hotels they were staying and swore next time they’d be staying at our place. We figured out that it was best to go swimming early when the tide was on its way out, then there was no rubbish in the cove or stuck to the rocks that framed it. But when the tide started to come back in all the shit people over in Palolem threw in it, ended up over in our

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

little piece of paradise. We’d usually collect as much of it as we could, hey it was our beach innit. The cafe was well thought out. The guys knew what they were doing. If you walked up Palolem beach all you got was hassles from waiters and shit as you walked past every restaurant lined up along the beach, which generally puts me off trying somewhere out. Our guys, just sat at the bar, or cleaned and left you alone. You could sit there all day and not order anything and they didn’t care. There were a few tables and chairs at the back of it closer to the bar and in the front there were four areas with foot high tables, loads of cushions. They were built for lying down and reading a good book while sipping on your G&T and picking away at some other awesome morsel they’ve pulled out of the kitchen for you. One day we decided to venture out away from our cove and check out how the rest of the tourists lived. Just on the other side of the rock pathway with its locals selling beads, bracelets and blankets, two guys pulled up in their old fishing boat telling us there were dolphins just off the coast. ‘How much?’ sceptical as fuck. ‘Three hundred rupee each sir.’ That’s cheap. ‘Are you sure there’s dolphins?’ ‘Oh very much sir, if you not see dolphins you not have pay sir. Please you and your wife get in. Pay after you’ve seen dolphin.’ Fuck it why not then? We got in, it was a bit wobbly but we managed to get comfortable in the open topped oversized wooden canoe with it’s out board on the back. We drove straight out from Palolem beach and it was great to see our cove tucked in the corner looking quaint and gorgeous. All of our bungalows had the fronts painted bright colours and were made to look a lot nicer from the outside than what they were actually like inside. Everything was fringed with coconut trees and the sand shone white off the dark blue of the ocean. We must have gone just under about a mile off shore in only a few minutes. There were five other boats a few hundred metres away. ‘All the boats over there sir, will make lots of noise and the dolphin will come this way sir. See.’ And he pointed just in time for me and Louise, my lover girl, to see the arched fin of the porpoise come out of the water and dive back down, followed by a few more fins. Wow!!!! Holy shit, actual dolphins in literally seconds! That shit usually never happens. ‘There on the other side, more sir.’ And a whole pod of fins bobbed up and out of the water then disappeared again. The other boats must’ve seen me and Louise, snapping away with our cameras and came racing over and the dolphins vanished. ‘It’s alright sir, these boats will scare off the dolphin with their noise, and the dolphin will come out over here sir,’ and he started the boat up again and drove off just as the other tourists pulled up. He drove a few hundred metres away, cut the engine off, and we sat there in anticipated silence; just the sloshing of the shallow waves breaking on the side of our boat. ‘There!’ Louise said and got the video rolling on her camera just in time to catch one appear and disappear. The fishermen seemed to truly love the dolphins as much as we did, and it can only be good for the dolphins if they’re seen as a source of income rather than just some assholes that eat all the fish. It was an easy week drinking gin and tonics that eventually got more gin and less tonic. The pricks with the big dog moved on, so we were all left in peace. The guys running the

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Bridge and Tunnel Bungalows were like a family to us and at nights when it would be just the few guests of the bungalows lying around the place the guys got us all hooked on Indian soap operas and fresh pakora. One soap, KumKum Bhagya was about a rock star who fell in love with a girl from a lower caste and the devious plan his jealous ex-girlfriend came up with to get him back, by having his current girlfriend kidnapped so she could help save her. This was all so that he would fall back in love with her. It was fantastic viewing. We had great internet there and I received a few emails from people worth mentioning. A friend in New Zealand knew someone who had gone missing in Goa a week or so before. They asked if we could try and give the parents a direction to go in. We looked in to what to do online and found an article that said over nine hundred foreign people are reported missing in Goa each year and on average over one hundred are never heard from again. At an average of three people reported missing a day the police just don’t have the resources or the will to keep looking for lost hippies. I recommended to the fulla, that the missing guy’s family should come over themselves meet the local police and ensure the right people were paid baksheesh to ensure the missing person was moved further up the priority list. It’s a shame that’s how things work, but that’s the reality. I got a message on facebook from a girl called Pip, she said she’d just finished reading my books and when she went to check my twisted travel tales facebook page saw that we’d be in Delhi as the same time as her. I was quite excited about this, ‘cause I just give most of my writing away. It’s on torrent sites all over the world I never really get an idea whether anyone’s reading it. I sure as shit don’t make any money from it. I asked Louise what she thought and we sent a friend request to Pip via my real facebook page. Turned out she was really beautiful with dark brown hair and bright blue eyes. Over G&T’s with cheeky scepticism, Louise was like, ‘Who’s this woman?’ so we stalked her facebook page and found out Pip was married to a handsome fulla with a brilliant smile called Steve, which made things easier. They were both a bit younger than us, from Aussie, and were somewhere out in the depths of South East Asia. My shnookums was like, ‘Ok fuck yeah, why not? Tell them we’ll meet up with them.’ She knew this was important to me, so I wrote back letting them know where we were staying in Delhi and gave them our phone numbers. I was quite nervous to be honest, at that point most of my friends and family hadn’t even bothered to read my books, or if they had, they’d only gotten through the first few pages of the Europe story and given up ‘cause of all the spelling mistakes and shit. A couple of people had even un-friended me on facebook ‘cause of it. Fair enough, fuck ‘em. Wha’da’they want? If ya’ wanna book that’s edited by someone who’s earning a hundred thousand pounds a year to edit a book, go buy one. Unfortunately I don’t have that luxury and it turns out there’s a reason why editors are paid so much. It’s fuckin’ hard work. Especially when I’d written most of my books so cross eyed on ketamine every single word was spelled wrong on the original first drafts and I had to just try and gather the stories from out of them. My first novella, In Brazil you would say, ‘Universo Paralello’, was originally ninety thousand k’d up words long, I once wrote a chapter twice because I had no idea or memory that I’d already written it. It’s been proof read twenty one times by me and various other friends and it still has words missing here and there, a comma in the wrong place or even the completely wrong word within a sentence. Some scathing criticism on Amazon where I was told the only use my Brazil book would be,

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

was to let mother know how I died, was useful really. I practised holding present and past tense and other weaknesses then got on to the next book. South East Asia, a tale of drugs and debauchery came out a lot easier, and I enjoyed writing the sex scenes – although Louise isn’t the biggest fan. That’s understandable and says a lot about her character that she stayed with me after reading the book. But I rushed that to finish it because I got a bit bored and it only came out at sixty five thousand words. To get it finished I bought a load of coke from the Blue Sunflower cafe up the road from my house in Finsbury Park and smashed out eighteen thousand words in five days between work and eventual sleep. I got inspired a bit though through some great comments from the people actually in the book itself so I went back over it and ended up adding about fifteen thousand more words to the story and smoothed it out a lot. £700 and a one way ticket to Amsterdam was only s’posed to be about the Ozora rave but when I was lost amongst the memories trying pull the first chapter out of that LSD fuelled haze, a clear photo of actually being at the front gates of Ozora festival flashed through my mind. ‘How the fuck did I end here like this in this fuckin’ state?’ The whole of my life in London flashed before my eyes, and it was that instantaneous movie in my mind that I tried to get down. But I didn’t know what the story as a whole was. I just knew it was going to end up with me taking way too much LSD and filling myself up with self doubt even though I was surrounded by friends. Another guy had gotten in touch, a fulla called Jesse and with honesty he said there was a good story in there, but the book was more like a collection of short stories, and that just wasn’t my intention. In my head it all made sense and flowed, but after nearly a year away from it and the editing I did when I was sick on arrival at Colomb Cove, I’d pieced that story back together with thousands of small and subtle changes. I added nearly fifteen thousand words to that yarn too. And for the sake of flow, took out two chapters and moved them to the back as extra stories to read after. So hey, writing is what I do, what I love, it’s the thing I can sit there for hour after hour and get lost in. When I look back on all those wasted years in a soulless job, at least I can have something to be proud of. So yes, we were gonna meet this Pip and this Steve in Delhi, and although I love Louise to bits, it was something I would’ve done no matter what she thought. I’m just glad the right woman has fallen into my life and accepted me for all the misbehaviour, missing teeth, and expanding waist line. Alathea wrote to me and said I should get in touch with an old friend of hers from facebook called ‘Bob’ and that he was great guy and would be able to tell us loads of stories about the old days in Goa in the late seventies. I’d seen Bob floating around the Goa Hippy Tribe page and another group of online friends, The Smugglers’ Arms, but’d never really chatted with him, apart from the one time I put a picture on the Smugglers’ Arms showing the shit Charas I’d bought in London from the guy who’d told me about Colomb Cove. Bob had written to me and said, if I was ever in India, let him know and he’d show me the real deal. So I sent Bob and friend request, with Alathea as a reference. Then I convinced Louise that meeting another stranger online wouldn’t end up with us dead in a ditch somewhere. Well I hoped so anyway, but from the little I know of my online friend Alathea, she aint nobody’s fool, and if she said Bob was legit, then I was happy with that. Bob got in touch and was pleased as a pig in shit we were coming to Delhi and wanted to meet. I had in the back of my mind the charas that he’d mentioned in a one off comment to a photo I’d posted on facebook the year or so earlier.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

We’d sat around the Bridge and Tunnel Bungalows having the perfect beach holiday, pretty much with the place to ourselves, fantastic food, great service and not just that, the guys working there offered us friendship too. They had taken the effort to know what travellers want and produced that in scores, a comfortable, quiet place, where you can read books, eat well, drink well, and feel included. All of this in our own little piece of paradise with its coconut trees, water that was clean at the right time of day at least, and dolphins off the sparse tree covered point. There was just one last task before we took the taxi back to Vasco de Gama and the plane to Delhi, and that was to find someone to give the last half a gram of crystal MDMA to. During the wonderful week we spent at the Bridge and Tunnel a few people stumbled across our little slice of paradise. Over the last two days a group of young English people came over the rocks each day from Palolem. I sat there playing cards with my lover waiting for one of them to strike up a conversation with us so I could give them the MDs if they wanted it. But in two days not one of them even looked at us, let alone said hello. So fuck ‘em, I’d bury it in the ground for Shiva before I gave it to them. I wasn’t far from handing it over to the gods, when they delivered their vessel anyway. Another English fulla showed up one day, sort of attached to the other guys but not enough for them to make room around their table for him on our last night, so he sat up at the table next to us. As soon as he sat down, he, smiled, said hello, shook mine and Louise’s hands and asked what was the best thing on the menu. Louise put him on a winner with the Saag Paneer and fresh naan bread. He smashed the whole fuckin’ thing, offering us some as he went through it. I liked him. I offered him a pipe of some of the last of Bruce’s Parvati valley hash and he asked if he could buy a little, said he didn’t smoke much, but also didn’t really know where to get any from. I gave him pretty much most of what I had left, two or three grams. He insisted on paying. I was like, ‘Dude I’m not gonna charge you four pounds, ‘cause that’s about what that costs.’ So he insisted on getting us a G&T each. He was well in. I raised the MD fact to him, I got half a gram of London’s finest dude if ya' want it? You can have that for free too. ‘It’s only gonna go in the ocean for the gods to share man. I don’t want ya’ money either.’ And smiled. The MDs had played their part in our holiday and I had no more use for them and no desire to shove ‘em back up my ass along with the Lebanese which was coming with me. Oh yeah, I’d forgotten all about the four trips in the hem of my jeans. Just to prove to the dude I wasn’t lying or grooming him in any way, I showed him the fat crystals of it and told him to have a little taste. He knew what he was doing, it wasn’t his first time, and as soon as he tasted that vile shit he knew I was genuine. I had good drugs, and didn’t wanna take them on the plane with me, it was that simple. I eventually accepted a thousand rupees from him for the MDs, he wasn’t avin’ it any other way, so fair enough, there was no point being stubborn, he was just trying to return my generosity. We talked shit between the three of us for a bit, before he said his goodbyes, and chucked an extra few drinks behind the bar for us without telling. We only found out when the boys poured them and said he’d paid before he left. Fuckin’ legend, we’d totally found the right person to give the drugs to. We had found a lady a few days before who had been volunteering at kid’s shelters but drugs weren’t her thing. She did appreciate the offer though.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

So that was us. We woke up after three or so weeks in Goa, shared tearful goodbyes with the Bridge n Tunnel team, who all came out that morning and carried our bags to the waiting taxi, and with the only Lebanese hashish in India shoved up my ass, and four forgotten Hoffman’s hidden in the hem of my jeans, I took my little wooden pipe to pieces in the back of the taxi and tossed it out the window, a gift for the Gods.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, Delhi!!!! We got on the plane at Vasco De Gama, for our direct flight to Delhi. I remember a fulla with a jacket on and scrawled across the back in gangster like tagging was, ‘There’s only one true God!!’ and thinking, please don’t blow up the fuckin’ plane man. We landed in Delhi all in one piece. My snuggles had smashed her way through my crappy sweet corn pizza thing that she loved, and had sunk a few G&Ts during the journey. Outside the airport it was sweet as, Delhi wasn’t hot like Bangkok, it was way easier to stand around in. We’d organised a taxi to pick us up through the hotel and I was all hopeful to see some dude standing out the front with a, ‘Mr Wilson’ sign. But there wasn’t shit. Louise rang the Hotel and I did another cruise through the crowd of sign waving taxi drivers and chauffeurs. Nope, none of them were for us. But that couldn’t break my mood. I could smoke where ever the fuck I wanted. There was a pre-paid taxi stand right beside us and we had the address, printed in English and Hindu, on a map and also on Louise’s phone. We were on holiday and we’d get there. Even the lying cunts at the hotel who kept telling us someone was, ‘only just around the corner sir,’ weren’t gonna break this. Somebody had reached out from the ether of the internet, had read my writing, had liked it, and now wanted to meet up! I was over the moon with it. To know my work was getting out there and doing something, made it all worthwhile. I still would’ve written anyway to be honest, it’s the thing I’ve always wanted to do. It’s the thing I can spend three hours at a time absorbing myself in, time just flying by. Some people, train spot, some people cycle, my name’s Bryce W James and I write books, it’s what I do. I won’t be sat around on my death bed wishing I’d done the things I only ever dreamed about. I went out there and did them. Well, at least gave it a shot anyway. Failure is measured within, and although I knew I wasn’t selling any of my books, they were still getting out there. I’ve put them on Piratebay myself! A few people a year get in touch, but this one, this angel in the sky, had flown into my world, daring to say hello. I think it gave a lot of substance to Louise who has read some of my writing and has to know about all the whores and sex and drugs that most guys have done, but none tell the missus. Well there’s no hiding it for me is there, and although I know it can be difficult for Louise at times, she’s a good, strong beautiful woman and loves me as I is. We gave this hotel and their fuckin’ taxi mate an hour and a half, before I finally lost it, and went to the pre-paid stand and paid some fulla about twelve hundred rupees to drive us to Hotel ...... in the Main Bazaar of Delhi. I didn’t bother to ring the hotel to tell them we’d left, the hour and a half late taxi guy would learn his lesson about what it’s like to waste someone’s time. Would the Indian’s call it karma when we would call it enjoyment through spite? Fuck knows but we’d landed in a beautiful late afternoon in Delhi and after about half an hour in the taxi it was dark. Sod ‘em. ‘Oh yes mister,’ the driver said with a waggle of his head, as I smoked a fag out the window of his little rusty car, with its multiple gods hanging from the mirror, ‘This is the university,’ with a proud smile and glint in his eye as we took a turn off the motorway and passed a steel gate with two men with machine guns sitting out the front of it. He carried on,

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

‘We have over ten thousand students studying here,’ and looked at me with a cheeky smile that popped out from under his moustache and a final waggle of his head. We pulled up in front of an over pass and a flow of what smelt to be raw sewage and the piss of ten thousand drunken students washed across the road at least two inches deep. The smell gagged me but it was only for a moment. Then we were off again. I remember in the amazing book Shantaram he went on and on about the smell of Mumbai being the first and most expressive thing about the city, but apart from the filth we just drove through Delhi wasn’t really that bad. Bangkok stinks way more. The air in Bangkok is thick, stinky and gluey. It sticks to you and settles in ya’ lungs, whereas Delhi was super. To be honest I was a bit caught out by the fact. In all my travels through Asia and shit it’s always so fuckin’ hot. Delhi was like a warm London. The price for the taxi was all pre-paid so we had no worries of our city-proud driver going around in circles or putting the cab in neutral and then hitting the gas to send the meter spinning in circles like they do in Saigon and Thailand. It was all relatively simple. We followed the journey on Louise’s phone and knew where we were and how long it would take to get to the Bazaar. It was an hour or so. It all changed though when we took a right on to Main Bazar, just after Rama Krishna Ashram Marg Metro station. Then bam we were in Paharganj! It was like Kao San Road, but dirtier. We only got a few metres up the street before the road just became blocked. The driver was like, ‘It is easier and faster for you to get out and walk. The hotel is only being two hundred metres up on the right.’ All around us, tourists and locals squished their way up the road. Motorbikes, honked their horns and pushed for position between everyone. Guys pushing barrows loaded with fruit and other shit to sell blew whistles, banged on bells and the sense of being in Delhi came alive. I opened the door to the taxi, jumped away from the three fingered, no nose leper girl and dodged a slimy puddle of fuck knows what between my feet. We slung our bags on, tipped the guy and made our way down in to Main Bazar, hoping the driver hadn’t fucked us and dumped us off too far away. Like a pack of dogs ravaging over fresh meat the stall holders were on us. It was like they’d seen us get out the cab and must have sent some secret signal out, ‘cause they were flies on shit man. ‘Oh mister, buy for wife.’ ‘Hey lady, look at this fabric.’ ‘You must promise to only use my travel agent.’ Trolleys seemed to be accidentally pushed in our way so we’d have to halt while some guy brought jewellery out or showed off some crappy bracelet. One guy went to grab at my shnookums, ‘Don’t you fucking dare touch her!’ checking my Black-ops switch blade, right front pocket, just above the knee, as he slunk back off under his rock. The whole time I was eyeing out for pharmacies, the ones I’d been told years ago I could buy ketamine from. It was way back in my time in Cambodia, during the untold story when a fulla I met over a microwaved plate of k, told me he’d cooked down ten kilos of it during the Mumbai shootings. Said he was buying two twenty litre bottles at a time and tried to look casual as he walked down the street with it in water containers and had to carry it up the street, in to the hotel and to his room, where he had a pot boiling it down non-stop for days. All the while his

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... room was filled with condensation from the brew and the streets were filled with the entire Indian army. A lot of poor fuckers died that day ‘cause of some asshole’s ideals. And all the while this fulla, was just boiling down the ketamine. There’d been no ketamine in London for a year or so now, ‘cause of some other fuckin’ unknown reason. The shit had just dried up, but I was here now, and I was determined to find some. I didn’t need a lot, all of our lives had been a lot easier and more sociable without it. It was just costing a lot more now for a night on the nose. I hate speed, it’s shit, I’m too lazy and like to sleep. Cocaine is great and I won’t hear a bad word against it, but the shit is expensive in London. What costs you five dollars in Colombia would cost you eighty in London. And that’s only if you know the guy. Others were paying a lot more for what we were getting, but the k? The k was gone man. The Portuguese, the ravers even the guys in suits couldn’t get the shit. But there was a hard core of us who lived and dreamed of the good old days when the streets were paved with white. I’d brought Louise here to find it. Don’t get me wrong, she doesn’t really like the shit, but she’s a good sport and was game for the hunt. The hotel came out of the dust and dirt and we took the right off the grimy people packed street, swished through the doors and into the bright, airy, clean reception space. I think we looked a bit more run down than most of the other people in there. It wasn’t like it was a place for millionaires but at three thousand five hundred rupees a night it sure as fuck was above the price most back packers would pay. They kept us waiting and then with a, ‘Hello sir,’ from the smart dressed guy behind the counter, they took our passports, checked us in, and some fulla carried both of our bags up to the second floor. The man behind the counter apologised about the taxi driver being late and I told him, it wasn’t a problem. Then we took the elevator to the second floor, tipped the guy who’d carried our bags, fifty rupees, and with a nod and a handshake from him, he said, ‘If you need beer mister, please let me know and I shall bring it for you myself.’ Beautiful. We were meeting Pip tomorrow so tonight was just for us. It was fuckin’ noisy in the room, we may as well’ve been sitting outside, what with all the drumming and ten thousand motor bike horns. I shit out the hash, so we thought fuck it, let’s go for a mission and find a pipe. I needed some fags anyway. We took a right out of the hotel, skipped over the sleeping children with no shoes, twirled passed the two cows eating trash, hopped over the massive turd and slapped away the stretched out hands of beggars and shop owners. All the shops sold the same old shit, hippy chillums, pipes and blankets, I grabbed a cheap pipe. I’ll give one guy his dues, he had non-negotiable signs up selling those baggy cotton pants they all wear for way less than I think I would have paid if it came down to bartering. Two guys wanted to polish my shoes, they could fuck off. Another guy nearly took me out with his motorbike and after about two minutes of this shit Louise looked at me, ‘Fuck this, let’s go home!’ and we headed back to the hotel. The restaurant promised good food and fuck yeah did they deliver. Fresh naan and a spicy lentil dal were perfect. We smashed that with a bottle of fanta and a lemon honey tea each then went down to the room to drink beer. They didn’t sell beer in the restaurant? Booze was illegal except in designated bars? Oh well. What the fuck? On the way down to the room I saw the guy with the ‘One True God’ jacket on, coming up the stairs. Funny how you just seem to notice people. The mass

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... shooting in Mumbai came to mind and I hoped he wasn’t planning a bombing or mass shooting at our little tourist hotel in the Bazar. We gave the guy outside the room four hundred rupees and he came back with two kinda warm bottles of Kingfisher super strength, which was good enough. I tipped him a hundred rupees, smoked a pipe, shared a beer with my shnookums and watched tv in between journeys to look out the window at the very noisy fuckin’ chaos happening outside. Just as I was starting to moan to Louise about the noise, ‘I’m never going to be able to sleep here lover,’ it all stopped, bang on nine at night all the stalls and shops were shut and apart from a roof top restaurant across the square from us it was ghost town outside. Fuckin’ empty! Silence, oh holy shit balls yeah! We ordered another beer, tipped well, and watched one of the Mission Impossible films.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Strangers to fill my heart This was it, I woke full of apprehension and nervous hope about the day ahead. We were gonna be meeting Pip, this woman who’d read my shit, and took it in to her heart. She understood where I was coming from and even looked me up. Now we were gonna meet, what was I to do? Some sweet love making with my snuggles was the perfect start to any day, and after a good shower and a fat pipe of the finest Lebanese in India, we hit the road. It was a left out of the doors and a promise to the first two tuk tuk drivers to hassle us that if we needed a taxi we’d use them. We passed another shop and I’d promised a third guy that if I wanted to go on any tours and travel I’d use him. Aha, a useful shop. I found a guy selling Marlboros and big rizlas, so at least we could smoke a joint if it came to that. Bruce had said Rizla were fuckin’ hard to get hold of. About a hundred metres down on the left was a small cafe with a few back packers of varying cleanliness and knotted hair sitting about drinking tea, coffee and eating eggs. It was a good sign so we pulled in there and ordered scrambled eggs on toast and jam. When it showed up we smashed the eggs and put the sweet bright red jam on the left over toast. It was an easy meal, and washed down with lemon and honey tea with strips of ginger in it, we felt really good. Delhi wasn’t too hot and a bit of sightseeing for the day with new friends was gonna be just the ticket. We gave the guys a call and made a plan to meet them out the front of the New Delhi metro station. I had no idea where the fuck that was but Louise was on the google maps so she knew it wasn’t far. We walked to the end of the road, passed all the guys hassling us to take their taxis and waved down the only tuk tuk not trying to ruin my day. It’s just a spite thing for me I think. Any asshole hassles me about anything, and even though I need it, like on this occasion, a taxi, I told them I didn’t. It’s life innit. I knew what Pip and Steve looked like ‘cause I’d been stalking them on facebook. From the bright coloured head scarf Pip was wearing in some of the more recent pics, I could tell they’d been up around North Vietnam, Laos or North Thailand. It was Black Hmong or Red Dzai clothing. The tuk tuk, pretty much just drove us ‘round the block and dropped us at the far end of the road to where we had come out. Well that’s where the station was so what could we say? It didn’t matter anyway, ‘cause as I got ready and Louise was paying, Pip and Steve stood out from the crowd. Now I was nervous, I aint ever claimed to be no Hunter S. Thompson but I know for a fact that he felt trapped between the persona people read in his books and who he actually really was. He felt he always had to give the crowd what they wanted, and me? Pffh, fuck it, I’m only ever gonna be me. A slightly grumpy, slightly fat drug addict, with a good flow of cash and two passports. Oh yeah, and a lot of time to sit around and write books. Someone asked me other day if what I write is like Hunter S Thompson, and I said, ‘Well kinda’, if you consider all the drug use, but unlike Hunter it’s without all the witty observations, sharp insight and big words. My writing is purely uneducated rants about raves and travel with poor grammar innit. My writing is important to me as I’m able to look back on a mundane existence in a grey cold slab of a city and go, well hey, actually at least I’ve

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... written something, or ya’ know, achieved a goal while I sat at home on Friday nights sniffing cocaine and drinking Tyskie. There Pip was, an angel in a crowd of dirt, and Steve too, he beamed that natural warm smile of his and we knew we’d be friends. We met and hugged, this was more than I ever thought’d be a reality with my writing. Everyone always wants to be famous and never have to work again, but a Stephen King book I was given by Alycia one time after we had split up, called, ‘On Writing’, explained there are only ever about a hundred famous anything at any one time in the world. A hundred famous authors, a hundred famous actors and a hundred famous bands. But there are millions of people who have delusional dreams of grandeur and expect it one day to be them in the headlines. No one’s ever told me I’m gonna be famous, in fact if anything I’ve had a little too much honesty from assholes. But it was the assholes who made me go back, evaluate and rewrite the books. It was only those cunts who broke my heart at the time, who really had anything useful to say. Yeah it’s great when someone tells you they love what you’ve done. But then that’ll never help to improve it. Of course it’ll help you to carry on. People ask why I give my writing away, and it’s simple, I sell one maybe two books a month, but fifty to a hundred are downloaded for free a month. I’d take that any day. And as I’ve always said, I’ve bull shitted my way in to making good enough money to do all the things I want to do in life. So writing to me has never been about financial escape, although that’d be great. It’s been about me finding something to love, and to live for. I can spend year after monotonous boring fucking year doing a mindless and soulless job just getting closer to dying, second by agonising second, but this, I can look back on it, and see that I’ve done something. That yes it hasn’t just been a waste of existence alive but not living. I’d travelled, loved and felt kindred with our Earth and all of us living with her. And now it turned out I was encouraging other people to do it too, to never give up and to hit the Long Road. Over the years a small number of people have gotten in touch with me ‘cause of my writing and told me that they’d gone out there and lived life because it was always in them, but my books proved any fuckin’ one with pure grim determination and no fear of failure to hold them back can get out and see our Earth. We always worry but that doesn’t mean it has to stop you. To do anything in life, just be random as fuck and tell all your friends so you can’t back out, work hard, save up, buy the ticket to somewhere you’ve seen in your sleep, and go. Or build that house, get that mortgage, make that model airplane, but just turn off the fuckin’ TV please! Fuck the excuses, just fuckin’ do it! In life, some people talk and some people do, which one are you? It’s that simple. And hey hopefully you’ll survive it without too much scarring and even more hopefully, you’ll have fuckin’ enjoyed the experience. The humans of our Earth seem to have forgotten that our existence is so unique and important. Life is to be lived, not spent working in a job making fake electronic money for some asshole who you’re never gonna meet. Who’ll never buy you even one fucking beer! You’ll end up dead at some point after the hyenas of palliative care have crushed the marrow and dignity from the bones of your life. The leftovers of that fake electronic money that you never got to see, will be stolen by the vultureous government.

But on a brighter sunnier day in the busy centre of India’s capital city, Pip and Steve were people just like me and Louise my lover girl. We’d all stuck two fingers in the air to the

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... system, quit our jobs and ended up strangers in a strange land, in a group hug out the front of New Delhi metro station. Well now what to do? I wasn’t quite sure what to say? Bob was busy until tomorrow, so it was the tourist trail for sure. Louise was keen to check out the Red Fort and being someone who is quite happy to just drink beer in a corner, I let her take the lead on the tourist side of shit. We looked for the prepaid taxi sign and on the way over to it, some fat fulla yelled out that he had a van. ‘How much to the Red Fort?’Louise asked. ‘Only one hundred rupees each my friends.’ A quid each, why bother bartering over that? ‘Done.’ So we jumped in this fulla’s van. Louise, Pip and Steve were in the back, with me and the fat boy in the front. Next thing ya’ know some other fulla jumps in and pulls out a block of hash. Nice! Put ourselves out there, told a stranger we had money, got in his car, and now we were being offered drugs. Fuckin’ perfect! Ignore what ya’ parents say. Sometimes it’s funny getting in a car with a stranger. Besides I had the black ops switchblade, right front pocket, just above the knee. The dude started working the hash, warming it in his hands and putting a low flame to it so he could mush it up with a bit of tobacco. Then he pulled out the tiniest chillum I’ve ever seen, a right nose burning little cunt, but in a fat cone shape. He sparked that shit up and passed it around. Giddee the fuck up! I passed it over to Pip and she was like, ‘I can’t believe that this shit happens to you. We’ve been travelling for months now and no one’s just turned around and passed on the drugs. You seem to attract this shit man.’ Cool so at least I wasn’t just some spoilt rich kid typing out fake stories about drugs then. The hash was great, had a great taste and a real whack on it too. In the few minutes it took to drive around the corner to the Red Fort we’d managed to down two of these chillums and the van looked like the car outta the Cheech and Chong film when they smoke the Labradorus weed. You know the one, when Chong’s dog eats his stash so he follows it around until it shits it out. The guys in the taxi said they’d wait for us and with blurred eyes we stepped out of the van into the chaos of any tourist attraction in any part of the world. Cars honked, children sold shit, and every type of cunt wanted a penny out of ya’. But sad to say, we were hardened to this shit now and bulled through the crowd with a quick stop to buy a bottle of water each. The touts and other scum mustn’t have been allowed through the gates and now that we had all the time in the world to check it out, this big red brick building built by the mass of poor for the rich few was well impressive. We took the time for selfies and high fives. Ya’ gotta love a well placed high five. The key is to look at the other person’s elbow, not their hand, and you’ll never miss. Try it, you’ll see. I was well fuckin’ stoned from the taxi dudes charas, we all must have been as we floated towards the ever growing walls. The fuckin’ place was massive as and we followed the hundreds of rich Indian tourists around to a main entrance with metal detectors and security searching people. Fuck! Fuck it, I wasn’t about to give up my blade that easily so we found a casual enough looking rock in some gardens just opposite the entrance and stashed our two

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

knives under it. The hash I’d take the risk on. Fucked if I was leaving that lying around. Turned out it didn’t matter anyway, I gave them my best Namaste and was waved through with Steve while the girls had all their shit checked and put through the metal detectors. From there we took a left through an open hall area with like English beachside stalls selling crap that no one wanted to buy. Through that and waiting just on the other side was a finely dressed man who with a practised English offered to be a guide for a couple of hundred rupees. Well might as well, it’s gotta be better than just walking around looking at rocks in the sun built by slaves. The story he told was an interesting one. Well where we could understand him anyway. To be honest I don’t think he actually understood the words he was saying, he just spieled out this speech without knowing half of the shit he said just wasn’t in English. It was like he’d gone and remembered a half hour speech in a foreign language and where he fumbled he just put in something that sounded like he knew it should. The same as I do when I’m travelling and givin’ their language a go. We walked through an amazing space with solid stone ceilings fifty feet in the air. It was held up by massive Roman like columns. The archway design in between had the seven small arcs similar to Angkor Watt and which I’ve been told are s’posed to represent the outline of the seven headed Naga (snake). We got up near a group of fancy white buildings and it was here the guide told us that the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan held court. Or in other words told everyone what to do. Ol’ Shah Jahan was also the same guy that built the Taj Mahal and he’d built the Red Fort up in Delhi for the more even climate during the hot months. But a series of ever poorer family members and greedy conquering assholes eventually stole the glamour from the place. The silver ceiling in the white Rang Mahal where he held court was stolen and replaced by copper by one particular shit head and eventually the Persians and English showed up and shit on everyone’s parade. The Persians took the Peacock throne for themselves and the English, among many things, took the world’s biggest diamond for themselves and placed it right there on show for all the world to see on the crown of their own inbred royalty. I think it’s fair to say that using the term colonials is just a polite way to say, genocidal fuckin’ thieving murdering cunts who eradicated entire fuckin’ civilisations and simply left nothing behind except desperate poverty, jesus and their own language. Oh yeah, tobacco, alcohol and stolen children were the gifts for those left living. I checked behind the back wall of the fort and sure as shit there was a slum filled with the desperate, sheltering and shitting underneath. Had they ever seen inside these empty walls? We were pretty much at the end of the tour and the guide although fab, just did not understand our questions. He smiled and waggled his head repeating a part of the speech that he thought related to what we were asking, maybe recognising one of the words we’d used. We were on our way out, still all a bit spaced out when we did something I always preach against. Something which is the drive behind everything that I write. Some half Chinese looking kiwi bird came over and was like, ‘Hi guys, I’m travelling on my own and I’m just stuck with this guy,’ pointing at an Indian fulla lurking behind her. We sorta, ‘ok’d and ‘cool’d and weren’t really sure what to say. We were still a bit stoned to really talk to each other much I think, and hey, she never actually said, ‘Can I join ya’ll.’ But after she’d sorta stood there for a minute in the worst kind of silences you could see her get the hump, and just go, ‘Well, ah, fine.’ Turned around walked off. I still feel really bad about it to this day. Someone was doing exactly what I say everyone should be doing, she was out there in India,

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

by herself, trying to meet a new group of people and we’d just blanked her, like so many mother fuckin’ assholes have done to me in the past. So dude, if ya’ reading this, sorry for being a dick. But hey, we were really high, I think I was tryin’ to roll a joint and she shoulda been a bit more direct with us. Of course she coulda hung out with us. We were all just a bit too inside our own heads to strike up conversation. So she stropped off, cursing us for being stuck up cunts, which was fair enough, and we made our way out the front gates, picked up the switch blades and then went through the carnage of trying to find our taxi guys. I didn’t have a Scooby-fuckin-doo what the dude looked like, and there was more than one, that said, ‘I am your driver sir, I have been waiting for you.’ Or, ‘Your driver leave and ask me to take you.’ I was going through all this while the guys bought us ice cream and eventually our man, came and got us. The dude with the hash packed another chillum up, and instead of actually buying his, I gave him a small tar- like ball of the melting Lebanese. Bob called out the blue and said he’d gotten back early and was goin’ to watch India play South Africa in the cricket world cup. So although I wanted to stay and hang out with Pip and Steve it was time to meet another new friend. We gave the guys a couple of hundred rupees to get them home safe, and promised to meet them later that night. Me and Louise then jumped outta the van at a red light found a tuk tuk and jumped in with directions to take us to some massive shopping mall in the south. I only knew Bob through my facebook hippy friends and Alathea had vouched for him, so I was confident he was alright and besides, he’d said that he could get the best India had to offer for us. I knew what that meant and hoped he did too. It was a long ol’ drive must’ve taken over an hour. The tuk tuk driver wanted eight hundred rupees but after a phone call to Bob he said to only pay him two hundred, two fifty at best. The driver was well pissed off and said he wouldn’t have taken us at all if he knew we were goin’ to pay Indian prices. ‘I don’t care what your friend says. He would pay two hundred because he is from India, you are a tourist and must pay me six hundred.’ Once we were outta the back of the tuk tuk, I gave him three, and with a swollen pissed off face the driver wheeled around and took off back the way we’d come. We were in a rich part of town and you could hear the chanting coming from the thousands of Indians watching the game in a fenced off part of the mall carpark. I hid my knife again in case we were searched on the way in by one of the guards at the gates. Bob called and said he’d be there soon and after about twenty minutes a guy who looked like his profile on facebook pulled up in an old hatch back car and told us to get in. So out there in Southern Delhi with a pocket full of cash, and no one else knowing where we were, I put my knife back in my pocket and we got in the car. Bob had that same smile in real life like he does in his facebook picture. It sorta starts at his shoulders and ends somewhere up near his greying hair. He had a terrible asthmatic wheeze on him too. We shook hands and had a laugh. I gave him the last of the Lebanese that I’d been saving just for him, and then he drove us to some middle class part of town and got some fulla to keep an eye on his car for him while we went to watch the cricket. The bar we ended up in was bit like a night club I think and we were the only people in it. Well us, three waiters, a manager and some shy couple in the corner. We ordered two large

