Hello hello, how are we all? I'm very lazy, aren't I? Been mooching around the sleepy little towm of Arambol for a week, or at least it will be come tomorrow afternoon anyway, and I must say it's all very agreeable. If I stay here much longer though I am in serious danger of not leaving, strangely enough after just one week (of which I must have spent nearly one entire daytime in my room, getting unfeasibly stoned and falling asleep for hours at a time) it is very clear that I just can't hang about for too long.
This, as I am told every 6 hours or so, is NOT India.
There must be a famous travel book somewhere that, in the section on Goa, sports that line ("this isn't India") and everyone seems to have read the thing except me and all they can recall is just those 3 or 4 little words. I can't help feeling sorry for the poor bastard who wrote it as he's clearly the most quoted writer in the entire state, but no-one seems to know his name. Or her name. Poor fucker.
Anyway, Goa: It's not India, in the sense that here are lots of people here who are doing alright for themselves and I haven't seen a single dead dog yet, nor any slums - in fact even the poorer housing is generally, well, housing, as opposed to a rag stretched between one ramshackle doorway and another to shelter (and I use the term loosely) yet another poor family from the cruel outside world. I mean at least everyone has a hut, or at least a bit of wood to sleep on and a reed matting roof/wall arrangement on 3 sides - in Mumbai an awful lot of people have an awful lot less.
And the number of buildings and their construction is pretty amazing; all around the village there are reddy-brown stone block hewn into rough cubes, they dig the stone up somewhere down the beach and carry it by hand, uncut, into town. There are little guys of about 5-foot-nothing carrying a rock on their skulls that must weigh 45 kilos - I've picked up the cut blocks and they're real stone, each about as heavy as whole armful or bricks, and the uncut things are 3 or 4 times the size... the kids In Mumbai have flat heads from sleeping on stone floors from birth, the grown men here must have skulls like inverted golf balls.
The most impressive thing thiough is the speed ith which these guys can knock up a house - about a day and a half from foundations being laid and they bloody building is there, if they put their mind to it. Most places are bamboo and reed and they take hours to erect with enough blokes, but with a big gang I saw a brick house fly uwards into existence in less than two days. Pretty nifty work.
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But anyway, yes, this place eh? Well come along as long as you don't mind the cows - they are everywhere and yes, they're sacred, although not so sacred that everyone using motorised transport isn't willing to risk a little karma by honking the living shit out of the poor creatures whenever they stray into the road, which is all of the time. And onto the beach, although these are pleasantly devoid of cars, vans and bikes and because the beaches are wide and long (gotta be a good few miles of clear sand here
) no-one minds them getting in on the sunbathing too. Hey, maybe even cows feel they need a tan to turn bull's heads, ya never know.
The other wildlife here isn't too stunning to look at, but boy it sounds impressive - whether they are bullfrogs, cicadas, locusts and crickets that play the nightly tunes around here, or whether the locals know what we expect and have a really good outside PA system rigged with a `tropical ambience` CD eternally on loop I don't know, but it sounds pretty wild out there. I haven't seen anything too exotic yet but they do have the cutest, tiniest owls here and I got a photo of one at night, still working on getting the pictures online but it should be possible now I have tracked down a 'net cafe that can read memory cards 
Gimme a few days to fill it up and then we can rock and roll.
The other great thing are the ants; they come in two sizes:
1) so small that you have to check the pepper you laced your food with isn't shuffling forwards, and
2) fucking gigantic, to the extent that four of them, with a bit of coordination, could carry your chair away with you sittin' in it. I saw one of the latter variety amidst a racing squad manhandling a sugar cube - not a grain, an entire sugar cube - on it's own without in any way slowing down. Remember how many of the little buggers there usually are...
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I have slipped into a vague routine of going to the impressively Bohemian cafe Double Dutch each morning to refresh that part of me that DOESN'T feel like driving an 8litre humvee half a mile to the shops or that likes the idea of chainsawing rainforests, and this place is impressively laid back and disgustingly liberal. They're probably all Communists. They don't sell water but have a massive water-cooler-sized bottle from which you can refill your old one for 5 Rupees (fuck:allGBP), saving the plastic rubbish which is unfortunately very noticeable on every beach up at the tide line. Still it's a start to solving the issue, and like everything else about Double Dutch it's not rammed down your throat, just gently brought to your attention . The public notice board with all the hippy messages and suchlike is actually labelled `the bullshit board` or something similar so it's definitely not taking itself too seriously.
