I have a slight confession to make even though it is more a statement of pride, in a sense.

Apart from 2 beers on the Backwater boat trip two days ago, taken with lunch in the middle of the day and quite metabolized by about 4pm, I haven’t drunk a drop of alcohol in, now, seven days.
That’s a week, for those of you not up with post-Babylonian events

This is going to be well received by some people, those with an active concern for the state of my internal organs for example, besides myself of course; whose concern has been pretty lax these past 6 years or so; a total nonplus for anyone whose not known me in person or at length, and a mark of shame for a bunch of people back home steadily hardening their arteries as I usually do in daily fashion.

This is the reason I have been so active on the blog lately – it’s called displacement activity; when one pattern of lifestyle is replaced wholesale by another, it’s just about the only quick-fix solution this universe has yet offered, and I’ve done it myself before...

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I used to be something of a pot-smoker: a proper stoner. I stayed in single rooms for whole days, memorably once managing to not leave the same room for the best part of a week, having food brought by people who visited me to smoke with me (and perhaps do a little business ) and, I am ashamed to say, relieving myself of excess liquids courtesy of a handy window.
The body can metabolise an amazing amount when you are young, supposed to be fit and healthy, and a huge quantity of Marijuana is added to the system, and you rarely need to process anything else, if I may make my insinuation without becoming too coarse at this time in the morning, for days on end.

This was in, in fact, the reason I had to leave the room after five days, if memory serves – and it’s incredible that it does serve anything at all after all that weed.
And Charis.
And block.
And Thai stick.
And skunk – lots of skunk, lots and lots and lots as anyone back home reading this who has known me a few years will testify.

To celebrate the Millennium my best friend, Brother and I made 7” or 8”-long joints and sat in a cheerful if semi-tranqilised state to welcome it in, watching something BBC-ish on TV to mark the precise event and, I planned this precisely such was my dedication, after filling my gob with an unhealthy dose of smoke, the very first thing that I did in this millennium was inhale.

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I used to be something of something to reckoned with as a stoner, in fact, such were the vast and copious quantities of Cannabis that I inhaled, and among a few social circles if someone was to be thought of as one of the hard core smokers who would sit for up to 12 hours getting unmentionably stoned and knocking scores of others under the table, along the corridor, and out of the door, then one of those was definitely me.

I decided to stop it one week, having forgotten my name and address just one time too many, and within that week I had almost completely displaced pot with alcohol, better for my short-term memory, far worse for my overall complexion and physique. Unbelievably, a drinker is less fit than a stoner, from the outside.

A little known fact: Stoners have great abdominal muscles and are almost always very thin. How many fat stoners do you see? Almost none. The stoner of fortitude will have great abs through coughing an awful lot, a good percentage of one’s day is spent coughing in fact, because even though they are used to the smoke the mark of a stoner is always pushing oneself to get something back of those first great highs - so through devices known as `lungs` `shotties` or `shotguns`, `buckets` and many others, along with an interesting range of designs and sizes of spliff, the stoner’s lungs and throat are constantly tested for weaknesses, and the brain is constantly harassed with near-lethal levels of intoxication in an attempt to see just how close you can get to sensory overload and throw up, pass out, faint, or perhaps die if we were really lucky.

And coughing, though you may have never thought of it like this; engage yourself in it for a full minute, with gusto, and you will feel the strain in your stomach muscles; is in fact your body trying for a full-on rejection i.e. to vomit, but your stomach muscles keep it in check through reflex, thus we are not plagued with oil-slick technicolour-yawns on every pavement and bus in the city of London

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So this, dear friends, is why I have been so active here on Versive this week, and so inactive in the bars and booze-shops of Kochi (cochin).

It's something of a badge of pride I wear, in fact, because I haven't managed more than one or two mostly accidental days without drink for a couple (read: around 4) of years straight now, apart from an ill-fated attempt to give up for exactly one year beginning sometime about 18 months ago: after running around telling everyone I was quitting the sauce for 12 months in the hope that setting myself up for such shame as would be wrought if I failed I would be kept on course; I managed only six weeks off the drink and had two little lapses where I snuck a couple of cans of lager away (nothing more, mind you - I was drinking a full botttle of spirits and some beer every day usually so they really where quite small lapses) and I also distilled my own whiskey in that same period, reasoning that `If I actually make it myself it doesn't count` so really, it was a bit of a shambles.