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

Kingfishers, and from that got an extra one free. Fuckin’ shoulda been at three hundred and fifty rupees a go. Bob told them to put the spare in the fridge and then ordered one of the waiters to pour our beers with a few words in Indian and a flick of his finger. We ordered some food to go with the cricket and beers. Massala nuts turned out to be peanuts with coriander, tomato, and fresh lime juice squeezed over the top. They were well wicked and me and my shnookums still make them for ourselves to this day. Other shit was less memorable but we did order a plate of Indian-whatever cauliflower and Bob fair lost his marbles at the waiter ‘cause there was only six pieces of cauliflower on it. I was like, ‘it’s cool man,’ and Bob was like, ‘Fuck no! Do you know how much an entire cauliflower costs in India? I can go outside right now and buy one for less than ten rupees and these guys think that ‘because you’re English they can charge you three hundred rupees for six pieces of cauliflower! Look, look it’s all bloody onions and green peppers, when you bloody ordered cauliflower!’ He was fuckin’ right. Ol’ Bob was proper wheezin’ away and I offered him my ventolin inhaler. ‘No I don’t use bloody steroids, the bloody doctor tried to give me all kinds of steroids and crap, it just makes me worse. I go down to Chennai once a year to take Prasadam fish. It’s amazing, they give you the treatment for free. They give you a specific type of fish whole, which you must swallow once a year and then prescribe you an eating regime which you must follow for three months. After that your lungs clear up and you’re much better for another year. I’m going to see them next month so for now I must just hang on ‘till then. Bob was telling us about the good times in Goa in the late seventies until the heroin came and ruined the place. Said his wife had a taste for it. That and the booze. I told him about the dirty rich Indian cunts that were preying on the girls when we were there, and he was sad about it. ‘You see,’ he said’ ‘Too bloody many of the Indian people are close minded in relation to sex. The families just do not talk about it. Especially with the children. So the kids grow up with soap operas and movies being their only source of education. “Have you seen them?” On most of them the cool guy slaps a woman at some point and she just apologises for being wrong. It’s bloody terrible. With these people, generally their children and for sure one hundred percent the girls, just do not have sex before marriage. Oh the shame. But now you have these rich Indian kids with all their money, no sexual or relationship talks with their family and now western porn is everywhere. They are confused. Indian girls will not have sex with them, or anything else. They’re spoilt brats who think they can have whatever they want. They get to Goa, see a white girl with a white man, see they’re not married, presume she has sex with him, and think they can show off and take her from him. It’s sad. But you can see how it’s not just their fault they’re playing up. In India we’ve built a culture for this type of behaviour because many Indians simply do not tell their children how they should behave and the rising middle class kids just are left to the movies and pornography for guidance. See everything is not just a simple event. It takes many bloody things to make up one happening.’ It was great to be in India watching the cricket with a local Indian person. Bob was able to recall all kinds of famous moments from cricket’s history the same way most hardcore English fans could football. There was a smoking area out the back and I busted the young couple making out in there. Much to the shame of the pretty young girl who hid her face. I just smiled and we got chatting about New Zealand and the young fulla was sure we were

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

going to win the cup, Bob was too when I got back to the table. In the end India smashed South Africa and it was great to be in a country that had just won a game in a world cup. We got down to the task of the charas. I wanted fifty grams of India’s finest so I could take as much home as I could. I knew I’d still have to get it across the border in to Nepal and then from out of there to London, but I had a plan. My ol’ friend Kimmy had taught me well. It’s all about the layers of clingfilm and the way you roll it up, fat side first, then melt and twist. Then end over end, melt and twist, then fat side, melt and twist once more. You roll about a foot and a half of cling film on each layer before the light, melt, clip of the ends. Finally melt and twist the ends by twisting the melted plastic on your palm to seal it. I trusted Bob, for no other reason than someone else who I’d met online had said he was cool. And after meeting him, I knew he was cool. It was gonna cost me three hundred rupees a gram but it would be cream from the Parvati valley and he’d known the guy who made it for years. Fine by me. You gotta have faith in humanity sometimes. It was about six o’clock now and Mr Sun had checked out for the day when I handed nine thousand rupees to Bob with a promise to meet him tomorrow to drop off the rest. Now a gram of good charas in London will cost you anywhere between ten to fifteen pounds and Bob was gonna sort me out for three quid a g’. It seemed a fair price for what others had told me they either bought it for, like Bruce. Or sold it like the guys at the Fresh Water Lake up the top of Arambol. So I was happy with the cost and in a world of bartering that’s all that matters. Once Bob had huffed and puffed his way down the staircase we hugged our friend farewell and caught a tuk tuk home, Bob negotiating the price before we took off. ‘Pay these bastards, Indian prices,’ he said with a triumphant grin and waved us good bye. We called Pip and Steve and asked them if they wanted to meet with us for dinner in the Bazar. Of course they did, so we pulled out in the tuk tuk and spent the next hour and a bit freezing fuckin’ cold as a downpour of wind and water chilled us to the bone. I might slag off the heat in Thailand but I’d still rather be wet and hot than wet and cold. The driver got chatting about the new underground tube system. Said we could get from one side of Delhi to the other for eighteen rupees. It’d made fifteen thousand tuk tuk drivers unemployed,’ and with a frown, ‘It just added to the poverty.’ Fifteen fuckin’ thousand people unemployed over night. I thought about Cambodia and how most boys only plan in life was to ditch school and become a tuk tuk driver. Thing is though, if that was suddenly taken away from them they’d be fucked. Education would be low and I’ll bet with a complicated writing system like these places have, most couldn’t read or write. What a shit thing to do to your people. Yes a tube system is great, but think about the knock on effects. Yeash, governments can be cunts like that. Promising and giving with one hand, while poking and taking with the other. We got back to the hotel, took a warm shower and met the other guys in the reception after. We went down the stairs and at the bottom some ol’ lady was at the travel agent guy in the corner and he was telling her that there was no way up to Dharamsala in the north ‘cause of the snow and ice melting and flooding. Fuck! We were heading that way too. The next leg of the mission was to Kalka so we could get the toy train up to Shimla. We’d seen some documentary about the Shimla station and the ol’ boys who put their kids through school by carrying rich peoples’ bags. They said it was more difficult now, because it’s more back

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

packers than wealthy tourists, and the back packers prefer to carry their own shit. The program was interesting as it showed a changing India and the ever creeping doubt foreigners have towards the locals. People just don’t trust these sixty year old men to not fuckin’ run off with their bags. Besides Rick Stein had taken the toy train, so we were gonna do it as well, fuck the weather. With Pip and Steve we went for a nosey about the now dark and crazy Bazar. Bazaar was fuckin’ right. I was pleased as pig in shit that I’d carried my work boots all the way through Goa and now had them to put on, unlike my poor shnookums. ‘Cause of the rain, she only had a pair of pumps to try skip the shit filled puddles and greasy road way. As soon as we stepped out the door, it was tooting motorbikes trying to push past you. The ting ting of the cycle rickshaws, and the noise of every mother fucker in the country making you promise to see the shit in their shops, ‘On your way back after dinner mister.’ With a slight curl of the chin. We walked up the road a bit, bottled it and went back to the place underneath our hotel. Yeah it was a bit rancid looking but, it was filled with Indians, and the kitchen was on the street. I thought, urgh, I’m not too sure about the open kitchen, but then Louise reasoned with me that at least we can see what they’re cooking. Fuck knows what they do to the shit when it’s out the back. And that was it. A solid and fair point had been made. It backed up what ol’ Rick Stein had said when he reckoned to always buy on the street where you can see the food being cooked fresh, because then they must take pride in what they do. ‘After all, if the Indians eat there. Then you should too.’ And Rick was right. We sat down at a crowded bench table and a proud waiter wiped a menu with his sleeve and handed it over. I think me and Louise got lucky ‘cause we’d been practising our Indian food at a fuckin’ wonderful vegan place in Finsbury Park, called, ‘Jai Krishna’, so we knew that, Mutter was peas, Gobi, was cauliflower and Saag spinach etc. But Pip and Steve were well lost. They were a bit quiet to be honest and I think I was a bit, ‘Come on pick something.’ In the end me and my lover ordered the meal and a load of different dishes all came out the same yellow colour and flavour, just with different vegetables in them. We talked a bit of shit about our holidays so far. They’d been right up through Thailand and Laos, and then we’d met them in India. After dinner we walked around the Bazar a bit and then they caught a tube back to their mate’s parents’ place and me and my snuggles went to do a little pharmacy shopping. I had the hash sorted; it was, diazepam, Viagra and ketamine time. When it comes to buying drugs in a strange land, if I’ve already got some I’m usually a bit more careful, but when I’ve got none and I really want some I usually just go for the first option that approaches me. In this case, in the Grand Bazar in Delhi it was the pharmacy next to the restaurant. We dropped the guys off at the train station and made our way back towards the restaurant. I started off easy, ‘Hello sir. Do you sell Viagra?’ ‘Oh yes sir, one hundred rupees each,’ said the clean cut gentleman in his suit. ‘ A pound each? Oh well fuck it, that’s still better than the fiver they are in London. ‘I’ll take five,’ and handed him five, hundred rupee notes. He passed me back five packets of four, and they were hundred milligram pills too! I looked over at my shnookums with a cheeky grin. Someone was getting lucky tonight.

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‘Do you have diazepam?’ ‘Oh yes sir,’ These are only one hundred rupees too.’ ‘Ten milligram ones?’ ‘Oh yes sir,’ with a double waggle of the head,‘ of course.’ A pound a diazepam, crikey, that’s well expensive, but they’d do for tonight anyway. And I handed him a thousand rupees. He then pulled out a box and gave me ten strips of ten, ten milligram diazepams. Bazinga! Someone was getting lucky and a good sleep tonight. There was no one else in the shop so I asked him, ‘Do you have ketamine?’ ‘Oh yes sir but not tonight. Please come back tomorrow at two o’clock and I shall have waiting for you. How much would you like?’ ‘Three ten mil’ bottles please.’ ‘Oh yes sir,’ a little waggle. He seemed like a good guy and Louise asked him if he knew a reliable travel agent. ‘Oh yes sir,’ with a right, left, right of his head. ‘Come with me and I will take you to my friend. There are many shysters who are dishonest, I will take you to a very honest man.’ Usually that would set off warning bells, but this dude had already had two opportunities to rip us off and hadn’t. So we followed him back out on to the road and down to the left where there was a scummy looking alley with a guy on one side selling prayers for cash and on the other was the travel agent. We thanked our friend and told him we’d see him tomorrow. The travel guy only had an office big enough for a desk and a couple of chairs. When we told him about wanting to go up to Shimla and the guy at the hotel’s travel agent he just shook his head. ‘Why do these people do this?’ he asked the heavens I guess, and then he went on about how the trains were fine and the hotel’s travel agent why just taking advantage of the old lady. He showed us an Indian Railway Company website and all the costs on the website and said he’d just add one hundred rupees each for his commission. ‘Look on your own phones to see that I am not lying to you sir and madame.’ So we did and his prices were the same as we found, but he was able to book us two seats as Indian passengers to guarantee us a seat each in two days time. A quid each. It was well worth it. We’d tried to figure out the same website ourselves for fuckin’ weeks back in London and we always ended up on fuckin’ waiting lists and shit. To have this guy decode the website for us and take care of everything for a pound each was well good. We’d keep this guy’s details and send as many people his way as we could. We even took a couple of extra cards with us to give away. It’s the age old law of the traveller innit. We all know these slippery poor people are always out for our cash and can only do our best to avoid being constantly lied to and ripped off. But word spreads amongst our mobile community. Honesty like this guy’s, word would get around, I’d make sure of it, and dishonesty like the cunt back at the hotel, I’d make sure people knew about that shit too! We called it a night and went to bed to smoke a pipe, have dirty Viagra fuelled sex and to sleep it all off, but holy cow man, there was a celebration down on the street. A procession of people banged on drums and hooted and hollered as some miserable looking fuck in a golden suit was lead around on a white horse covered in flowers. He looked like the type of guy who was off to get married and sure as shit didn’t want too. The next day was easy, Louise stayed in bed and I got up early and took a taxi down to meet Bob again. I gave him the other seven thousand rupees and he passed me on the charas,

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all wrapped up in plastic, I said my thank you’s, told him we were leaving in a couple of days for Shimla and promised to meet him the next day for the cricket. Bob’s final words were, if you do not like the charas let me know and I can trade it for a different one. I got home at eleven forty five exactly, went upstairs and hoped the smoke Bob had given me was the finest in all of India. But alas, as always the locals were testing me. It was nice hash but it was very dry and had like yellow powdery fungus growing in between where they stuck the tolas of it together. We rolled a joint and smoked it, the taste was ok, but it wasn’t the greatest charas I’d ever smoked. Shit I’d bought better in a field in Brazil, even a squat party in London. The high was a bit odd too, real heady and uncomfortable. I sent Bob a text and he was like, ‘No worries, come now and I can swap it.’ And I was like, ‘It’s cool man, see you tomorrow for the cricket.’ And with all that taken care of we gave Pip and Steve a call, then met them fifteen minutes later down at Rama Krishna Ashram Marg station. With a skip in my steel capped boots we all hugged a big fat happy hello, and cruised up to the hotel for an Indian breakfast and honey, lemon and ginger teas. I like the Indian breakfast, I was worried as fuck that with the change in my diet my haemorrhoids would flare up and my asshole would fall out like it did after I ate the kilo of king crab for breakfast and had the 14oz steak with blue cheese sauce on it for dinner in Las Vegas, a future twisted travel tale of epic proportions. The fuckin’ shit you can fit into two weeks of your life can be fuckin’ amazing and my twisted travel tale from Las Vegas is prime fuckin’ example of what too much money, a three day rave, a wedding and a bad diet can do to ya’. Anyhoo, my asshole was holding up great. I think it was the lack of meat to be honest. If anything I was actually losing weight and starting to put a bit of colour on my pasty London blue skin. So I ordered the Indian breakfast and smashed my chapatti’s down feeding my fuckin’ cantankerous case of the munchies, shovelling the yogurt and acidic lime pickle down with them. I drank a fluorescent orange bottle of fanta then we all smoked a fat joint of dope before plotting out our day. The guys had the same idea as me and Louise, let’s just get shit faced! After all two o’clock was rolling ‘round and I had a surprise for the guys. There were still no actual bars around that we’d been in too, so we asked the ever helpful restaurant manager if he could point us in the right direction, and of course he could. ‘There are two bars sir, one at each end of the Bazar,’ and he pointed over to a sign up towards the station we’d picked the guys up from. And then said the one the other way was a few hundred metres up on the right. We hadn’t really walked down that way and it turned out – when we missed the bar the first time – New Delhi metro station was right there. That’s where we picked up Pip and Steve the day before and on the journey to Shimla we would only have to cross the road to the New Delhi train station. We turned back and found the bar about fifty metres back up the road, pulled in, and were slightly gutted by the feeling of being in a Thai strip club but without the strippers. It was dark and cold inside, and they only sold Kingfisher ultra, it was like three hundred and fifty rupees a beer again. What the fuck was this shit? You must be able to get cheaper beer in India with all its fuckin’ poor people than you can get it in fuckin’ London. There had to be something? Fuck it, worse come to worst just sit in our hotel room getting bottles of super strength delivered and watching the bazar outta the window. That was fuckin’ entertainment

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in itself. Reminded of that we shared a laugh with the guys over the miserable looking fucker on his white horse of doom, then we finished the beers and went looking for the other bar. One oh five pm. Less than an hour to go. I hoped the guys would come through for me. Bob although a great guy hadn’t really come through on his end yet, but I kinda knew that was just a local testing me out and he’d come good. Otherwise I’d tell on him to my other online friends who’d introduced me to him. Alathea had vouched for him and that was all I needed. I had complete trust in that situation. So we paid the astronomical fuckin’ bill of fifteen fuckin’ pounds for four fuckin’ beers. Fuckin’ ridiculous, the cunts! Most English people couldn’t afford that, let alone the billion Indians that lived here. There had to be better options out there. Maybe we could just pay a taxi driver to take us to an illegal place? We walked back up the Bazar and for once were left alone by all the stall guys. Today no one jumped out and harassed us or made us promise to buy shit from them, or promise to use their taxi or tuk tuk. It was our third day and they seemed to be ignoring us now and chasing after the new kids in town. We were an eerie calm in the eye of the storm. Now we could stop off at shops pick something up and no one would say a word. They’d sure as fuck be hassling everyone else, but us? Nope, not one fuckin’ word until one of us would look up for the guy to buy something and then he’d pop out of nowhere with a figure, just more than you were willing to pay, already half way out of his mouth. And if we haggled him down it was fine and for a fair price. But if we didn’t want whatever it was, we could just put it down and move on without some asshole following you half way up the street. What was going on? We got down to the other bar and it was just more of the sleazy same but without the strippers. I hadn’t come to India to sit in fancy fucking bars that modelled themselves on something based on Upper Street in Islington. I’d come with my lover to sit amongst the shit, get high and have a good fuckin’ time all the while drinkin’ cheap, cold beer. Has to be cold, fuck them. Wary of the prices we only ordered two this time. Just under a thousand rupees later and at two minutes to two we paid the bill and I led my lover and our new friends over to the wonders of a fine third world pharmacy. The girls ordered some diazepam for Pip while me and Steve met with my friend from last night. ‘Eight hundred each,’ he said. What Eight pounds for half a gram? Which is what’s in a bottle once you cook it down. Fuck it, it was thirty five pounds a gram in London if you could get it at all now. The days when we used to buy salt shakers filled with the stuff and three of us would smash fifty grams in two weeks were over. Now we’d had to come to India to see if we could sort out a new supply and I was hoping Bob would be that man. Fuck it, I asked the dude how many bottles he had, and he mouthed back, ‘five.’ Steve was keen to take one, so I nodded at the dude, handed him four thousand rupees and he passed me a little brown bag he had under the counter. I took a look, and there it was. A box with Ketamine Hydrochloride written along the top. ‘If it’s good, I’ll be back and I’m gonna buy a lot of it, if it’s not, swap it over now dude ‘cause you’re gonna lose money in the long run. ‘Oh yes sir, see you soon.’ With just a subtle left and right tilt of his head. ‘Oh and if you do not mind me saying sir, my friend has a store down the road where you may buy pots, pans, spoons and candles.’ How handy.

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Life was good, I was surrounded by good friends, a great lover, had thousands in one pocket, five bottles of ketamine in the other and the trusty ol’ black ops switch blade, right front pocket, just above the knee. About fifty metres down we came across the hardware store, and oddly enough, they had a big container filled with giant spoons and ladles up on the front counter, along with a stack of candles next to it. How superb. We bought the equipment went back to ours and started to cook up. It wasn’t my first time, I knew exactly what to do. As I use to say to Kimmy, I know ketamine dude like you know hashish. By now I’m a connoisseur, I’ve bought ketamine in bulk from pharmacies in Cambodia and then India, before I went to Ozora I’d met a great lady who got it for us by the litre (fifty grams) and not just that, she had all kinds of weird shit. The hysterical tickling of 2-CB, bottles of two drop liquid LSD and even once opium. It all eventually got the better of me and the fact that ketamine had simply disappeared was for the better of all of us fiends to be honest. Those of us who liked k’ loved it and we did too much of it, it’s too easy to get used to and think your motor skills are fine, but other people notice and your circle of friends gets smaller. But then it was gone, and it was back to spending money on goddamn cocaine again. Fuckin’ expensive shit. That’s why that time I just thought fuck it and flew to Colombia, met Cousin Paul and we locked ourselves in various hotel rooms around the country for a month and sniffed that shit like it was cheaper than beer. ‘Cause it was. We locked the door of the hotel room, closed the windows, opened up the top draw of the empty black table thing and found a shoe to sit on top of the ladle. Then it was just a simple matter of putting the ladle on top of the table with the spoon bit hanging over the drawer. The shoe on top of it to hold it still, and the candle in the top drawer underneath. I gave Steve his bottle and then we struggled for a few minutes trying to get the little metallic cap off the top of the bottle. Ended up using a knife. Then we poured that shit in the ladle and waited and watched as it began to bubble and steam. As the liquid evaporated bits of the powdered k’ would sizzle and crackle around the edges of the ladle and I’d have to give it a bit of a swirl around to wash the crust back into the brew. After a spliff and a cigarette we got the snap, crackle and pop I’d been waiting for. When you get towards the bottom the k’ suddenly forms but there’s still a layer of liquid underneath that you’ve gotta have the patience to make sure it’s nice and dry. Then you can sniff it while it’s still warm. ‘Cause that’s when it’s best. Mmm mmm mmmmmm that shit sure is good when it’s at its finest. Straight from the pharmacy, straight in the spoon and while it’s still warm and one hundred percent pure human grade ketamine, for me? That’s the shit right there man! You can keep your LS- fucking-D. Fuck off with your heroin and stick ya’ expensive cocaine up your ass. Ecstasy? Pffh can’t piss on that and besides, E’s haven’t been around for years. And MDMA? Yurck it tastes horrible and gives me the shits. Weed or hash I’ll always smoke, that’s not a drug that’s just a way of life for me. And as for all the online legal highs from plant food palace? Fuck that shit, them legal drugs will kill you! And really, they’re too strong. So cold beer and ketamine, that’s the drugs of choice for me. There’s nicotine too but that’s not really a choice is it. If you’re stupid enough to take that lying load of shit up. Louise and Pip were fine they didn’t have any, Louise is good like that. She’s a strong enough woman to do what she wants and doesn’t try and keep up with me. I’ve lost a lot of women that way and as my life settled down so did she blossom into it. We met up in

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Liverpool after not seeing each other for years and I got on stage at the cavern club and sang Imagine to her. When I got back to the table the couple we’d met told her she had to kiss me after that, and she did, and now we live and travel the world together. She’s beautiful, wonderful, a great shag and is strong enough to be herself. What more could you want in someone you’re going to share your life with? I was responsible this time and put out a little line each for me and Steve. We hoovered that shit up thousand rupee notes while it was still warm and we were fuckin’ rockstars! Rockstars or not, when the wavy effect came on we had to get out the room, so it was back onto the street. We were thirsty as fuck so Louise mentioned the Burmese looking place that we’d been eyeing up from our bedroom window. It was across the square opposite our room on a roof top about five floors up. It was a bit of a struggle figuring out where the entrance was but the girls took the lead while me and Steve just felt the place. Let the whole scene of the Delhi Bazar flow through us. There were bikes and taxis, Indians were everywhere and there didn’t really seem that many tourists. Coloured stalls sold all kinds of cooked food and other shit. There were trinkets and necklaces, girls dressed in Sari’s with dirty black bare feet sitting on a curb beside a pile of rubbish offering henna. Guys sold Marlboros and packets of crisps and flies flew everywhere. But not one fucker amongst them sold beer. Not one! ‘This way,’ said Pip, tugging on Steve’s shirt. He looked at me with that full lipped grin of his and the blank expression in his eyes of some one lovin’ the warm stuff. We followed the girls up a staircase that had no sign out the front. It was made of concrete and was at such a fuckin’ steep angle I used my hands to help me climb up. Remembering to wash them later. We went up two flights and came out at some restaurant bit half way up the building. The girls had it sorted though and some waiter grabbed a few menus and led us up to the top. We scored a plastic table for four right beside a pagoda thing with a round foot high table surrounded by cushions that had six or so tourists laying around it. It was all westerners up here and they all seemed to be drinking tea from plastic mugs. We were like looking at the menu, well me and Steve were trying to when the dude next to me ordered a beer?! The waiter took a plastic cup away and came back a moment later with a foaming cup of what I sure as shit didn’t believe to be a pint of cappuccino. ‘Yes how may I help you sir?’ said the Burmese lookin’ waiter.’ ‘Do you sell beer?’ ‘Yes sir, we have Kingfisher strong or Budweiser.’ ‘Eh? You’ve got fuckin’ Budweiser? How much?’ ‘If you come with me sir I will show you.’ So I followed him, and just out round the back through a little door by the staircase. He fuckin’ pulled out two five hundred mil’ or so sized cans of Bud with ice stuck to the side of them. I almost cried to be honest. I’ve never been one for hiding my emotions and this man was about be hugged. I kept my cool though, went back and met the girls, checked to see if they wanted an alcoholic beverage on this most magnificent of Indian days, and Louise ordered a gin? ‘Well might as well see if that have it eh Mr?’ ‘Yes man,’ and so I asked my waiter and he said, ‘No unfortunately not sir, we only have vodka.’ With a cheeky grin. ‘Vodka ladies?’ ‘Yes, with tonic and if they don’t have that, lemonade.’

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‘Vodka and lemonade sir,’ the fantastic gentleman helping us out said, as he placed two big plastic cups filled with Bud on the table, and then got down to the prices. ‘Ok the beer is one hundred and fifty rupees for the Kingfisher strong, and two hundred for the Budweiser.’ We’ll stick with the Bud. The vodka is seven hundred rupees for a three hundred and seventy five millilitre bottle. But it is good vodka, and even real. Lemonade fifty rupees. But what I must ask you sir is that you keep the vodka bottle below the table at all times. Please never hold the bottle up where other people,’ and he looked out over the balcony at other restaurants we could see, ‘may see it. I will bring the glasses for the ladies.’ And he did, he brought them back filled with ice and showing us how to behave, leant down close to the floor, and poured the girls their drinks. Always keeping an eye over his shoulder at the other places. Now we were settled in and had made a group decision to never leave we took a look around. Leaning over the balcony to look down on the square felt miles up and well unsafe so remembering the rules about being high and being in high places I took a step back just in time to see an eagle fly into a nest it had made at the top of the massive street flood lights and feed it’s baby in there. It was beautiful, I got my camera out and took a couple of pics. It was the first time we’d actually had a chance to really talk with each other. The day before had been a bit of a mission and then that dude fucked us up with that smoke of his in the van. After that there was the poor kiwi girl we blanked (sorry dude) and next thing we knew it was bit of a quiet dinner, a walk about. We got talking, Pip mentioned my books and Louise said she’d read them. There was a bit of a girl look between them, ‘cause of the hooker stories in Thailand I imagine. And that’s fair enough, and hey that’s another thing about Louise, girl has to be strong enough to know about the life I’ve led. My last fifteen years is on show and hey, all the other men are just liars. Besides I think I was nice to them, had had a good time thrown in to the bargain. Hey such is life. Pip asked if I still had the same knife, right front pocket just above the knee, but my wooden handled one that I’d originally bought in Laos and carried with me all through Brazil and then back through South East Asia the second time was eventually confiscated by customs in New Zealand when I ended up there that time with Jacob, kinda lost, broke and not sure what to do with life. But hey I never gave up, I set myself goals and just went for them. If you want something in this life you’ve gotta fuckin’ work for it. Ya’ gonna get shot down loads, but fuck those cunts, take on the useful shit they’ve said and friends have skipped over and make yourself a Doer in life and not just a Talker. Pip on the other hand had stabbed herself in the leg with her knife it turned out. Well and proper too. And the worst thing was; it had happened in Laos. She was putting her bags on the plane. And there aint no fuckin’ good hospitals in Laos. It was either call the insurance company and get flown to Bangkok or just bandage that shit up, say nothing and wait out the few hours on the plane to Delhi. She reckoned it was a good inch hole in her calf, and had bled right through everything by the time they got to India and went to one of them fine Indian hospitals. I asked how she’d found me, and Pip said I’d left my facebook details in one of my books. I wasn’t sure which one it was myself. Later on when I was proof reading the Europe story I

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

found it in the back of there. I didn’t remember doing it. I wrote those books really fucked up on gear. I’d spend a month or so thinking about a chapter /story and then get a bottle of red wine, some k’, an ash tray and off I’ll go, flying through my memories, trying to keep my fingers up with the pace of my mind. Louise asked how they’d ended up in Delhi, Pip and Steve both laughed and she said it was a bit of a long story. I’m all for a long story, so with that I paused them for a minute so I could go down to the toilet and smash another line of k first. I was hoping to remember it so I could tell it back one day. I got back up, offered the k’ to Steve, he was cool for now and with her Australian accent Pip got on with the story. ‘Right so we’re staying at the family of our mate’s place.’ ‘Cool where’s he?’ ‘Well he never made it. We told him we were going through South East Asia and he said we could meet him in Delhi and stay at his parents’ place. We weren’t even plannin’ on comin’ to India, it just so happened that he’d gotten in touch with us when we were in Thailand and he talked us into it. So we booked our tickets, fuck it ya’ know, free accommodation. ‘Just after that I finished ya’ book and checked ya’ profile on FB. It said right there when you were gonna be in Delhi and we were gonna be there at the same time. I couldn’t believe, it was fate mate, so I sent ya’ a message and was blown away when ya’ got back to me. And here you are! ‘But the thing is, he hasn’t fuckin’ shown up, so now we’re staying at his parents’ place and they’re really straight as. We’re s’posed to be home by nine.’ ‘What what the fuck? You’re on curfew?’ ‘Yep,’ said Steve and sorta laughed and shrugged his shoulders at the same time. ‘So hang on, hang on,’ Louise said. ‘So you’re on holiday in Thailand, havin’ a good time. He invites you to stay at with him at his parents’ house in India, and hasn’t shown up? Have you heard from him?’ The waiter poured us another beer each. And brought back the food menu. Steve was like, ‘Nope,’ with another laugh, shaking his head a bit. I got back involved, ‘How the fuck do you know this dude?’ ‘Well,’ Pip said, ‘we know him from back in Sydney, he’s a good mate. He’s normal around us but telling by their house his parents are pretty well off. ‘Last year he told us about how there’s loads of rich upper class Indians now who want to spend their money on expensive shit.’ I cut in, ‘Like what’s the point of a million or a billion dollars if you can’t spend it right?’ ‘Exactly,’ Steve goes. Pip carried on, ‘Yeah so he wanted to promote some of the microbrewery beers from Oz as premium stuff and sell it for like a thousand rupees a bottle to the posh night clubs.’ Made sense. ‘So he got me to do some bikini shots for the advertising.’ I lost it and laughed out, ‘Whaaaatt? He actually talked you in to dressing up in a bikini and took pictures of you? ‘Steve, did he pay?’

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‘Yeah man,’ Steve said, ‘he’s a good friend. It’s a good idea,’ I couldn’t help but crack up, ‘Wait, wait, wait. So you let this rich Indian kid take pictures of Pip in a bikini?’ We all laughed, they knew where I was coming from. And Louise told them about the dodgy rich Indian tourist fuckers we’d come across in Goa and told them about what Bob had said about the porn and lack of sexual education from the parents. Nine o’clock rolled around and we were way past the first bottle of vodka and fuck knows how many into the beers. But we called it quits for the night and me and Louise walked the guys down to the station so they could get the tube home. Steve reckoned the tube was awesome, but I had my doubts.

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Life’s choices The next day rolled around in sweet bliss as I upped the k’ levels in my blood and smashed a massive line before getting out of bed. Then we went for a superb Indian breakfast and lemon, honey and ginger tea up the top of the hotel. My Shnookums got to sleep in as I caught another fuckin’ taxi down to meet Bob and swapped the dope he’d given me for the best charas I’d ever come across in my life. I’d had the taxi leave me next to a juice stand standing out on the road amongst the piles of rubbish and staring locals. I think I was the first tourist in that part of town for a while. But the fresh juice was fuckin’ amazing and I got about a litre of it in a chilled mug for a few hundred rupees. After about twenty minutes Bob appeared and I jumped in his car. ‘How’s the juice in that place? Bloody great eh!’ ‘Fuck yeah man. The stand itself was clean as, and man it was cheap.’ ‘Always eat where the locals eat. Any way thank you for bringing the hash back. I expected you to check it yesterday in the car, but you just trusted me and put it in your pocket.’ ‘I had faith dude. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’ He smiled at this, ‘Ah good, so this is the one you want then, as he pulled a white plastic shopping bag out from an inside jacket pocket. Check it this time.’ I opened it up and holy fuckin’ shit! There was a series of balls all stuck together and flattened a bit in to a square shape. I had no scales but it was easily fifty grams. It was about a centimetre thick and ten each way. It looked like a dry but soft leather and was almost the density of blue tack. Although the charas was black to look at, where I pulled it from the plastic it left a greeny, yellowish film on the wrapping. ‘Here I have some papers, go on roll it, I want you to be sure this time,’ said Bob as that chuckle of his bounced from his chest all the way up to his forehead. He wheezed and coughed a bit and the car swerved in the lane. ‘Here let me pull over,’ and we went down a quiet street. I picked a small piece of hash off the great big block I had and after working a bit of warmth in to it, rolled it out into a nice bendy stick. Then I put that in with a bit of tobacco and skinned the spliff up. The smoke was sweet, thick and greasy. It billowed off the joint thick as a stage curtain and the wonderful aroma of fantastic dope filled the car. Bob had a puff too and started the car up again. With sweet dense smoke streaming out the window we drove around the block a few times and he dropped me off near the taxi rank again. We hugged, good friends who’d both taken a risk, we both only knew each other from facebook and had taken the word of Alathea and my other online friends from the Smugglers Arms. That was all it took, that and actually following through. We could easily have bought the taxi driver’s dope that first day with Pip and Steve but no. I knew Bob would have the best. Just had that gut feeling. I took a chance and got rewarded for it. Rewarded fuckin’ big time. I promised Bob we’d come back and meet him after our journey up north. We weren’t sure how long that would be. It was sometime around the end of February, and we didn’t have to be anywhere until March seventeenth when Lou’s mum and best mate Chrissy were coming

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to join us up in Nepal. I still had to get the charas and all the ketamine I planned on buying up there yet. But I had a plan. Let me be clear about this, the drugs I was planning on trafficking from Asia to the UK weren’t gonna be sold on to other people, I wasn’t doing any of this or taking all these fuckin’ risks for profit. I just like good charas and ketamine and if I couldn’t get them in London I’d fuckin’ buy a plane ticket to where they made the shit, find it, buy enough to last as long as possible, swallow it all and bring it back. If you follow the wrapping up procedure and do it right. That shit will never break inside you, How the fuck is a hundred layers of cling film gonna tear apart? Besides, if the charas ripped open I’d only get very, very stoned, probably sick too. The k? That would be an issue but I’d roll it two hundred times and have about three mil’ of cling film to cut through on the other side. By now in my life, I do it all the time. I do what the fuck I want. As long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else. I’m not a drug pusher, or dealer. I’m not even a fuckin’ addict ‘cause I can’t even get the shit back home. I’m a person who likes to bathe in the luxuries of life, and apart from my lover girl, family and friends, these drugs were next in line. Most of these fuckin’ drugs would end up being given to friends on their birthdays and shit anyway. I always share or give away everything that I have, and that aint about to change. This is our life, be who you wanna be, and if the laws are wrong, well fuck them too. As long as you aint hurtin’ no other mother fucker, then what the fuck is it to anyone else? The war on drugs is a lie! It was told to our parents and they soaked that shit up. A bullshitting group of rich scum bags stopped the use of hemp because it was too fuckin’ useful. We wouldn’t be reliant on the Rothschild’s fucking oil if Africa and Asia were covered in hemp and the seeds were used instead. We wouldn’t be reliant on the steel and timber industries if we could grow the hemp ourselves in our back yards, and then form it into mortar and bricks. These cunts have destroyed our Earth just so they could control us and as far as I’m concerned they can all fuck off! Think about it, would the corporate states of America be the power house of the planet if Africa supplied the world’s fuels and fibres. Our oceans are filled with plastics, the fish are nearly all gone, Fukushima is still leaking radioactive waste five years later in to the ocean, and mass migration of the poor and bleeding is happening worldwide, and what are the majority of the guardians of our Earth doing about it? They’re hating on the weak, while smoking their cancerous cigarettes. They’re following the media and they’re not questioning the law one bit! Our Earth is dying and we need to stand up as one. Fuck at least find something you care about on our Earth, something other than yourself and humans, and get out there and save it, because everything on our Earth is in danger of extinction now, and it’s these assholes leading those with eyes wide shut that are at fault. So fuck them and fuck their laws. If I wanna smoke fuckin’ the best Charas in India and buy some fucking kick ass ketamine and take it back to share with my mates in London I fuckin’ will. Sod it, why not? For some reason people seem to think this life we have is not short or something? They think there’ll be another one maybe and so they work themselves to divorce or to the grave. But more of us are opening our eyes now and it’s through the strength and power of the hippies in Goa and all the rest of them in the seventies who took LSD and opened their minds, grew their hair long and took off their clothes. They freed themselves from mentally slavery. As Bob Marley says, ‘None but ourselves can free our mind.’ Or that’s what he says in my head.

