For Christmas we decided to throw a party. Rebecca had purchased a gallon of Canadian maple syrup at a duty-free shop on our way to India. It inspired me to use the local Portuguese sweetbread and readily available eggs for French toast. Before Christmas morning I hired four Goanese women to chop up a variety of fruits and make huge fruit salads. We produced a unique, welcome feast for about 200 people, including Peace Corps volunteers and other travelers who heard about the party by coconut telegraph up and down the beach from as far as 50 miles away.
Photos by Rebecca
As the party cranked into full gear, a group spontaneously decided to rent three canoe-style outriggers from the local shark fishermen. This turned out to be a much more exciting adventure than first thought. After piling a half-dozen sated and stoned party-goers into the boats, and clearing the shore break, we found ourselves cruising festively in open water. The fishermen then proceeded to set up for themselves several bottles of an illegal, powerful whiskey and launched into a celebration of their own. Gleeful at their unexpected, over-paid rental success, they swilled liquor until they were blind drunk. These outriggers were very narrow and no one had experience in manning such a craft – our lives were given over to the more and more inebriated, celebrating fishermen. It was with great difficulty that we managed, by hand signals and body language, to instruct them to row us ashore at Chapora Beach for a swim. After a relaxing, enjoyable dip and a few hits off the chillum, it was then up to us to pile the besotted fishermen, now asleep, back into the boats and launch ourselves and the other fools towards our home beach – in the darkness, through shark-filled waters. When we finally hit the beach at our Heart House, the party was still raging and would do so all night long.
As the days flowed together in the month that we spent in Goa, it became obvious that the primitive living conditions were putting an unhealthy stress on everyone’s lifestyle. Foolish hippies were eating something called Mandrax, a form of Quaalude, just to get them through the nights. Smoking prodigious amounts of hashish all day long was a common pastime. More acid arrived when members of the Brotherhood of Light from Southern California came upon the scene. Girls went topless on the beach and men wore nothing but the g-string type bathing suit preferred by the local fishermen. The local women bathed in full saris and seemed not to mind that their scantily clad foreign sisters were bouncing around the beach. This fantastic feeling of “freedom found” was compromised by the primitive lifestyle and the spread of lice and disease. The time to move on was quickly approaching.
It was in Goa that I connected with a Canadian we called Montreal Michael. Michael came up with the concept of extracting oil from hashish in an ingenious way to slide it past unsuspecting customs agents. Michael’s “bonafides” to me were his 20 or more heavy textbooks, U.N. Reports and scientific journals that he referred to as a “study library.” His mother had been a member of the LeDain Commission created by the Canadian Government to study and present recommendations to the progressive Prime Minister, the worldly Pierre Trudeau. The commissioners voted five to four against legalization in their report. Michael inherited the “study library” his mother had used in her academic examination of the history and use of cannabis. Michael had hauled these heavy books to this center of low-key hedonism more replete with paperback novels than texts. He told me that he was going to go to Afghanistan and try and put the extraction operation together. I said I was planning to make a trip to Afghanistan as well for the major, ultimate horseback ride of my life and that if I saw him there I’d consider taking a look at his idea. We talked about a plan to transport hashish from legal Nepal and Afghanistan to quasilegal Amsterdam. If only the countries in between didn’t carry a sentence of ten years of hard prison if caught. We never shared these thoughts or plans with Rebecca. She had little use for legal subtleties.
Shashi Kapoor departed for Bombay to begin filming “Siddhartha.” We found ourselves spending more quality time with Jennifer and the children rather than the hippies who found their way to our front porch and who mostly wanted to talk of their acid trips the night before. It was at this time that I made a cardinal rule in my traveler’s life: no stories about acid trips. Boring. What was not boring, however, was the whisper of war between India and Pakistan.
Most people arrived in and departed from Goa on large, cargo-carrying ferry boats that plied their trade along the shore to Bombay and back. On the way down from Bombay the boat would moor a half-mile from shore and it was fascinating to see the small boats rowing out to collect the various supplies that were, in many instances, just tossed overboard into the waiting vessels.
The ferry did have six lovely first-class cabins on the upper deck, which we had the foresight to book round trip.
We left Goa in January with our sights on Nepal and the beginning of an import business. Jennifer Kapoor and her two children joined us on the ferry. The lower deck was filled with hippies heading back towards the hashish trail, replaced by those pouring into the hippie Disneyland.
Rebecca and I were so overcome by the romance of our journey that we decided to be married by the ship’s Captain, an event reminiscent of those classic seafaring ceremonies of yore.
In the spirit of occasion Jennifer Kapoor went below and commandeered, as she said, “the best looking European Don Juan I could find.”
He was Alejandro, a handsome Spaniard whom Rebecca and I had met at various Goa celebrations. Unfortunately he could not be the best man and stand up at the wedding because he was so inebriated he could not stand. We propped Alejandro against the life ring and Jennifer Kapoor accompanied Rebecca as maid of honor. The first mate was my best man. The brief rite was held on the open deck and highlighted by a beautiful, gigantic red sun setting into the Arabian Sea behind us.
The Captain entered our marriage into the ship’s log.
Chapter Two
“Hark, now hear the sailors cry Smell the sea and feel the sky Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic.”
“INTO THE MYSTIC,” VAN MORRISON
A threat of war hissed through Bombay. The world powers had ludicrously allowed the creation of an East and West Pakistan with thousands of square miles of India in between.
We checked into the Ambassador Hotel, then went to fight the lines to buy railroad tickets “towards Kathmandu.”
Everything got hazy that first night in Bombay. We ran into our would-be best man, Alejandro, and he asked us if we had ever been to an opium parlor. “Your honeymoon night in Bombay … why not?”
“We go to ‘vice’ part of the city. Anything goes … for centuries,” Alejandro emphasized, “for centuries!” Alejandro further explained that “the deal was to visit the O dens in the Sokologie Square part of Bombay but, above all, to avoid spending many days there.”
“Come, I’ll take you down there,” he said “and we must go now and you must start to say the following mantra: ‘I will not stay more than 8 hours, I will not stay more than 8 hours’ because the masters of the pipe will continue to offer to refill your pipe until there is no money left. Some people have actually started to