Therefor I'm pretty chuffed that I can displace drinking with writing, although I know I'll have to go and get a few beers in a few days because physically my system is in need of it (I haven't been sleeping more than a couple of hours in the early morning each `night` - I usually drink myself to sleep you see) but still, I find this a great deal more enjoyable than drinking which has, like smoking pot before it, become a pretty hollow experience.

As long as I keep reading and learning and doing the occasional stupid/mentionworthy/exciting/picturesque thing, however, I will never tire of trotting out prose

I'm cringing at these titles myself now, that one is a bit contrived, isn't it? Sounds like the title of a Harry Potter book

I've enjoyed reading old HP and his adventures through mystery, magic and puberty, but frankly it seems as if Ms. Rowling read the Hobbit and the whole Discworld series and simply abstracted a made-for-modern-children version from there, using 3 serviceable, if rather predictable main characters. I've read the whole lot and I have to admit that the bad guys are far better, and far more likeable than Harry `Saint Potter` in this series.

Oh well, enough of the literary critique, lets see what I got up to a while back.

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Gokarna

Yes, this is only the stuff from Gokarna - I was there, what, 6 weeks ago? There is a lot of catching up to do as you can see...

The first bunch of things are just going to be links - click the link to see the pic which should, with a bit of voodoo good luck (`Hocus Pocus, Harry!!` ) open in a seperate window each time.

Oh yes, the quick story: Jon, Alia and I left Hampi to go on a wild-goose-chase on a very stupid whim, and were about to travel to the very North of India to do something silly, stopping in Gokarna to meet Jon's friend, Maria.

Maria is far more intelligent than than the rest of us and had a little thing called `reason` which she brought along with her, and the mission was aborted and none of us have to do any jail-time, which is nice

Nonetheless the three Stupideers first arrived in Gokarna at about 2:30am, with no idea where we were, hunted down a truly idiotic taxi driver who had no idea where anything in his own town was, a few arguments and a lot of pointless diversions later we arrived at a clifftop cafe overlooking the beach at about 4:00, the taxi driver tried to overcharge us and 3 of his mates came out to help on his side of the argument, naturally - and Alia, being Indian, harried and argued and insulted the man in Hindi: she was screaming at him the worst things one Indian can say to another, a bit like me going into a Harlem nightclub and calling everyone a dirty N***er over the P.A. system. Great start.

So with four irritated men at our backs and a windy clifftop before us, we found ourselves, too early for dawn by a long shot, making our way down highly treacherous steps from a clifftop to the beach: in almost total darkness, in a fair gusty wind, with heavy backpacks.
Anyway we made it - even in daylight those steps were fucking awful, I'd just like to mention - and wandered the beach as dawn broke somewhere over the horizon around 5:00am and found a bar/restaurant, which we promptly hijacked, chucked out bags down and each commandeered a hammock.

The staff found these strangers in their restaurant a couple of hours later - we had to stay there rather than any another place after that; It would have been a bit rude otherwise, I thought.

Anyway that's how we got there. Here. And this is some of the stuff we saw:

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Not seen much fishlife at this point so this little fella was worth a snap I thought - about 4 weeks down the line I saw some amazing fishlife and have some real worthwhile things to see, but give this little guy a click anwyay, go on:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric200.jpg

There was a great restaurant with a really cool entranceway - an arched bridge. Pretty redundant at this time of year with no river underneath it but I guess around monsoon - when no-one visits the beach - it looks just lovely:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric198.jpg

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This is, in fact, the best cow-on-beach picture I have ever got:

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Nice shot - no-one we know of course (the cow or the man) but I liked the way the cow's footprints trailed in the sand. And of course hated the fact that this guy is all slim and toned, the git :

Here is Jon and Alia, I say `is` rather than `are` because they function as one single unit :

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric192.jpg

And - this one is just for you Mum - a carved elephant that looks a lot like some others we know of

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric191.jpg

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I call this one `Sunset as taken by a drunk` Actually you have to allow for the fact that this was dawn and only sophisticated human eyes and thousand-pound lenses could show this properly so a normal shot on my little digicam would show just blackness, so this was something like a 5-second exposure:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric190.jpg

Point is, you get the idea of the lovely sunrise, if not any actual detail

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I thought some of you at home might like to see what these beach huts we all stay in at Goa, Gokarna etc. look like and are constructed - this is a slightly posh one, they provide their own scabby mosquito net:

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A little part of the Gokarna coastline, seen from a boat (the following shots are from Paradise Beach, a tiny, slightly busy yet lovely little beach a short boat ride from Om Beach at Gokarna, which is where we first landed):