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First we fought against slavery and then we fought for equality for women, then freedom of sexual orientation and now we need to fight for freedom from corporate and religion structured governments and their poisoning ways and laws and penchant for fucking children. Remember though if you choose to make the choices I make. Don’t get fuckin’ caught. When ya’ walkin’ through customs, be clean, well dressed have no stupid hippy shit in ya’ bags, be sober and be polite. And smile mother fucker smile, ‘cause if you get this one wrong and you aint got enough cash in the bank, you’re goin’ to prison for a long time.

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The day before Shimla I got back to the hotel, gave my lover a sweet morning kiss, had a bump of k’ then went down to the pharmacy and ordered ten more bottles of ketamine. Yeah it was a bit expensive and I coulda shopped around but fuck it, I have rules in life when I play around doin’ this shit, and there’s the one about, when ya’ buying on the streets stick with the first decent supplier you come across. And these guys had the good shit, besides they’d helped us out with the travel agent big time too. Pip and Steve went to a big Indian birthday party that day with their mate’s parents. The woman had Pip dress up in all the local garb, dot on her forehead and all, while Steve got to sneak out the back with the man and drink beer. Me and Louise rocked up to our new favourite Burmese restaurant and after the tip we all chucked in the night before, were given the pagoda overlooking the Bazar below. We ate their little dumpling things, drank beer and vodka and talked about Rick Stein and his travels through India. The guys showed up and Steve had a laugh about how they’d been told off for coming home late last night. They had a curfew of nine in the evening and had to stick to it. Fuckin’ funny. They told us about their time in Laos and how they bought half a gram of pure Burmese Ice for like forty dollars and spent the next few days just smashing it. Me and Steve passed the k’ back and forwards whenever he felt like a bump, the eagles swooped over head and the waiters treated us like royalty. When it’s not raining and cold it’s way more comfy to sit around outside on a roof top in Delhi than it is to be on the streets of Bangkok. I was getting to like this town. We drank and ate and laughed our way through the day. We’d told the guys about our tickets to Shimla the day before and they wanted to come along so we promised that on their way home to take them to the only honest travel agent in the Bazar. When it got to around seven-ish the guys said they better shoot off home. We paid the bill, tipped well and told the waiters we’d be back after the journey up north. There’s a time when you’ve gotta stop trying to find the even better times and enjoy the good times you’re having right now. Along with my lover girl I had everything I needed. A manic dirty part of town, not that many tourists, apart from the travel agent our hotel was great, there was beer across the road, great food everywhere. I had fifty grams of the best charas I’d smoked and I could buy as much ketamine as I wanted at the shop next door. Plus there was the cricket world cup on and Bob’s team were doing awesome! You’ve gotta look at yourself every now and then and go, ‘What more do I need? Fuckin’ nothin’, this’ll do nicely. Down at the bottom of the stairs was a queue of Indian people all lined up for something in a big steamer pot. The guy had a sign up saying Momo’s, whatever the fuck they were. Ah, it looked like a good opportunity to eat what the locals eat, so we queued up too, and for twenty pence got a plate covered in the little dumplings the Burmese had made for us earlier, just smaller. Dude covered them in spicy sauce, but not too hot and they were vegetarian and tasted awesome, we got a couple more plates. With more food going in to our bellies, and none of the locals hassling us – some were even saying hello now – we got to stroll at our own pace through the calm of the surrounding mayhem when an idea hit me.

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‘Hey I got a surprise for you guys. Let’s stop off at our room.’ We took ‘em up to ours’ and I got the four Hoffman trips I’d completely forgotten about until just then and gave them to them. I had no desire to take any LSD, none at all, I wanted to stay on the same wave length as my lover, apart from the naughtiness of the k’, but I get used to that and if I took too much one time, it’d wear off soon enough, and half an hour later I’d have a smaller bump. But the acid? Fuck that! My fuckin’ poor ol’ melon... I’ve put it through some abuse in its time, and after the whole Ozora thing as soon I was back in London we were just straight back on to the two drop chocolate bottle. The chaos that ensued over that year was scary to be honest. Ambulances were called I held a friend with foam coming out of his mouth ‘cause of too much k’ in my arms at the cafe in Finsbury park and it was just madness. Yes I thought I’d take the LSD with me when we flew to Goa, but when the occasions came up to take it, I didn’t really want to. I didn’t wanna be in my own little fragile world while Louise was there supporting me just not connecting mentally with her. And I was afraid too. Afraid that my mind might turn against her like it did to Amadora. And poor ol’ Amadora that Acid had really gotten her after the squat party that time. Yeash, just give me a nice happy bump a’ k’ a cold beer and let me sit with my lover. So the guys were stoked, they hadn’t been expecting that one at all. Like the dude in Colomb Cove they were the perfect person to share this stuff with, and I hoped they found a safe, calm place to enjoy it both externally on our Earth and internally within themselves. After another bump, we took them down to the only honest travel agent in Delhi to sort out their tickets and went to pick up my two boxes – which is only five grams – of ketamine. Targets were being achieved; my collection was building. Turned out the guys couldn’t get on the same train as us in the morning, so they booked the afternoon one, and we hugged for safe journeys. We got back to the hotel and put on a movie. After nine the beer guys were gone so I snuck back to the Burmese restaurant, under it’s half closed shutter door and up its endless staircase. I was rewarded with a couple of cold Buds, and Louise got a brilliant video of it.

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To a great little town called Kalka The alarm went off for the first time in what seemed like forever. Had to be done though, we were city folk now about to catch a six thirty in the morning train. We knew where we had to go. So we strapped our mobile homes on our backs, the laptop was on my front, like a pregnant snail. We ignored the tuk tuk guys and walked to the end of the road to Delhi railway station. After the fat line I’d had I was a bit weary crossing the busy road and was always keeping an eye out for terrorists, ‘cause they shoot the white guys first. My lover took the lead and in no time had us on the right platform, on a seat waiting for the train. She’d even sorted snacks. What a legend. We talked about the boys from Leeds and hoped our train wouldn’t be eighteen hours late like their one had. But it was only thirty minutes late and our comfy seats were reserved for us. As we watched people from the half hour long slum, shit and piss beside the tracks we were served tea and biscuits and were given a news paper. There was a story was about a female drug king pin who’d just been caught in a sting and had been selling meow meow to the millions living in her slum. It was a cheap, non addictive drug that just made you feel love in everything and was legal in most places. They’d banned it in England a few years before but I used to get that shit delivered to my door from Plantfoodpalace.com. And since they banned that one the chemical companies just came up with more vicious shit. And when the law came to ban that substance they just made five others even more dangerous and now more people in the UK die a year from these legal online drugs than do from heroin. So if you can figure that one out maybe you can tell me how the war on drugs gets its victories? The story of this woman was excellent, she’d come out of nowhere; shagged and paid off the police and even stood up against the gangs. She was godlike figure in her slum the same as Pablo Escobar was to his. After half an hour the poor and their slums ran out and empty farm yards and land took over. I couldn’t tell that we were going ever upwards but when we got to Shimla. The next day I could hardly fuckin’ breathe because the air was so thin. Up at Kalka train station we got off and spent a bit of time going back and forwards until we found the small ticket office for the toy train to Shimla. Shit was getting real, we were gonna do what Rick Stein had done and I was gonna get one of the ol’ boys to carry my stuff for me just like the dude said in the documentary. The one where the guy had carried luggage his whole life and had put his kids through school, but now found the tourists wouldn’t trust his wiry sixty year old frame and he and his wife went hungry a lot of the time. That mother fucker was gonna get tipped well. I always say it. I know I’m blessed to be a minority, a member of the one percent, which is those who earn more than eighty US dollars a day. And if I think some cunt has earned it, be it helping me with dinner, drinks, drugs or anything, I’m gonna share some of what I’ve got with them. Now don’t get me wrong I do my best to be nobody’s fool, and I work fuckin’ hard for my money, but some people work harder, and I don’t wanna be a cunt during my one experience of conscious life. As the great Ian Brown said, ‘Keep what ya’ got, by giving it all away.’ I’m not gonna go that far, and I don’t reckon he has either, but still, there’s an easy message there and that’s what it’s all about.

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So we called Steve up and he said they were already on their way and to buy them tickets on the toy train for the morning too. He’d sort us out when they caught up with us. They’d be getting in late so we’d meet them outside the Kalka train station at five am. Fuckin’ god damn early mornings, oh well, what can ya’ do? It was the only time the train went up into the mountains so I had to put my big boy pants on and act like one too. Outside the station being new kids in town still with our back packs on, the vultures descended on us. Every fuckin’ man and his bike wanted to take us to their friend’s hotel. But one dude sat back, watched us get the hump and walk off, then came over and said, ‘See at the top of the hill there, about half a mile up? You can stay there. Give me eighty rupees and I’ll save you the walk in my rickshaw.’ Yes I know tuk tuks are called rickshaws in India. I just never called them that when I was there. ‘Done,’ and we gave him a hundred. Hey fuck it it was better than walking. We had a room on the second floor with a balcony for a thousand rupees a night and he’d wake us up in the morning for the train. I went for a bit of a sleep and my shnookums went to find some food. She came back a bit later rubbing her belly and telling me to put my boots on. She’d found the best omelette in the world and it was in a shack on the side of the road just next door. I couldn’t say no to that, I had a bump of k’ and followed her down and to the left of where we were staying. There was a little shop made out of corrugated iron with just a dude in it, stacks of eggs, a few tables and the cricket world cup on the tv. It may not have looked like much in a westerner’s point of view but it was this man’s castle and although dirty there wasn’t a speck of dust in the place. He loved the fact that Louise had come down by herself, smashed his food, asked about the cricket and then came to get me to share this moment with her. The Kiwis were fuckin’ battering some poor fuckers in the game and this dude was stoked he even had a kiwi in his place. We ate his food, supported the same team as each other on the day all the while me and Louise drinking the fantastic bright orange fanta that these dudes sell. It was time for walk. So we thanked our new friend for his food and hospitality then kept on up the hill to check out what the town was about. The mountains eh? All fuckin’ uphill I tell ya’. I was fat and fed by this dude’s omelette. It started out as just ya’ normal mixed in a bowl eggs but they dude had a touch for taste. The spices were not hot and were fuckin’ so unreal on ya’ tongue he could sell the fuckers in London for a fiver. Lazy as with my boots on and my lover beside me, we walked up past a massive army barracks with fullas with machine guns at the gate. There were a few other hotels and we stopped to check the prices, even went to look at a couple of rooms and pushed on the mattresses and shit, see if they were any good ya’ know? But it turned out we had the cheapest and best value in town. We were on holiday and had nowhere to go, so what was the rush to try and go somewhere. We just enjoyed the us and the now. All the other hotels must have been paying off the tuk tuks and taxis and were charging a mint. There was no other way for a tourist to get to Shimla except by the toy train, and that fucker left at six in the morning. The first train from Delhi pulled in just after lunch. Up past the hotels to my fondest of joys was a booze shop on the corner of a junction.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

‘I’ll have a Kingfisher please sir.’ And he was happy to oblige. I couldn’t take it with me though ‘cause he wanted the empty bottle back. The dude had a seat out the front made outta empty beer crates for us to sit on though, so we sat down and chugged that sucker back. Being a fat lazy cunt I was trying to avoid walking up the hill, Louise let me lead her down a side street and eventually back the way we’d come. I dropped the suggestion of going up to the booze store paying the dude for the glass deposit too, and she led me right into a walk to the top of the mountains. ‘Come on I wanna get a photo,’ she said. It wasn’t that bad, I huffed and puffed a little and we managed to stay outta the way of the speeding trucks and to swap over to the other side of the road just in time to avoid slipping down the fly covered plastic pile that the town had turned one corner of the hillside into. After about ten minutes we came out at a viewing point with a massive vine covered tree that hung over the edge of a gravel playing area. We managed to get a couple of photos before some local came running up and asked if he could take a picture with us. What are ya’ gonna do? ‘Yes of course boss, just one though.’ Next thing he wanted one with his brother and was calling out for friends and wanting to just take pictures with Louise. So I asked him straight. ‘You have wife?’ ‘Yes sir,’ with a waggle and a smile. ‘May I take photo of your wife please?’ He looked at me like I’d punched him in the face. Like what the fuck would I want a photo of his wife for? Well why the fuck do you want one of mine? ‘Oh, no I can’t? Then you cannot take picture of my wife.’ And we left the guy standing there confused, like we were the offensive ones. We took the whole thing light hearted, it was a good day, and the local fullas had been friendly enough. We were used to the locals now, but it was time to head back down the hill so we could get a few drinks and go chill out down at the hotel. We picked up some beers on the way, paid a bit extra for a glass deposit on the bottles and checked a message from Pip and Steve. They confirmed they were on their way but wouldn’t be getting in till late at night. We’d meet them at the Kalka station in the morning. Sweet. My lover and me sat down out on our balcony with a stack of beers, a spliff and I had a few cheeky bumps as we started on another round of card games I was destined to lose. Opposite us was the Kalka Baptist Church, a red and white building with a corrugated iron or asbestos roof that had a green parrot living on it. For a small town the road was really busy although when two donkeys decided to use it as a place to catch up with each other, and it slowed the traffic down, no one tried to move them on. They must have stood there in the middle of the road for a couple of hours without any hassle from anyone. Like a pack of trouble makin’ drunken teenagers, a troop of small brownish-grey monkeys showed up in the gardens of the church and began to play about in the trees and grounds. They’d challenge each other for control of the power line and grab at one another or shake it until one dropped and landed in the tree below. It was all fun and games until a couple of big bastards showed up. Even the soldiers just up from them at the end of the barracks’ driveway moved away from the church a bit. Next thing we knew, one of the big fuckers had me and my lover in his sight. He was just sorta sat there lookin’ around while smaller monkeys picked at his fleas, when you could see the cunt just clock us. He never looked away once as

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... he called out, stood up, and then jumped down off the big white wall he was laying about on and started crossing the road towards us. About thirty of the fuckers grouped together and stopped traffic as they all started making their way the short distance up to where we were sat. ‘Run quick,’ Louise shouted and we grabbed the cards and booze just as the big prick was starting to pick up speed, all the while with the blank stare that never left his face. Fuck this guy. We bailed inside and locked the doors, only a second or so before the bastard – who you could see now would have been just under a metre short if he stood on his back legs with his swollen red testicles stuck out between his thighs and shiny Mick Jagger lipped ass – jumped up onto the balcony and searched through where we’d been sitting, nosying for food. He looked straight at a terrified me through the white curtain. You could tell he knew I was there hiding in the shadows, his eyes filled with curious human thoughts. He fucked off after trying the door to see if he could pull it open. It wasn’t his first time terrorising the white man. We gave them a minute then went out for a look. Nothing out the front. I took a peek around the side of the building and there was a massive female sat there waiting for us with her thin sagging breasts resting against her belly. ‘Woah!’ back inside. Oh what the fuck were we gonna do? We couldn’t let the fuckers beat us, so armed with the broom Louise went out the back to check while I held the door open. ‘Nah they’re gone,’ she said. Although she looked ready to come flying back in to the room. The sun was setting and the red peach of it was stunning. So happy the psychotic little fucks were gone, I climbed up the dodgy ladder steel ladder that ran up the side of the room next to us and on to the roof. All it would’ve taken to send me a hundred feet to the ground would be one rusted bolt or one scary ass primate. Curious as a monkey I got to the top. The roof was flat concrete and animal free. Louise came and joined me and arm in arm we took in the full mellow sunset of the tropical mountains of Kalka. A rattle from the tin roofs next door, saw the last of the monkeys disappearing over in to a football field behind us and they startled a couple of the green parrots into the air. The twilight of the night with the birds calling out their sunset songs, it felt much more like we were in the wilds of India than any time when we were in Goa. Goa could be any beach in the world really, and Delhi any city, but up here in these mountains, with the odd dude walking past with his donkey, street food vendors, machine gun toting armed guards, monkeys, parrots and noise. This could only be Mother India.

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

The Toy Train We finished off the night with the final Futurama film, the one where Fry ends up with tin foil wrapped around his head. It was funny as fuck, and after a pipe, the beers and the odd bump, sleep came without me realising it. I found out when the alarm went off, Raap, raap, raap, raap!!! at some god-forsaken-hour scaring the shit out of both of us. Fuckin’ thing. What’s the point of a fuckin’ holiday if your alarm is forever waking you up? Oh well, fuck it. We strapped our lives to our backs, and opened the back door to a torrent of fuckin’ rain that was just bound to fuck up anyone’s day. Sod it, what can you do eh? Well, one thing we could do, was put on our plastic bag rain ponchos, which work a fuckin’ treat. Things fit straight over our back packs n’ all. You still get a bit wet, but it’s more of a creeping damp than the outright, fuckin’ piss down all over us storm just outside the door. I poured a fat shnarff onto the back of my hand, hoovered it off with absolute determination. I offered some to my snuggles, but she said no, and now numb to the emotions of it all, we stepped out in to the downpour. It was only a few hundred metres, but dogs were barking and jungle sounds were howling. A cold wind whipped at us and the moon was hidden by the clouds. I had the heavy torch in one hand and the black-ops blade open in the other in case whatever it was living out in the wild here decided it wanted a piece of us. It’d be the last bad choice it ever fuckin’ made, fuckin’ hassle me when I’m hungover on holiday havin’ been woken up at four-o’ fuckin sumfing o’clock in the fuckin’ morning. We got down the station and the place looked fuckin’ abandoned, there was no one fuckin’ here let alone some fuckin’ train to take us up in to the mountains. ‘Hey how’s it?’ A soaked looking Steve yelled out of the frosty dark. We shared a wet hug and a smile, before some dude came out and was like, ‘The train is delayed sir, until later this morning when the rain stops. I am very much sorry for this. ‘ ‘How long is that man?’ ‘The train is fully booked sir so must go. But we must wait for the rain to stop. Please come back in a two hours.’ Pissed, off, hungover, wet, cold, soggy feet, carrying a back pack and then a smaller bag with the laptop on my front, miserable as all hell, we did the only thing we could. We grabbed the guys took them back to ours, passed around the ketamine, rolled a fat joint, put on Futurama and I fell asleep. Louise woke me with a stick from a distance, she knows I’m a bit jumpy when woken up. I think it stems down from when my older brother used to spit on me when I slept. Some shit scars you for life. All of us were grumpy and wet now, but the rain had stopped and a cold fog had settled over the valley as every creature waited for the sun to warm the misty day. Down at the train station again, there was bit more going on. A chai wallah sent from heaven sold us thimble full after little thimble full of sweet hot chai with cinnamon and cardamom. There is never a mug for tea when you want one eh? Dude was just putting it in these little half sized white plastic cups that burnt ya’ fingers and only carried about a shot of tea. It was like the same thing you’d put ya’ ketchup in at McDonalds. Well at ten rupees each what are ya’ gonna do? Drink five of the cunts and shut the fuck up. The train was still fuckin’ about and we had no idea when the fucker was gonna leave, or even if it would. But

India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it...

the station manager told us all was fine and it was already on its way down to meet us. After a slow hour, where we gave up all worry of being arrested and started smoking pipes of charas at the far end of the platform, a train a bit bigger than I thought it would be pulled up. Some slick lookin’ dude in his fine pressed uniform, taped sheets of paper to each door. One of which had our names and seat numbers written on it. Fuckin’ beautiful. There was little blue sign with white writing on it at the train station, in its best Indian, it said. The Kalka Shimla Railway line, an outstanding example of a hill passenger railway, was opened to traffic on 9th Nov. 1903. Mastering the art of tunnelling using innovative measures like multi Roman aqueduct, to maintain a steep gradient by normal adhesion, is the very significant feature of this line. The 96 km long, two foot six narrow gauge railway line from Kalka to Shimla, in its six hours journey, passes through 102 tunnels, many arch bridges (886 in nos.) and several picturesque stations like Dharampur, Taksal, Barog and Solan. The excitement of travelling rail on this line has special charm, offering unique opportunity to capture natural beauty at close quarters and experience the majestic Himalayas and their conquest through engineering construction skills more than 100 years ago. Isn’t that nice? What a great accomplishment of colonial power of the masses. Yes I was well excited, cold, and miserable, but really looking forward to the train ride. We’d planned this fucker since we’d first talked about coming to India. Apart from the k and the charas the Shimla train journey had stuck with us through all of our plans to get here. And we’d even talked Pip and Steve in to coming along too. Reading that sign though, I couldn’t help but wonder how many Indians died making this small gauge railway track? The reason for the two and a half foot wide track was that no other train service in the world used that gauge, so if anyone tried to take down the overlord British government that were on their summer holidays, they’d have to pull up the track or build new trains to fit it. It may have been a great example of architecture; it was also a lasting legacy of a greedy, murderous power hungry regime that had shit on a billion people, lorded over from half our Earth away. Fuckin’ colonial scum. They fucked the world for their own gains and when it was all gone, or in this case, after Gandi out smarted them, they fucked off and left a right ol’ fuckin’ mess. But saying that the Indian Mughals had been no better to the other people of India either. At least the British brought the railway hey. So we got on. The train carriages were bigger than I thought they’d be. I dunno, when they say toy train I pictured something really small, but actually the carriages were the same size as shipping containers and they had two rows of red leather bench seats inside with plenty of space in between. The genius of the seats was you could flip the back rest around so it sat on the other side of the seat, depending on who you wanted to talk to. When we finally pulled off, stocked up with biscuits and crisps from the chai wallah on that cloudy shitty day, wet through and close to shivering I spilt a big load ketamine all down the back of my hand in the grimy hole-in-the-floor toilet and thought sod it, and whacked the lot of it right up my snout. Back at the seat and selfishly numb we jerked forwards again on the always upwards pointing train. Round the back of Kalka, rubbish and piles of plastic built up behind homes until we left the quite cool little town behind. I liked Kalka, dunno why, just took a shine to the place. I would liked to have stayed for a few more days and gotten to know the area a bit better. In

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reality we fuckin’ should have ‘cause all we had for the next week was frozen fuckin’ solid cold weather. The hippy fulla that’d had food spitting out between his teeth when he was talking to us at the Fish Tail in Goa had called that shit like fuckin’ Nostradamus. Dude was a fuckin’ genius. Oh well, it was onwards and up wards. The first tunnel came and it was all excitement as we choo choo’d right through the side of the mountain. Then it was, gasping breaths as we came out the other side and the mountainous jungle valley just dropped away to the horizon. We were sat on a hundred year old railway line, built by pissed off enslaved workers, travelling across stone bridges that seemed to cling on to the side of the steep slopes with sick determination, and as we began to reach the clouds, we continued always upwards in to the Himalayas. Oddly enough we’d come across a random town or city sat on the top of, and down, a hillside, and lost in my daze of thought all I could think was; ‘What the fuck do all these people do for a job? How the fuck do they survive? What do they eat? Where the fuck do they even grow their food? There were no paddy fields like East Asia for rice. It was all hillsides covered in trees and the odd slip of plastic and rubbish filth. Way up in the mountains we pulled up at the promised Barog station and it was just like any shitty railway station anywhere. Hopeful and with camera in hand, I managed to get a nice shot of my shnookum’s bum and the tunnel we’d just been through, but that was all there was. It was getting colder too. Does the novelty of going through a tunnel on a train ever wear off? Well after forty of fifty of them, yes. We’d go through phases of nothing but boring trees and dirty train windows but then we’d pull out over a great expanse of mountains and when we took a sharp right turn you could see that we’d been travelling a hundred feet in the air over arched stone aqueduct looking bridges. Then the whole thing that we were doing would settle in its beauty. The Kalka to Shimla railway was stunning; it just seemed you got to enjoy it more looking at it from the outside or on TV rather than just being sat in the fuckin’ train for six god damn long, cold and ketamine filled hours. At least if we were in Vietnam or Thailand they would have sold booze. But the Indian government doesn’t feel it can trust its own citizens to the drink and restricts easy access. We pulled up again for a photo shot, the trees were thinning out now and the mountains had less on them. The train snaked back and forwards more and what felt like a dull ride up a hill, would become majestic when you could see the gravity defying path that we had followed. Six hours is just enough to feel like too long and just enough to not last forever. As the train pulled in to Shimla station I took a last sweet lungful of air and then kissed goodbye to the ability to breathe for the next few days. Shimla’s two kilometres straight up from the ocean, and there aint nearly as much oxygen that high. My lungs had started to burn on the train, and the fag I lit as soon as we got off, tore shreds outta me. Just like I swore I would after watching that Shimla documentary all that time ago I found a couple of the old boys waiting to take our bags and asked them to find us a decent place to stay. These dudes were the healthiest strongest men I’d met since Morro de Sao Paulo in Brazil. While I fuckin’ choked and gagged for every breath of air the two guys bounced forward with all of our bags strapped to them and ploughed on ever fuckin’ upwards. It was startin’ to get scary, as they chatted amongst themselves and took us from overpriced hotel to overpriced hotel, I fast lost the will to live having already given up on the freedom to breathe. I was at breaking point, I

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... was gasping for air. It was freezing fuckin’ cold and when he led us down some alleyway and started to haggle with the owner I snapped. I couldn’t have given a fuck how much the place cost. I needed to sit down, have a line of ketamine and gather my bearings. I’d never had to acclimatise to height before, and I wasn’t sure I could take this. Pip and Steve had been travelling a lot longer so they went and found a place that was better for their budgets. I just asked the dude at the counter, ‘Do you sell beer? Oh yes. Good show us the rooms and I’ll tell you which one we’ll take.’ I gave the guy who’d carried our shit, and found us the place, five hundred rupees for him and his mate to share. Fuck it, it’s late, it’s cold, the sun seems to be setting at four in the afternoon, take the rest of the day off boys and go treat ya’ missus. There were a couple of shitty rooms with shitty beds that we were shown first, but we were ruthless with the manager, and ran the taps, and checked all the bedding. He finally took us to the room we wanted which had a view over the mountains and a sign on the door that said, ‘Do not leave open windows unattended! If monkeys get in your room and break all of your stuff, that is your fault. If monkeys get in your room and break our TV that is your fault too.’ Monkeys! Little bastards. One of the guys brought a beer for me. Fuckin’ warm! How the fuck did they manage to find warm fucking beer in a place that outside’s colder than a fridge? I told him to put two more on ice, took out my ladle, and candle, poured a bottle in and left it to cook down while I smoked a pipe of Bob’s fine Charas. Me and my shnookums took a minute to just stand in awe looking out the window at where we were. Arriving in Shimla had been a massive goal achieved. We were well stoked. For a freezin’ fuckin’ cold mountain town though there sure were a lot of fuckin’ houses and people living up here. What the fuck did they all do for a job? I gotta say though, like Kalka the mountain people seemed to have more financial wealth than the Indian people living in Delhi. The spread of wealth seemed more even. ‘Monkey!’ Louise yelled and slammed the windows shut just as first two, then three, then dozens of the cunts crept along the roof tops opposite and along the ledge under our window. Always their keen eyes on the lookout for food and thievery. The k cooked down, I sniffed it and the guys came to get us. Then we went for a gasping nosey around the town. I fuckin’ couldn’t breathe, it felt like my lungs were on fire and all I was gettin’ was half a lungful at a time. I felt ridiculous and stubbed my fag out. More monkeys crossed our path and looked at us like thugs wanting to mug us on a street corner. Cunts. I checked my knife, right front pocket, just above the knee. It’d be all you fuckin’ need, to get savaged by one these pricks. Apart from the stitches and shit in a dirty Indian hospital, you’d have to have ya’ rabies shots and all kinds of shit. I noticed behind some buildings they had big water tanks with sharp steel spikes on the lids. I took it that at some point they realised a lot of people were getting sick cause of the monkeys pissing in their water. Cunts! Everything seemed to be fuckin’ uphill in Shimla, and as we came over the top of one then took a left, in a few minutes we were in fucking York, England? What the fuck? It was unbelievable. There was a big sign up stating no plastics were allowed in the town, and smoking in public was banned. I put out my next fag, and placed it in the first rubbish bin I’d seen since Vagator! Shimla was crazy like England. First we came across an old nineteen

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... fifties fire engine, then there was a street lined with English looking shops. It coulda been any high street in the UK. It was uncanny. And just above that loomed a great big rundown Tudor building with white panels and black log frames n’ all. Over on the right was an old style coffee house, and a bakery; oh hallelujah, cakes, sweets and pastries, oh my! The only reminder that we were in India, and I reckon it was over compensating a bit, kinda like a small cocked man driving a matt black Maserati, was a huge bright orange statue of the Monkey God Hanuman who’d helped out ol’ Rama in his war against the Demon King Ravana. It must have been a hundred metres high at least, a great big orange rampant rabbit dildo on top the mountains of Shimla. Funny as fuck but hey, it’d give us a mission the next day. For now though it was bloody freezin’ in Shimla and none of us were that keen to walk very far ‘cause we were already at the top of the mountains and it was steep as fuck downhill in every direction, which would only mean steep as fuck back up. I just didn’t have the breath for it, and thank fuck, my lover and Pip and Steve didn’t have the desire for it. So as luck would have it, a little sign stuck out above a doorway with those three blessed letters, B.A.R. Perfecto. We moseyed on in and they directed us up some stairs to a little tabled area with about a dozen men in different stages of sobriety either talking away with each other or a solo dude meditating on his glass of whiskey. Fuck this I was in a good mood, despite the lack of oxygen in my air, so the girls ordered gin and tonics and me and Steve drank beer and whiskey. Nothing could be make it better, oh yeah that’s right, and snuck off for a fat bump of k off the back of my hand. The view out the window toilet was nothing short of spectacular, the whole valley just dropped away beneath us and trusty ol’ Mr Sun was just finishin’ his shift in a blaze and glory of oranges and pinks. It was a stunning sunset, and I took the moment of silence by myself and just wallowed in the beauty of India. Back at the table I was going through their whiskeys and settled on a bottle of Black Dog Scotch. It wasn’t too smoky like some of them can be and was just what I needed to keep me cockles warm. They had a smokin’ room out the back and with choked guilt I huffed them down for as long as my lungs would let me in between bumps of k in the toilet and scotch. I shoulda been drinking tequila ‘cause they had a fabulous sign that said, take life with a grain of salt, a slice of lime and a shot of tequila. And written underneath, Tequila, the choice of youngsters! Too fuckin’ funny. By the time we walked out of there it was fuckin’ pitch black and the lights of the town rolled down each side of the mountain ridge that the high street cut across. It was like we had stars above and below us. It’s all a bit of a blur after that but I’m sure my banter was remarkable and witty, and I behaved in the finest of fashions. The next day me and Louise were up for a bit of a tour around so we struggled back in to the town. I pulled my knife on the odd monkey lookin’ for trouble and wandered about wondering where to get a taxi. Unless you’re a proper fuckin’ hiker you just can’t go walkin’ around the streets of Shimla. It’s like fuckin’ mountain climbing. I didn’t really wanna fuckin’ walk anywhere, fuck it, I couldn’t go far anyway ‘cause I couldn’t breathe for shit. I stubbed my latest fag out in short breathed disgust with myself, and found a bin to toss the butt in to. Louise dragged me up to the bakery so we could have sweet pastries for breakfast and got an actual tomato sandwich, like a real one. Not even sweetened bread like you usually get at cheap Asian restaurants and back packer places. It was the first sandwich I’d eaten since we’d landed in India about a month ago. We were just wondering what to do, and

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were starting to dawdle about a bit. Louise even got sorta close to a monkey sitting on a handrail that over looked the valley that was on our side of the mountain ridge the town was spread across. Louise came across the Himachal Pradesh Taxi Union office just around the back of the old Tudor building. Turned out that was getting a repaint too. So it fuckin’ should it was a beautiful old building, then again I’m sure there are plenty more people you could spend the tax payers money on. Anyhoo, there was the taxi union with set prices written on the wall and a guide ready to take us to see the sites. We agreed on a three stop off tour, the big tacky orange Hanuman, Another temple which was s’posed to have some great carvings and then to the ol’ English government summer house. The place they controlled an entire nation of people, whose language they couldn’t even – and had no desire to speak – while they stripped the continent of its resources. We paid up and the guy led us to a steep as fuck track down a path that led behind our hotel. The first stop was the monkey temple, and the taxi driver drove us up and around the most terrifying of streets and sharp corners that seemed to just drop off in to nowhere below them. We passed the obligatory hillside of rubbish that every town in the mountains seemed to have and then half way to the top of the world we pulled over in the car park of the Hanuman shrine. ‘Have you been here before mister?’ the driver asked. ‘No.’ ‘You may want to take your glasses and hat off. And if I may suggest Madame, I would remove all your jewellery or the blessed monkeys may take it.’ And he gave full smiled shake of his head, his eyes beaming. Without me glasses on I could only see about ten feet in front of me, but it was enough to see a guide with a long bamboo cane in his hand shepherding a group of elderly tourists to their cars. ‘Are you sure we should do this?’ I asked my lover. ‘Fuck it, we’re here now.’ I was reminded of when Cousin Paul had been in India, and had bought a bag of peanuts to feed to the monkeys when he was at some temple, and he reckoned a gang of them pounced on him, went though his pockets, took all the peanuts by force and left him lying on the ground wondering what the fuck had happened. Always up a fuckin’ hill, we walked up the long steps as groups of monkeys started to come out of the trees and followed us. Victims. Another guide with a big stick led a group of Japanese people down past us. Oh shit. But we held our nerve and made it to the top. The statue of Hanuman was ludicrous, the most horrible shade of orange ever and when Louise was stood beneath it she wasn’t much bigger than one of his toes. It was just a giant monstrosity but it was sure as shit Indian and proud of it. Hanuman has an amazing story all of his own, but let’s just say he went to Sri Lanka to battle the Demon Ravana and kicked ass. A hundred metres high this giant orange plastic looking, half man half monkey god statue stood above the whole valley of Shimla and lurking around his ankles was an ever more aggressive bunch of little furry bastards that were gathering in numbers. It was just the two of us gringos now and we had no stick. And they knew that. As four big fuckers started circling us Louise said, ‘Ah, I think we should get the fuck outta here babe.’ And she was right. We quickly ran about and took a few more pictures as

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... they started to cut us off from the exit. Cunts knew exactly what they were up too. Trying not to run we darted down the stairs just as they closed in. Halfway down, one was sat waiting for us right in the middle of the footpath next to a small scenic lookout point. Son of a bitch herded us straight into it like sheep. Now they had us trapped on a little two metre, by two metre platform, a hundred feet up and nowhere to go. He came right in and fuckin’, like hissed at us and made a lunge, I screamed and yanked my shnookums in front of me, then pulled out my knife, right front pocket, just above the knee. Fuck you mother fucker! As soon as it flicked open and the cunt saw the glint of my steel, holding on to the hand rail, he took, one more lunge at us with his yellowed inch long canines dripping and used his arm still holding on to the railing to pull a feint, and threw himself away and off into the trees. ‘Let’s get the fuck outta herreeeeeeee!!!!!’ I yelled at my shnookums, and we bailed down the stairs two at a time, flew around the corner at the bottom and back to the waiting car and laughter of the driver. ‘You did like the temple sir?’ with a few waggles of his head. I was starting to get the waggle now. A few from side to side, were usually an expression of humour. One sort nod to the left or right was either agreement or disappointment; I was starting to do it myself now too. We pulled out the car park and I checked over my shoulder half expecting to see the horde of hairy animals crowded at the bottom of the stairs with bats and chains, goading us and ready for a fight. Monkeys are cunts! Around the thin winding mountain roads the driver took us to the next temple. ‘No monkeys this time sir, but you may have to watch the ladies there,’ and smiled a beautiful twinkle eyed smile. This temple was much smaller but had some amazing statues and pictures of Ganesh the Elephant headed god, and Shiva the Blue god. You gotta give it to the Hindus, their religion is so much more fun than the other ones. And to be honest a four armed god with an elephant’s head who is the son of the blue big major god, Lord Shiva is just as likely as jesus and whatever the fuck the fooled Christians call their one true god. What a pile of fuck head, lied to can’t think for themselves, need religion as an excuse to be a good person sheeple. Cunts! I don’t need no fuckin’ excuse to do what I believe is the right thing, and I’ll fuckin’ tell you just what that fuckin’ is..... Be good to one another. Simple. And how do I define good? Something that makes you and others feel happy. Happy is not an emotion that is taught, brainwashed or has to be learned. It starts right at the beginning of your life when you laugh, or cry but still haven’t learnt to walk, talk, or shit in the toilet. Happy starts right at your belly button and explodes out of your ears. It’s an emotion that translates into every language and every creature on OUR Earth. Not your fuckin’ medieval fairy tales based on cunts from the Middle East. The Vatican was invented by the Caesars when Rome lost power across the modern world they had created because, political regimes may come and go, but people have been fooled and made to act a certain way by religion for millennia. Where it was hot and dudes cocks must have gotten infected ‘cause they didn’t wash, because water was hard to come by, some fuckin’ professor invented circumcision and for a thousand years they’ve cut the foreskin off boys’ pricks. Or maybe it

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... was just so they could tell their people apart from the others? It's all just s method of control for those who need to be told how to exist. In the middle ages some Chinese fuckin’ king had a fetish for little feet and so for hundreds of years little baby girls had their toes broken and rolled underneath the soles of their feet so they were little perfect triangles, fuck it whether they could walk or not. Human and animal sacrifice have been a main stay any time there was a drought because it gave the masses something to blame their suffering on and hope that now because their uncles fuckin’ head was chopped off and used in a fuckin’ ball sport that now, the gods are gonna make it rain. And all the while, they fucked your children. You’re more likely a fucking rabbit runs all over the world in one day laying chocolate fucking eggs!! But isn’t it funny that he only does it in countries that have jesus’s easter. Like what the fuck? So yes, out of all the stupid fuckin’, don’t think for yourself religions on our Earth I like the one where the gods have four arms and are half fucking monkey. Why the fuck not? Anyway back at the temple, four old ladies hobbled over towards us, wrapped in woollen saris, one using a cane to hold herself up. Of course they had their palms out and were begging for food. ‘Just get in the car,’ chuckled our ever laughing driver. ‘Quickly my friends.’ And with that, we outpaced the grannies and dove through the waiting open door. ‘Do not feel bad about those ladies,’ the driver said, ‘they are more wealthy than you or I sir.’ He pointed over to the house covered hill that ran down and away from the side of temple. ‘These ladies and their families have been in Shimla for generations, and the government had to pay them a lot of money to build these temples on their land. And see all the houses? They are the landlords and collect a lot of money from the people around here. To them a minute not making money is a minute wasted, so the four of them sit up there on that seat waiting for the bus loads of western tourists and make a lot of money sir.’ He gave a twist of his head and neck and bit down on his lip. I understood that to be a mixture of frustration and also, such is life. We had one last stop on the tour and this one was really gonna piss me off. It was the grand residence of the English Empire in India during the hot summer months. The British had the raw audacity and cheek to almost not even be in India and yet they still controlled it all, while they robbed and pillaged this beautiful continent of all they could. The building itself was great to look at, a stately manor that any English town would be proud. Inside and outside it was stunning, but it was built high up in the mountainous peaks with only a small railway track to get to it in the old days purely because they knew if given half a chance some of the children whose fathers had been murdered while trying keep their simple home and farmland would one day want to take it back. So they built this place way up in the fuckin’ god damned hardest place in the entire continent to get to; just to keep them out. Like monkeys, the colonials were bullying cunts too. On the way back down to Shimla town, just as we were coming off the top of the mountain and starting the massive down hill drive we passed one of the ol’ porter boys, on his way up the hill with a fridge strapped to his head. No that aint no lie. He had like a big strap around his forehead which ran around behind him and held an entire fridge/freezer. Not one of those little bar sized ones which hold a few cases of beer, but a full five foot tall fridge, for holding a week’s worth of food even in the western world. Shit was fucked. But he was doin’ it. Christ we were about ten minute drive up the fuckin’ hill, how the fuck was this

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... guy doin’ it? Maybe his belief in his gods gave him the strength to never give up. Maybe he believed in his next life the sacrifice made in this one would be rewarded. Maybe like a three billion others he should stop waiting for the false next life and get down to enjoying this one. But that’s not quite a fair comment. This man was not lucky enough to be born in a country where the average wages are over one hundred US dollars a day and this man never let that crush his spirits. This man carrying this fridge could teach me a lot of things, if only I stopped to listen. I was done with Shimla, it was cold and I was getting bitter. Those three tourist attractions were all there was to see on a snowless day in the mountains. It had been a great town, a great stop off on our journeys. To leave the wilds of Delhi behind and end up in such a majestic place, and to take such a novel ride to get there had been beautiful, but it was all up and down hills. I was proper struggling to breathe. The idea of what the British government had done to India and all the other colonies burned inside of me with a swelling hatred. The Long Road called. We met up with Steve and Pip that night and told them our plans. We were heading to Dharamsala to see the home of the Dalai Lama. They were gonna chase the Charas trail and were off to Manali and the infamous Parvati Valley. We’d see our friends again in a few days down in Delhi, if the Gods of India willed it, and after one final meal we hugged our friends goodbye.

