Diu Days

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that companies who sell full packages to tourists cut corners and search for cheap deals in order to grab and hold on to as much money as possible. And ‘Diamond Tours’ is nowhere near of being an exception: our last tick on the boxed sheet of Rajasthan was a train ride from Udaipur to Ahmedabad and that much closer to the seaside. We were planning to visit A’bad for at least half a day and then take a night bus to Diu, a northern beach resort.

As it were, the corner cut by ‘Diamond Tours’ was exactly this train: it would take us 11 hours for a mere 400 km, which not even by Indian standards is really acceptable. So we pushed hard to have it changed for a more bearable 7 hours by bus, which only led to us not having time to see much of A’bad, except for the bus station and even that in the dark (but that’s always better than seeing it by day). Still, it gave us (mostly Mona) a better insight into ‘The Indian Way’, more specifically, the Indian way of bus riding. This, compared to the 4 hours of waiting and the night semi-sleeper bus that humped its way to Diu, was virtually nothing! I am starting to think that the Indian roads are part of a conspiracy to ruin people’s peace of mind and sleep, as they are usually paved once the bus ride starts, which gives you a feeling of safety, but, as soon as you think all’s going to be, literally, a smooth ride, the roads become like mosquito bites on your back: you cannot see them, yet you know they’re there because they’re irritating and inconvenient as hell.

History is repeating itself and, while I had a somewhat uncomfortable, restless sleep, Mona was up most of the night and by morning, she was looking more like a scared owl, eyes big and red and a mood to match. But we were at the seaside and were looking forward to three days of not packing, not reorganizing backpacks and not checking out. It would be heaven, if only we’d find a nice place to stay with some sand and water somewhere less than 50 meters away... So we took the advice of the blaze information officer, who wearily suggested Nagoa beach, the best beach area in Diu. We did what he said and we found the Richie Rich Resort, a place ‘for rich and famous’, so, being both (to what degree is up for discussion), we happily checked in and started the routine which would keep us going for a while: sleeping, eating and drinking, sometimes in a well established order, sometimes all together, sometimes on the beach, sometimes in the safety of our mold-scented fanned room.

This being India, nothing is quite this straightforward; having a strip of sand full of Jet Ski riding eager Indians and as many old white people as you could count on the fingers of an old hand, swimming inconspicuously as a young white woman in a swimsuit on top of all, is not ever going to become a reality. A swimsuit could describe most outfits universally accepted except for the half meter fabric that covers about 20% of your body, not even reaching the sexually intriguing (for Indians) neck and shoulder area. Now that’s definitely no suit!

Back to the matter at hand, it was impossible to avoid all the curious Indians intently watching us going in the water but we ignored them as much as possible and did our job. During the first two days we went as far from our room as the length of a football field, eating, drinking and sleeping our way through the tourist-less resort. The biggest decision we made was going in Diu Town for dinner on our second night, as we’ve read in our priceless guidebooks that there’s a place that serves barbecues in the evening, so our chances to meet fellow tourists would increase by 100%. Also, the place would supposedly be an old church turned guesthouse. The matter of serving barbecue ‘every other day’ had not been made clear enough, so we figured it out once we got there: the party would be held the other night, as in the next one. Nevertheless, we asked to see a room because we might consider swapping our eating-drinking-sleeping headquarters for the last night. And we instantly agreed to get the room, even paid in advance to do so. What could be more awesome than spending a night in a church and not being forced to do so (or go to mass)? Well, this was not your ordinary working church, as the actual church room had been converted into a museum and, obviously, the later added quarters of priests and monks had been turned into paying guests’ rooms but it still looked (and felt) as the ex Portuguese colonists’ catholic church.

We happily checked in the next morning (although our plans of not packing/unpacking for three whole days had been ruined) and, after exerting our well established routine some more, we split into one-person teams, one heading for the beach, the other to the train ticketing office. My team, the train ticket one, of course, was pissing its pants (to put it lightly) because it might not find a train ticket from A’bad to Varanasi, one of the last Indian stops, as the big holiday of Divali was approaching fast and tons of Indians were also heading that way.

If I have not been ranting enough about trains and the great train system of the country of Gandhi, you should just know this: when an Indian desk clerk sees in his database a waiting list of roughly 550 people for the train you just asked a ticket for, he’ll start laughing in your face. Hard. And the only option, which, surprisingly, has priority over the waiting list, is the emergency 24 hours before departure Tatkal system, which is simply described as ‘first come, first serve’. As I had 2 days until this epic train ride D-day, I resolved to come back the next day, 10 AM sharp, stay in line, cross my fingers and hope. So my team headed for the beach but not before immortalizing this:

Words are useless...

Meanwhile, the beach team (comprised of Mona) was just beaching away, happily sunbathing but impossibly getting into the water higher than an unsatisfactory ankle level. The reason, as I witnessed myself, was a huge slab of rock standing between the beach and the swimmable water, so deep that you could walk on it (and on the funny-looking creatures and live oysters that made the slab their home), but so strategically placed that if you’d jump off it into the water, you’d be propelled in it by the waves. So we gave up swimming for the day and, after some hours of sunbathing headed back to the church guesthouse (church-house?) to grab some barbecue along with other English speaking people – and I mean English not Hinglish. The closest we got was German English and Israeli English but we eagerly settled for that and joyfully went to sleep in the house of God.

I’m sure that sleeping in the church-house would have been a far better experience were it not for the early morning wake up and the trip to the train reservation office. Being the only white person there and also the only woman there, the system abided by the rule of ‘not first come, second served’ which meant that my ticket was issued at 10.04 AM: 30 hours A’bad – Varanasi, a happy occasion, a reason to celebrate with some beach-hunting, this time preferably with swimmable coastline. And it wasn’t even as far from the place of our first attempt: smooth, very fine and very hot sand, water to spare, pleasant and clear, inexistent human beings, except for the odd Indian ogler… it was a good end to our seaside complete relaxation holiday. We got to the bus station fully prepared for another bus ride, this time investing in a sleeper bus and, with less frets and pain, we came into A’bad at 6 AM, confused but somewhat rested (even Mona).

A’bad surprised us with really beautiful sights, which we decided to see before a self-imposed limit at 2 PM, when Mona would head for the airport to catch her flight to Delhi and I would get another 5 hours to mentally prepare for ‘The Big One’, the train ride crowned ‘My Longest Ride in India’. The mosque, the temple and the city’s gate we saw were exceptionally pleasant, as were the animals encountered on the way.

Last but not least, there was the museum, because of which I finally understood the curse Le Corbusier had cast on modern architecture. It seems he really liked concrete and to experiment with it and was commissioned to design many buildings in India, not to mention an entire city. But, as experimenting goes, it opened the road to concrete cities, from where the crappy apartment blocks got their inspiration.

Finally it was time to part ways with Mona and we said our goodbyes but I refuse to describe the feelings stirred inside me by our separation. Let’s just say that my sadness could even reach the ionosphere.