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Animalia; order arthropdia; class Insecta; genus bigguss fuckoffius cricketus : This is just a cricket, not a machine for moving soil, just a cricket. Bloody hell, as Ron might say :

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric183.jpg

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Jon and Alia laughed at me for this, literally laughed at, in a bad way: it's an Indian squat toilet. I realise that you don't perhaps want to see it - it's quite clean it is just the size and impracticality of it that I want to impress upon you - and you have to rotate it anyway.
I'll understand if you don't want to:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric182.jpg

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Young Banana tree, almost correctly framed against the seashore:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric181.jpg

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Palm leaves, just palm leaves, but I thought the way they sat together was quite... I don't know, it just looked kind of like the essence of the palm tree, when you get past the weird way they can grow out of the ground:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric179.jpg

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This is sheer brilliance, although I can't quite remember why, except that it shows how something about how many places treat the most wonderful of things - like a beautifully patterned natural cliff face - by slapping a very large, very messy mass of concrete right onto it without even tidying up the edges

I can't see the picture because good ol' Photobucket isn't allowing me to enlarge anything, so I'm working entirely from a 6-week-old memory, but I know it shows the same message in loads of languages and that the message is slightly stupid, or really sweet.
It's gonna be either "Fun is Prohibited" or "We are all one with nature and each other" or similar.
I'm betting on the former:

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More Gokarna coastline from the ride back to Om beach:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric174.jpg

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Here we have Jon, slightly out of focus but still there, climbing a massive boulder in the sea - crazy sod swam out to it and climbed barefoot from the sea up one of its oceanside faces. I have some pictures of his glorious victory posture atop the thing somewhere in here as well...

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric173.jpg

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Kingfisher; an airline, a brand of beer, a variety of packaged drinking water and, apparently, also a bird.
Damned hard to track down, the little devils, but these are the best photos I have of them so far - they do love the sea with all the easy pickings around the low-lying, rocky tide pools:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric172.jpg

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Ah, Jon in victory mode on top of the rocks - shame he was so inconsiderate as to let the sun be right behind him, but I did the best I could to move him out of it using the magic of geometry, and some careful rock-jumping around the big tidal plateau that lead up the boulder:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric165.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric166.jpg

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This was just a nice way of showing the ambience of most beach restaurants around this part of the coast; walls of the place built into the boulders that the whole thing must be built on, half-hidden hut where staff live in the trees just off the beachfront, and the name; Namaste - one of the very typical and usually very limited selection of tourist restaurants.

If it ain't called Namaste something, Om something, Ganesh something, Buddha something, or Surya, Shanti or Shiva something then it just ain't authentic-fake-authentic-fake-Indian but actually truly Indian tourism And I mean that in the nicest way
That's Jon and Alia climbing the steps there by the way:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric162.jpg

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Okay, this is the cutest puppy ever. I've got this huge yellow elephant-pattern towel thing I bought in Arambol (it was forced into my collection of purchases by the stall-owner, in that kind of I'm-selling-you-this-as-well-whitebread, don't even think of putting it back way they have).
It has been one of the most useful things I've possessed out here: it is a blanket for light nights, a scarf for when I'm travelling at night and can become an instant blanket, Alia used it as a sarong for two days, when Greg cut his foot up in the sea at Palolem I tore a big strip off and it wrapped his foot until we could get some proper bandages, it was what I got Stefan to use to tear off from and wrap up my thumb to staunch the flow of blood, and this guy in Gokarna found it when we turned our backs one late night, and made his bed in it's soft folds.

I found him and wrapped him up, naturally, tucking him into bed like a kid Isn't he just the cutest little puppy you ever did see? :

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Sunsets/horizons - and these ones are almost in focus!!

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric156.jpg

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Just some cool rock textures - the fissures of these shots run in the ground as you can see the water gathered in them; I thought the large one in the centre was like a sort-of scale model of Loch Ness, although I admit I'm only extrapolating this from what I see on an Ordnance Survey map of Scotland - where the Loch runs from Fort William to Inverness, from memory, it also breaks at the ends but the water continues in other lochs, all the way across the land so that to me, the OS map of Scotland always looks as if the country is actually two giant, close islands instead of one landmass.