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The rolling road to Dharamsala Morning rolled around in a bit of a blur. I’d cooked up a couple of bottles the night before, ready for the journey north to the place of residence of the Dalai Lama. You can’t really call it his home town, ‘cause that’s somewhere in Tibet innit. Unfortunately in the reality of how our Earth is being run, the Chinese government’s set its sights on the minerals and rocks that come out of the Himalayas, and it seems there’s nothing anyone can do about it. A hundred people could set themselves on fire in protest against the theft of their homelands and that won’t even get on the lying-news these days. It’s a sham, a mockery of individual existence wrapped up in Christmas paper and fed to the masses as necessary modernisation of our society. All the while the elected or forced upon us leaders hide their wealth in banks in Panama. Tibet has been taken from its people, their language eradicated in their own country and the wealth of the mountains removed so cities like Shanghai and Beijing could be built. Anyone with education or leadership skills has had to run or else they’ve been locked up for re-education. That’s reality. Louise and me in the meantime had our homes strapped on. We were up at the Taxi Union again and a driver was being sorted out for about twenty five pounds to drive us the six or so hours up to Dharamsala. It was all done and we had to walk down the steep track again to the road way below the peak that the main street crested and then under a tunnel to a carpark on the other side of town. It was just a crappy carpark in the middle of the road to nowhere. It was crowded with buses and trucks and we hopped in to the car of our friendly driver. He pulled out amongst the traffic and raced around the first corner we came to and slid to a stop by his prayer guy; who for a few rupees, stuck a big red blob of blessings to his head. The driver came back to the car, gave his little orange Hanuman figure that was hanging from his rear view mirror a rub and hit the accelerator. Wow! This dude drove fast. It seemed there was no line of traffic too long or corner too blind that could stop him from overtaking or using his brakes. Our hearts were in our hands and our eyes were on the thousand foot drops that changed from left to right as we crossed over rivers and passed through towns. A few hours in and Louise had given up looking. She was laying there cuddled up and snoozing like my own little dream. We were overtaking three busses and a truck on the inside of a long right blind corner, when the truck appeared in front of us. Our man hit the brakes, and jerked the steering wheel; we just nicked a spare life as the front of the truck seemed to almost drive through the back of the car without leaving a mark. Next was the car coming straight at us, that was obviously trying to overtake the truck that we had somehow missed. Our car was in full lock now as it slid straight past the front of the other car, close enough for us to see the wide eyed fear of the opposite driver as we careered towards a foot high dirt bank and the bleak mists that covered the valley hundreds of metres below. ‘Ooooohhhhh Shiiiiittttt!!’ Hanuman saved us again when for no reason at all the car just straightened out and the driver carried on as if nothing had happened. He looked at me and smiled, then gave Hanuman another little rub and focused on the road again. And we were off, now it seemed our driver was sure we were a blessed car. He held nothing back as he over took everything on the road like a challenge to be conquered rather than an obstacle to be manoeuvred. Like

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he couldn’t have cared less, he zoomed in and out of the traffic, pulling in at the last second between two trucks loaded with rock stolen from the crown of Mother Earth. After a few nerve racked hours we pulled up at some small place that the drivers eat at. After originally turning down the food in exchange for beer, what the guy was eating looked really good, so for twenty rupees me and my lover shared a plate of rice with mungbeans and veg gravy, was fuckin’ proper. I took a piss on the side of the road, and wind or not, opened my wrap of k up and shoved some up my nose, then smoke a quick pipe. All this, us, the car and the cafe hung on to the side of a cliff with a thousand foot drop and just the blue expanse of the mountains threaded by road ways and an endless ant-like procession trucks as they carted the rocks from the mountains to build the cities. Our car was like the one chaotic flea that hopped amongst it all, stern, tough and indestructible. Well with the help of the great lord Hanuman we’d made it this far anyway. We took a corner and were thrown into shadow as Mr Sun was torn from us. One side of whatever mountain we were on had sunlight and on the other side it was night. The driver pulled up at a lone-star pharmacy, it was the only thing on the road we’d passed in an hour. Just a pharmacy out there all on its own. I bet they sold good speed for the drivers, and wanted to go over and see, but the driver was back before I’d made up my mind. While I was still lost in the thought of what might’ve been, he hit the accelerator again and gunned off up the road trying to catch up with all the trucks and buses he’d just spent the last five minutes passing on the blind corners in the dark. I saw the snow topped mountains of the Himalayas for the first time. It was still a trek but we were closer to Dharamsala than we were to Shimla. A lot closer. ‘Maybe two hours mister.’ And we stopped for nothing. Finally we hit a place called Mcleod Ganj, and the final step of our journey. The rain had started to pour in a torrent and as we got closer to our destination the Monkey God thought he’d have a few chuckles at our expense. Maybe as payback for saving us from that truck, which seemed to go straight through the car. The rain turned to ice and hail, the easy route was blocked off to the town and we’d have to take one last terrifying trip up, over and around Dharamsala and past the turn off to Dal Lake. Here the road scissored on itself, and drivers like our own, pushed and nudged their way over the edge of the corners and roadways, somehow managing to not be blown off the side of the mountains. And finally, after all that, we got stuck in a traffic jam. ‘It’s not far mister, perhaps you and your lady friend may walk the last bit so I may turn around and make it home tonight?’ I was done I almost jumped out the car and kissed the fuckin’ ground we somehow hadn’t been splattered across. I skipped a tooloo-la-lay and tipped the dude a fiver ‘cause he’d driven for eight hours to get us here, and still had to drive all the way home. I dunno how much the Union let him keep of the two thousand five hundred rupees we paid them, but he’d had to pay for his own petrol out of that. And it was another eight hours home in the dark now. Fuck that. I was never getting in one of those cars again. With all respect to the Himachal Pradesh Taxi Drivers’ Union, which was a real godsend of a company. That was a truly horrible experience and I didn’t ever want to feel that close to death again. I was a ruin. A quivering wreck with shattered nerves and desire only for four solid walls, comfortable bed, and the calmness of my loving shnookums in my arms. Good grief, that truck, didn’t miss us, it can’t have, what the fuck happened there I don’t know, but maybe that bright Orange

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Monkey God, had been watching over us. We walked the few hundred metres through the torrential rain our plastic raincoats managing to keep us dry. We’d booked an expensive hotel at the top of the hill, it was over two thousand rupees a night but at least when we got in there it had heating and hot water. We took a hot shower, had a smoke, found a little place that did vegetable momos, and then with full bellies and a bit of KumKum Bhagya on tv we crashed out.

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You have to have new trainers to be on the run We woke up to a glorious sunny morning in the mountains. It was cold but we were dressed for it, had all the woolly clothes from leaving London’s winter behind, on us. Poor ol’ Pip and Steve were gonna be in a bit of trouble up in Manali, but it was too late for any of that. Me and Louise wrapped up tight and went for a walk through town, I dunno what I expected to find in this sanctuary gifted to the Tibetan people by the kind hearted people of India, but the words of John, our bartender in Goa came back to me as we saw Tibetan monks in new Nike shoes wearing ray-bans and carrying new leather satchels. The Buddhist monks in Thailand dress in yellow and are famed for having nothing and always having a hand out for a blessing. These guys had money. More money than maybe me. They sure as shit didn’t look like the hungry refugees we have on the borders of Europe. That were happy, and if ya’ would, a little snobby. The ones in Thailand and Cambodia, are forever lining up for pictures to the point it must be a pain in the ass. But here, they just didn’t seem approachable and ignored, our excuse me’s and thank you’s. An entire generation of people base themselves on the ideals and supposed principals of these guys and to be honest, they seemed a bit fake. People talk about the wonders of Tibetan culture but one of the realities is if you become handicapped, disfigured or are born with a deficiency of some form, they believe it’s your karma and you deserve it. Perhaps in a previous life you were a cunt, and so that’s why in this life you must suffer. Which makes me question what the fuck are they all crying about? If you followed their beliefs in the same way they do towards disabled people, you can only assume, the whole of the Tibetan people deserve to have their homeland taken from them because of shit they’ve done in a life that never really happened. It’s their karma. Well that’s what they say about what goes around comes around, but how can you suffer for something when you don’t know the reasons for your suffering. It’s crazy and it was cold. We ate some momos, and went down to the Dalai Lama’s residence. He was in fucking London! Fucking typical. Maybe that was our karma? There was a beautiful temple in the centre of the town which had those prayer wheels of theirs that you wheel about as you walk counter-clock wise around the building. It’s a calming activity. I found it gave you a bit of solitude in your own mind to think about something positive, or worry about how you could change something negative. I liked the idea of them, the same way I like the current Dalai Lama. I think he’s a good man, and we’ve been blessed to live in a day where we’ve had an opportunity to hear his points of view of oneness of humanity. And he’s right. We are one race, the human race, and we’re only just surviving as the corporate and greedy poison and sicken OUR Earth. The eco-system that is this planet chokes and bleeds and turns black as our coffee oceans become empty of life and are filled with plastic and sewage. But maybe I’m being harsh, on the monks, I didn’t know what to expect but wealth wasn’t really it. There didn’t seem to be anyone else from Tibet in the town. There were no poor refugees who looked like they had struggled across the snow capped Himalayas. There were boards up advertising the missing Panchen Lama, who was kidnapped by the Chinese at the age of six; as we got further in to the town, missing signs were up everywhere and there was Tibetan flag painted on a wall with, ‘Banned in Tibet’ written beneath it. Shops were everywhere all selling the same expensive looking trinkets of fake gold and carved wooden Buddhist monks and symbols.

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We went down the hill a bit to the Dalai Lama’s place and it was like a school or community centre. It hadn’t been made out of ancient stone or wood like it was in my mind, but was a canvas topped structure housing a few over the top temples. It had metal detectors on the way in and a guard with a machine gun and shoeless people shuffled about in awe lost in the wonder of their prayers. I was underwhelmed and we were in and out within a few minutes. The monks on the run from Tibet seemed to be living in an Americanised version of what I imagined. With the freezing cold of the outside and the drizzling rain that started again, we pulled in at a pizza place and tried to come up with a plan. ‘Fuck this,’ Louise said. Wha’d’ya’ reckon? Let’s head back to Delhi.’ We checked online for trains and it looked like we’d have to cross the mountains and head over on the border of Kashmir and Pakistan. Fuck there had to be a better way, so we ate up and found a travel agent who booked us an overnight bus ticket for that night back to Delhi. Fuckin’ night buses, now they’re a cunt. Just uncomfortable boredom and broken down buses, that’s all they’re good for. Well, at least we wouldn’t be able to see it every time we nearly went off a cliff. We’d paid for the extra night at the hotel, but fuck it, fuck the money and fuck the cold, we were headin’ back to the big smoke and I was lookin’ forward to it. Outside the rain had really started to piss it down, we couldn’t get a taxi from the hotel so walked to the edge of town and jumped in a tuk tuk. I wasn’t looking forward to fuckin’ driving up and around the wet, icy snaking roads to the bus stop and was kinda stoked when the driver said the road up and around Mcleod Ganj was washed out anyway, so he drove us to the start of a small town as far as the road would go then told us to walk to the other side and wait for the bus there. It was a proper mountain storm and the wind blew the rain in every direction. It fuckin’ poured down on us and even though the plastic raincoats kept our top dry within seconds our shoes and feet were soaked through and chilled to the bone. Another couple looking lost came from the other way and we reassured them they were heading the right direction, and told them even if there wasn’t a tuk tuk waiting, it was only a half mile to town anyway. Half frozen rain drops the size of five pence coins pounded against us as we walked through what looked like an abandoned village, or more like a new village not quite finished. The road works had a two hundred metre gap between them. After that it was fine, we were on a road in a down pour and they had an off licence with a little canopy selling bottles of whiskey and beer. I took a small bottle of some whiskey with a blue label and a beer to sip on while we waited the hour for the bus in the pissin’, shittin, windy, cold rain. One fulla helped us take our packs off once we were under the canopy and we sat in shared misery as Hanuman had one final laugh at our expense and poured his storm on us. The dude that had helped us was drinkin’ Kingfisher strong, and I joined him, it was gonna be a long cold night on the bus if the diazepam didn’t take hold. Then I saw him take a bit of squidgy black either charas or opium, and swallow it. Oooooooohhhh opium I want some of that. But I never asked and wasn’t offered any so we all stood together trying to keep the wind and rain off us as other western tourists came and huddled around like penguins in the South Pole. Some started walking down the hill disappearing off ‘round the corner, but the fulla we were with reckoned to wait right where we were and a bus would come. For entertainment there was a lot of shouting and horn blowing when some dude in a shiny new grey Landrover couldn’t take the sharp, steep corner heading down the road in front of

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us because of our bus that was trying to do a three point turn on a road that would struggle to allow a horse and cart over it. But the bus finally managed to swing around after about fifty attempts and then disappeared back down the hill and around the corner. ‘I’m gonna check where the bus is going,’ Louise said. She disappeared off into the twilight and rain and I was left with just the guy and my bottle of sippin’ whiskey. It was four o’clock and we shoulda been gettin’ on the bus. Turned out all the tourists walkin’ by us were right. My chilly snuggles came flying back up the road waving her hands, and yelled, ‘Hurry up, all the buses are parked up down the road. Stupid locals and their stupid advice. If I was on my own I woulda stood there right in the middle of that storm freezin’ my bollocks off waitin’ for a bus that was never gonna come! The dude just sorta shrugged, and helped me put my shit on my back and cover it all up with the plastic rain poncho, and then I was off out into the storm as the light of day faded away. Just around the corner there they were, about six buses all with different logos and promised levels of luxury written down the sides of them. All sat there ready to go and there I was running down the side of them now with Louise hoping to make it to our one before it took off. It was fine, we made it, soggy as fuck but we got there. I stuck my shit underneath and kept my back pack, the charas, the ketamine and the diazepam with me. We had just enough time, to realise how cold we were to swap our wet socks for dry ones and then we were off. The bus crowded up and I saw the three young Indian guys near us all swallow a lump of black magic too. Fuck it, I had to ask. ‘What’s that you guys have taken?’ The one fulla said it was the finest charas in all of India, ‘Did you try it while you were here?’ ‘No, didn’t even get offered it.’ Didn’t occur to ask either ‘cause I’d plenty of Bob’s finest anyway, but it would have been a nice addition for my collection to take home to London. Oh well can’t have it all, I was still a bit like, fuckin’ hell, but oh well. I swallowed thirty milligrams of diazepam with a mouthful of whiskey, Louise swallowed ten and we hit the road Jack. The bus left at four and we were due in Delhi the next morning at five. A thirteen hour trip isn’t too bad, at least we had dry socks on. I can’t sleep on those buses at the best of times, and being wet too? That would have made it a nightmare, but we’d changed into warm clothing and the diazepam did what it needed to do. Well that is until the bus broke down. I woke up when they turned the lights on and my guts were just lurching. Holy shit, s’cuse me, s’cuse me as I rushed past the other sleepy riders and told the dude I needed to go. They opened the door to a fierce wind. I ran out and up to the back of the bus where I fuckin’ hoped no one would see me, and just as I was about to shit myself, there was the driver fuckin’ about with the engine! Oh god! So I kept going, somehow holding my ass together, and got just enough outta the light to not give a toss anymore, dropped my pants and sprayed watery shit all over the side of the mountains. Oh it was awful, and vocal, yeash. I had nothing, to wipe my ass with and to be honest there was no need anyway ‘cause I’d just pissed shit outta my ass. Where the fuck had that come from? Back at the bus they thought they had it sorted, and started her up and we carried on hobbling out of the Himalayas. I wasn’t sick, thank fuck it had just been some rejection of my guts to all the shit I’d been putting into it, so at least I wasn’t puking after that. Woohoo, for the one off splitter splatter! The bus was suffering and was in more dire straits than my own diarrhoea. But fancy as she was painted and comfy as her seats were, she was done. But I think to all of our surprises,

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Delhi, take two I woke in the morning to a crowded motorway and despite the delay of the broken down bus the boys said we’d still be in Delhi around seven. Sweet. Five-am is useless to anyone anyway. For first thing in the morning the motorway was crowded but not at a standstill. After dropping loads of people off at probably useful places me and Louise were the last of the few left to get off. The bus I woulda thought’d pull in to a bus station. You know that’s not too much to ask is it? But no! They pulled over on the side of the motorway where a dozen tuk tuks waited like hyenas picking at a carcass. In these situations I find it’s just easier to take the first guy and let him rob you a bit rather than standing there arguing with a thousand dudes who are fighting over each other and screaming at you for you for your cash. I thought I’d gotten it right but I was way off the mark. Ten guys crowded around the door waiting for it to open, and the first one that caught my eye, I told him to take us to the Delhi train station. Another one had already gotten my bags though and yet another had gotten hold of Louise. All three of them were ready to kill each other, and as the pack of dogs started to tear itself apart I pulled Louise behind me as we were forced towards the wall of the motorway with cars speeding past in the light rain. I went for my knife. It wasn’t there! Right front pocket just above the knee!!! Had no knife in it! Where the fuck was it. One of the guys grabbed at me and I lost it! ‘Who the fuck are you to put your hands on me!’ I was just about to start swingin’ when one big fulla with a beard came up, and goes, ‘You get in with him,’ pointing at some quiet dude just off to the side. Done. And with the pack of assholes still shoving and yelling at each other we got in the tuk tuk, and drove off. It was like they hadn’t even noticed we were gone. We had a laugh with the guy about the getting off the bus and without any other hassles he drove us right to the front of the hotel. We got inside and they had a luxury room spare for us, which only cost a few quid more and was twice the size of the other one we’d had. Or more you could say, we had got the best room available because we hadn’t already pre-paid online. ‘You can sleep in your own bed,’ Louise said, and then curled up in to a cute little ball and passed out. I on the other hand went down the pharmacy just as he was opening and ordered twenty more bottles of ketamine for later that day. Then I went upstairs had a fat Indian breakfast of greasy chapattis, yoghurt and spicy dip, drank a cold fanta and then went to bed and snored my head off. We woke up a bit later called Bob and organised to meet him the next day and then still drowsy from the diazepam, decided we’d do nothin’ today and would plan the rest of our trip tomorrow. The rest of the day was simple enough, we had no desire, plans or energy for the day so we went over to the Secret restaurant, climbed it’s fuckin’ big, steep staircase and got our drunk on. It was a bottle of their finest Indian vodka for my shnookums and an endless supply of cold Budweiser for me. We sat there all afternoon, snacking on momos and pakoras. We got talking to two people next to us, they were from England too, and were drinkin’ up large before they went to a nightclub, we were tempted but the pull of the diazepam on the booze was making for weary company. I managed to shoot off at some point and bought the ketamine and ordered another twenty bottles for the next day. The way I was goin’ I was gonna need a lot of it if any was gonna make it back to London.

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So I was buying ketamine in ten millilitre bottles, and a litre is fifty grams, so including today, I’d only bought about a third of a litre, about fifteen grams once it’s all cooked down. That’s just a big weekend for us. Back around the Ozora times I was sniffin’ seventeen grams every two weeks. Well three of us would buy a litre every two weeks anyway, so by all standards, at the moment I was doing ok, and not really taking that much for a fiend. But don’t get me wrong, I was still being fiendish. Every time I went to the toilet I’d have a bump off the back of my hand and these days I pee a lot. But in my head I was doing ok. Once you get used to it you function quite well on ketamine. Maybe surrounded by sober people you’d stand out, but once everyone’s drunk I was no different than the rest, just a bit more polite and wobbly. The ol’ staircase was a bit of a trick but if I used my hands as well as my feet when I went up the steep staircase I was fine. Going down involved a lot more hanging on than usual but I was ok, it wasn’t my first time. I was fine in fact. I loved being back in Delhi, it was warm, wasn’t raining anymore and we were sat in just the right place. Some lady came up and couldn’t find a spare table so I offered her the spare chair at our neighbours’ table and it turned out they were from the same home town. What can ya’ do eh? Luck and fate had brought them together. With a cheeky little help from Hanuman of course. They all got along like they were still at home and next thing ya’ know they were all off clubbing together. Did we wanna go? Nah fuck that the pills and booze had us tired as fuck so we called it a night paid the bill, tipped well, and I even gave the waiter a small ball of Bob’s fine Charas. We went home and slept. The next day came about with bright blue skies, god it was good to be warm. We’d had all that fuckin’ mission up in to the mountains and all that, and it had been lovely but the spitty food man in Goa had been bang on the money. We’d gone up there, frozen our fuckin’ tits off and after three or so days of reading books come home to Delhi again. It was cold up there. It’s just not something I’m used to stumbling across when I’m travellin’ around. If I wanted cold we could have stayed in fuckin’ England. We’re s’posed to be on our fuckin’ winter break for fuck-sake. I wanna hang out in the sun man not sit in the mountains freezin’ my fuckin’ ass off. What the fuck! So beautiful as they are, fuck those mountains. We came up with a plan. Holi festival was only a few days away, but we’d been told by a number of people that it can get a bit leery on the streets and the Indian guys can get a bit touchy feely with the women. I believed it. That was the last thing I needed or wanted. I’m fine and happy when I’m on drugs, but I had been close to snapping in Goa with the way the guys treated the girls. Especially my girl. We got online and looked to see if there was anything organised going down in Delhi. There we came across all kinds of stories of women being harassed or the dye itself sometimes being toxic! What the fuck? But looking on the positive side, we came across loads of websites with lists of awesome raves to go to. So we called a few up and the guys from Rang Festival were just awesome on the phone, and we organised to meet them a little later at their head office. Rang was in the gardens of a five star hotel in southern Delhi. We looked around for a place to stay down there and next door to the Rang Festival we hit the jackpot. The hotel beside it was five star with retractable roof and spa bath. It had a pool, sauna and spa. Fuck it, it was sixty pounds a night and we were well under budget so we booked three nights in the five star hotel for two days’ time. What after that though?

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‘How about the desert.’ Louise was born a genius. As a nurse common sense is just something that comes naturally to her. She’s the beauty and the brains of our operation and I loved her that little more for it. So we looked at our options, we knew we had to be in Kathmandu, March seventeenth, so we still had a few weeks to kill. We’d head to Jaipur, the train was only about four hours and we’d take it from a station not far from the five star hotel. After Jaipur what was there? The obvious route would be head from Jaipur to the Taj Mahal and then over to Varanasi. From there we could head back for one last blast in Delhi then fly or take the bus to Nepal. Simple. We called Bob and he told us to meet him about two-ish, and he recommended we go check out the Parliament Gardens for the morning. We’d slept well and it was only about eight or nine in the morning, I went downstairs, bought the twenty bottles of k, then ordered ten more for the next day. We went down to the little cafe the hippies and us used for breakfast and ate the staple fried eggs and toast with fluorescent red jam. Fuckin’ loved that jam. Then washed it down with honey, lemon and ginger tea with great stalks of ginger in it. Everything that people had said about the hygiene of food in India, for us, was completely wrong. The food was amazing, and with all the healthy teas we were drinking I was losing weight and with the bit of a tan I’d gotten was feeling great. I was happy from the inside out. Louise my snuggles was a bit pissed off because she said she was putting weight on. To me she looked gorgeous. But I think the answer to this was she was over worked and under fed as a nurse; while I was a fat lazy bastard in London who did as little as possible and ate too much food. India was bringing out the natural healthy weight and look for both of us. We checked on the map where the Parliament or Mughal Gardens were and it wasn’t far from Rajiv Chowk which was a circular looking park one stop away on the blue line. ‘Should we walk?’ Louise asked. ‘Yeah, fuck it why not? From there we’ll take the tube to the Rang head office, get the tickets and then go meet bob.’ It was time to venture out of the Bazar. We’d been in Delhi long enough now to have our confidence and to be able swat beggars and liars away without guilt or even a second glance. At the end of the Bazar road on the Delhi station side, we took a right on Chelmsford road and followed it down until we reached Rajiv Chowk. I tried to take some more money out and hey-fuckin-ho, the bank had cancelled my card. I rang them up and some Indian guy told me I had go on hold for a while. I could see the credit racing down on my sim card, so I asked the guy if he could call me back. ‘No I am very sorry sir, we cannot make international call backs.’ ‘Dude I’m in India. Tell me right now that you’re not in India.’ ‘One second please sir.... Yes sir we will call you right back.’ We had a bit of time to kill so we wandered around Rajiv Chowk, and holy fuckin’ shit balls there’s a McDonalds! ‘Oh my god, that’s dinner later yeah.’ Louise was just staring at it willing the doors to open. ‘Oh yeah.’ The bank called back, my card was unlocked and we were good to go. It had been closed because of the way I’d been maxing the withdrawal limit each time I used it. I’m allowed

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three hundred pounds a day but the Indian ATMs were only letting me have one hundred quid or ten thousand rupees at time. I took twenty thousand rupees out and added that to the five I had in my in my worn out wallet. I’d have to buy another one from the Bazar later. It was warming up, and the route to the Mughal Gardens was a bit trickier than we thought so we waved down one of the pedal guys on his cycle tuk tuk. He wanted like fifty rupees to cycle us to the gardens. Fifty pence is a cheap price in any man’s world, so we hopped on. It was great being in the pedal powered tuk tuk, you haven’t got the tin can vibration and noise of the petrol motored ones. It’s quiet, breezy and gives you time to think and look around. It was grand, in motorised tuk tuks you’re cramped in them and the roof of the cunts are always a bit too low so you’re stooping down on a funny angle trying to see everything as it whizzes past. In the cycle one, we were out in the open and were sat quite high up, just over my shoulder height I’d say. The day was peaceful and calm and as we gawped about in bliss. Nothing could ruin this moment for us and as we hit the main drag down to the gardens, with the wind in our hair, Born to be wild and George Thorogood rang through my head, ‘cause like a true nature’s child, me and my lover, we were born, born to wild, we’ll climb so high, we never want to diiiiiieeee.’ Life is good if you fight through the shit of it, ignore all the bad stuff and stay away from the shitpapers and the politicians. For us in the West life could be real good. The man cycling us around – which can’t have been fuckin’ easy, although I was getting thinner I was still a fat cunt – hadn’t been given the same opportunities we had, but he may have been just as content at that moment as we were. At least he wasn’t trapped in an office job earning so much money but still actually being in debt, it seems the more money we make in this world, the less of it we have and the more of it we owe. It’s a whore’s-life of a cycle. We breezed down the long, flat straight road to the Mughal gardens and I gave the guy a hundred rupees, he’d fuckin’ cycled us for fifteen wonderful minutes and he deserved every penny of that pound I gave him. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky as we walked backwards and forwards tryin’ to figure how to get the fuck in. Next thing they wouldn’t let me take my cigarettes and lighter in with me. What the fuck? Maybe it was to stop psychotic cunts blowing up bombs hidden within ya’ fags? Fuck knows, I asked a guard to look after them and he just said to leave them up on the road a bit behind a sign. We got in the queue and they separated me and Louise, some bitch went through my stuff and stuck an ‘Inspected’ sticker right on the fuckin’ screen of my camera. Was it spite? I waited for Louise and then hand in hand we walked through the gardens. They were immaculate and started off with small green gardens and herbs and grew in amazingness until by the last few walled off areas we were surrounded by yellow and pink blooms edged with water features and ponds. Couples slunk around the place and because it was free for all, there was a mix of wealth and the common man. It was a beautiful, if a little self gratifying gift from the government to the people. Either way it was a sweet blissful place to be; in the calm of eye of the Delhi storm. We left there and sure as shit my fags and lighter were gone, ah fuck it, they were cheap, I was pretty sure the guard was gonna steal them from the moment he knew where I’d put them. Such is life, walking ‘round the gardens with my shnookums was more important than

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a pack of dam fags anyway, those I could always buy more of. Memories with my lover are priceless. We walked up the road together back towards Rajiv Chowk, ignoring the tuk tuks that tried to get our attention. I once asked a couple in Cambodia who had just come from India how you could just ignore the poor and the beggars, and they said there, was just too many to help. But it wasn’t quite that. In Delhi the majority of people hassling you weren’t helpless people, disabled, dismembered and in despair, they were just cunts after your money. But they were polite enough and so if you turned a blind eye there would always be the person after you to hassle. McDonalds wasn’t open yet and so with slavering mouths we went down the stairs into the tube station. And wow, first you had to pass through the metal detectors, the searchers, and girls had their bags x-rayed. But then you felt safe. No terrorist action shit gonna go down here after that man. How the fuck did the whole of Delhi go through searches like this every morning on the way to work? London would fall apart at the seams if they tried to do something like that. Second was the cost. Eighteen fuckin’ rupees to get from one side of Delhi to the other. That’s fuckin’ outrageous, apart from my hitch hiking days, I’ve never travelled for such a bargain price anywhere in all of my life. No wonder thousands of tuk tuk guys lost their jobs when it opened. Then once you’re inside, the main stations are just like Westminster and the other central London Jubilee line ones. Big, open expanses of concrete with an exposed industrial steel look. Fabulous, something to really be proud of. The tubes themselves were spacious enough and even had women’s only carriages. Louise gave it a shot just to see what it was like while I nervously sat on the men’s carriage next to her trying to always keep her in my sight. I would never let anything bad happen to my lover. But she was cool. Later some ladies got on the shared carriages, and I thought, ‘Good on them,’ there’s no better way to beat fear and the prejudices than to stand up to them. We got off near where the Rang head office was and using Louise’s phone followed the roads around to a small business area with thin streets and shops on ground level. One floor up were offices for online travel agents and shit like that. We saw people brewing up dyes for the Holi festival to make the powder with and realised yeah, people could use whatever the fuck they found, it could be street sweepings dyed red or asbestos and saw dust turned yellow. We may lose some of the wildness doing some rich kids’ party but we were done with wildness for now. It’d been a most excellent six weeks on the road and we could do with a break from our budget holiday. Five star luxury, and spa treatments were the way forward. We found the office and went up to meet the Rang guys. They were a tight knit bunch who were really stoked we were there. ‘How did you find out about us? Was your journey ok? Would you like a chai?’ They were young studenty types, and all of them, men and women were equal in the office. They were our type of kids and we wanted to party with them. Rang Festival was a real find. From there we carried on our day, walking with ease back to the station and then down to meet Bob in South Delhi. Louise wanted to hit the shopping mall to see if she could find any hot bargains, while me and Bob went to another pub and watched New Zealand thrash some poor suckers in the cricket world cup. We drank beers and I gave him a label from one of the ketamine bottles. Could he get me anymore of this? He’d see. Bob opened up a bit more and told me about a time years ago he’d posted some charas to a friend in Sweden who was

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locked up in prison. It had gotten in fine, but the dude wrote a thank you letter back to Bob which the guards intercepted. The charas was found and Bob’s details were handed over to the Indian authorities. They thought they had a major trafficker on their hands, not just some guy who’d send an ounce to a friend in need. They didn’t have a name but they had a phone number and from that got an address. They raided his place and when there was only a bit of personal stash found planted more to make themselves look good. It took some baksheesh and some time inside but he had done the best he could and had the sentence reduced as much as possible. He was almost better off they had planted the fake evidence on him, because the shame face for the chief of police spending all that time and money for a no one dealer, may have meant he’d have been treated worse. We talked about the beggars, and he said, ‘Well all the opportunities in India are there. With the internet people can teach themselves to read and write, and do mathematics for free. Hell you can study some university courses for free online if you want, you just don’t get the certificate at the end. But you can get the business training and experience if you want it. ‘These people,’ he said, ‘must learn to help themselves, they choose to live in this way. Either because they don’t know any better or they are simply waiting for a hand out. It’s the same story. As the ol’ saying goes, “give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” ‘You can’t just go handing out food to nigh on a billion people, they have to get up off their ass and learn how to survive. It’s that simple. These people who are begging in general are choosing too, they’re dogs, if they get too much just kick them away.’ I was starting to act that way already. It was so hard in Cambodia, all those years ago, but now I was hardened to it. Or perhaps it wasn’t that, I could now see the difference between true poverty from those who are trying and fake poverty from those dressing up as it. It was subtle but you get an eye for it. It was such a fuckin’ shame. Back in the Bazar that night we cruised up to the top of the Secret restaurant. The ketamine and beer made me a bit vague and wobbly as usual but I was doing my best to keep up conversation with Louise, and tried to balance, ‘that feeling’ with the point where I would start forgetting what I was saying half way through a sentence. The team seemed to be waiting for us, and the manager himself met us at the lower restaurant and walked us up the to the roof top. When we got all the way up, the manager, looked at me, smiled, shook my hand, and said, ‘I know what you have done for the boys, from the tips, to the gift last night. So tonight, we have reserved the pagoda just for you two, I shall have the drinks brought in a moment. The boys were excited as fuck, and , ‘Hello sir’d me, and Hello madame’d my lover, then they made a show of fluffing the pillows up and dusting off the table before another one appeared with the usual Budweiser in a coffee cup for me, and bottle of vodka with a can of lemonade for my shnookums. The boys, giggled with each other as menus were wiped down and given to us. We ordered pizza for a snack then planned the next day. Pip and Steve were back in town and we organised to meet them at a different botanical gardens late morning tomorrow, they needed to sleep off the long as fuck bus journey back down from Manali. We ate pizza and momos, King and Queen of the Delhi Bazar as I drank mug after mug of Bud, and Louise quaffed her vodka.

