"Sand, Sun, Beer, Gals"..I am not talking about BayWatch!! This was how Sarkar described Gokarna the day we left from Bangalore..He was partly correct..Sand and Sun were there to see..but alas!! Beer and Gals??? I guess we were far away from civilzation to expect anything remotely related to these two.
Sarkar had been to Gokarna at the peak of the season and he painted a picture of shacks stretching all the way from Bangalore to Gokarna :-) And here we were..looking on as a sadhu and his two dogs patrolled a remote beach untouched for months! Somehow the dogs appealed to me more than their human counterpart. They appeared more genuine, ourgoing and genial.
They sprang to life seeing 16 humans entering their territory; it seemed as if they got a new lease of life after months of trauma seeing the boring sadhu sitting on the pedestal. For a moment, I felt the dogs needed the break more than we did :-)
Pasha had removed his shirt a few hours back (which he forgot comfortably until we entered Bangalore) and he felt at home seeing the semi-nude loner on the beach and somehow struck a cord with him; the two were talking as if they were distant relatives :-) We asked for a bottle of water and got it! We had nothing to lose and asked for place to sleep..and were directed to 3 rooms by the side of an asylum. Well..the 3 rooms were no better than the asylum - people had taken pains to copy half of Oxford dictionary on to the walls of these rooms :-)
We decided to stay outdoors..it was cloudy and pitch-dark. The sadhu seemed to have left and out came our saviour for the night, an enterprising drunken old guard. A quintessential service-man that he was..he was determined to make a dream outing for us. We had fried rice, cold drinks, daaru, and sutta..all in a matter of minutes.. He wasnt contented though; we had bon-fire and DJ to finish off... DJ and daaru is quite a combination for me..especially if I get to move my body in all those directions possible only in science fiction; the only significant thing that I remember after the bon-fire was having stepped on one of the dogs while trying a MJ step possible only after gulping 5 pegs :-)
Morning light and to say that the beach was brilliant would be an understatement; what's more we had the whole of the beach to ourselves. We played as if we hadn't for years! It was time to make a move and Om was our next destination. The time had come, the hour had struck and the models in our group rose to the occasion..every tree bent at more than 15 degrees became a
heritage site and every 100 meters, we found a new national monument. We shot as if all the digital cams were bound to be non-functional from the next day :-)
Om beach wasnt that great...after Paradise..it was like seeing the dubbed version of Harry Potter in tamil :-) We then decided to move to Kudle..Sarkar gave up now and KK, Adi took up the reins of being the path finders. They took their job very seriously; they moved at such an alarming pace that I couldnt help thinking they might have been born and brought up in
Kudle..and have been finding these paths all their lives :-)
The trek that started as "trek ke naam pe dhabba" became a question of survival. We started doing stunts that would have made Mithun Da and Rajnikanth proud :-) Sarkar moved into the dooms day mode - he wouldnt leave his beer even while climbing rocks; it seemed he was trying to savor his last kingfisher :-) Kavya was walking intermittently between innumerable slips;
She would have made sufficient marks on that path for trekkers for the next few decades :-)
We still managed. Little did we know that Swetha was carrying a weapon of mass destruction. She was carrying a hat..err...if this is a hat..then the hats you know would be tea cups! With a span ranging a few meters, she brought a gigantic hat, which would have taken 3 years and expertise from 4-5 countries to be made! She actually trekked with that! She wore it
sporadically, but it was the valiant effort of Srikanth which saved the day :-)
Back to the bus!! I felt that a bit of rest and fresh air would have changed the driver. I was being foolish. Here was a driver who stuck to his rules; he seemed to have attained such an enviable state of self-restraint that any kind of teasing, bullying by the other drivers would not perturb him! He brought us all again to that steady-state where all it matters is you, the bus and the driver..the rest of the road and the vehicles are in a ultra-modern zone you dare not enter :-) It is a unique feeling travelling at the same speed for hours; it brings new perspectives to many things in life! You think about a lot of things, you seldom think when you are accelerating or decelerating! Our driver taught me the value of being patient, the importance of controlling your emotions and the utter waste of time and energy in pursuing things because others are
(Overtaking buses, cars and lorries).
Who said you get nirvana..or you get renunciated only when you go to Swamijis or when you go to the Himalayas. Call up Sangeetha travels and you are on your way to a soul searching experience :-)
We reached Bangalore back @ 1 PM on Monday..and Roma's voice sounded like a rat running in and out of a hole..
13k for the bus, 4k for food and 2k for the stay...One night @ Paradise...Priceless :-))