Anyway after all that bollocks I can see (now Photobucket wants to play again) that I didn't quite capture on camera what I saw in real life. Hey ho, but here you go anyway:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric150.jpg

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And this is Om Beach at Gokarna - pleasant, nicely sandy, dramatic rocks chucked randomly across the scene and amazingly not busy at all.
A few weeks before it was tourist hell, so my Irish friends who migrated there briefly do tell me.
Right then, though, it was as nice as this:

To show you just how the boulders project from the sand:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric147.jpg

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The Second before Sunrise, pinned down on paper (well, screen) like a Lepidopterous god, although I may be giving myself slight airs and graces with a phrase like that:

This was a cow that just didn't know the people/animals/places rules:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric145.jpg

The same cow after we told him his place. He was quite lonesome and upset with us, the rules and his lot in life, and I took this mournful, bleakly-lit shot of the wandering bovine pariah traversing a great beach of solitude:

I might have laid that on a bit thick. And lied about it being the same cow. Actually it was the same cow now I recall, so I'm not a complete fibber.

This is a cool shot - not only because it shows a little spit of land with a lone tree springing from it, but also the tide lines - all those arced lines on the beach are where waves have each washed a little detritus onto the sand.
Cool huh?

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Okay, actually this might be the coolest cow-on-beach shot, if only for sheer volume of beefy presence:

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Right this is as we were leaving Gokarna - sorry about all the actual posted photos folks, if it saps your bandwidth anything like it does here it must be a bit of a bugger! - check out the logo of a liquid gas truck:

"cook food . serve love" seems a bit like seeing a bottled Calor gas truck in England with "Heat rooms - Warm Hearts" down the side.
All obviously painted by hand, too, such is the generosity of Bharatgas' financial department; and with a skull & crossbones on there, too.
Cook food . Serve love . Don't fuck with the connector hose or else.

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That was in the truck stop, where our journey back to Hampi with Maria in tow began in earnest, after a short ride in some other local contraption - this too is the truck stop and there's not much point in looking at it, it just shows an array of vehicles ready to go do something profitable with masses of tourists some time in the middle of the night:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric135.jpg

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Okay, save and rotate this one, it's worth it. It is the inside view of the buses - the Deluxe Luxury AC Sleeper buses, that cost half as much as a taxi - and their wonderfully generous allocations of space for baggage, central aisles, customers, driver, wheels etc: basically this is the same type of thing as where Jon and Alia, on the way to Gokarna, bribed the driver to sleep in the cab with the other driver and his mate and where Jono was flung into steering wheel when the driver made a sharp turn.
I baksheeshed my way into the only spare single seat just beforehand myself.

On that first trip we had booked tickets but actually had no seats or bunks or anything - we had in fact booked tickets to stand or sit in the narrow GANGWAY of an overnight bus for a 10-hour journey. On Indian roads..

And Indian travel bookers see nothing at all wrong with this: this journey, the way back, we made damn sure we had confirmed seats with actual proper numbers and everything (you can easily book `seated` tickets to find that, without seat numbers, everything else is booked up by other people and you, basically, have a ticket to nowhere or you can stand in the gangway).

Anyway have a look at the space we all had anyway, even with proper seats tickets - try and squint down the back of the bus; those `gangway` tickets don't really allow for the fact that there is no space for luggage for anyone who is in the seats and bunks, so you also have to compete with 45 other people's rucksacks and travel accesories for any space.
And of course you need somewhere for your backpack too:

Long exposure shot of the bumpy bus ride - total mess but still it looks kinda cool:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric133.jpg

This was the view to the front of my position in the bus from, thank Vishnu, an actual seat:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric131.jpg

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I thought for some reason this would make a good photo, suitably rotated (it's just the side of a balconied building):

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric130.jpg

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Hampi - yay!!!

We made it back. The first thing I recorded for posterity were some of those reassuring ridiculous boulders, ahhh, what a relief it is to be back in this LSD-fuelled alien landscape:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric125.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric120.jpg

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Three Psychotic Ducks - at a restaurant in Hampi called Gopi's there was a little pond, and these three monsters guarded it - I swear they were carnivorous - and I managed to get this shot with full zoom, just before they turned on me and I fled, like a girl:

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Everything but the Hippy: this was our rickshaw back to our first place of residence, I jumped out to take the picture and, as you can see, there is just barely space for one normal person to fit in beside Jon, let alone a 5'11" 102Kg chubster like me Poor Jon, I think the expression on his face says it all, really:

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Every autorickshaw has some superfluous ornamentation, this one is surprisingly modest; stickers, flowers (especially flowers) and tassled thingies hang from every vehicle, and the proliferation of Western or Westernised brand stickers and cultural icons (you see dozens of little 125cc bikes with a big `007` painted on the front windshield and it's all you can do not to laugh sometimes, although it's actually rather strangely sweet) are amazing.
This guy settled for just a few tassles and few strangely feminine decals:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric121.jpg

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Back in Hampi we made our way back to Goan corner where the secret police all but interrogated us each, because of a presidential visit and the river crossing was sealed off, no-one was allowed within about a bajillion miles of it in fact, and every guesthouse, and practically every guest, was checked out.
Paranoid inefficiency quite frankly, because as I have said before if you want to assassinate someone all you need is a really really powerful sniper's rifle. They have to appear in public somewhere, at some time, and I guess you just work out a place from there.
I should have gone for that career as contract assassin, I knew it...