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At some point all the tables were full and the boys were about to turn away a group of four guys, so we asked if they wanted to come and lounge around up with us at the round, white, wooden pagoda, with its low round table and mass of gritty pillows. The boys said the pagoda was ours for the night and that we did not have to share, but a few extra people to talk to after so much time with it just being us love birds is always a bit of a treat. They were from England and Aussie, and when they couldn’t find booze on the menu, one of them went, ‘What the fuck is it with this town? What type of place doesn’t sell alcohol anywhere?’ First nighters I see. I took a sip of my coffee cup. ‘This aint no cappuccino my friend,’ and let out a laugh as Louise poured herself another vodka and lemonade. ‘It aint on the menus guys. These fullas serve big cans of cold Bud for two hundred rupees,’ and went into the spiel about how it has to be kept hidden and the whole of Delhi, my Delhi, was like a real version of the wannabe speakeasies in London. Five more buds were brought to the table and the six of us talked shit about our journeys and what we’d been through to get here to this roof top. Me and Louise wanted one last feed at the place under the hotel, so we paid the bill, tipped the guys, and spent five minutes hugging them and shaking the manager’s hand while saying our goodbyes. We were movin’ on tomorrow and just like down in Colomb Cove we were gonna miss these guys and the relationship we had built up with them over the last week or so. We felt comfortable in the Bazar now, and took a night time walk through some of the darker and less populated pathways. I’d smashed a stupid fat line on the way out and my mind and body was buzzing like I was hooked up to a battery or something. We walked by a few posh looking hotels that may have looked nice in the brochure, but it was sure as fuck a dodgy walk to be making when you’re unsure of yourself on the first night in Delhi. There were a few pharmacies I thought I’d do some k shopping in, but what was the point. And hey, you’ve always gotta remember the golden rules. Stick with the supplier you have. You don’t know what risks you’re taking on when you go shopping for drugs in third world countries. At this point in time, I was paying over the odds, but it was a price I could afford, and the guys had been helpful and trustworthy. So why start taking on new risks, fuck it. We got back around on to the main Bazar road, and most shop owners just waved at us now and gave us a smile with a twist of the chin. We pulled in at the restaurant, and the owner was happy as always. He sat us down, brought over the menus, and then asked if I had tried poori. I didn’t really want to but he insisted, and even went first himself to show that it was safe to eat. We’d seen these little trolleys everywhere on the streets, always some dude with a green right hand and forearm would be serving up from them. The manager got out a little golf ball sized, puffy wheat thing, then he poked a hole in the top of it with his thumb, spooned a little mashed potato with turmeric in it, then ladled on a thin sweet and sour mango, tamarind sauce and then dipped the whole thing into a steel pot of cold watery green stuff, which turned out to be mint sauce. I thought fuck this I gotta eat it, but I’m gonna be poisoned from this one. But I never was. With a yell from above, a naan bread flew out the window and the chef caught it and stacked it on a plate as others came flying out the window into the waiting arms of the chef.

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The manager fed me three or four pooris. Then he said, ‘Hey want a beer?’ fuck yes I did, ‘We’ll bring one over for you soon. I like you and your wife. You come here and eat with the locals, and you are right to do so too. Everyone who works in the Bazar eats here because we have the best value for money food, and you can see the kitchen. Indian people always prefer to see the kitchen, and we like to show them. We are proud of our food. You two, also experiment and eat different food each night too.’ ‘Dude, your food is awesome,’ as another couple of naans landed in the hands of the chef beside us. ‘If you need anything else my friend. You just have to ask. If you get in trouble, you come to me, and we’ll sort it out for you. And we smiled, wiped our hands on the same ragged cloth, then shook. He asked us to ‘Please enjoy Delhi,’ and to ‘try not and fight her.’ We talked about the how great the tube was, and that me and Louise were still watching KumKum Bhagya. This gave him a full and warm laugh. Said we were heading down south tomorrow to treat ourselves and to celebrate Holi with the Rang party people. Finally he told us to take our seats, drink our beer, and he would send over the food that he thought was best for us to try as tourists becoming locals. Stuffed as turkeys me and Louise rolled out of the restaurant with more handshakes with waiters, managers and the most excellent of chefs. Then we were up the stairs once again and off for a grand night’s sleep. The next day we were up early, shit, showered and shaved, then packed our bags up. I did one last ketamine run to the pharmacy, bought all the k’ they had, two hundred ten mg diazepams and a hundred, one hundred mg Viagras. Then after a quick shnarff and a pipe of the Parvati valley’s finest we went down for the breakfast of champions and it’s awesome fluoro jam. We sent a text to Pip and Steve telling them to meet us at the botanical gardens around two in the afternoon and then checked out, leaving our bags behind the reception. Hand in hand we walked up through the Bazar waving out to our friends in the stalls and laughed as fresh tourists were pounced upon. It’d only been a couple of weeks, and some of that had been spent freezing our bollocks off up in the mountains, but we got Delhi now, and it was just a great city to be in. Up at Rajiv Chowk, McDonalds had opened and there was a queue out the door. You do sorta think about the scumbag terrorist attacks, and McDonalds in Delhi would be the place the cunts would attack innit. Being all American and shit. And especially once we realised in India, McDonalds was for the rich non-believers. We smashed a fillet ‘o fish each and got an egg burger with no meat, just ‘cause we could. I was hoping like in Germany you could get a curry sauce burger, but not for all the cows in India did they sell beef at Mcshits. It was rammed with kids on ipads and the latest Nike trainers chattering away as they sucked on luminous orange fanta and cokes. We took a walk around the park that makes up Rajiv Chowk and picked up a flyer for the Red Bus tourist adventure. It wasn’t far but out of laziness we took a tuk tuk to where the head office was. As can be expected of all drivers when they think ya’ fresh off the boat he took us to his mate’s tourist office. ‘We don’t wanna go here dude. We want the red Bus Office.’ ‘Yes mister this is the office.’ ‘No it’s not.’

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‘Yes sir it most certainly is.’ ‘No it’s not!’ ‘Please sir, follow me.’ Fuck it we went inside like suckers at the end of a lollipop. Sure as shit some fulla thought we were fresh as fuck, sat us in his office and offered the whole of India as a tour. ‘Do you sell tickets for the Red Bus tour?’ ‘Sir, you must see, “this place and that place” and it will be very good value for your money.’ ‘Do you sell tickets to the red bus tour? Look I have a map, it says the office is just up ‘round the corner. Is this that office?’ ‘But Si—’ ‘IS THIS THE RED BUS TOUR OFFICE?!’ ‘No sir that is just arou—’ ‘Let’s get the fuck outta here lover. See ya’ dude.’ And we fucked off out the door heading towards where we knew we had to go. The tuk tuk driver was waiting outside for his cash from the scam but he was shit outta luck this time. Prick. If he’d taken us straight to the office he might have been able to hassle them for cash for bringing us there but he was a cunt, so he could fuck off. Me and my lover walked to the end of the road, took a right, and side stepped the begging children with no shoes, scraggy hair and dirty rags clinging to them as clothes. Past them women were hunched down washing clothes and pots in filthy water next to a small shanty town made up of a few tarpaulins and used tyres. Across another road and we came across about thirty fathers of the scene huddled around sheets of tin foil as they smoked what I could only guess was smack up paper straws using matches to burn it with. I stood over a human shit and we made it to the Red Bus Tourist office. A quaint little lake of calm amongst an ocean of society’s lost. We bought some crisps and checked the seals on the water we bottles we bought from a street vendor then went in and got the tickets for the tour. The next bus was leaving in five minutes. There were a few different tours so we took the most central one, with the shortest journey. The bus was hot as fuck, they’d turned the air con off and me and Louise ate crisps while we waited for two others to join us for the ride. The guide was lovely and well trained at having people look at some random building on the other side of the street as we passed by the heroin shanty town. From then on it was just traffic and buildings of the rich as the guide, half hearted, tried to make the whole shit sound interesting. About twenty minutes in the other two got off at some museum of some sort and then another five before me and Louise called it quits when we passed by a tube station and took the tube to the Botanical Gardens stop. It was the usual shit, ticket machines that didn’t accept your money, then only eighteen rupees for the ride anywhere in Delhi. Eighteen fuckin’ pence to go anywhere in the city. Fan-fuckin-tastic. They put our shit through metal detectors and gave us a frisk, then feelin’ safe as houses we went down to the platform. Louise pushed her way onto the Ladies only carriage while I kept a worried eye on her from the chaos that was the men’s.

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It was a long ol’ ride so my lover came and joined me much to the staring of some of the older guys, and we rode that fucker all the way down to the Botanical Gardens’ stop. There were no gardens there, there was fuck all except traffic, dirt and the smell of too many cars in too big a city. We didn’t give in though, and showed a tuk tuk driver the map and pointed to where we hoped the gardens would be. Jumping in he drove us for about five minutes before finding a mate of his and, ‘durka, durka, stupid English’d’, him. Louise stopped him. ‘Stupid English, you do realise you said that in English don’t you?’ He laughed out of embarrassment and then we all joined him, he was right, we didn’t have a fuckin’ clue what we were doin’ but that hadn’t stopped us from at least trying. It had seemed an obvious fuckin’ destination. The stop was called Botanical fuckin’ Gardens for christ’s sake. Oh well. We rang Pip and Steve, they had been taken to the Mughal gardens. At least they were gonna see the flowers and shit, we were in the south end of some god- forsaken-hole and it was time to get back on the tube. On the way back to Rajiv Chowk we found on the map a palace of some sort we’d be goin’ past, so we jumped off and took a look around. It was a stunning place, more a religious complex than palace and all around it was the story of India carved into its walls. There was the usual stop and search and shoes off when entering the temples. They did a laser show at night with music but we couldn’t be fucked hangin’ around for that so we checked it, appreciated it and then went back to Rajiv Chowk and walked back to the Bazar. We took a motorway type road that led to the main train station, passed off duty tuk tuk drivers and then skipped around the stagnant stink of the puddles of piss they’d made over the last hundred years or so. Then it was back to the Bazar and up to the Hotel to meet Pip and Steve who’d sent a text sayin’ they’d meet us on the roof top. Back at the hotel a couple of policemen were playing pool and after the waiter brought us a round of lemon, ginger teas Steve showed us the chillum he’d bought and told us about their journey up to Manali. We’d felt a bit bad for them to be honest. Like us they’d gone all the way up into the mountains chasing a dream or an image in the mind. Spitty food man, had been right once again, the guy had words as solid as Buddha. They’d spent days gettin’ there, it’d been freezing cold and after a few days huddled around a fire place readin’ books, like us they’d come back south to Delhi. But proud as punch, Steve had sorted some of the infamous Manali cream out and wanted to show his appreciation to us by packin’ a fat chillum. I went to the toilet, passed by the pigs, and smashed a fat greedy bump of k off the back of my hand. Past the pigs again paranoia hit me with the amount of ketamine I had in my bag down stairs as well as the hash and shit. I was jittered and the drugs were gettin’ the best of me. I was becoming withdrawn to speaking to people who weren’t my lover girl, and was blunt as fuck. ‘We shouldn’t smoke that shit here. Anyway we gotta go, gimme some to take with me and see you guys later.’ It was a cold hard goodbye to people who’d gone out of their way to find me, catch up with me, and let me know the writing I do isn’t just disappearing into the fuckin’ nowhere of the internet. I felt bad as I said it, but I was a closed shell, and only my lover could, with patience, get a conversation out of me. I went for another bump to make myself feel better and then with hugs and promises we left these two intrepid travellers to their lives and their luck.

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We knew where to go, and our homes were on our back. Ever the pregnant snail – I had bags on both sides of me, laptop and drugs in the front, home on the back – we got a taxi at the end of the street, agreed a price and set off for our five star destination.

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Five star luxury It was now a familiar route headin’ south to where we’d met Bob. We passed the shopping mall and kept on going, until we reached an industrial type area which had a few tall banks and a random mall on the side of the motorway. The hotel was as flash as the pictures on the website and the people holding the door open for us looked at me and Louise a bit funny as we made our way to reception. Lookin’ like shitty back packers or not we’d paid the sixty quid a night for three nights online and they had to hold the doors for us and bring us juice and tea as we checked in. The place was built for conferences and was mostly empty except for the staff. There was a micro-brewery making beer onsite and we were blown away when the door man showed us how to roll our roof back in our room so we could check out the sky through the glass ceiling above. I tipped him well, we may look poor with all my tattoos and our unwashed clothes, but I was sure as fuck anything from it. Maybe they would consider us the extravagant rich? Louise took a nap and I broke out the ladle and chucked three bottles in with a book holding it in place above the candle. Ten minutes later I had another gram and a half of warm k, so sucked down a fat twisted line and checked to see what there was to do in town. Holi was tomorrow and Rang was being held next door. Turned out there was a speakeasy in the middle of the industrial estate, so after a shower and some satisfyin’ of my shnookums we took a cab to this booze house and ordered cocktails as fine as any of the world’s greatest cocktail bars and got our drunk on. A drink in this place was the same price as one in London and the crowd were hushed women and men enjoying the equality money and education can bring. We shared tapas type food and made our way through the menu as jazz music played from this basement bar and after tipping well the first round, got talkin’ to one of the bar tenders. He was like in awe of the ‘Nightjar’ a speakeasy in London that has earned a reputation as one of the world’s best. Me and my lover had spent a few hundred pounds there one night and told him it was nothing special. Most of the cocktails were undrinkable and Nightjar relied more on their presentation than their flavour. We told him his cocktails were easier to drink and he was a master at making them taste alcohol free. But you fuckin’ guess me wrong, those fuckers packed a wallop. A few fried prawns and the ever present fried paneer couldn’t hold back the strength of the booze and a hundred pounds later, yes a hundred fuckin’ pounds in India on a few drinks, and I was a mess. Well not yet but it was coming. We paid up, left a five hundred rupee tip and took the offered cab back to the hotel. The same staff were on and with a smiling shake of the head the door was held open for us common folk and we took the elevator up to our room. I’m a greedy cunt, always have been, and as soon as we were back I shnarffed a line of k fat enough to have me drooling and hangin’ from the porcelain phone talkin’ to the gods. My lover had seen me like this untold times, and knowing I would be fine and because I had done it to myself left me to struggle in my own surroundings; to sleep like a beggar on the toilet floor trying not pass out in their own spew.

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Rang! We woke up late, missed the free breakfast, and drank and sniffed instead. It woulda been nice to have saved the MDs but they were gone. Besides even if we had kept them they’d’ve been gone by now. Holi is s’pose to be a festival of colour, with toxic powdered dye thrown everywhere and from what the gringos had said a grope fest for the local boys. Outside we went to leave and a group baton wielding guards were gathered at the driveway barrier looking well pissed off. There was a shanty to the right between our hotel and the one hosting Rang. Some guy with no shirt or shoes marched past angry lookin’ and swinging a big fuckin’ steel pole back and forth ready for a fight. It wasn’t what we expected. ‘You cannot leave now sir, I must apologise but there has been an accident and the people are very angry.’ He gave a single twitch of his head. ‘What?’ I looked past the guys and two dented cars were in the middle of the road. One lady held a crying baby as an ever growing amount of dudes yelled at each other. What could you do? ‘Just wait please sir and we will tell you when it is safe.’ A few minutes passed and no one gave a fuck anymore, but it put an edge on the drugs that had filled my mind. The day didn’t have that innocent glow to it anymore. The guard let us through and walked with us down to the place next door for the party. He was proud of his job protecting us and to be honest we appreciated it. Although it was only mid-afternoon the outside of the party had already taken that nasty turn that all parties do after a certain time. You could feel the tension of spoilt drunk kids who can’t handle their booze without wanting to slap someone in the face; cut it with your flick knife. We had the tickets and queued up with the rest of them, my fags were confiscated as we’d come to expect and I worried about my next fag as I tossed my last one on the ground and tramped on it with my flip flops. The whoomp, whoomp, whoomp, whoomp of outdoor bass filled the stiff air around us as we entered the party. In front and on the left was the trance stage and as we walked towards it the guy who’d sold us the tickets flew up with a hug for me and a handshake for my shnookums. He’d just finished his set and welcomed us to the Rang party. He told us where to buy beer from then led us to the queue. The Rang organisers were good people and they’d gone all out for the party. In front of the main stage were multi coloured umbrellas strung up above the dance floor and a guy with a big beard rode around on a bicycle throwing powdered dye in the air; a tribute to Albert Hoffman I s’pose. Over by the bar we waited until it was our turn, and then after fuckin’ ages the cunt told us we had to get money vouchers from the dudes out the front. What the fuck? Oh well, it was Universo Paralello all over again. Louise waited and I cashed in some tickets. Dying for a fag back at the bar the fuckers had marlboro’s for sale, so I paid five pound for a pack of them, got two beers and then we went to join the other rich kids of Delhi who could afford to pay fifteen hundred rupees a ticket to come and enjoy the rave. It’d cost more than most Indian people get paid in a month, just to get in the front door of the party. Although it was chaotic outside, inside was calm bliss, the party hadn’t really got its teeth in yet and we joined others sitting around watching the day go by, protected from the reality of India in this millionaires’ paradise.

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We were enjoying being the only white tourists and it wasn’t long until some painted local girl plucked up the courage and ordered us to be coloured up too. She was gentle with the powder and me and my shnookums only ended up with some pink and yellow on our faces and in our hair. We laughed about how we’d had to ditch our cigarettes and then had to buy more at the counter and the girl was amazed that we could smoke in here. We shared a joint with her and a few of her mates, then took them to the bar to buy fags. A new guy had started on the stage and we set up position with our new friends on the left side of the stage if ya’ facin’ out. But shit would have a stone if wasn’t ol’ didgeridoo man from Goa. Hangin’ out with this guy was becoming a habit. We’d first seen him play in Goa down at Curlies after Jay had stomped the scene, then again at the Hill top festival. And now here he was once again playing to his heart’s content in front of these Indian kids. He had a track playin’ on its own. No mixin’ or anything, he just let the tunes run while he just added a little, boop, da, da boop on his bongo every now and then. It was the same dude, but he was skilled and played for the crowd. In Goa they wanted full on, whereas here, sunset, his job was to add funk to the day. It was not like his bongos took over the sound, he just added a bit here and there from the drum between his legs. The fulla had a grin like the Cheshire cat and he toyed with that crowd like they were mice. Ol’ bicycle fulla dumped a load of sacks of yellow and pink powder down beside us and the girl tore them open, looked at Louise and yelled, ‘Welcome to Holi!’ Before tipping a load out on top of us and everyone one around. Holi really began then as we all launched the non-toxic shit at each other. Now we were feeling the Holi festival, our mate was on stage, bongin’, away with the biggest grin, the crowd had gotten bigger in front of the stage and he plied his trance to them as they lapped it up. Although it was setting the sun still baked us and after another hour or so of me shnarffing and Louise drinking, she hit the wall. The girl next to us told us how rich she was and said she could get any drugs we wanted. We smoked a joint of the Parvati valley’s finest with the crew and asked for some MDs or something. She faded out of the conversation like all those that mouth off but don’t really have what they say. My lover was feeling ill, the sun, smog, coloured powder and India had gotten to her. We left. Outside the place still seemed on the edge of a fight so we scuttled back to ours and covered from head to toe in stinkin' sweat covered dye, had to convince the night guard we could actually afford to stay there. It was only ‘cause one of the team from the night before was on duty we were actually allowed into the hotel. Although we were told to go straight to our bedroom and stay there. Louise went for a shower, puked, slipped over in it and stayed wallowing in her spew as the shower cleaned her up. I on the other hand had the ladle brewing, cable TV on and ordered the meal we’d been waiting for ever since Rick Stein had told us about it. I got a mutton curry, with cheesy naan and a side of two cold king fisher’s. Louise made it to bed and my food arrived just as the film Harry and the Hendersons started. I curled up around a table covered in ketamine, tipped my guy well, and got on with the movie. Pleased as a pig in shit,

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Jaipur and the very poor The next day we were back on the Long Road. I’d done the entire three bottles the day before. I’d been smashing ketamine for over a week, and by now was a fully functioning ketamine sweating machine. It’d ceased having that spaced out uncontrollable effect that people get when they use k every now and then. Now I was havin’ it for breakfast, right through till I had my last bump before closing my eyes to sleep each night. A hard night on the drugs gets you thinking though and I wasn’t sure if I was really contributing to Louise’s experience in India or whether she was just humouring me and putting up with me as I blitzed myself and wandered around the country. So I packed it all up in the morning as we ate our final breakfast in Delhi with the roof pulled right back and the sun shining into our room. Once we were in the taxi to the train station to Jaipur, I threw the ladle out the window. It’d allowed me to sniff as much as I wanted any time I wanted to. But the cunt was gone now, stainless steel gold for some foraging homeless child I guess. Just as we got to the station the rain started to pour, it fuckin’ proper pelted it down and the gracious with nothing offered my lady their seat. An hour or so passed, Delhi cried as we left her behind. We wanted to come back this way to say good bye to Bob and then cross the border on a bus trip from here. But it ended up being too long a journey getting to Varanasi where we could take a train and a bus to the border crossing with Nepal. We couldn’t face the doubling back for days to end up at the same place, so fuck it. The boys from Leeds had told us we’d see some shit on the train ride out of Delhi, so I expected a bit more. But yes, although people we pissing and shitting all along the railroad track as we left Delhi behind, it was in general pretty clean. The shanty towns that we could see running along the sides of the tracks were no different to slums in any other country, Thailand, Brazil, India. The poor people all live at the same low standard of accommodation. Plain orange brick wall, asbestos sheeting roof and no running water. The only difference that we’ve seen between slums here and in America was in the States they have dome tents instead of bricks and asbestos. In India though, I’m pretty fuckin’ sure that if the government provided these people with clean, safe public toilet facilities and showers they wouldn’t have been taking a dump in the rain while trains filled with money stuffed pants shunted past their lives. ‘Cause I s’pose in India where the poor are kept that fuckin’ poor, even someone who earns, I dunno, a dollar a day is a rich guy to you. Especially if they’re not lucky enough to have a deformity or missing limb. Blind beggars make more money. Child blind beggars even more. It was night by the time we got to Jaipur, real late and everything was closed. A thousand guys tried to get us to take their tuk tuks but we walked past them all, until only one friendly asshole was hassling us and we used him to show us where the pre-paid taxi rank was. He ended up being our driver anyway but at least we felt like we hadn’t been ripped off and had had some form of control over what was going on. The rain moved on as we raced through the warm deserted streets and the damp smell of India embraced us as I packed my pipe and lit it up at a set of traffic lights that led up onto a motorway. With the Spring breeze in our faces and roaring in our ears, along with the whine of the tuk tuk we sped down the empty street, every now and then passing sacred horned

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cows sleeping on the road in the moonlight. At some point we took an off ramp and ended up underneath the road above, then at another set of lights he did a U-turn before taking a left and then a right and pulled up outside a hotel with dark tinted windows. It had polished grey and black specked marble fronting. Across from it a huge tent filled with hundreds of real smart dressed Indian people were laughing and having a good time. Like the food and the music their clothing was well thought out with a touch of over-the-top. Bhangra tunes were blaring and they looked to be helping themselves to a buffet as they either mingled or sat at long white clothed tables. We were both really fuckin’ tired; it’d been a long day on the train of reading, looking out the windows and playing cards. At his insistence we took the phone number of the tuk tuk driver with a promise to call him and accept his most best and most honest prices. Fuck it, why not, they’re all gonna be thieves so it might as well be one you like. He was a funny guy and drove real fast so having him as a driver would just add to our experience in Jaipur. And hey we gave him another hundred rupees tip then shook his hand after he’d carried Louise’s stuff to the door. It was well posh inside with a big open marble reception area. There was a dodgy nightclub bar lookin’ thing – which they sold booze in – through a doorway opposite the reception desk. The bar was in the stripper club style that they’d had in the Delhi Bazar, and like that this came without the luxury of strippers too. Just the seedy feeling that comes with a strip-club and its red crush velvet seats, loud music, UV lights and those stupid red and green dot lasers racing around in patterns along the walls and floor. Good grief, ‘Do you deliver to the rooms boss?’ ‘Yes sir’. We’d get the beer delivered to the room. Up in the room it was over two thousand rupees a night ‘cause we had booked using the ever increasingly shitty booking.com. We were realising the website was just a way hotel staff ripped off tourists who haven’t bothered to come and check their hotel prices on the wall or even the rooms first. Every day travelling together we were learning though, and as soon we got in we turned the shower on to check the water, made sure the TV worked and then checked the bed. And hey fuckin’ ho, the inside sheets were covered with pink and yellow dyes from Holi festival the night before. The pillow on Louise’s side even had a grease print on it and a few strands of black hair. Yurgh, what the fuck? Ah well, fuck ‘em, we didn’t even get close to pissed off, just ordered me a beer, my shnookums a gin & tonic and sat their going through our photos while they ran around changing the sheets and appeared to be apologetic. But really, they’d known, they’d all fuckin’ known they were giving us rich white cunts the shit un- cleaned room. And we thanked them once they’d finished and the manager had been up to apologise. Meh, we were alright, we were on holiday, travelling the roads and rails of India and we’d landed ourselves in the centre of a city in the middle of the night, that everyone said was beautiful and were gonna wake up tomorrow and go and look around. Besides the second round of drinks was already on its way, so nothing fuckin’ mattered. I had no idea where the fuck we were in the city but Louise went through the maps on her ipad and pointed out we were staying just outside the walls to the pink city, and planned our tourist shit for the next few days. ‘The Royal Albert Museum, oh that might be like the Royal Albert Hall, we should go see that. The Jawa Mahal ‘the Palace of Winds’, where the

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Mughal’s kept their harem of women away from everyone else. And the big main museum in the centre of the town. ‘Let’s do that too eh?’ she said and I nodded along with her and ordered us another round of drinks over the phone and then settled into her bright and expressive blue eyes for the night. The next morning I was pleased as a pig in shit with myself again as I put on my boots ready for the streets below and slung on a shirt with a couple of death angels on it and Just One Fix written across the front. It’s from the band of one of my mates in Aotearoa. Louise chucked on a loose shirt that matched her eyes, a pair of jeans and flip flops. At least she could wear sunglasses too but I already have to wear normal glasses now ‘cause of sitting in front of a computer at work back in the real world. We walked outside into the heat of a Rajasthani day not sure if holding hands was cool, so slightly apart from each other. The sky above us was blue and without a cloud in sight. Buildings rose up three or four storeys around us and the tent from the night before was already clean and being set up for today’s party. We’d picked up a printed map of the city at reception and Louise had circled where the hotel was, the Royal Albert Museum and the Hawa Mahal. The big city museum stood out in the centre of the map. Following the map to the left, we stood over shit with a yellow string of flowers sticking out of it and skipped by the lifting mass of blow flies. I was pulling Louise by the hand behind me as she let out a squeal and tried not to get her flip flops in the centre of the bug- ridden turd. We walked up the road talking about the shit and we came to the conclusion that we couldn’t tell whether it was human or animal made. It had that greasiness that human shit does, but there was so much of it you’d have to think it came from a cow. Up and outta the end of the street we were faced with a big dirty road with a big – what may have once been pink – dirty wall on the other side of it. Dirty shop fronts lined either side of the dirty road and everything was closed except for one guy selling lassis in clay cups to people for ten rupees. A group of tourists walked up and one of them was like telling the others this guy made the best lassis in town. So they ordered a round as we walked on. Louise led us with the map to the right for about half a mile past closed shops with the shutters down, over streaks of left over Holi dye, until we got to the main gates of the Pink City. It was easy to tell they were the main gates, apart from the fact they looked like the picture on the map, it was ‘cause it was fuckin’ chaos. Fifty cunts on motor bikes tried to squeeze through a gap built for one dude with his donkey and cart. We joined a group of fat women in the silk green saris with one end bunched up in a sweaty pug-like hand and their blubber hanging out the sides like an overstuffed shaved hamster’s guts. They had gold jewellery on their fingers and make up like last night’s whores. But they were better than the other castes of Indians of that they had no doubt. Through the darkness of the city gates, the smell of piss drying in the heat of the morning following us and then out the other side it into the Pink City. Jaipur looked an interesting place. The main road was busy and five or six cows spread out across the street eating from piles of garbage and I guess it hadn’t rained since Holi ‘cause the dye and strings of yellow flowers were dumped everywhere like Christmas trees are in the west. One day idolised and loved. The next, like an old aged, one toothed, disease ridden whore they’re tossed out on their arse, used and no longer wanted as we step over

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them while they lie in the gutter day after day rotting away, waiting for someone to clear up the trash. It’s our culture innit. Some dude must have seen the flashing fresh gringo signs we had hangin’ above our heads and came running over all gracious like with a waggle of his head and a, ‘Hello sir, please do not think that I am trying to sell you something. I do not want anything from you sir.’ Then why did you risk being hit by a car when you were trying to get to us from about a hundred metres away then dude? You’re just an honest man who’s willing and able to help are you? ‘What do you want?’ ‘Why would you say that sir? Why do you think that all I want is something from you.’ He looked like he was the one being hassled in the street when all he was doing was walking down the road with his missus. ‘Well why are you here talking to us? Wha’d’ya’ after?’ ‘I am not wanting anything from you sir. However my friend has a tuk tuk and I may help you with an honest driver and be your guide to the city sir. I am at your service sir.’ Well if you’re just after a few instructions from me dude, how about kindly fucking off so I can walk down the street with my lover girl? We were learning and hadn’t stopped walking, soon we’d graduate to completely ignoring them and I found myself day dreaming again about that time in Cambodia when I had first come across truly poor beggars and not just ones who dress like it. It had been a true pivotal point in my life to see people surviving in the conditions and surroundings they were in. You have a bit of it in the UK, but when I grew up in New Zealand, everyone had a house close to the beach and a job. We were such spoilt whinging cunts growing up too. Out of habit, I checked the blue flick knife in my right front pocket just above the knee, in case he tried to rob us in the street. But as we just kept on walking and acted like he wasn’t there he eventually pissed off. What else can ya’ do? Fuck him it was a sunny day. On the sly I loaded my pipe, took a puff and carried on following Louise while fingering the button on my flick knife. We followed the foot path under the shelter of buildings as the shop fronts opened up. Bicycles and pink plastic buggies were put out on display. Men sat at chairs outside their shops drinking chai and smoking as blue tuk tuks with red material roofs weaved between the cows and shoppers. On the opposite side of the road from us buildings were painted a browny/pink colour with a fresh coat of white paint around the window frames in a look that seemed a mixture of ancient Greek or Roman triangular stone things that usually sit on top of the columns, and the curved shapes and scrolls that you see on old German houses’ windows. One building was pink with white plaster on the upper levels. The plaster work had been decorated with hand painted pink flowers and green leaves and vines twisting together. Brown symmetrical patterns framed what looked like half pagodas sticking out and the glassless windows were finished with brown wooden shutters. Jaipur was way more tarted up than Delhi, problem was if you spent too much time looking upwards in wonder, you risked slipping over in the shit beneath your shoes. At a big junction we came out from under the buildings and way off in the distance at the top of the dry brown hills that encircled the city we could just make out the Amber Palace which was right on the edge of the map. That would be a mission for tomorrow. On our left was a sign that said Buddha temple so we climbed the steep stairs and came across a stunning little shrine that could easily have looked at home tucked into a corner of

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Angkor Wat. It had the high arched domes of Angkor Wat temple and fat oriental stone heads ran in a line up the tiled roof. Golden stacks of bowls were in between each head and what looked like stone monkeys were on every roof tile huddled with their knees pulled up to their chest. Below an elderly lady in a bright red sari bent over as she swept the stone floor with a homemade reed brush. We saw a tall thin tower where perhaps the Muslims called to prayer on the other side of the busy junction with its heavy laden trucks and motorcyclists dodging each other blowing their horns. Crossing back over we followed a sign up some stairs towards an art studio which had dozens of moulded and handmade statues that ranged from small painted men to women with pots balanced on their heads to a two foot tall donkey with carved reigns and saddle. There were the must have foot high elephants and even a couple of camels with all their riding equipment on their backs. We walked around the roof top above the empty courtyard below taking in the tower from the outside and trying to mark its location in our head-map ‘cause it wasn’t on our physical map. The path around the roof top was painted white with bits of black moss coming through where the paint was bubbling up and peeling off. A small bird landed in front of us and as I tried to take a picture the dark shadow of a hawk circling above crossed our path. The white tower was octagonal sided and the top was bell-like with a viewing platform just below it. Back down on the street the tower was gone from our vision ‘cause of the height of the buildings around us, but we went the way we had remembered and took a left off the main street and another at a junk yard surrounded by motorbikes and a shop with a sign that read, ‘Authorised Dealer’, it was funny to us, I don’t think the locals got the joke though. A bit lost we went down through a passageway and up some steps which opened up to the base of the tower. Some fulla was there at the bottom collecting a few rupees as admission for walking the stone ramp that spiralled all the way up the five or six storeys it was high. Fuckin’ thing would be a bit treacherous in the rain! As we got higher the air funnelled in the windows, these too had no glass so it was cool and refreshing being in the shade and off the street with a bit of wind. Up and up we went passing by a pigeon in her nest made of the green, yellow and red plastic tubing used to protect electrical cables. Up top the view of Jaipur was fuckin’ awesome. Although depending which way you faced the city was either white, pink and beautiful, or grey, black and shit. Not too far away we could see what looked like the Jawa Mahal, so I finished my pipe off, soaked in the view over a shared cigarette and then we took the tricky pathway back down to the street, stopping to take photos of the tower from her base. We passed more archways with elaborate and finely detailed carvings which ran through the white and yellow walls allowing air to flow in to the unseen courtyards beyond and everywhere colourful left over traces of Holi festival stained the perfection of it. The people living in India have some crazy gods in their lives. One poster had a blue guy with ten legs, ten arms and a necklace of decapitated heads. His tongue was stuck out and ten blue heads which wore crowns fanned out on either side of him. He held a bloody sword in one of his hands and the head of a dude in another. He was stepping over some other fulla who looked passed out. A cobra sat on the chest of guy on the ground. A yellow sun radiated over a red background. Fuckin’ now that’s a proper religion.

