Well, I'm back. Only got the one week there, but I feel that it was enough.
The train ride was... Impossible to describe with mere words. The Indian Rail System (IRS?) is one funny little critter, and dealing with it is an experience which cannot be adequately represented. You either know it, or you don't.
Goa, on the other hand, is much easier to put into words. Tourist hive.
We got a rickshaw driver to take us to a nearby site of accommodation for the night (the drive reminded me just a little too much of Mr. Toad's wild ride...), and found ourselves at a 'quaint' cluster of beach huts known as "Flavia Paradise". Now, when I say hut, I mean a construction that not even a seven-year-old would put together.
It had everything. Latticework front wall, which you could stick your hand through and push back the inner deadbolt if you happened to lock yourself out somehow (convenient!), a loosely-woven roof which provided a lovely view of the blue(-ish) tarp which had long since passed the two-month lifetime of its waterproof coating, walls which were topped with more latticework to provide easy access for gentle ocean breezes and nocturnal monkeys, and a net hung over the bed to keep out mosquitoes. Well, the ones that don't find the hole, or come up from underneath the edge, which hung a foot off the ground.
First night, it rained. I got cold and damp. The wildlife would chitter about my hut and clamber around it, so I would only be able to catch fleeting glimpses of them (since they were climbing, I assumed that they must have been monkeys), which kept my nerves wired enough to keep me from falling asleep.
But then we got to spend our first day in Goa, almost all of it on the beach or in the water. Speaking of Goan water, did I mention how incredibly warm it is? We're talking bathwater here, you can walk right into it without all the eeks and acks and intakes of breath you get from trudging into the drink in other places (I'm currently thinking of Southern Californian beaches, mind you).
We spent another night in the huts, and then looked for slightly more decent lodgings. We found them, but not until after sating our grumbling bellies with Goan cuisine.
I can sum up the dining in both Goa and Hyderabad in a single word each.
Hyderabad: Delicious.
Goa: Potatoes.
Everything in Goa has potatoes. For our first meal we had samosas that were packed with potatoes, alongside potato-and-bean soup. Plus some white bread which was only mildly less squishy and tasteless as other whitebreads.
Later, we ordered a couple curry-ish dishes from a beachside restaurant. The first one was made from potatoes. The second one was made from potatoes, but had some cauliflower in it as well.
Next day, we went to a place to have breakfast. We wanted idli. They didn't have idli. We ordered what they had. We got breakfast bread and potato paste.
By now, I was pretty sick of potato paste. I wanted something that didn't have all the sharp or spicy (Goa, being a tourist spot, has edged out almost all chillies from their cooking) flavors cooked out of it. As we sat at another beachside restauarant (bar), I decided to try some of the non-Indian food, to see if that was any better. I ordered a veggie burger.
When I bit into the rather dejected-looking thing with its dry bread and cucumber slices (the word "pickle" here refers to anything which has undergone the process that results in what we tend to call chutney. I think the idea of western pickles was lost on these fellows, so I got cucumber slices. I wouldn't call them "fresh", so let's say they were "raw"), and found that the patty had been made from something vaguely familiar...
The texture of the thing was so completely stomped that it took me quite some time before I found a chunk that could confirm my suspicion. It was a potato patty. A potato patty that didn't have the texture or firmness to hold its own weight.
Potato paste.
In desperation, I tried one of the fries (chips), even though they looked a bit strange. They were potato paste-ettes, with a light garnishing of oil.
I couldn't bring myself to eat it all. Thankfully, my parents had ordered fish curry and had some left over. It wasn't great, but you could actually chew it, and it wasn't made from potatoes.
We eventually managed to find a couple spots that could serve us food that tasted like, y'know, food. We also managed to spend most of our time in the water, so that's a plus. Okay, so sometimes that water happened to be a covering layer of sweat, but you work with what you've got.
Goa had other fun things as well. The packs of remarkably friendly dogs wandering the beach, the packs of cloth/jewellry/drum sellers that walked the same routes but barked slightly more, and the wandering herds of cows.
The cows in particular were funny. From time to time, they would pop down to the beach and simply lie around for a while. In the mornings, they'd make their rounds through the populated areas, since the locals would leave out baskets of food for them to consume and, well, process...
But sometimes free food is not enough. Sometimes, you need more free food. Sometimes, you're a cow.
This logic led to a couple memorable encounters with the bovine population of Goa. One time, I was standing outside a small fruit shop while my father perused for bananas, when a young bull walked by. The bull rooted around in the turned-over offering baskets for a while, and then made his way over to the wire-grid front of the shop, where the pineapples and newspapers were kept.
Surprisingly, the daft thing went for the newspaper first. I watched as he nibbled the corners of local news columns that were poking out of the grid, and then observed him as he turned his attentions upward and a little to the left. The pineapples.
For those of you who have never seen a cow tongue, allow me to describe it. It is a deep purplish color, and is long enough to extend about eight inches from the muzzle, which just happens to be long enough to wrap around the leafy top of a pineapple through a wire-grid shop wall.
Of course, he couldn't actually pull it through the wall, but he certainly tried. After a couple attempts at stealing one of the things, he contented himself to just munching on the leaves that were sticking out of the grid. Litte India tip: never buy the pineapples closest to the street.
Eventually, someone came by and gave him a good thwack on the rump to send him off, and the remaining pineapples (and newspapers, which he had returned to eating after the pineapples. I guess they tasted better). Came as a little of a surprise to me, actually. I wouldn't have expected an Indian to smack a cow, but I suppose times have changed, at least in the parts of India I've been in.
And then there was the time when we were eating our bread with potato dip for breakfast. While we sat and contemplated our food, a cow came by and simply stood in the entranceway (the restaurant was mostly outside, and had a wide entrance). After some time, someone came out and handed the thing a lump of bread, and then began pushing it out of the restaurant. After the cow had walked on, he saw us watching and said "three times! Three times today it has come!".
I wondered about the level of intelligence cows must possess, in order to return to a place where they get free bread. I honestly didn't think they had the brains for it.
I also had to wonder about the level of intelligence the person feeding the cow possessed.
So, after our times spent in Goa, with its long beaches, its restaurants with names like "Cafe del Mar", "Casa Fiesta", and "Big Delhi" (actually one of the passable spots), with their mountains of potatoes hidden somewhere safe behind the kitchens, its unreasonable drum salesmen, its water-resistant huts and water-proof rooms that had power outages on a regular basis (as well as a resident Australian), its madcap bus rides and its proliferation of shells to step on (all but one of which contained hermit crabs), we finally hopped back on the train for the 21-hour trip back to Hyderabad.
After we got back, I had the best damned sambar idli I've had all week.
Not one potato.