So we got back, we found our base and established our presence with the usual aplomb and indiscriminate rudeness but inbetween times, I went about getting photos of these quite lovely patterns on the wall of every hut in the guesthouse.
I think that's just a really lovely touch, someone came around at some point and made individual Rangoli, painted blessing patterns, on the wall of each hut:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric119.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric118.jpg

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New hut, new view - and far better than the other one! This was what we woke up to on opening the door each morning - how cool is that? :

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric116.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric114.jpg

And evening:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric113.jpg

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Fucking motherfucking Butterflies - remember, you may, that I was hunting down the SwallowTailed butterfly for 3 months, trying to get a shot of one or even see one properly? And I settled for a half-arsed picture taken at distance a week or two before, and thought nothing more of it.

Something is telling me to be a hippy; I literally just held my hand up one day soon after getting back to Hampi, I had my camera, switched on, in my other hand by coincidence as well, and this guy came and landed on my finger. Lazily, he seemed to want to live there, I could even turn my finger around and he drunkenly clambered back to an upright position. If I was a hippy I'd say soemthing about getting what you want only when you've let go your desire for it. But I'm not :

He finally went and sat on the floor in the perfect positio for a photo of his wings spread out - I just call that cheeky, I do:

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Back in Hampi holy part (non-beer side) and I took a few photos to record the state of the town, such as the river:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric109.jpg

A typical street in the maze of houses, guesthouses, shops and stalls in the backtreets off the Bazaar:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric107.jpg

A sign showing the enterprise, multi-skilling and lies of the local business operators, and also the humourous spelling which isn't fair to make fun of, but still, I'm a bad man.
I'm betting that a lot of those massages and treatments are remarkably similar (rotation/head tilting needed) :

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric106.jpg

And some more local Rangoli, these are just the daily chalk patterns drawn outside most homes and business'.
I had no idea what they were apart from obviously being something like a blessing, but I did some reading of the Glossary in my Lonely Planet on a train the other day, and found a fascinating wealth of new information - including what the heck these things were actually all about. Also called Kollam, so the LP said, they are sometimes beautiful, complex and colourful, and sometimes rather simple.

This couple fall into the latter category really, I'm afraid:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric105.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric104.jpg

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A rather nice temple rather spoiled, from a certain point of view, by stall selling generic `Om` and Che Guevarra T-shirts, as stall holders in Goa and Hampi are wont to do.

The bullding itself is far nicer:

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Hehehehehe - the back of a rickshaw owned by a man of admirable, yet somewhat silly ambition:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric102.jpg

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It's a monkey! Jokes about `that great picture of you there, Tim` are not appreciated or actually funny :

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And there were seven fat cows and seven thin cows, all running away from Tim... Maria, Australian Holly, a guy called Span (after Spandau Ballet - he was one of those guys still stuck a bit in the 1980s) and I went off to go swimming in the reservoir - at a sensible place where you don't have to jump half a mile into the water, Jon - and I disturbed these cows (buffalo really) purely for the sake of phorography. I must be a git.

The strange thing was that these buffalo, each quite capable of reducing me to a loose sack of meat and shattered bones with suitably determined trampling, were terrified of me. And there were, what, 6 or 7 or 8 of them? I know they had some young 'uns with them, but still.
The fear of the lash I suppose
Anyway here they are, legging it from me in a most picturesque way:

And one looks back at me veeeery suspiciously:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/cric298.jpg

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And, finally because this has been quite enough for one post, the very first motorbike I ever rode, awwww! Still the only motorbike I've ever ridden, a little 50cc chicken-chaser of a thing (and my best mate has just bought himself another proper bike of like 600 or 750cc or something - I feel shame ) looking lovely on the little chunk of land where we all went to for a midday swim - and lovely it was too.

Mine is the shitty little thing at the right and the rear that looks like your granny would shun it out of sheer pride:

Phew, once again. I've got the pictures sort-of sorted now, so, just a matter of ploughing through them and NOT worrying any more - yay!!