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Although the guide books call it the Jawa Mahal, we soon found ourselves outside the Hawa Mahal which in reality was a prison for the women the rich guy in charge two hundred years ago wanted to fuck. You couldn’t say that he loved them, because there were hundreds of them in the old days locked up in there never allowed to leave. They were his possessions not his loved ones. I s’pose the only positive is he didn’t live very long. Probably poisoned by some other rich dude and then had all his money stolen. Plaques that we read as we walked around stated how great he was by allowing the women to look down on the others outside. Dunno if I’d call him a ‘great’ for that. An old worn out looking sign out the front said in English, Hawa Mahal at Bari Chaupar was built in 1799AD by Maharaja Pratap Sigh (1778 – 1803 AD). The chief architect was Usta Lal Chand. This five storied building has two large courts. The names of the five storeys are: Sharad Mandir, the first one where the Autumn ce_ebrations took place. The second storey is known as Ratan Man_ir because of the dazzling glasswork on its walls. The third storey is _alled Vichitra Mandir, where the maharaja worshipped his Lord Deity Krishna and the fourth Prakesh Mandir with an open terrace on both sides. The fifth storey is known as Hawa Mandir after which the whole structure came to be known as Hawa Mahal. No mention of his wives or the slaves who built it then? We stopped for photos then entered through the gates which were ornate as fuck with the now familiar nine arched, scallop shell shaped archways and small domed pagoda things on top of them. Inside it opened out into a great big courtyard with like a raised pool thing in the middle. I ran up to get a picture of the pool just to be knocked back by the stench of the foot deep piss with its swirling yellow foam on top. It could only be a toilet used by the guards who protect the now shrine. It had all the spouts and shit for a fountain but obviously no fucker knew how to work it. Or it cost too much to have the water running. They just pissed in the pool instead. The stench of aged urine in the close to noon Rajasthani sun was too much so feeling kinda violated we fucked off into the building to get a nosey of how the other half keeps their women. Inside was cooler and the air fresher as we passed up stone staircases and through rooms lit red, yellow, blue and green by the sun shining through the coloured windows. One plaque on the wall said the breeze was created by cutting penetrations through the outer-stone work on an angle so the outside was higher than the inside. And then worked on the simple principal that cold air sinks and hot air rises. The cold air as it goes down, funnels through the holes in the rock and blows down into the building while the rising hot air is allowed to escape. Pretty fuckin’ cool eh and it worked too. There were loads of great photo opportunities as long as you didn’t mind bustling through all the Indian tourists and waiting for them to finish posing so you could do it too. The coloured glass windows weren’t quite right in shape either and may’ve been hand rolled or something, anyway they weren’t a perfect clear picture like we get. The little pagodas everywhere gave us a few quality snaps and shade from the sun. And always in the background on one side were the walls of the Amber Palace on the barren hills in the distance. It could still have done with a bit of a clean and paint job but the Hawa Mahal was a pretty cool tourist thing to look at if you like rocks in the sun. And hey if it wasn’t at least built by slaves it at least had housed them.

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From there we moved onto finding the museum which was just down another high street out the back and past some dude selling deep fried potato bhajis which was like boiled potatoes battered in curry spices and deep fried. It was a pretty fuckin’ epic snack and fresh as. This was the way to eat in India, vegetarian and freshly cooked. Case of munchies sorted for five fuckin’ rupees equals awesome. Rick Stein was right about eating the street food in India, as it was made with more pride than the tourist places. Sure as shit was right. The guy who ran the stall may not’ve had much but he could fry up an awesome meal and even took the effort to wrap it in a decent piece of clean paper. On the shaded side of this busy street, clothing was being sold and cars were being held up by a god-like cow as it took a shit in the middle of the road before looking me right in the eye as it then pissed everywhere all the while snuffling through a bag of trash someone must have lobbed out the window of their car or truck. Louise was really missing a pair of sturdy shoes; the confidence in the ability of her flip flops to keep her feet clean had disappeared some days ago. Taking another left we found ourselves on the parade road that led up to the museum. Tuk tuks, muslims, sikhs, hindus and all kinds of four legged gods crowded the road. Tent like stalls lined the sides and then we held our breaths as we passed under a huge golden archway painted with blue flowers and symmetrical patterns. All of it reeking of human waste. On the other side a dog that had been tied down next to some small shrine barked at a monkey that sifted through the food left for the gods. Other dogs lazed in the sun and cows just stood about chewing on nothing. Swastikas were painted everywhere and it was like we were passing through the servants’ quarters of the Third Reich. Carved into the archway was a giant half dome painted with those blue stars the jewish like so much, and a carved orange Ganesh poked out of one place up above everything else. We carried on towards another arch or gateway, not as high as the one before but the painting on it was amazing and the workmanship of the arch itself with stone gods, paintings and windows was epic. There were a couple of cannons in front of little grottos all filled with painted patterns of flowers and portraits of the rich guys who must have been in charge at some point and wanted to live on forever by being immortalised on the walls. ‘Cause it turns out no matter how much money you got, at this point in humanity, you aint gonna live forever. Then we found out it was like five pounds each to go and see the museum so we fucked off the idea and followed the crowd to somewhere else. That turned out to be the Jantar Mantar, (what else?) where we had to pay anyway but it was only like fifty rupees not five hundred. We had no idea what the fuck it was but with a name like Jantar Mantar it couldn’t be disappointing could it. Well turned out I let us down ‘cause some fulla was like, ‘I’ll be your guide mister.’ And I was all like, ‘Fuck off and don’t talk to my wife.’ (she’s not my wife, but they don’t really get the ‘girl’ friend thing yet) Inside it didn’t really make much sense. It all looked kinda new, and it wasn’t really anything. More like sculptures Salvador Dali would have made? Not much bang for our buck at fifty rupees a go. Nothing was really adding up to what it was we were lookin’ at. So lacking our own guide, we stood next to a tour group and listened to a fulla go on about how the place was a set of sun dials which had been made by some fuckin’ genius dude just over one hundred years ago. Say fuckin’ what? Depending on what month of the year it was different sundials were located in different places and were still accurate to within ten

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minutes a century after they’d been made. Fuckin’ outrageous. The guide looked at us a bit funny so we moved on. But it goes to show that if ya’ve gone to the effort to get out there amongst it in the raving hot sun, sometimes it’s worth shelling out a quid to some cunt hassling ya’ so he can take you round and tell you what ya’ lookin’ at. Otherwise it can all just seem like hot rocks stacked up for no reason in forty degree heat surrounded by beggars and their begging children. Well that turned out to be fuckin’ awesome, so charged up on science we went outside got an ice-block from some guy who kept them in to a tub of dirty but icy cold water. We removed the plastic packaging, sanitised our hands with the little bottle my snuggles kept in her bag, then sat by a couple of flea ridden dogs in the shade and chilled out for a moment. I thought again about my experiences in Cambodia and talked with Louise about the couple in Siam Reap that had just come out of India and how I never thought I would be able to get used to, and be able to turn a cold shoulder to, the poor and the dirty. Turned out it didn’t take as long as you might think. Or perhaps really my feelings towards it were evolving. The pain of it was numbed the more you waded through India and the arrogance of the wealthy who had so fucking much was sending me over the edge of anger. We had worked up a deserved beer so with the afternoon starting up and the day beginning to go back towards the late twenties we agreed to tick off the Royal Albert Museum then head back to the hotel and check out the promised pool on the roof with a couple of doobies and a lot of cold booze. Back out past the monkey, through that stinking fuckin’ archway, right at the cow with floppy ears, and then stopping to take a photo of the dude sleeping on the edge of the footpath. We came across what might be the grossest looking grainy turd we’d seen yet. It was like someone had taken a shit and mixed cous cous in with it or something, even the flies didn’t really seem that keen. Someone had stepped in it too, cause there were bits of it up the footpath with feathers stuck in ‘em. We went by the well-dressed family that was steadying one of their four children as she squatted in the gutter, like this is just what people did. Then we deliberately got lost amongst a spaghetti of alleyways as we made our way back towards the main gate. A good walk like that makes you hungry and thirsty so we stopped off at small café with a few people in it, and shared an egg biryani and drank a couple of cold lassis filled with ice. The food was awesome and it felt like we were getting the hang of this India thing. Nothing would surprise us now. As we walked out of the main gates that we’d come through earlier I saw the guy that’d hassled us acting as a tour guide to a couple of girls. He looked over and waved. I laughed, what could ya’ do. He was only trying to make a living, Jaipur is the type of twisty windy city that a guide would be good to getting you behind the closed doors or down those alleys you would’ve ignored. The Royal Albert Museum was straight ahead of us, down a big avenue lined with trees and surrounded by a fair sized park. There seemed to be lots of people chilling out in the shade from the day’s thirty something heat. A few hundred metres ahead of us we could just make out the white turrets of the Royal Albert’s multiple layered roof and the archways surrounding the ground floor. The sky behind it was blue with just a few candy floss clouds dotted around. Over on the right

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between the shrubs and what looked like gum trees, there were like little holes pocked through the ground everywhere. What the fuck? And then there he was, just perched on the edge of one these holes was a brown and grey rat with beady little eyes snacking away on something in his little hands. ‘Hey check that out love,’ I said to Louise, pointing out the rat. As we carried on walking it became clear that the people weren’t just sheltering in the shade, they were passed out and sleeping in it. Dozens of guys without shoes wearing like kilts were laying around everywhere on blankets or empty sacks with pictures of rice on them. Their feet had that ingrown dirt look of someone who doesn’t own footwear and their shirts looked thin, worn and were covered in dust. More rats started appearing and we could now see hundreds of holes and tunnels with like fifty or sixty of the vile little cunts sticking their head out, havin’ a nibble on a toe or something. Some would only appear for second and then disappear back underground. Others would brave a quick scamper above ground to another nearby tunnel. Some were running over the top of the sleeping Indian men or would appear out from under a blanket or shirt. At the same time well-dressed families walked past holding hands with their children and young twenty somethings in shirt and tie enjoyed the hot day and shared ice creams. Not all of the sleeping guys were badly dressed. One fulla in a quite a nice pair of pants and shirt with good leather shoes was dozing under one tree and surely he couldn’t be homeless, he was dressed better than me. Maybe he was just on a lunch break from work? But he didn’t even have a fuckin’ blanket so he was worse off than the guy without shoes sleeping next to him who at least had a yellow and red plastic mat under him. So would you sleep on the dirt in the middle of the day on your lunch hour break at work? I’ve done that loads. I spent every lunch time one summer sleeping in the park opposite us in Waterloo, but I at least had a sheet to lie on. A rat ran right over his leg then went down a hole. What are these guys on heroin or something? Are the rats just part of their accepted life while they sleep in the infested gardens of this building built with their nation’s money in honour of a foreign invading king? Further up a couple of dogs had dug themselves in to a bit of shade and two ladies in purple and yellow saris ate their lunch, while another three guys huddled around a blackened tea kettle waiting for it to boil. Black rats with big balls. We got closer to the Museum and a lady in a flowing brown and yellow sari with little flowers sewn into it was trying to sell balloons to some guy parked up in a car next to her. She was knocking on his window and going, ‘Oi, oi,’ while he just stared straight ahead. Tuk tuks were scattered around the front of the museum and millions of pigeons flew around shitting everywhere at once like they had been practising and had the group timing to perfection. A teenage boy with a red woolly jumper pushed his ailing grandmother in a wheel chair as four young women in smart and vibrant clothing carrying two young kids in light t- shirt and shorts passed by. The Royal Albert was right in front of us now and we dodged the traffic and flying rats as we made our way around to the entrance on the left hand side. It was an extremely fuckin’ extravagant, way over the top building with almost like a pyramid silhouette made of five floors that got smaller as it went up, finally finishing with a massive domed roof and like a golden sceptre thing on top of it. There was no glass or

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windows, just these massive archways that led into darkness and balconies all around it. Everywhere it was hand carved and each corner on each layer had one of these dome things that seem to be the theme through all the fancy shit in Jaipur, while everyone else lay in the shit and the shadows. We went up to buy a ticket to go in for a couple of hundred rupees and the guy sold us a bargain city-pass for about eight hundred rupees instead that would have let us in to everything. I’d well recommend sorting one of these multi-tickets out, cause although we’d already paid to see a couple of things it was still cheaper to buy the pass now ‘cause it covered the Amber fort and the Ganesh temple which we decided to check out tomorrow. Leaving the wastelands of the ignored masses behind we entered the over-the-top-ness of the Royal Albert, that shining fucking example of British Empire and the conquering of nations in the guise of advancement but in the reality of control, power and greed. It had been built over a hundred years ago to honour Albert. The man who built it was proud of the fact that it had cost a huge amount of money, and that the British government had given him the money for the project so he built it. Thing was though, once it had been built he hadn’t actually planned on what the fuckin’ building was to be used for. The rich invaders just wanted to show their dominance so they put it right outside the walls of the city of Jaipur. He just had so much money given to him because of his promises that he just had to do something with it. Never mind the fuckin’ starving people of Jaipur, never mind the education, toilets and other sanitary shit for the actual fuckin’ Indian people who’d built it and lived here. No the fuckin’ spoilt British cuhuuuunts, had stolen every-fuckin-thing they could from these people, built big fucking monuments to themselves and then sat about quaffing fuckin’ cognac and smoking fat cigars no doubt while some half-starved fuckin’ child sat there pulling on a rope connected to some form of fan so One may have some breeze whilst One suffers in this barbaric frontier. One simply cannot break out in a sweat. How common, perish the thought. You fuckin’ rich murdering colonial cunts. You fucked these countries up under the guise of bringing them into the modern times, when all you wanted was their gold and their cheap labour work force. While the dozens of homeless men slept outside among the plague of rats, inside the Royal Albert museum it was quite lovely. We enjoyed the massive variety of musical instruments, especially the string section. There were like violin things with like twenty strings and giant sitars. Carvings, statues and art work were strewn about the place and it was worth a look when you’ve got nothing to do and ya’ travellin’ about. I was well wound up though about the arrogance of the rich feeling they were showing leadership by spending their stolen money on expensive bricks rather than doing a single flying fuckin’ thing for millions living in abject poverty in India. I was back in Cambodia again having that conversation with that couple, and the thought still rang true. Even after all the shit I’d seen. If every person who ever came to India helped one person to learn to be able to help themselves the place would be much better off. The many would contribute to a successful nation of people. But now the success is in the hands of the few, and those few see the masses as too many to carry. So they leave them unmotivated, uneducated, untrusting, without sanitary facilities, shoes or education and imagine that they’re not there. I know Bob was like they have to want to improve their own lives. But what if you are bred without hope? What then? We just leave them there in their own waste with the rest of the parasitic vermin.

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Back outside the blue sky had taken on that steely grey of the afternoon. We decided to head back to the hotel for a feed, a beer for me and a gin for my lover girl. We took a different route back just to add something to the day. We turned left halfway up the main road instead of going all the way up. We talked about the roof top pool at the hotel and ice cold drinks we’d order. There was a park that’d been overtaken by a village of people living in five or six homemade patchwork tents made out of loads of sheets being sewn together. All up the footpath men slept in the open while children played football in the distance behind the tents. We were as invisible to them as they are to the billion other people of India. We passed them all by and made it back to the hotel. For us it was time for the pool, we were going in. Drinks had been ordered; we grabbed our towels, took the elevator up to the top and came out above the whole city. There was a big mesh net around the pool to keep the birds and shit out but some fucker had left the door open and a half drowned pigeon couldn’t find its way back out again. Another pigeon on top of the net shit in the pool just as we arrived so we decided to just sit there in the late afternoon sun and play bastard with the cards and Louise decided to roll a fat fuck-we-lucky-we-were-born-in-the-west sized joint for us. It was awesome, and if the pool had felt safe to swim in it would have been perfect. Well for us anyway, all the homeless, shoeless, educationless, toiletless, foodless, freshwaterless, people just surviving below us; well I never stopped to ask how their day was going. Maybe they were happy, blissful in the uncomplicated life of sleeping in a tent, smoking smack and sending their children out to beg? Imagine never having to get up and go to work again? What would you be willing to sacrifice for that? We had an early night, going to bed just after watching a huge silver sun move across the smog filled sky while having drinks brought up to us. I was drinking big bottles of cold Kingfisher which Louise moved onto as well. She painted her nails blue to match her top and her eyes as I tried catch the perfect moment of sunset on my camera. Although we called ourselves backpackers, we lived the lives of millionaires to the families existing beneath us. To them, we are the one percent. The wedding party was ramping up again and from above we could see the tent was made of white, yellow, green and pink striped cloth. On the roof top one floor below us on an open grass area gold cushioned chairs were being set up for another ceremony of some sort. Behind the marquee empty tennis courts were ready to be lit up with flood lamps. A proud Indian flag blew in the distant breeze as Mr Sun strained to kiss us goodbye through the cloud of brown and grey smog. It was beautiful in its own way. India was sure one hell of a place. The next morning the hotel people told us we had to move, they’d given our room to someone else. Fine, fuckers. It was overpriced anyway. Yeah, twenty quid a night maybe if the rooftop pool wasn’t filled with bird shit but yuck there was no fuckin’ way we were swimming in that. We laughed over memories of the disgraced Indian run Commonwealth games where all the swimmers shit themselves ‘cause the pool was so polluted. So fuck ‘em we only wanted to stay in Jaipur for one more night anyway. We called our mate to come pick us up and had him drop us off next to a string of smaller hotels right opposite the train station so we could catch a train the next morning to Agra and the Taj Mahal. Well although I was fightin’ it, I s’pose ya’ gotta visit the Taj when in ya’ in India. I’d originally planned to stick to my guns and avoid all the big cities and go through the national parks instead but our previous lack of knowledge on how to get around had led us on the tourist trail. Oh well we’d

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just have to ride with it and enjoy ourselves. We were off to Nepal in a week or so anyway, maybe there we could get away from it all. We’d at least booked a room at a guy called Dee’s place up in the mountains above a lake not far from Pokhara for a week. We could re-touch with Mother Earth once we were up in her heart in the Himalayas. Back in Jaipur the hotel was right on a busy road so we got a room a bit back from there, and went for a nosey around. Just outside on the left was a bottle store with vodka, gin and beer. I wanted to pour the three hundred or so mills of ketamine I had into a gin bottle so I could walk it through the airports back to England. Also cheap fair priced booze was getting harder to find, so we bought a decent half litre bottle of whiskey for me plus two of vodka and four bottles of gin for my lover girl. This way we would always be sorted. We dropped that off at the hotel and then carried on for a nosey about. We found a small chai grotto in the shade under a building. The proper chai wallah was boiling loose tea with water and milk, then he’d pour it through a sieve to strain it and mix the sugar through. With pride he waved us in and two ol’ boys made a fuss of moving for us so we could sit in the shade. It was a small dark little space, blackened by the soot of the vehicles that roared by only a few feet from us. Two old policemen smoking cigarettes in their smart khaki uniforms and massive moustaches moved their machine guns out the way so we could sit down too. A bottle of cold, bright orange Fanta was popped for us and straw put in the top. We were on holiday time now, and were in no rush to do anything except to enjoy this little gem of a place. Chai was offered with both hands to Louise, everybody insisted she was first, and the sparkle they all got in their eyes as she took a sip and approved with a nod and a smile was heart-warming for everybody as they waggled their heads in the shared excitement of the experience. Our cultures were sat shoulder to shoulder and even after all the English had done to the people of India we were still treated with awesome respect. I was served my chai at the same time as the policemen which I took as a compliment and then the four or five other guys that were crammed in with us got their little cup full too. Turned out we’d ordered food too, as a bowl each of the yellow soupy curry we were used to getting was placed in front of us and big crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle bhaji, pancake things were pulled out the fryer and crushed up by the chai wallah in to the curry sauce. It’d made a most fuckin’ epic breakfast and had been one of those treats you sometimes stumble across when ya’ on holiday from the forgery of life in the city and walk through the random darkened doorways or let the locals guide you to a secret location free from tourists in a third world country. ‘Cause although we were next to the train station aint no tourists stoppin’ for breakfast in a perfect example of India like this that often. We were ready to face the day full on and full of awesomeness for the Indian people and the jewel in the heart of their motherland, Jaipur. We called our mate again and he raced us out of town all the way up to the Amber fort. It was a bit of a windy road at the edge of the valley on ya’ way up towards the fort and we passed a couple of elephants painted pink and white with like a chalk dust dye looking stuff. The Amber fort itself was ok. The walk up the hill to get to it was a killer in the heat but we managed it, and looked around at this rich guy’s place, getting lost among the cramped corridors. It always seems odd to me when you see these rundown old palaces around the world in hot countries that the main area where the rich dude hung out with his mates eating too much food and drinking too much wine as they decided the fate of the unworthy beneath them, that there are no walls. They all just sat out in the open with a nice breeze with a few

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hundred slaves running everything while they did what the fuck they pleased until another rich fulla sent his slaves to kill all that guy’s slaves and steal all his money and then kill him and his entire family. I guess I’m used to the image of castles in England with big dark fuckin’ cold rooms. Anyway the Amber fort was what it was, the only interesting thing was a well that went down hundreds of feet and they had like a bucket pulley system to supply them with fresh water from an underground spring in the middle of the desert. From there, with the wind in our hair we drove back towards the city and the driver pulled over next to a big lake with a beautiful sandstone building looking like it was floating in the middle of it. The driver insisted it would make great photo and he was right. It was grand with the dry mountains circling all around and this small palace sat in the middle of the lake. I think it was in the James Bond film, Octopussy. It was one of the shots you’ve seen of India somewhere in the past and suddenly you realise it’s just the two of you and you’re there out in the exotic. We were soaking in a magical place that was only ever an imagined dream while we worked through our days and flicked through photos of India online dreaming of actually living life. The driver pulled out past another one of the painted elephants and we passed a couple of camels being led by a dude out in the middle of nowhere. Soon enough hotels and then the city came back to life and we drove right across Jaipur to the new Ganesh Temple. This place was awesome. The grounds were a green oasis in a dusty brown landscape. The temple was all white marble with dozens of engraved statues and works of art with small captions below giving the story of baby Ganesh and how he’d come about. Stained glass windows lit up the inside of the temple with images of multi-armed gods riding tigers and shit. And no temple in Mother India was complete without a few well-placed Swastikas above the door too. It was well cool. It was actually quite interesting to find out about ol’ baby Ganesh too. Turned out the god with an elephant’s head and four arms was the son of Shiva who’s the blue guy that plays the flute, rides the bull and has the tripod spear thing. His mum Parvati just so happens to be the protector and regenerator of our universe and all life. I wonder if Jesus or Allah or the Easter Bunny know this? What about the old South American gods where they cut poor peoples’ heads off because that’s actually what makes it rain. Why didn’t they just ask Shiva’s missus to sort it out for them? Oh hang on that’s right, maybe people are so scared of what happens after our atoms fall apart that you can make them do or act in any way if you’re good enough a story teller. Back at the hotel the cheap knock off gin we’d bought wouldn’t do back up watertight once it’d been opened. The tops just kept spinning around when you tried to do them up. The vodka and the whiskey bottles had those funny plastic pouring-top things fitted into the bottle that Jose Cuervo tequila sometimes has, so you couldn’t refill them either. I was going to have to come up with another plan for getting the ketamine back to London. We stayed in that night watching tv, eating an awesome mix of chana (chickpeas) and other veg food with fresh chapattis, drinking the gin we had opened and smoking charas and fags in the toilet of the room with the extract fan ‘cause that’s what the manager asked us to do.

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The next morning we crossed over to the station. With the sun coming up we bought our tickets to Agra and got the train as it pulled in right on time.

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Agra and the Taj Mahal There were a thousand people squished into every carriage, ten looked to be hanging on to every doorway about to fall off. I looked but it was dark and couldn’t see if there were any on the roof. We’d booked the air-conditioned seating up in rich guy’s class which made life easy for us during the four hours it took to get to Agra. People had slagged off the train system in India before we’d used it, but we were finding it to be awesome and on time. It was just difficult to do from outside the country. Like all travelling; the trick is to just go there and learn how things work – without the locals taking too much of ya’ cash on the way. Louise had found a place online which wasn’t on booking.com but had reviews saying the manager was great and it gave the best view of the Taj from its rooftop. The Taj was the only reason we were going to Agra and the boys from Leeds said it could be a proper nightmare in the town being hassled by tuk tuk drivers and guides, so we avoided the whole hassle by claiming the first desperate looking dude who stood out in the crowd of drivers crammed just outside the door of the train when we went to get off. You may as well just get the driver out the way ‘cause at the end of the day you’re gonna need one anyway aren’t ya’. It was a bit of a drive from the train station and there was a lot of traffic around hootin’ their horns and edging into the path of each other. But we got there in the end. Down the back of a few buildings and past the cows flapping their ears in the heat of the day, we paid off our guy, took his phone number and checked into the room at the guesthouse. We’d been told booze was not available in Agra, the same as it wasn’t s’pose to be available to buy freely in Delhi. That was why we’d stocked up before we left Jaipur. After we unloaded our lives off our backs and signed in at the reception, the fulla who ran the place took us up to the rooftop café and was quick as to offer cold beer in a teapot served in really nice china cups. It was awesome and a bit cheeky. Like anything that’s ever been banned, the people find a way and India sure as shit was selling booze under the counter. It just meant that the government wasn’t getting the tax from it anymore. So there it was eh. As we sat sipping beer with a pinkie extended and a loaded pipe burnin’, with books on the table surrounded by flyers, maps and guides; there off in the distance was the Taj Mahal in all her white marbled, over the top glory. The domed onion caps on each of the towers and the roof were set against the silver blue haze of city skyline. Between us and her a mixture of plain brick and plastered and painted buildings crowded into the space of the old town. Washing was hanging up on lines and the odd monkey scampered across the rooftops as silk flags that were yellow, orange, pink and green flapped in the light wind. I zoomed in with my camera and we could make out that the Taj wasn’t just a white building; we could see flowers and scroll work painted or scribed into it. Dozens of birds flew overhead I guess scavenging the food thrown away by tourists. There was no fucking about really then was there. We scoffed down some toast with that bright red jam and a couple of scrambled eggs then went for a walk to suss out how to get in. For some fuckin’ reason beyond me we missed the main entrance just up in front of the hotel and ended up ‘round the side where I managed to buy a pack of fags from a shop, a bottle of Fanta for us to share. And then we ended up at the side entrance telling a hundred tuk tuk drivers to fuck off, then being told by the guys at the gates that this was an exit only one. So

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as typical confused as fuck tourists we had to get the guy to draw on the map where we were and where we were supposed to be. The guard at the gate was pretty cool though and he said later we should go up through the gardens on his side of the Taj for, ‘the most excellent of photographs sir,’ with a smile and little waggle of his head. We missioned back past all the tuk tuk drivers who smelled fresh tourist carcass like vultures to a rotting zebra and we had to put up with saying ‘no’ a lot. Walking on regardless, stepping over gutters with shit in them, pools of foul slime and back into the busy space in front of the Taj Mahal. It’d been beautiful and quiet around the side of the place, now after only a few steps around the corner we were back amongst the shops, the hard-sellers and the tourists. Motorbikes missed us by millimetres as they rarrrrrped by. Although you’d expect one, there wasn’t really a big sign post stating Taj Mahal this way at the end of the dodgy looking street you had to walk down to reach the entrance. People were ‘Excuse me Mister, Sir and Auntie’-ing us down the street but not as bad as we had expected. At most some street kid got pissed off with me when I wouldn’t listen to him and use one of the safety boxes you can hire to put your smokes and lighter in which I then lost when I got to the front gates. What is it with fuckin’ not letting you take cigarettes with you anywhere in India? You could piss against the wall of a building but you can’t walk in it with a pack of fags and buy a beer. So it cost twenty rupees for a local Indian person to enter the grounds of the Taj Mahal but foreign tourists were charged seven fuckin’ hundred rupees! What the fuck, but then again I s’pose they don’t earn seven hundred pounds a week and hadn’t travelled half way around the fuckin’ world to look at the thing either. Ya’ know once you’ve come this far I guess you’d pay the money wouldn’t ya? Well I s’pose ya’ fuckin’ gotta! We got in through the gates minus the packet of fags and lighter I’d only just bought and shoulda given to the kid instead of the guard at the gates. Inside there was the typical giant Indian gateway, almost muslim looking its brown walls spanned the length of the courtyard we’d been herded into. Just the gateway with its domed entrance, which was wide enough to fit an elephant with riders through, was flash enough what with its gardens out front and massive entrance. Then walking with the crowd through that and coming out the other side face to face with the Taj Mahal was one of those tick the chalkboard of life moments. You know like ‘Go see the Taj Mahal,’ box fuckin’ ticked man. First impressions; it was alright I s’pose, the gardens were well kept but it wasn’t as big as I thought it would be. Some sign out the front said it was fifty five metres wide by fifty five metres high which isn’t that big really. And as the sign said it turned out to be just a big fancy place to keep the dead wife of a rich guy. Fair enough it was built three hundred and fifty years ago which makes it a pretty awesome bit of engineering but it had also cost the rich guy thirty two crore rupees. A crore is a million which would make the cost of building a fancy fucking tomb at nearly a billion U.S. dollars of today’s money. Well luckily there was no infrastructure like plumbing to install, housing or education requirements for the common people where this rich dude got all his money from. Luckily no one else could have benefitted from the wise use of the money and it was readily available for frittering away on a personal trophy for your dead favourite wife. Not his only wife, his second wife. His favourite who’d been betrothed to him at the young age of fourteen back in sixteen oh seven!

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All the birds that we’d seen earlier during breakfast with a view of the Taj Mahal had scattered and there was just an eagle circling above us as we took selfies among the masses pouring through the gates. We got the shots that everyone wants of us right in front of the pool that leads up to it and then followed everyone around to one side. I turned back to the entrance gateway and could see that it had been dressed in white marble too in places and this was painted with flowers and had Arabic like writing all down the sides. As we got closer to the Taj it was the same style of writing and flowers but once we got right up we could see the extra colours and everything had been carved into it or fitted with coloured stone. When you see pictures of the Taj it looks pure white but close up every surface of it is carved and inscribed with writing. Another eagle joined the first as I tried to get the ultimate panorama shot and failed in my attempt. We joined a massive queue of people that were walking into the Taj and put on the offered disposable paper shoe covers. Inside was busy as you’d expect and there was one western fulla just standing there with his eyes closed soaking up all the sound as the voices and the scuffling of the covered shoes echoed through us. Ya’ not s’posed to take photos inside. The fine details etched into the stone were well good for a tomb and must have cost shitloads. But at the end of the day it was still a tomb that no one lived in. The Taj has no fuckin’ use at all except for tourism. Except to stand as a shining example of the arrogance of the wealthy and how far and for how long they have been totally out of touch with those who build them up, revere and die for them. It doesn’t matter what they say, they don’t really care about the many and the Taj Mahal is proof of that. Back outside it was cool in the shade and we took a couple of extra snaps of the river floating behind it and the forgotten looking buildings on the far bank. Meh, box ticked we left. Of course the exit wasn’t the same as the way we’d come in so lucky I hadn’t paid some kid and left my fags and shit up there with him. We got a tuk tuk to the next stack of bricks in the sun that my lover wanted to see, the Agra Fort. Someone had told us they thought it was better than the Taj, and to a degree they were right. An absolutely massive fuckin’ palace we were able to get lost wandering around and came across the most excellent signage that stated that Shah Jahan the most estimable rich guy who had spent the fortune building the Taj Mahal for his dead favourite wife had started covering the Agra Fort in Marble too – ‘cause he just liked that type of thing – when one his sons, just went ‘fuck this shit’ and locked him up in a cell until he died. The Taj Mahal, The Agra Fort and the Red fort in Delhi were all connected and lived in by the rulers of that time hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Together they wallowed in their wealth while millions died of starvation and famine around them. That is until the English and a few others with bigger guns came, did a big, ‘look how big my penis is,’ exercise, stole it all and divided it up. So really the whole thing had been for nothing. We finished off the afternoon with a irie trip across town, through the busy traffic over the river to the mini Taj. Turned out it was the model they’d used when they made the big one. It was something to do I s’pose. Besides it was worth a few photos and was a lot quieter than the real Taj Mahal. You could photograph the inside too which was a bonus. And just as the sun set our driver raced us to a viewing point with buses and cars everywhere and we

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... followed the tourists down to the riverside so we could get that always epic shot of the Taj across the river at sunset. Our tourism for the day was done and staying away from the tv we went out for dinner at a Nepalese place and ate momos while sipping beer from a teacup. The next day we were up and about just before lunchtime. The tourist shit was out the way and we were free to walk around Agra, although there wasn’t too much more to do. So we got online and booked the night train for that evening to Varanasi then just moseyed about the place killin’ time. Tryin’ to bring a little adventure in to our day we followed the guard’s advice from the side gate and went looking for the gardens he talked about. It was a beautiful sunny day not too hot, but warm enough to make an icy cold orange Fanta go down like mother’s milk if ya’ happen to be in to that type of thing. If you’re looking at the front of the Taj we went down and around to the right. Where the exit gate is we took the road opposite that led up to it and walked on for about half a mile directly away from the gate. There were a few shops and dogs but the rest was just fenced off parklands on both sides of the road. It was beautiful and quiet, no one was hassling us in some way for our money, no cars or motorbikes were roaring past. It gave us a strong feeling of actually being one with Mother India now that we had the time to sense her. We came across the small gates to the gardens and spent a good few hours walking randomly through the massive grounds. It was all over grown and wild looking. Embarrassed couples were hiding in shade between or under the bushes. There were loads of different viewing points to see the Taj from a different angle too. She looked a lot more beautiful when she seemed to be coming out of the park and forest rather than a city filled with people and smog or across a dirty river surrounded by hundreds of other tourists. In fact this was better than actually going to the Taj Mahal and dealing with all the people. Little chipmunk looking dudes ran between the trees and the secret lovers hidden under the flower bushes when we got too close. And as some parts of the gardens were wild and overgrown other parts were sculpted and planned. It felt just the two of us lovers wandering through the trees and around the small lakes in the park. Well us and all the other lovers. Except we didn’t have to be ashamed of loving one another, unlike the local Indian kids we saw. It’s such a shame that the emotion of attraction and love is seen as evil or wrong but the emotions of greed and being better than others are actively encouraged. Even worldwide events like the Olympics are in general who’s the best rather than what we can we achieve as a collective whole. Maybe divisions like racism and in the case of India caste-ism are off shoots of the, ‘you have to be better than others’ attitude we’re taught at school? The day we spent in the park on the right hand side of the Taj Mahal was the calmest and most beautiful day we’d had since leaving Goa. And we’ll be back there someday if we’re ever out in Agra again. We had paid for the room until the next day so we had somewhere to keep all our stuff while we waited for the train to Varanasi. We spent the evening trying to photograph the Taj under the moonlight. Bob had told us that the Taj has four different colours depending on where you stand in relation to the sun and whether the moon was out at night. She was a dark blue this night as the moon was shining off her in the wrong direction but we were in bliss anyway, what with all the food the manager was bringing up along with the teapots filled with beer.

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The night train was delayed by hours and hours but the hotel manager stayed up with us, and spoke to our tuk tuk driver to make sure he understood what was happening and when to come and get us. There was nothing we could do but watch the last of the Futurama seasons on the laptop as we waited for the train crossing India to show up at our station. With the internet and full bellies it wasn’t too much of a mission and when we finally got a solid arrival time online, the hotel manager phoned the station to confirm everything, called the tuk tuk guy and had him race us across Agra for about half an hour it turned out. The temperature had dropped during the night and it was the first time we’d been cold since we’d left the mountains. We got to the station on time, found the right platform after a bit of figuring things out and then just followed the other tourists getting the late train at about half three in the morning. We had top bunks on the sleeper train opposite each other, but weren’t separated from other people on the train by compartments like in Vietnam or curtains like in Thailand. So we chucked on some warm clothes, dropped ten milligrams of diazepam each and slept right through the rest of the night, each with the easy peace of mind a flick knife in your hands can bring.