They serve Assam and Earl Grey tea at any time of day. I love them dearly.
In case you hadn't noticed, I am lacking a little Joie d'vivre today but far from being discontented it is purely on accounf of being still slightly stoned, and also because the local pharmacies here have a wonderfully liberal approach to dispensing exotic painkillers and sleeping medicines, notably Diazepam (which isn't that strong, stop clucking Mother) and which I feel perfectly justified in occasionally taking because the mattresses here have more in common with gravel than they do goose feathers, and getting more than 5 hours sleep a night is a novelty I welcome with open arms.
If one were to be naughty (and I'm such a good boy myself, of course) then there is a guy know as Dr. Death who runs the only real pharmacy in town. Despite the charming nickname he is in fact a caring member of the medical profession, and is a genuinely qualified doctor not some crazy man with a collection of halloween masks and bloody knives. I think he just likes to see the kids have some fun, which is why he makes ketamine is available in liquid form, in bottles of about 15 millilitres for less than 2 pounds. Yes, that's a couple of grams of special K (once cooked up, ooh, you naughty naughty junkies) for two quid.
And they wonder why some people never leave.
It would be an attractive prospect, if you bought a house and found something with a bit of purpose to do as, even though it's a little paradise, it would wear very thin after a month or two, unless you became best friends with the good doctore, I suppose.
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I am giving very serious thought to losing this ridiculous hairstyle after all and I have at least two volunteers to help me with that, kind of reluctant given the time and cost involved already, but fuck it, it's only hair. Plus, less to do is good in my book so the occasional Bic'ing of one's bonce would make up for a hell of a lot of washing, fumbling and scratching. Sod it - it's outta here - next time you see me I shall probably be bald
...and maybe sporting a new tattoo? I have found a place here that looks clean and professional, haven't enquired about prices yet nor come up with a design, but thanks to the overabundance of Vitamin-D-rich sunshine here I've been inspired to put pen to paper once again and have come up with, I don't mind saying, a couple of rather nice designs. Somethign with a lot of colour this time, so I really should find myself some decent colours, must be some here somewhere...
The shpos here invariably sell the same junk as they do, I'm guessing, in every tourist resort ever built. 90% fake antiques or mass-produced `cultural` knick-knacks, 10% travel essentials that the silly foreigners forgot to buy eg: sunscreen. And toilet paper. Thank freakin' [insert deity of choice], they sell toilet paper, but only here I am sure, so once I leave the Western-friendly sanctuary of Goa and into the wildlife reserves of Kerala then I'm gonna be going native, in more ways than one 
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In terms of super-fun activities I haven't been involved with too much, but I did miss the night market in a beach, like, 18miles away or something called Anjuna - formerly THE party beach in Goa, although now much depleted (all the truly mad people hang around there now, you know, hippes who've been to space etc.) and appaently thi market is something quite amazing. Guys from a place I've been hanging out at went and got stopped by the police on the way in, and the way out, and generally the whole thing was a bit of a fiasco.
I DID spend a night camped out on the beach with some lovely folks, a Simon and an Emily, and we did indeed get thoroughly, disgustingly, outrageously plastered and danced around a campfire in the manner of shameless lunatics. I tell ya what, staggering up to the line of crashing surf in almost pitch blackness and letting the warm waters of the Arabian sea crash around your feet in the middle of the night, while wrecked on the Good Doctor's medicines, is something I wont forget for a while. That was a supremely good night all round.
I did find that I made the right choices with my gear though, the knife and torch have been invaluable already and I use them daily, having stuff that really works really well is reassuring, and also makes everything so much easier for you, and whoever you're with. Score some points for Timmy there, methings
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And finally, there is a seafood restaurant here that shows Western films, constantly, every night. If you need a dose of home then there you are right there, just pull up a char and try to avoid he blandishments of the staff trying to flog of the day's catch before it goes off.
I even watched Notting Hill (in my defence it would have taken a bit of effort to move, and boy, was I stoned by that point) and against all rational thought it really wasn't that bad. I really must be mellowing out here