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The road to Varanasi I woke up the next day at some point. Louise was reading a book across from me and a policeman was sat below with a shotgun and a smile. Once we were up and about he disappeared amongst the crowd of young men crammed in with us in our second class sleeper carriage. People had said online and shit that you may as well go first class on the trains in India ‘cause it only cost say thirty quid for a first class ticket instead of say eighteen for second. Well there aint no fuckin’ first class sleeper trains that we could see or get on so all those cunts have never travelled in India before. Or if they did they were better at it than us. So second class was as good as it got, to be honest it was all we needed. We had a hard but clean mattress beneath us, a backpack for a pillow, bags full of diazepam and the Long Road clunking away below us as we headed off into the unknown exotic. The Long Road that’s what it’s about. Strangers in a strange land we passed by… Yes!!!! Marijuana was growing along the tracks like grass or a weed! Chalkboard of life, box ticked! The policeman had gone off and me and Louise were now sat opposite each other on the noisy ol’ train with its plastic walls and floor. The top bunks had been flipped and clipped there by some fulla just after we climbed down. So we were sat on the normal seats playing bastard on the cards – Louise winning as always – driving past bushes of two to three foot tall dope plants that stretched from ten to sometimes over a hundred metres at a time. Some guys were playing on a drum somewhere down in the distance and out the open window sounds of the train running over the tracks blended with the sight of passing villages, farms and what looked like brick factories. I reckon they were anyway ‘cause you’d just see red mud banks cut out of the ground and there’d be like these tall red kiln/chimney things that looked like what you’d use to bake pottery with. There would be nothing interesting out the window for a bit and then suddenly a spray of purple flowers surrounding huts and shacks that would lead up to mounds of plastic with cows picking through it and then eventually the next town of people would pass by. Muslims and Hindus and all the rest of them seemed to live together quite well which made me think why the fuck did the British when they left decide to draw a line through half the country and go, right those in love with Allah please move over to the left of the line and those who love the blue dude who had the elephant for a son, over on the right please? Except they didn’t say please did they. They fucked the country, took what they could and when Gandhi finally out smarted them, fucked shit up by putting a permanent divide between the people on their way out the door. It must’ve been somewhere around lunchtime and both of us were starving. Yeah had enough booze to get a football team drunk but straight cheap vodka from a dodgy off-licence in Jaipur is no solution to an empty gut. Well not without blood squirting out through one of ya’ holes at some point. It was about the time I actually won a hand and was beginning my epic winning streak of next few days when we pulled into some train station halfway through nowhere and loads of dudes jumped off and ran at this guy standing on the platform with a big box in his hands. It was either trouble or food and I was hoping for the second one. Everyone jumped back on the train just as I was getting the courage up to hop off and try and get some of what all the locals

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were having. Whatever it was it came wrapped in newspaper with patches of grease soaking through it. ‘Fuck it, should I go lover? Should I go?’ ‘Aaaaaaw, wha’d’ya’ reckon?’ ‘Yep, fuck it I’ll do it. ‘Oi!’ I yelled out the window to the guy and he smiled and waved back at us and gave a little waggle of his head as the train pulled out. ‘Fuck it I knew I should’ve just gone for it.’ ‘Well lesson learned sweetie, there’s always the next station.’ Turned out we didn’t have to wait at all ‘cause some dude just showed up at our compartment with another big box filled with spicy smellin’ goodness. There was no talking on language grounds, and we were like, ‘oh yes please go on, how much’ and all that. But the cost didn’t really matter I could’ve eaten my own asshole I was so hungry. He passed us one of the packages of steaming newspaper and we opened it to find big pyramid shaped samosas in all their glory. These weren’t little the triangle things you get from the local Indian takeaways either these were almost the size of a tennis ball. Fat triangular pyramid things wrapped up with an almost dry crusty dough rather than the oily crispy shit we get in the rest of the world. Inside was a mixture of potatoes, chickpeas onion and a couple of peanuts. They were spiced with just a touch of turmeric, cumin and probably garam masala. We had no idea what the cost was and careful not to get ripped off in our excitement I handed over twenty rupees to the guy to get negotiations started. He just smiled, put the money in his pocket and handed us two more! Oh fuckin’ yes twenty pence for four fuckin’ epic samosas, this day was starting off great! So we smashed those fuckers too just as the tea guy or chai wallah showed up and for another twenty rupees we got a couple of miniature sweet chais to wash it all down with. From there we spent the day just looking out the windows at the all the dope plants as we went by; sometimes at walking speed sometimes a bit faster. There were no smoking signs up and guys were jumping off every time the train slowed down or came to a stop. So as we joined in more with the rest of the people during the train journey our confidence in everything we were doing increased. Next thing ya’ know I was jumpin’ off the train puffin’ down half a fag, and with a supportive wave from the train guy blowing his whistle I’d jump back up on to the train with the help of a couple of the other tobacco smokers and we’d all help haul up the rest trying to get back on before they were left behind. Every time the chai wallah came by we ordered a couple of chais from him, and the same with the samosa guy too later in the afternoon when he came past with a fresh boxful and a smile. It was weird really that there were no other western tourists on the train. Well not from what we saw anyway. You always picture India being filled with backpackers and shit everywhere but they just seem to gather in certain places, the rest of the time you’re out there on the Long Road alone. Nothing we passed by was fancy or flash there were no big cities and even the farmland looked like it was for rice or something. Each town just turned into another as unmemorable and dirty as the next. That is the greatest shame with India, people just seem to throw their

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shit everywhere. Fuckin’ plastic jesus it’s just fuckin’ everywhere in every photo you take. Perhaps in the old days people just threw shit away and it decomposed but in the twenty five years that we’ve had plastic like this in our lives it has fuckin’ fucked everywhere hasn’t it. The oceans are fucked from it, the waterways are choked with it and the land is covered in it. So well done to the oil companies for that one, here’s a standing ovation with a sincere fuck you very much. Sometimes there’d be nice looking houses and then out the back on the railway side they’d have a pile of rubbish twenty feet wide and three feet high with a goat and two fuckin’ cows eating from it. Like some places had massive gates and white washed walls with a pile of garbage right beside the driveway into the property. Surely you would just fuckin’ clean it up? Or hey here’s a fuckin’ idea, while the rich go about paying the backbone of the country a pound a day for twelve hours of hard manual labour why not have them clean the place up a bit while you’re at it? And then it would just be miles of weed growing alongside the tracks and the chai wallah would show up with a fresh batch of tea and life would be all good again. Especially with me now finally winning at bastard after all these weeks of losing. People are always like don’t drink the water in India and be even more careful buying bottled to make sure they didn’t just refill empty bottles, all so much worries. In India you just gotta get amongst it man, and tea is boiled water so that should be your first stop in this country, find a decent chai wallah and half your problems in life can be solved. We got to Varanasi during the afternoon at some point. We’d already booked for the first night right on the Ganges. So we slung our lives onto our shoulders and started the battle it always takes to get to your guesthouse from the station.

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Varanasi and Mother Ganga It was traffic everywhere and the guy tried a few different ‘short cuts’ but we always just ended up back on the same choked and polluted streets. After a while the fulla just pulled up, said our hotel was, ‘Just up this alley mister,’ and pointed down some derelict footpath. Whatever dude, fuck it, it was gonna be faster to walk and the sun was disappearing behind the two or three storey high buildings that acted like walls to the labyrinth we were about to step into. Luck would have it though that there was some guy waiting for us as soon as the taxi drove off to give us directions to our hotel. He was an ol’ boy kinda stooped over and half a set of teeth, and before we had a chance to tell him to fuck off, he had the map in his hands and Louise’s pack on his back. ‘No, no,’ I tried to say as he laughed and pointed at where the hotel was circled on the map. ‘This your hotel sir?’ he said cackling over his shoulder as he just started walking off with Louise’s stuff. ‘Hey wait a… Fuck it,’ and we followed him before he disappeared down the closed in alley with its shop sellers on each side. The usual shit was on sale, strings of yellow flowers strung together by street children for pennies and sold for pounds so, whichever imaginary god they talked to in their head would be happy. Cause let’s face it, religion doesn’t seem to exist without child slavery to support it. There were incense sticks burning and statues of the most favourite gods, all for a cost. Varanasi seemed to sell every which way you needed to make it into heaven or to talk to those whose atoms have come apart to the point where they’ve lost conscious thought and returned to the universe. With the sun now hidden by the buildings in the dark and busy alleys we passed food stalls packed with locals chowing down on all the vegetarian offerings there are. The odd cow would block the path. One of them was eating a plastic bag filled with rubbish, bag and all. The alley itself was made of stone but had a layer of dirt and shit about half a centimetre deep and again I cringed at my poor shnookums in her pumps while I trudged about in my steel capped boots. The fulla we were following kept checking for us over his shoulder. ‘How much further?’ I half asked half demanded and he turned around with the pack slung over one shoulder. ‘About five minutes sir, not far if you know where you are going. The driver left you all the way back there sir and pointed behind him and then half way across the map. You were very far from your hotel.’ We kept on walking through the maze. The guy could’ve just been marching us in circles as far as we knew. And when he’d smile and wave at a local stall owner I starting to feel like I was back in Brazil and all the locals were just laughing at us as we got done over by an enterprising junkie. But we got there in the end. A final few steps down a slippery stone staircase and a sharp right turn down a ramp and our guide pulled up through the doors of a place that was a lot flasher inside than out. We gave him his hundred rupee tip for the hassle and also for saving us from walking around half the night and ending up somewhere else halfway through a fight with each other.

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Inside was ya’ nice polished wooden floors and the guys sorted out our room without too much hassle and a promise of cold beer. It was becoming pretty clear the whole no alcohol thing people talk about is just not true. Well it may be for the locals and those who don’t question the rules. I on the other hand found booze wherever I went. Besides the backpack was full of grog, including one lot that was mixed with ketamine that I’d finally been able to seal closed. The room was good enough but up the top and in a corner which is what we expected to be given after booking online. You always get the worst room in the house when you book online don’t ya’. We were hungry and thirsty and Mr Sun was about to set over Mother Ganga. I packed a nice bit of Bob’s charas and the pipe into my pocket and we went downstairs. Louise was careful to close the gate outside the door to the room which had a sign up warning that monkeys would steal all our shit if we didn’t lock up properly. There were about twenty tourists on the older side of life and the upper side of wealth sitting around eating veg-rice and shit drinking tea in the courtyard. Me and my lover girl went out to look at the river and spotted a table just around the corner from everyone else which had a full view of the sunset. Eh? No sun set! It just got darker and darker. The fulla brought my beer and we order vegetarian pasta and pizza and I smoked a pipe while we wallowed in our Indian experience. Mother Ganga was about fifty feet below us and looked about three hundred metres wide. The other side was made up of sand and had people scattered about on it. Hundreds of boats pootled backwards and forwards, up and down the river. The bigger ones were powered by motors as they ferried tourists around whilst the smaller ones were powered by the poor. Darkness dropped on us, it was warm in the night. Our food was good, our beer was drunk and all the boats started to come together as the path running along the edge of the river lit up and crowds started to gather just over to our right. Chanting started up, repetitive and obedient as always. Other musical instruments started. Musical you could say, or just noisy could be another opinion. Anyway it was no good just sitting up here lording it above them all, we needed to get involved, hadn’t come all this way to just be spectators. So we billed the booze and food to the room and followed the staircase down through the hotel beneath us and out onto the path that runs beside Mother Ganga. Even though it was night, people were washing in the filthy holy water taking whatever it was that it meant to them very fuckin’ seriously. Kids looked at us like they were gonna rob us and dogs growled when we passed. Guys were selling wishes and the solution to your problems for cold cash and humans lined up for their answers. People and gods were everywhere. There’s something you can feel about Varanasi although maybe you would expect a place considered to be holy by hundreds of millions of people to be a little cleaner. Bells were clanging away and through the dark we came across a huge group of people. We all had reasons for being there; like most western tourists, we were just there for the show and the spirituality. To be able to say we’d been to Varanasi. But to all the Indians that were there it was because it meant life, death and maybe the next life even too. We all gathered around a stage with neon umbrellas strung across the top of it and some dudes dressed in golden silk clothing waved around a fire thingy with a gold cobra on top. The footpath was

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rammed and so was the river as the wealthy had their driver get them the best view. Holy relics like Shiva’s trident and big shiny gold chests were draped in more of the flowers that are made by children on the side of busy roads as they all gathered around to watch these fullas offer their form of prayer to save Mother Ganga, the source of our life. Or that’s what the big lit up banner with the face of some humble servant of the gods said anyway. I wondered how much of this humble servant’s money that he collected went on providing sanitary solutions to India’s human waste problem. Standing there in Varanasi it didn’t look like much was coming back to the community. Or whether he just lived humbly in his palace while his servants fed him seedless green grapes and rubbed his feet with lavender oil? They were praying to save Mother Ganga but I think time has proven that prayers alone save no one. Its scientific actions implanted and followed through without profit being the driving force which have the best chance. Then again maybe I’m just an uneducated alcoholic, drug addict that should read more? Fuck it. The show was nice to look at, made us feel welcome in Varanasi but that’s all it felt like to us; something to give to the tourists. We turned our backs on the spectacle and walked away to try and see a bit more of the area. It was a bit dark to go and try to figure out the labyrinth off the river and the dodgy kids were hangin’ around in the shadows so we just walked down the Ganges for half an hour, turned around and walked back past a few drug dealers offering hashish at the bottom of the hotel stairs. We spent the rest of the night drinking beer and playing cards at our table above Mother Ganga then hit the hay. We were up the next morning before sunrise. Our alarm clock sounded like a group of young kids being brainwashed by some fucker who was making them repeat the same lines over and over again. They went on repeating the one line from the time they woke us and were still going when we walked out the door to catch the sunrise over the Ganges. My pipe was loaded and it was quiet in India. As ol’ Mr Sun started his shift for the day a few boats of tourists were already out paddling across to the other side where the sand bank, we could see now, had a few tents scattered around over on our far left. When I zoomed in it looked like someone was farming vegetation of some sort ‘cause there were squares of green mass laid out. One shitty old wooden boat with faded blue paintwork and tyres hanging off the side was loaded with fifteen or so oriental people, five or six of which looked like Buddhist monks. I zoomed in again and could see one of them in an orange robe was stood at the front with his hands clasped together in prayer while the others in the boat that had shaved heads were dressed in white and reminded me of Tripitaka from the Monkey Magic TV series, except with red capes instead of yellow. I puffed on my pipe and thought about the TV show and how they sent Monkey, Sandy and Pigsley with Tripitaka to Tibet and India for the sacred scriptures so maybe it was something along those lines. The other lot in the boat were dressed as normal civilians in jackets and camera and seemed to be washing their hands with buckets of water pulled from the Ganges which’d probably mean you need to wash them after too. Mr Sun settled into his day’s task growing fatter and brighter by the minute. A couple of eagles flew from out above us and started their slow lazy circling, rising up on the invisible columns of warm air.

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We ordered toast with bright red jam for breakfast and cups of honey, lemon, ginger tea then went down the steps to meet Mother Ganga and to check her out in the brilliant sunshine of the day. Varanasi was all people said but still I expected it to be treated with a bit more respect. Maybe it’s just my lack of understanding but every shrine painted on a wall had a trail and then puddle of red spit spread out below it. I guess that’s what it was anyway. The more holy shit seemed to be the more it looked like people had spat paan or betel nut juice on it. But saying that, it’s still an interesting walk down a river. On the far side was all sand with the scattered tent dwellings and on this side the river had great stone slab staircases that ran up to fort looking buildings with turrets and elaborate balconies that looked like palaces. Along the river different staircases from the streets, or that led out of a doorway and spread down to the water’s side, looked to have been made hundreds of years ago. But that was the thing, they didn’t look like they’d been cleaned since and there was big yellow banners with black writing painted on to the sides of the buildings facing the river with Dashashwamedh Ghat or and Manikarnika Ghat which I took to be names of different gates. There’s nothing wrong with that but they just didn’t seem to fit with the spiritual feel I think they’re after in Varanasi. As we walked on down with the river, on our left we passed by the area where they had done the dinging of the bells to save the river and all the boats that were filled the night before were parked up waiting for today’s tourists. A few guys tried to make us promise to take their boat if we ever wanted a ride which thinking back we probably should have done. But with the ever growing number of locals smelling fresh meat on us I was starting to get a bit short tempered with them. We came across some beautiful graffiti of Ganesh and his mum and dad Parvati and Shiva. Another we came across of Ganesh’s parents was painted on two big pink towers. A four armed Parvati was sat on a crocodile holding different religious symbols. On one hand an Om was tattooed just like we remembered Bruce had. We talked about Bruce and how he’s just one of those people you meet, who even if you’re with them for only a short time, you remember them fifty years later. He’s just one of those souls. As we walked past the big pink towers a twentyish looking guy shepherded his water buffalo past us, leading him down to the Mother Ganga for a morning splash in the water. Groups of young Indian people and families were sat in any shade they could find sharing breakfasts of chai and chapattis. A breakfast we were starting to enjoy too. The next big pink tower had a painting of a blue four armed Shiva dancing on the phallic symbol of a stone cock. Well it wasn’t exactly like a big knob but that’s what it represents. Years ago I went to Wat Phu (Mount Penis) in Laos which had a big stone knob on the top. The ancient Khmers had built a road from Angkor Wat straight to it. They’d even built a big building for Shiva to park his flying bull in. It was a beautiful mountain with the best mangoes in the world dropping from a tree at the top. You wouldn’t eat the food off the ground in Varanasi though. We passed a few of the dudes from last night who sat under their umbrellas accepting donations to make ya’ feel better about ya’self. They were busy taking the last few pennies from the poor in exchange for hope. You can’t eat hope though. You may be able to feed it to your families but it will never fill their bellies. Opposite the guys selling you your escape from despair were guys selling chilled bottled water and ice creams. Umbrellas were being opened all around us as street vendors set up for

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the day and goats tootled on past, pausing long enough for Louise to get a cheeky photo with one before their mate came along. There must have been some fuckin’ big money in Varanasi at some point but it looked like it’d fucked off long ago. All these awesome buildings, like the pink one with the domed roof we were passing now, were in serious need of a bit of TLC. The pink building had like a traffic cone shaped roof with dozens of little pink traffic cones running all the way round it. Just next to that we came across another mural this time of a young Ganesh hugging the phallic stone that his dad was dancing on in the earlier painting. He was hugging? I dunno maybe it was the weed over complicating my mind but did that not mean, the young boy, god or not, was hugging his dad’s cock? Maybe I was misinterpreting it? Made me laugh anyway. Young Ganesh had four arms in this picture too. In one hand he held a lamp with the image of his father in the flames and in another was a bell with his mum. The pink lotus I saw him flying around on in Universo Paralello was gripped in his trunk and his other two arms were wrapped around the stone dick. It was a sweet picture. Ganesh looked young and innocent. Maybe not quite yet the destroyer of obstacles. I take it you need to be a teenager before you wish to wipe out civilisation so that it can grow again more pure. It does make you think though. All of the ancient human societies were wiped out and all memory of them forgotten for hundreds and thousands of years. Maybe the image of Ganesh is in the image of an alien culture that came down and wiped out these cultures that used human sacrifice as a means of showing the poor and hungry that the guy whose fault it is they’re all starving is still in control. Maybe the grey aliens with the big eyes that we think of actually were grey aliens with big noses? Fuckin’ jesus that charas was strong. Pffffh. Men were starting to wash in the Ganges, an important thing for them I guess, but if you told a doctor in London you’d done that he’d have a fit and fill you up with all kinds of anti- parasitic drugs. Surely that water in the Ganges is dirtier than not washing? Maybe I’m just ignorant? Speaking of dirty we were looking out for the cremation pyres but couldn’t see any, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to anyway. To this day I’ve never seen a dead person and I hope I never do. But still it’s s’posed to be part of your Varanasi experience innit? That’s half the reason people go innit; to stare at the dead bodies as they burn on the side of the river? Run down or not there were some stunning buildings and the hand work that went into the details of the domed roofs and archwayed balconies was something you thought wouldn’t happen now. Money is too tight these days and it’s a lot harder to lord your wealth over the people without them cutting your head off and raping your daughters. Much of the building was similar to Angkor Wat and I wondered whether at some point they were all one people. If you take out the fact the British left Burma a fucked up warzone and consider the fact it’s one land mass. Ancient India and the Khmers shared the same gods so they must’ve had free trade between them. That is until it stopped raining in Cambodia and the wells dried up and the most modern civilisation at the time simply disappeared back into the jungle. By the time we got to Darbhanga Ghat I’d told my tenth kid to fuck off and that, no I didn’t want a guide. And yes I know my wife is very beautiful, but that is no business of yours. It reminded me of the lady we met in Colomb Cove who asked the Indian men that kept wanting to take pictures of her if she could have a photograph of their wives and how pissed off they’d become. It always fuckin’ amazes me how much other cultures look down on Westerners as stupid and ignorant. As sub-par to them while they criticize us from their

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dirty rug on the ground and their two pound a day job. It’s sounds ignorant of me to say it, but they do. Maybe if you have nothing, arrogance and pity for others is all some people have left? Darbhanga Ghat was pretty awesome looking with it’s what must have been five storey high walls and octagonal towers with glass windowed turrets. It had a fuckin’ great big staircase leading out of it and I was dreading having to take one of the these fuckers up but we’d have to at some point, even if it was just to get back up to the hotel. Beneath it was another mural of a laid back Ganesh chilling out above the mountains with his mum and dad on either side, beneath that was one of Shiva and Parvati sitting on their golden throne while servants fanned them with giant leaves. Well hey what’s the point of being parents to the destroyer of worlds if you can’t get a few perks out of the job eh? Next to that was the painting of some Sai-guru type fulla which stated he was the Trustee of the painting and please send your money here type of thing. It reminded me of the con-artist Sai Baba and all the people that give money to him. Even my mate’s mum in Aotearoa supported Sai Baba. All that that guy did to get millions of people giving him their money was a bit of basic hand eye magic tricks. He palmed a charcoal tablet which he crushed when blessing people and they would see this little cloud come over them and think the gods had answered their prayers through him. Do you accept cheque, visa or just cash oh mighty one? It’s surprising how humans with a little desperation will give up on common sense when faced with blind faith that everything is gonna be alright or that their relatives whose minds have ceased are happy in an imaginary afterworld. That’s one of our biggest crimes, humans simply do not appreciate the single opportunity we have at life and spend it making imaginary money for imaginary people, praying to imaginary gods. Instead of all working together for the oneness of all creatures on the planet we have called earth. We are divided, tricked into hating and the majority of us just don’t care about anything else except our own little universe. Like this shit with borders drawn by mass murdering inbred families and these votes to separate us from each other, making democracy sound like a choice. Cunts are fuckin’ dropping bombs on children and we have a vote to not do anything about it. To not even provide shelter to people who have walked a thousand miles just for the same opportunities we have. We tell them to fuck off, and get back on their boats. But we’ll all be dead soon and it will mean nothing. There is no fucking afterlife, there are no fucking gods and when that last thought happens in your mind, that’s it. It’s not even over, you do not exist anymore. So get busy fucking living because at the moment we’re just fucking wasting it. Humans are missing the fucking point and we need take a long fucking hard look in the mirror and say, ‘Together we are one. Every day spent in an office or under a heavy load purely so some fuck can play golf in his buggy while drinking cognac is a wasted minute of MY precious life. MY life is too important to waste. Once it’s over it’s gone, I never fucking existed. So live god dammit LIVE!!’ We were busy living on our trip, it’s easy to feel alive when you’re on the Long Road away from your hotel and lost among the locals in a famous city. On one side of us was Mother Ganga with men washing in her. In the distance others were digging up her sand banks just at the bottom of the steps, maybe they were selling it to pilgrims? There was a big picture of a dude with an afro, smoking a chillum on the wall to the right beside us. The goats showed up again and took an interest in Louise while a lazy grey cow stood around chewing away like it had a mouthful of gum.

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As we kept walking down, the Ganges still on our left, the high walls, which looked more like for defence or just to show off wealth, disappeared and instead un-plastered or faded paint brick housing came up on the right. The river bank of this most sacred of water-flows was covered in plastic bottles and bags and a well like shrine lined with the plain stone statues of Shiva’s cock sat in a water fountain. It stunk of stale piss as we passed. A guy slept on a small handmade bamboo or wooden platform in a shade made of cloth as a plain purple flag blew in the wind. It looked like some fulla had moved his four poster bed outside next to the river. He was proper passed out on it too while a goat took a sniff at one of his feet. More pictures were painted or stuck on the walls. Swastikas, one of Hanuman the monkey god, tearing his chest open and the family portrait of Shiva, Parvati and Ganesh stood inside where his heart would be. Varanasi was a blend of life, thoughts, images and smells. It also just happened to be filled with little bastards hassling you all the time. We got down to a red and white candy striped set of stairs and a yellow sign painted on a wall at the top read, ‘Kedar Ghat’. There were people going in and out of a doorway up the top, and along the top of the building a series of small shrines made out of stone with statues depicting different scenes from Hindu mythology I guess. The stone statues were really well done and one had a blue Shiva and human looking Parvati riding on Shiva’s bull. Next to that a fat adult Ganesh sat on a sheep while some fat dude brought him an offering of a bunch of yellow bananas. There were about ten of these little scenes lined up along the top of the ghat. Inside was dark, smoky, the air thick with the smell of incense. It was heaving with people parting with their cash for favours from imaginary gods. People were crushed in everywhere trying to buy all kinds of praying stuff from different stalls. Piles of yellow carnations threaded together as necklaces by the homeless, incense in all its forms, sticks, cones, even just piles of loose powder could be bought. There were some more shrines in the corners with people praying to bricks made to look nice and me and my lover became lost in the crowd, just following them until we circulated back out the door again. We kept on down the river and a young western couple glided by in a rowing boat powered by some tour guide. It was a good idea to do something like that. It’d be great to see the town from across the river. Further on, a tree grew out the side of a broken down wall and a guy passed us carrying a twenty kilo sack of rice on his head without using his hands. The river started to curl back on itself but the morning haze and smog left the town looking a bit of a blur from this distance, so we started looking for a way off the river and in to the labyrinth of streets and stalls. I wanted to get away from all the kids hassling us to let them be our guide or sort out anything I would most being wanting. Walking up the thirty or so steps to get off the Ghat we passed a last shrine. This was just for Shiva’s bull and had a monkey chewing away at something using it’s little hands like humans do. A thick furry dog slept lazy as in the sun beside it. Just up off the river every building we walked by seemed to have its own child beggar and I was getting a bit short tempered with them. I tried ignoring them, didn’t work, tried kicking dirt at them, which only antagonised them. It reminded me of that time in Brazil when Tiago told me about the tourist who told him to fuck off. It was Tiago’s country not his, and at the time I’d agreed with Tiago’s point of view. Now though I was the guy on the other side of the story, pissed off with locals hassling me for my money when all I wanted to do was just walk

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down the street with my lover and check out the sites. We weren’t even sure if we were s’posed to hold hands in public so we couldn’t even snuggle in the shade. We got lost amongst it all pretty much straight away. This time trying to keep the hidden river somewhere on our right so that we would always be heading towards home. The day was dry but still at times there were puddles of stinking ooze in the thin winding paths. Motorbikes would force their way past and you had to watch your leg on the exhaust pipe as they overtook us. It must have still been early in the day ‘cause most of the shops were closed with the shutters down but there were signs painted on every wall, directions to guesthouses, silk factories and Ayurvedic massages. Cows did whatever they wanted and Louise wished she’d brought sturdier shoes rather than the pink flip flops she was wearing. We saw a tourist café and pulled in for blue berry lassis and toast with jam. Fuck it why not? The tourists were a blend of clean cut lookin’ kids like us and hippies that look like they needed to go back to the real world and get a job. You could smoke inside but some guy just started on a plate of shashlik eggs – a dish of chopped tomatoes, courgettes, aubergine and onions cooked down with a couple of eggs dropped on the top of it. Kimmy used to make a giant version of it in a two foot wide clay dish for us every morning in Lebanon. I thought fuck it I’ll go out the front for a fag while I waited for my lassi and Louise went up and ordered a shashlik for us as well. I was standing there puffing away thinking about all the annoying kids and being the fresh meat tourists until the little bastards left us alone when the new tourists came to town. And then out of midst of India Bruce walked up and smiled a massive hello and we hugged. ‘Buddy I didn’t think I’d see ya’ here,’ he said, ‘what are the chances?’ ‘Yeah I know right, like I’ve never thought about leaving a restaurant or bar for a fag since we got to India but I just thought I’d give the fulla beside a chance to eat his eggs in peace and hey here ya’ fuckin’ are. Brilliant,’ I said. ‘Yeah even me, I just had the random thought to go for a walk up the road to find the Bhang lassi shop so I could spend the day on my guitar chilling right out in the zone man. You’ve gotta know where to go in Varanasi but when ya’ do it’s an amazing town.’ ‘What hey fuck, let’s go inside Louise’ll be over the moon to see ya’. I’ll buy a cuppa tea.’ I tossed the end of the fag away, not that interested in it now and we went inside to surprise my lover. Her eyes opened right up when Bruce walked in and she flew out her seat and they hugged. Bruce sat at the table with us, and when the lassis came ordered a tea and we, like all tourists, talked about where the best food and drinks in town come from, and what the locals are like. He tried the lassi, ‘Hmm, not bad but if you want to taste what a real lassi tastes like I’ll have to take you up to the bhang lassi shop. You can really taste the yoghurt and creaminess of it, not just a watery dairy drink blended with ice. Oh and there’s a place by my guesthouse that does the best sweets, real heavy like you can only eat one or two at a time cause they’re just packed with condensed milk and sugar. The guys are really famous and some Indian people come to Varanasi just for them.’ I had a moan about the local kids who had been grating on my nerves and good ol’ Bruce took the sting right outta me by sayin’, ‘Yeah but that’s India man, you know you gotta take it with an easy head. I had the same thing every day with a guy who runs a stall next to us. Every time I passed by, he would call out to me and try and make me promise to buy from

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... him, and I snapped at him for it. But the other day I saw something he was selling that I wanna buy and now I feel bad to ask, so I have to walk halfway down the road to get it. His tea came and our shashlik wasn’t far behind it. We got onto the bartering to buy everything, and Bruce was like yeah man the key is to be the one in power. If they’re trying to sell you something which you don’t really want, then you can set the price on what you’re willing to pay for it. But if they know that you want something they can set the price on what they think you’re willing to part with. That’s why I can’t go back to that guy’s stall, he’ll know I must want something he’s got if I start talking to him again. It’s all a bit silly really but it’s part of the package when you come here.’ Some girls walked in wearing big baggy Thai fishing pants which hung down by their knees, flip flops and hair all dreaded up. As we ate the shashlik we laughed about the different types of people that come to India and how some girls just buy right into it and land in the country with designer clothes and leave it wearing tie dye, listening to trance music and have a bamboo tattoo of Ganesh on their arm or back like an Indian tramp stamp. They Namaste everyone thank Shiva when you pass them the chillum. Bruce was like us, still in western clothing, the only part of Indian culture he expresses on the outside is the Om symbol he’s had tattooed on the palm of his right hand. ‘What are you guys planning for the day?’ Bruce asked. ‘Come have a lassi with me, this place does the real bhang lassis for the long term freaks that know where to go. I’ve got some practicing on my guitar to do after though.’ I wasn’t in the mood for chowing down a load of dope and then spacing out all day long. It’s a heavy stone eating it and it lasts for fuckin’ hours too. ‘Nah, we’re right for now,’ I answered. ‘We’ve gotta sort out getting to Nepal and try to do some more sightseeing. There’s a museum up by the University down the bottom of town and a few temples we wanna check off as doin’ so we’re not just drinking beer constantly without any point to it. At least if we mark off a couple of things it’s a bit more justified to crack open a beer for lunch. At least we can say we did something during the day before we started drinking innit. ‘Well, look,’ Bruce said, ‘There’s a German bakery on ya’ map here,’ pointing it out. ‘Why don’t we meet there at five o’clock and have dinner. They do an awesome roast chicken. It’s just like a Sunday roast back in the UK. It’s excellent man. Especially after only eating veg for so long too.’ ‘Fuck yeah.’ We parted with hugs and the looks people give each other when they all realise it can only be fate that causes things to happen. If we hadn’t taken that specific Ghat off the river out of all the ones we’d passed. If we weren’t hungry and thirsty at that specific time and decided to for once eat in a tourist place? If the dude next to me hadn’t ordered his food and happened to not have an ashtray on his table? If I’d thought, fuck ‘em and lit me fag and smoked inside? If my smoke finished faster or if I decided to go to the toilet first? If Bruce just hadn’t had the urge to walk up the road to the best bhang lassi shop in town? If all of these seemingly random incidents that you would put no stock in as being important hadn’t happened in such an exact way, then our paths wouldn’t have crossed. I’d still be pissed off with the locals and India just wouldn’t have been the same. As it was now,

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... when the next kid walked up and asked to be our guide, I just smiled, shook my head and we carried on, enjoying the bliss of the town waking and the stalls coming out. The alleys opened up and we found ourselves at the top of a set of stairs leading down to Mother Ganga. On our left was a parking area with tuk tuks and motorbikes racing around everywhere dropping people off or picking them up. At the top of the stair was a big stone tablet and carved into was; Dashashwamedh Ghat According to ancient mythology Lord Brahma performed Das (ten) Ashwamedh scarfices here and a bath here confers the benefits of ten Ashwamedh. Of all the Ghats along the bank of the Ganges this is the most popular Ghat and is the hub of pilgrims morning and evening. It is also known as Brahma Dwar (Door step of Brahma) and its old name is Rudrasarovar or goaraghat and is one of the five Panchteerthas of Kashi. After coming of the Ganges the Rudrasarovar disappeared and this site continued to continued to be regarded as the prominent place of pilgrimage in Kashi and come to be known as Prayag Rajghat. Among the Ghats of Varanasi there are three which are very prominent and of these three Dashashwamedh Ghat is of prime importance. The karmas done here not destroyed and remain forever (akshya) the present ghat was built in 1748 by Peshwar Balagji Bajimo Ganga Aarti is performed daily at morning and evening. Well that was pretty fuckin’ uninformative but it was worth a photo and a read and now we knew they’d be making all that noise again tonight. We still had all day so we decided to tourist it and went looking for a peddle powered tuk tuk to see if we could get out and away from the river for a bit. There was an ol’ boy sat on his peddle tuk tuk and we asked him to take us to the university to have a look at this museum and art gallery place. He dusted off the back, helped Louise up and then I jumped on with her. And off we went, well kinda. He must’ve been coming up to seventy odd years old. He stood all his weight on one foot and with a grunt got the bike moving forwards. It was great up the top of the peddle bike, tuk tuks are always so loud and they haven’t quite got the roofs at the right height so ya’ always duckin’ down to see what’s going on. We were up above the car height as he pulled out in to the middle of the busy road. At just more than walking speed, through the smog and the car horns we got to sit back, relax and enjoy the morning sunshine. It was a bit irie going around the roundabouts with a truck trying to overtake us but our man seemed to have right of way for everything and people would stop and let us through on every corner and turn. The ol’ university wasn’t as close as it looked on the map though and the poor fulla was at it for a good half hour cycling our fat asses across town. We got to the gates of the university. Away from the busy street we found ourselves on a romantic and quiet ride down smooth tree lined boulevards. He knew where he was going though and with the effort of him putting all his weight on each peddle he was able to get us there, over the judder bars to the closed and locked gate of the museum. Fuck… He yelled out at a gardener who smiled and gave us directions to a temple a little further up the road that we could visit and nosey about in. Well since we’d come all this way, we may as well.

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A blue sign up by the busy gates said we were at Banaras Hindu University at the Shree Vishwanath Mandir (temple) and item 3 of the notices stated smoking, spitting paan, consuming narcotics, defecating, urinating within the temple premises are strictly prohibited. And item 4 said; Writing on the temple walls is strictly prohibited. Well it was about time someone said it! From the outside the building seemed a mix of old grey pagoda surrounded by newer plastered and painted pink-ish work. There were more swastikas on the building than even Hitler would have thought tasteful. Inside was all carved scrolls of the Dharma’s? I think that’s what they’re called anyway. There was all kinds of motivational shit written on them like, ‘As a solid rock is not shaken by the wind, so the wise are not moved by blame or praise’ Dhammapada 6/6. Under that was, ‘There is no fire like lust, there is no grip like hatred, there is no net like delusion, there is no river like craving’, Dhammapada 18/17. Another said, ‘That almighty all-pervading god is Brahma, the creative form, Vishnu the protective form, and Shiva the destructive form. He is Indra, he is immortal, he is self- existent, self-effulgent. He is life form, he is fire and he is moon.’ So hang on a fuckin’ second here; Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva are all the same dude? What the fuck! No wonder I’ve been so fuckin’ confused. And why do all gods have to be men? In every religion their god is a man? Seems like a bit of a cock fest. No wonder catholic priests rape so many little boys. It can only be happening because it is the will of god. And if a little Buddhist boy gets raped, it must be his karma for doing something wrong in another life, so he deserved to be raped. Even Santa Claus is a dude. Do you picture the easter bunny as being female? All religion is shit and lies for the uneducated and poor, so that those at fault can blame the problems on someone else. Or give you a better option in another life that they’ve managed to convince humans is coming for them. Well penny dropping here mother fuckers there is no more life than the one we have right now. Once your last breath is taken, the universe shall cease to exist. Back out of the temple the guide said, ‘I take you to another temple,’ and off he went all his weight on the peddle of the bike to get it going. That seemed to be his way. Instead of forcing the peddles round with muscle he let gravity do the work for him, popping up on one foot and letting it circle down and around then he’d swap his weight on to the next one. On and on, through traffic, dirt, rubbish and cows we went. It must’ve taken us about half an hour to cross town over to the Himalaya temple. Now this was worth fuckin’ going to see. It was a big carved stone map of India and the Himalayas and there was a focal point where if you walked around to the bottom of India and went down a few steps to put you at sea level you could visualise the whole of India and the mountains at her top as if you were seeing our world on the clearest day that ever existed. It was simple and yet so beautiful. That’d made the whole journey worthwhile. Even the bike guy came in and took the time to look over the huge map which was about fifteen feet wide. As we looked at Goa, memories of the sun, beach and raves floated back. We wondered where was Om Beach that Bruce stayed on and planned to head there next time we came back. We looked over at Odisha which was our original route around India and up into Nepal where we were heading the next day or so. Our time in India was up. She had been beautiful, you have to experience India fully to even begin to understand her. You need to not just see her, but also to taste her, smell her, fall in love with her and at times when you ‘re fed up with it all, hate her. But always you respect

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India. She’s an amazing part of our Earth and if you take your eyes off the ball for even a moment she’ll gobble you up like one of those fat rich chicks with their mounds of belly fat seeping out through their saris.

Bruce – The man, the legend The bike guy struggled to get us to the ghat but we got there in the end. We paid him eight hundred rupees for the honour of lumping us around for the day, some people would say that’s too much. I’d say, you fuckin’ get on a bicycle and peddle my fat ass and my lover’s perfect ass around for four hours and see whether you think two quid an hour is too much? Some people just enjoy the feeling of having servants. The dude did ask for more money, but eight hundred rupees was a fair price, and it sure as shit should’ve been enough for him to take the rest of the day off. We called Bruce and met up at the German bakery for the roast chicken dinner. It came out on a sizzling hotplate. I’ll never be quite right with one of the those fuckin things again after that fish poisoned me in Goa. But Bruce was really excited to be sharing one of his favourite places with us so I ate it and smiled. It was fuckin’ tasty. Then Bruce took us up towards his place, stopping off on the way at his favourite dessert shop that sold really fudgy Indian sweets that were like a fifty fifty mix of sugar and flour and with a bit of food colouring. They’re heavy, dense and sweet as condensed milk. There was the odd fly buzzing around trapped under the glass in one corner or the next, but what’s a few bug eggs between friends? We carried on back to Bruce’s place. It was miles from where we were staying with all the rich packaged tourists. Bruce was staying down with the backpackers off the main tourist drag. If ya’ lookin’ at the Ganges he was way down on the right towards the bridge and we were up near the expensive ghat with its nightly prayers to save the world; for a small donation please sir. I told Bruce about my Ketamine situation, I had it in liquid but couldn’t find a decent alcohol bottle to store it in. My only choice seemed to be to cook it down again into powder package it and shove it up my ass to get it across the border in to Nepal and from there try not to take it all so that I could get some back to the guys in London. We’d been having a bit of a k’ drought and it had hit us hard. I’d no intention of selling any of it. The whole lot was for consumption by fiends. The fifty grams of charas I was gonna wrap and swallow just like Kimmy had taught me to do in Lebanon. Under fifty layers of cling-film that shit would never explode out. You could run it over with a fuckin’ car and the bullet as we called them wouldn’t split. We walked back to Bruce’s guest house and on the way he told us about a couple of the different characters there. There was the wobbly man who did some form Israeli martial arts called Krav Maga. There had been no rooms in the guesthouse when the wobbly man showed up so he’d slept on the floor in the corridor for three nights until one came up. A couple with their young daughter had another room and there was a range of others. All long term travellers to India. It was one of those guesthouses that had no sign and you had to take a turn

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... down a random ally then go through a pitch black damp corridor and try and squeeze through a rusted old steel gate just to get to it. You’d never stumble across a place like this. Only seasoned travellers took you there and introduced you. We went around the back to where Bruce was staying in a small brick bungalow big enough for a single bed a small set of drawers and his guitar. Bruce had personalised it with a few tie dye wall hangings and other items that had meaning to him. There was just a small green courtyard with a small bungalow, a tree and a panoramic view of the Ganges. There was no noise, no beggars just a little slice of paradise and calm in the wildness of the legend that is Varanasi. ‘Hey man,’ Bruce said as I cooked down a little k for us on the fold out spoon pocket knife thing I’d bought. ‘We’re talking about getting some of the local Varanasi University music teachers down tomorrow night to play for us. If everyone in the guest house chips in five hundred rupees each we should be able to get the full band and buy some whiskey, nuts and stuff for them. Would that be something you guys would be interested in?’ ‘Fuck yeah!’ By now I’m suspicious of anyone I meet who asks me for money. But Bruce is one of those people who completely unconsciously proves himself as an honest and trustworthy person time and time again. It’s just in the way that he acts, includes everyone and shares what he has. Besides he’s a nurse back in the UK so he does have a solid income back in the real world and nurses are honest hardworking people who dedicate their lives to others. Me and my lover looked at each other and both made the same decision. ‘Let’s check out the hotel tomorrow, bring our stuff here, cook the k down, watch the band and then get the night train to the border with Nepal. Bruce took us to meet the owner and we handed over the money to him for the University music teachers and lecturers to come play for us. I asked him if he could get me any beer. Of course he could. So I threw him another thousand rupees to get three beers for me and a little something for everyone else. Back out on the Ganges the day was growing darker so we made the plan with Bruce and then found our way home through the labyrinth back to where the rich and first time tourists stayed way up back by the ghat. The next morning my Snuggles and me checked out, paid our bills, slung on our lives and trudged out the door past the kids rocking back and forth repeating the same ol’ brain washing chant. It’d rained over night and the dirt on the paving stones in the alleys turned into a thick mix of shit and mud. We passed a cow chewing on a plastic bag and came across a corner where lots of Indians had been eating when we passed the night before. We stopped there for breakfast, eating chapattis with coriander eggs; or as Bruce had described them ‘Unmanifested Chickens’. Always the street food in India was superb and we sipped hot sweet chai to wash down breakfast. There was something going on in one of the temples and a queue of hundreds of people snaked around the windy streets ready to hand over their money to which ever deity it was that demanded it of them. We were starting to know our way around now and kept on towards Bruce’s. I stopped off at a stall and bought a sauce pan, at another some gee – which is clarified butter – for cooking. I also got a couple of cans of coke and a roll of toilet paper. This was gonna make

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... up my oven or lab to cook down the k. You need to try and avoid using aluminium pots as the k reacts with it and gets a metallic taste and it’s hard to get off the pan. Somehow we found our way to Bruce’s guesthouse stopping off to buy sleeper train tickets on the way. The train left at half ten that night. We had twelve hours of India left and then the overnight train. Just twelve hours. I would have to cook and wrap here then try and swallow and shove on the train. Out in our garden above the Ganges, Bruce and I shared a pipe of charas while we all drank the cokes and I cut one of the cans in half, stuffed it with toilet paper then filled it with gee. I lit the top and off she went burning like a little cooker. Well that’s exactly what it was. Something I’d learnt in the boy scouts. We got two broken old bricks that made up part of a seat and use them to sit the saucepan on, tipped in the gin soaked ketamine and waited for it to boil down into powder. It was a beautiful day, boats passed by on the river and Bruce put some music on while we talked about life and love. A family of monkeys came running across the roof tops opposite us and lined up above an open window. Bruce said the place was a bakery. ‘Now watch this,’ he said, they’ll send in the smaller ones to see if the coast is clear and do the dirty work.’ Sure enough with a clip around the ears by mum, three tiny little monkeys, one just barely out of being a baby, snuck down to the window and peered inside. The smallest went in first then the others. Out come a small bag of flour, so mum went down and started to eat handfuls of it as she kept looking over her shoulder. She caught us filming the crime, oohing and ahhing over it and stared at us with a look like fuck off and mind your own business. Then there was an almighty crash, a yell from a human and the family took off with what they had managed to steal. It was beautiful. Everything you would expect from monkeys but without the violent side to them, ‘cause let’s face it, monkeys can be assholes. The liquid would just not boil! I was only getting a thin stream of steam off it as ol’ Mr Sun carried on through his lunch break and into the afternoon. By now we were cooking down small spoons of k to sniff and smoking pipes of Bob’s good stuff. Bruce came back from a journey up the road somewhere and invited us to pizza with the rest of the guys at the guesthouse. It was walking distance down the river so I thought fuck it. Blew out the flame and we went for pizza and juices. The guys had a proper wood fired oven and were pumping out pizzas nonstop for delivery as well as for us. They seemed to know the guesthouse crew really well, and we were able to smoke and be at ease. There’s nothing like getting off the tourist trap trail with a few knowing travellers to get the best out of a town. The wobbly man sat next to me constantly rolling his shoulders and bouncing them back and forth. He reckoned it was to keep him aware and ready. We had a laugh about our rickshaw guy and how hard he’d worked to get us around the city and the look on his face when the museum had been closed. But hey, age or whatever he’d never given up and we paid him a very fair price. Some people thought we’d paid too much. If anything we should’ve paid him more. Ol’ Mr sun was lookin’ like checking out for the day and I was startin’ to think the k would never get done. Bruce reckoned the easiest bet would just be to put it in a water bottle and if it looked like dogs or police were at the border just drop it amongst all the other trash and come back at night to get it. That made sense to be honest, but I don’t like the idea of crossing borders with drugs in my hands. If it’s not inside you don’t fuckin’ do it. I’d come

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too far. The line had been drawn. Then common sense hit me, if the fire is not hot enough make more. So we went back to the guesthouse and while everyone else went inside to start helping clear up for the band, I sat outside by myself with a big bottle of icy cold beer the owner gave me and cut the other coke can in half and topped it up with gee and paper and set that alight too. Now I was starting to get somewhere. The liquid got a good head of steam on it but didn’t quite boil, bits of dust were blown into it by the warm wind and there was now a film over it swirling with the liquid k. Louise came down with another beer and we looked out into the darkness over the Ganges together thinking of all that India can be and all that it is. She offered to stay with me but I told her to go back to the band which we couldn’t hear from outside. I was sat in the dark with only the gee and a few candles flicking in the breeze when it started to really get cooking and at last the snap, crackle and pop of the k finally dry blasted into the silence of that Varanasi night. I took the spoon and scraped me a triumphant wad of it up and sniffed it still warm with both nostrils. Ahhh fresh k from the fire. Albeit a bit brown. I smashed some more up, blew out the flames and in triumph went through the dark passageway under the side of the house then up the stairs into the guesthouse where the musicians were whining out that Indian music of theirs. Bruce looked over at me as I came in and the Owner passed me another beer. ‘Ha, you like Indian beer yes?’ ‘I like all beer dude as long as it’s cold. But this one you bought me is most awesome.’ His eyes lit up and he sat me at a seat they’d save for me. The room was small with about fifteen white people in it dressed from hippy clothes to city clothes. The family were sat there with their young girl and the Owner kept trying to make the little girl dance but she was a bit shy and was getting fed up with it. I sat next to the door into the room on the left. The wobbly man was dancing in the middle in a Bollywood style. Louise was across from me talking to an older lady while the others cramped around on cushions and a couch passing huge sweet charas spliffs around to each other and the University Teachers. ‘Cause of this the room was dark and smoky with an incense smell to it. The band were on my left sat cross legged on a small stage. The tabla drummer (which is like a small bongo) was next to me. There was a tabla guy, a flute guy, a little string instrument guy and the singer. The music sounded made up and random, but then the song would finish, the singer would take a sip of whiskey out the bottle, the bongo guy would pass a spliff on to him and off they’d go again. Each time the singer would introduce the new song saying this one is a traditional wedding song, this one is for a certain holy day so they had to be planned and written musical chords. The flute guy changed instrument with each song and the bongo dude was like nothing I’d ever seen before. He didn’t just bang at his bongo like a chimpanzee, he used all the parts of his hands, knuckles, finger tips, palm and the side. To memorise every one of those moves and notes and to get them to a level where you can teach others took some full on intelligence and brain power. He kept retuning his bongo between songs, by tapping it in places and tightening wooden screws that pulled the skin across the top tighter where it needed it. I couldn’t tell the difference in the sounds but he sure as shit did, and that is the difference between the student and the master I guess. I was only there for about thirty minutes before the guys finished. The singer with a whiskey burned throat and the rest of the band struggling not to spill their drinks or drop their spliffs.

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The owner gave me a last beer and we went down to Bruce’s to pack our things and to say goodbye. I passed onto Bruce my pipe so it would be used and not just thrown in a bin. Then dished him out enough ketamine to keep him going for a day or two. He was planning a mission to Rishikesh – where the Beatles had gone – so he could meet his favourite hash maker, and asked to buy some of my charas off me before I went. I refused to take money but he wouldn’t take it for free either. He said he’d charged me back in Goa so it was only fair that I charged him now. So to keep the balance I gave him a fat lump for a couple of thousand rupees. We shared a last hug as the taxi driver the Owner had called for us showed up and helped Louise with her bags. The rain started again and we got inside the cab just as it began to pour. The road to the train station became flooded and traffic came to a standstill. But ‘cause the Owner had ordered us the cab, he didn’t just throw us out, he competed with trucks and tuk tuks and finally when the rain became torrential as fuck he got us to the station with five minutes to spare. Well apart from the three hours late the train turned out to be. We sat in the station with hundreds of other Indians, not one other tourist around and we couldn’t help but wonder where the fuck they all were? You always picture in your head tourists fuckin’ everywhere when it comes down to Varanasi, the Ganges and train travel through India. But apart from Pip and Steve on the toy train to Shimla we’d never seen another westerner in a train station in India. Not even in the amazing tube system they had in Delhi. Not one. We found a seat and I went for a walk up the station platform to have a smoke and by the time I got back Louise had some Indian guy sitting beside her asking who she was travelling with and trying to shake her hand. ‘Fuck me. What do you want? Why are you talking to my wife? Huh?!’ Where is your wife maybe I could go and talk to her huh?’ It was rude and I’d decided to not be such an ass. But sometimes you’ve got to be firm with these guys. He only wanted one thing from this western woman and it wasn’t to do her any favours, no matter how many he promised her. And it’s true, he sure as shit would not handle me walking up to his wife, asking her, her business and checking whether she was alone or with someone else. The train came after a few rounds of cards between me and my lover and then there was some confusion about where we were sleeping. People were crashing out where they could. A train conductor guy came, looked at our tickets woke two dudes up and made them move. Thing was though, Louise’s bed wasn’t next to mine. I was out in the corridor and she was in a cabin area with three sleeping guys. I didn’t like it I kept thinking about stories of rape, but she took the blue flick knife from her pocket, dropped diazepam and slept with her knife locked open.

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Breakin’ the law We took the train to Gorakhpur and got off there. It would’ve been great to put India behind us and get on with Nepal. It felt like a new holiday was waiting just for us. It’s too easy to find a place you enjoy. You get comfortable and then busy out of boredom. So you’re working on your holiday worrying about first world problems, when the whole point of coming here in the first place was to get away from that shit. So keep the shoes treading the Long Road. Stop, enjoy and move on. That’s what keeps it fresh for me. Louise’s mum and the fabulous Chrissy were meeting us up in Kathmandu in a week. It was first thing in the morning and there was a lot to do. I needed to wrap Bob’s charas and swallow it. And there was over forty grams of that. The k needed wrapping properly too. I was pretty sure the border crossing was just gonna be a passport stamped on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, but if you enjoy life you don’t fuck around with borders. For some reason drugs are illegal and you’ll be put in jail to save you from ruining your life. So that means I have to risk everything just to be able to make my own choices and live the way I wanna live. Drugs have not had a negative effect on my life. Well only when I was hanging out with boring straight people who didn’t take any; who tried to make me pretend to be someone I wasn’t. Their life was dull. They ticked away each day into complaining nothingness. They judged others. I’ve found myself a sweet group of hard working professional friends who like to get high; not just drunk and obnoxious. My friends don’t beat their partners or steal from their families, they all get up and go to work on Monday morning and sure as fuck are positive to society. They own houses, have businesses and choose a life style suitable to them. We are the successful middle class. Weekend drug users and proud of it! We’re the type who take our annual leave in Ibiza, Thailand or India. There’s millions of us. So fuck the system! It’s built by liars. They’re rich and greedy. They don’t follow the rules they’ve created for us and neither do I. Stay off heroin and tobacco and the rest should be all good. Just show some common sense and fuckin’ self-control. Do the obvious like listen to your friends when they tell you to pull yourself together; or not to drive. If you’ve got the right friends for you, you can cut loose in life. Just keep that support network around you. Make sure the drugs you take are to make a good time better and they’re not a symptom of your surrounding misery maggotting through your emotions. So, we came out of Gorakhpur station and just opposite they had a most awesome old black and green steam train up on a pedestal. It was well worth a photo. From there we crossed the road looking for the first hotel we could get. We even tried the shittiest one on the street but they were all fully booked although there was no one around. Fuck it, we jumped on a tuk tuk and allowed the guy to drive us a mile or so away until he took us to his mate’s hotel with it’s over priced rooms and staff that looked at us like we were hippies. Tired as shit we booked that for the night. With the whole day ahead of us, we had a hot shower and slept until lunchtime. Then we just went for a walk to have a nosey around. The streets were busy and it was a humid day. Louise had read that back down by the train station you could get a bus to the border for a few hundred rupees rather than the few thousand a taxi driver was gonna charge so we gave

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us ourselves a mission to fill the day. We passed a busy KFC and laughed that it was out here on the borderlands of northern India. I told the story to Louise about how me and Jacob ate it when we found it in Phnom Penh and Saigon. It was a posh place with cutlery and ceramic plates. We grinned that grin and agreed with a glint to have it later after we walked up a hunger. With the KFC on our left we went down a few more blocks of green paths and mud for a curb side and cars racing past on the right. One junction was busy as and we took the left there up to the buses and waiting crowds. We found the guy with the clipboard, hat and moustache and he told us they were every hour on the hour each morning. It was first in first served and they didn’t sell tickets in advance. Well with that all sorted it was KFC time. It was for poncey rich cunts. But it was air- conditioned with blue tinted windows. The young and wealthy ate here with ice filled cups of coca-cola. It was lush to eat familiar flavoured brown fried shit again. That night while watching the latest antics of the kidnapped heroine in KumKum Bhagya, I laid out the first series of the three cling film strips I needed to keep everything safe inside me. They were done in this way. About a foot and a half long you need two about a cigarette’s length wide and one about an inch. Then it’s just a simple process of rolling the charas into big ol’ fuckin’ pellets, then wrapping them width way first. Try to stop the clingfilm tying up on itself and keep it smooth. Tuck in an edge at some point near the beginning and keep a soft tension as you roll it up. Twist the open ends. Trim them, then melt and smooth them against the side to seal the ends as best as possible. You gotta be careful to not melt right through clingfilm or anything could fuckin’ happen to ya’. Then to be double sure you’ve covered up the end gaps, get the inch wide strip and roll it end over end, always tidying up the wings that stick out, folding them in and rolling end over end for the length of clingfilm. Melt and shape the sides again. Seal it and shape it as best you can with the palm of your hand moving or rolling it quickly. Try and not burn yourself. The final layer is just like the first. Just try and keep everything smooth and tidy. Melt it carefully, avoid air bubbles, twist the ends, cut and shape. On to the next one. With hash I can swallow five grams in each bullet. If you’ve got a lot you can’t really go any smaller. It just takes fuckin’ ages. Once they’re all ready and there’s no edge of clingfilm loose that stomach fluids or shit can get in, take a sip of water, hold it in your mouth, put the lump between ya’ teeth and swallow that step you’ve taken against the system. Force it down. Don’t choke, don’t gag. Be a big kid with ya’ big kid pants on and take it! Once it slides down past your breathy bit, it just disappears and you don’t feel a thing. Then it’s on to the next one. I’d made twelve bullets up of charas and the k was in three. The k I was just gonna shove up my ass. It’s lot less dangerous than swallowing but without the right lubricant a lot more hassle than swallowing. I’d added another three layers to the k wraps just to be sure. A ruptured wrap of hash is one thing, a ruptured wrap of k is a whole different one. That’s game over. We tidied it all and I went up the road to throw away all the evidence of what we’d been doing. Then we ordered room service and I got a decent pile of samosas while my lover was served burnt shit on a stick for a vegetarian kebab dish. We shared the samosas. Next morning came and there was no time like the present. Neither of the jobs were gonna be easy. Swallowing the hash my throat kicked back a few times. More than once the bullet I

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... was trying to swallow refused to go down first time around. It’s the taste of the plastic too, that shit don’t help. A lassi or something thick and full of flavour would probably be better than bottled water from the side of the road in India. Oh, and the last thing ya’ wanna do is choke on ‘em and puke, ‘cause ya’ just gonna have to start again aren’t ya’. That or give up and flush it all down the toilet feeling like a fool and a loser. But finding pharmacy grade ketamine and Bob’s charas – and I was confident they didn’t get better than what I had – was part the reason of coming to India, yeah totally part of the driving force. I was looking forward to treating myself in London with them over the coming months and sharing them with my fiends.

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The road to Pokhara In the morning we checked out, walked down past the KFC and left again at the bus stop chaos opposite the train station. It was busy, dry and we had plastic rubbish around our feet but it was a good start to the day. We felt positive with each other and we were leaving India behind after six awesome weeks and were heading off deeper into the Himalayas. Fuckin’ typical, we’d missed the bus by like ten minutes. It’d just filled up and left. The next one was in an hour. The place was crowded and a mess so we stepped over to the train station carpark to get a breath. As sure as fuck some fulla pulled up and offered to drive us for two thousand rupees. In my head I had it sort a’ close by but he reckoned it was three or so hours. Fuck it we’d been under spending on our budget again so we got in his car and headed off for the border. As soon as we got out the grey and brown town, the green grass edges of the roadsides turned into the green marijuana edges of the roadsides. They were lined in two to three foot weed plants. It was beautiful. It was a weed that you couldn’t stop from growing everywhere. And in Aotearoa you go to prison for that shit. Here in northern India it was grass growing everywhere. I wondered what it would be like to come back at the end of the growing season like September or some shit. The ganja plants would be six feet tall – well if it was anything like Lebanon. Oh imagine; you could rub your own charas on the side of the road when ya’ stopped and got off the bus for a piss break in the middle of nowhere. Anytime you could just roll a doobie of fresh cream and smoke it. The countryside was flat farmland with not much else to look at. The driver seemed in no rush so the drive was ok and relaxing. Not the fear induced hell ride of the mountains a few weeks earlier. He only stopped at one place so we could buy him something to eat. There were no other forced stops at friends’ shops and restaurants like Cambodia or Egypt. After a while we got to a place with a gravel road beneath us, a few bars to the sides and a load of buses in front. We were there, we’d made it safe and sound. So we grabbed our bags, gave him a tip and walked towards the border. The way was along a wooden footpath under a wooden shade. It was like a cowboy and western town. A sign on the right told us where to get our exit stamps; we were leaving India. We passed through the no man’s land Bruce had told me about where I could just throw the bottle of liquid if I got paranoid and pick it up that night when there were no guards. But fuck that shit. I’m not risking it all because I’m desperate and willing to take chances drug trafficking for profit. I was just taking a bit for gluttony, greed and pride. Whatever I could avoid sniffing during the next four weeks would be coming home with me to share with Roberto, Mish and Thierry. So when it comes to trafficking across borders and taking these types of life destroying risks. If it’s not in your body, your one day gonna get caught by a random stop and search you haven’t planned on. I had a good idea of what the border place would be like anyway. Same as all third world, out there outposts, and besides Bruce had given his story of it too. So I had a good mind’s image of what I was going to face at the border. I’d tried to think about all the surprises I

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India: See it, Smell it, Taste it, Love it, Hate it... could face and the lessons I’d learnt in the past. Like the Cambodia/Vietnam border that time. I’d gone through all my clothing and bags to make sure nothing loose could pop out at the wrong time. So we crossed over no man’s land and up to a dude in a pill box in an army lookin’ uniform. He looked more oriental than the dude back over on the India side. Our world’s funny like that innit? It was only a hundred metres in the middle of nowhere and suddenly the language and the look of the people had changed. Just like that. We waited around somewhere for a bit, got the stamp and then went up past a group of travel agents and shit on our right. One had a beer sign, looked like a pub and had written on the window, bus to Kathmandu, Pokhara and Chitwan national park. Fuck it. Perfect. We were there. The border had been nothing and now we had beer and a dirty pub with a fan on, wooden benches and tables to drink from. Fuckin’ good start. They offered three options of where to go. It was a shame we were so organised ‘cause good ol’ Bruce had put an idea into our heads. And it was this. ‘Don’t look on a map or decide on anything until you get to the bus station in Nepal. Then just pick a random place and go.’ There was too much logic to our journey but you gotta roll with that sometimes. It can’t always be about you. There are other important people on our earth too. We were picking up two of the best in a week’s time in Kathmandu. It had all been planned out, we were looking forward to their company. To fill the week we’d booked a homestay near Pokhara with a family up above Leknath (a big lake). It was called Dee’s place. The beer loosened my guts. I had the three wraps of ketamine up there and the forty odd grams of charas were well into my intestines by now. I couldn’t feel any of it, but I followed the advice and made sure I sat up straight so I didn’t compress my intestines and the hash could move freely. I could feel the odd bullet take a turn on my left side every now and then, but apart from that and a few burps, everything was cool. We’d done it. We’d crossed the border. So I let go of the ass cramps and went for a shit. We were across now anyway and about to get on a bus. So I went to the little cubicle out the back with the hole in the concrete floor and the bucket full of water with the plastic sauce pan. One good vegetarian diet shit into that saucepan later and I plucked out the three wraps of k. I gave it all a wash, thinking I’m probably the dirtiest cunt that’s been here and the locals would never shit in the ass washing bucket. All the germs you worry about in a toilet like this on the side of a random road, and I’m probably the one that’s spreading them. I rinsed the wraps in the bucket, washed my hands and went out to my shnookums. I put them in the right hand pocket of my small backpack ready for the bus. After a bit, the dude at the bar called out and said to get in the back of jeep. There was a shiny new black one with its ass down right outside the door. I was like, ‘This is the bus?’ and he was like, ‘Yes bus.’ So we gave them our big backpacks which some dude strapped to the roof and they put us on the back seat behind the driver. The bit behind us had extra seats added to it. Ours were actual meant to be there and were padded but behind was just welded on bits with a hard canopy over the top. Sweet, what a good day, we’d somehow scored a jeep to Pokhara. A bus was s’pose to be the safest way. A jeep ride though, this would be cool. It was a new one too.

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As we pulled out from the beer sellin’ travel place, we drove up an actual wide smooth asphalt motor way/road thing. Apart from the odd lonely building there was only us on it. The jeep stopped for the first time after a minute or so and the first lot of locals got on. Then after a hundred metres or so they picked up the next lot of middle aged lookin’ oriental-ish lookin’ people. They all crammed in, two on either side and another eight of so in the back. Fuck it. It was cramped but at least we were with locals and had the ride to Pokhara sorted. We were all excited. India was done. We’d survived it, and in fact had had the most awesome time. People like the boys from Leeds and just about every other person we’d ever met had told us Delhi was shit and cunts hassled you at the Taj, and on the trains. But me and my lover had gotten into it. We’d really enjoyed the cities of India. Let alone Goa and going on tour with Jay and sharing some road time with Pip and Steve who the fates had brought us together because Pip had read my books and tracked me down online at the same time we all had been travelling Asia. They’d changed our lives in their own small way. We’re still great online friends now. They’ve got a kid, we stay in touch. There was meeting facebook friend Bob and his strap of charas and having the opportunity to watch the cricket world cup with a passionate Indian person. And then there’s meeting Bruce. The three of us had danced on beaches day and night together and shared life, food, music, shelter, beer and Varanasi, safe in the arms of Mother Ganga. These accidents and moments of life were all experiences that only travel can bring. Here in Nepal, sat in our jeep we were surrounded by locals, excited about going someplace somewhere that was sure to be different than anything we’d ever experienced in our lives. The rush of travel was pouring through us. That drug called life all travellers on the Long Road feel.

And there in front of us a group of soldiers with machine guns had a barrier across the road. Ghurkhas! They walked in front of the jeep waving at us to stop. A few stayed straight in front, a couple went to the side. Some more went around the back, opened the hatch and started taking peoples’ bags off of them. A lady Ghurkha climbed in and took a laptop out of a bag and started pulling it apart, taking the battery out and talkin’ hard to the lady she’d takin’ it from. I heard their boots on the roof and looked up. The Ghurkhas were all around us and were taking everyone’s’ bags out their hands and emptying them on to the road. On each side machine guns were pointed at us. The driver looked at me and went, ‘Border check.’ with a calm but nervous smile. Wha’da’ya’ mean border check?! We’d already passed the border. I’ve got three wraps of cling film with a brown powder substance which could be mistaken for heroin until proved otherwise sat in the bag on my knees! And could you bribe and pay off Ghurkhas who have spent their whole lives training to become one? Like the Thai customs, are the Ghurkhas the only people; soldiers you couldn’t offer money to? I had about five thousand pounds, would that be enough? They were pulling things off the roof, the k was in the right hand side pocket. I looked straight ahead, opened the zip and pulled the bullets out. The Nepalese guy next to me saw me do it. Saw the plastic wraps. Would he tell on me for a cut of bribe money like the Thais on Koh Phangan would do? I looked at him, looked straight ahead and put it in my pocket hoping Louise wouldn’t have to explain to her mum I was in prison for drug

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trafficking. Sure once they found out it was only ketamine, I could start the story of only having bought it in a shop; that would be one thing. But all the charas inside me? It was too much. And could Ghurkhas be bribed? They opened the doors on each side of us and ordered the guys out. Would the dude nark on me? They searched their bags. Held guns towards the jeep. Then without a word to us, loaded all the locals back on and off we went. What the fuck? With my mouth dry, heart pounding and sweat dripping down the sides of my head. I took a few breaths of freedom. Tasted the saltiness of it on the edges of my tense tongue. I could only think it was because the Nepalese government relied on western tourism so they hassled everyone but the foreigners. About a half mile up the road we pulled up at an actual bus station and the driver led us onto the actual bus that was gonna be heading for Pokhara. The dude that had been sat beside me and hadn’t told, got on the same bus and this time sat just behind us on the right. I was paranoid about that maybe now we were in a military state, stop and search might be common place. So although he could see and watched me again I pulled the bullets out my pocket and shoved them down my socks. It was my only safest option. There were no toilets around to shove them back up my ass, so I just had to hope this guy wouldn’t tell on me. The Thais sure as shit would. The bus pulled off with only about ten or so of us on it. A kid hung out the left side open front door and yelled, ‘Pokhara, Pokhara,’ whenever we passed people. Every now and then we’d stop and a local either on their own or with their entire family would get on. It was good to see women travelling on their own again. It was different than India here, only a few miles from it. We were on a local’s bus. Awesome. No tourists. It might take a bit longer but if we made the most of it, it’d be a good experience. The food would be better too. We drove outta the first town and on the edge of it was another bus station. Some people got off and the dude said, ‘We here five minutes.’ It was hot, I’d dodged a life changing situation and we were off into the Himalayas with a bus full of locals and a couple of characters running it. I asked him if he could get us some beers, gave him some cash and he was back with a couple of tall cold ones. They were like seven fifty mil’ glass bottles with a pop top. He asked where we were goin’ in Nepal, we told him about Dee’s and Lou’s mum and Chrissy coming next week. People got back on the bus, plus a few more and it pulled off. Out through the trees we went. You couldn’t really see any mountains or anything for a bit. To start we drove through a light forest with what looked like gum trees or some shit, not the jungle I’d expected or was used to like over in South East Asia. The dude up front had his work down to an art form. He’d yell out and when he got a response he’d slap the side of the bus three times. It’d slow down and almost stop, he’d load the locals on while sorting their bags underneath. Then with a double slap on the side the driver would chuck her back into gear and we’d be off again. Most of the time the bus never came to a complete halt. At one stop some lady got on and walked up the isle trying to sell corn in bags. My lover girl got off to find some more beers while out the window I bought some egg pakoras that were hard boiled, battered and deep fried eggs that were so hot, fresh and oh so fuckin’

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bus. Soon there was only about ten of us left. The road was lined with street lights now and we pulled up somewhere and the dudes told us to get off. We were here. We were in Pokhara. We’d already booked the hotel and sure as shit as their word a dude was waiting for us as we got off the bus and drove us in his tuk tuk to the place we’d sorted, The room was ok. By now we were used to it, so the room was just as you would expect it to be when you’ve paid cash for it back on the border eight hours away. We went outside and down to the left to the dark lake and there were a few restaurants and things open. Every window had travel guide prices on it and we just wandered up a bit for fifteen minutes, saw there was fuck all at this time of night and wandered back to ours. The Chinese restaurant below us was kickin’ out the last Chinese lookin’ guests and they gave us a beer to drink while they cleaned up.

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We’re not in Kansas anymore Toto So that’s it. Just like that India was done. Like conscious existence eh. I’d like to carry on writing and continue the story of Nepal but life is different for me now. The manuscript to this book has been sitting in my email unfinished since just before my baby joined us in this life a year and a half ago. I’ve got more to do now than I did back then when I first started writing my twisted travel tales. Although in my head I call them, the Long Road, now. I think that developed as my own understanding of the stories and my experiences became more than just the holidays I went to get fucked up on. They were the journey of my life. Of healing, going wild and of the fight to ensure this life of mine was worth living. Death is coming for us all so be afraid of it enough to push you out of your comfort zone of just getting by and go and do. Do whatever it is. Have children when it’s the right time for you. Find a way to get by in your life that you enjoy, ‘cause sitting around for the majority of your days waiting for them to be over, working in a misery of silence, sweat and air-conditioning while we poison our ocean and our air; while we sit by while a few kill off the other life forms on our rock in the middle of emptiness, is not the point of humanity. I s’pose what is? Well that’s gotta be the easiest answer of all. Be good to one another and don’t take shit from bull shitters. Go and try and fail and win and laugh and love and cry and learn and see it, smell it, taste it, love it, hate it.

Thank you to everyone who let me write about them.

Jay went from Goa to London where him and Bridgette helped out in a soup kitchen before he flew off to South Africa to keep the Free Spirit ten year anniversary rolling. He tours all the time so keep an eye out for the name Journey on the flyers. And if you do ever see him make sure you chop him up a fat line of coke for me, buy him a beer, then get on down to his grooves. Like I have with words and writing, let him take you on the journey of his life with his music.

Bruce spends half his year in the England and half in India. So if you’re ever down in Southern Goa or walking through the alleys in Varanasi and man with bright eyes, a smile as warm as a summer’s day in Delhi gives you a wave and there’s an Om symbol tattooed on the palm of his right hand; go up to him and say, ‘Bryce said I owe you this.’ And roll him a fat joint and buy him an ice cream soda. But remember the coca-cola in the bottle and the ice cream in a glass. You get more that way. And don’t forget the hug.

Kimmy is off in the wilds finding his own way on the other side of the system. He doesn’t sell any of the other gear now and hashish isn’t hurting anyone. It’s very fine quality. But more than that. Kimmy has invited me in to a world not many get to see. I’ve been to the homelands of weed. With Kimmy I’ve worked the fields pulling out the males and dug my own holes in the soil to plant autoflowers. He’s given me adventures even I can’t write about.

Pip and Steve, those beautiful souls, are living in Australia and have a most beautiful baby too. We keep in touch all the time. The positive impact they’ve had on my life is hard to describe. It’s like spending years learning to whistle or click ya fingers and then one day

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you’ve just got it. It’s there. That feeling and sensation, that’s how I feel every time I think about them.

Bob’s doing awesome and still eats his asthma fish every year and every year it seems to work. Shows how much we understand medicine.

My facebook hippy friends, the ones who were there naked in sixties and seventies dodging the draft to Vietnam or just riding the wave of freedom from the system on a bus from London to Kathmandu are all most excellent and are also the most outrageous people I’ve come across. Many try and live the life they were the first to find. But apart from the likes of Kimmy who is the purest form of smiling, un-judgemental weed loving hippy, the rest are just imitators.

And me and my lover girl. Well we’ve already brought one glorious human into this world of ours and we’re discussing bringing another. We’re sharing life and love and experiences and getting by with the help of friends, family and support of each other.

I’ve got a fuckin’ sweet job at the moment and am working three days a week this summer which has given me the time to finally finish this book off. We still travel and Japan is on the radar.

My stories? Well there’s already another couple of twisted travel tales in my head. But maybe they’ll stay just for me or whoever I corner. There’s that time we went for my Brother and his missus’s wedding in Vegas and just happened to end up at Electric daisy carnival story. Or that other time I locked myself in various hotel rooms around Colombia for a month and simply sniffed coke, drank beer smoked a lot of fags and watched man versus food on tv.

I have in mind what I’m going to write next. If I ever get the time they’ll be children’s stories for my baby. I’m gonna use the characters my Grand Mother gave life too out of orange clay. The ones she said came to her. Said they must be made by her hands. I’m gonna try and bring them from the earth and her mind in to the mind of everyone.

This is to those we have lost and those who will come. But most of all those who are here right now.

Find me at https://www.facebook.com/theauthor.andlife.5 . Unless you’re the police wanting to question me about this book. Then in that case it’s all made up and there’s no case to be had.

I love you all.

Bryce

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