Taxi Ride

I’ve just left Palolem, hopefully not for the last time. My taxi – a little Indian car with a brand name that I’ve never heard before – is taking me through a landscape of hills, jungles, rice paddies and winding roads. I thought I should do one last post before I hit the airport and leave this place at least for a week.

I’m not looking forward to Bangalore one bit. For some reason I see that chapter as closed and do not look forward to reopening it. As if I actually have a choice. We should make those decisions that we get to make and accept those paths that we have to take. I’ve met a few people in the last few days who can’t make decisions and yet bitch about those things they can’t control. Now that doesn’t seem very grown up to me.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about today, I wanted to talk about Palolem; more specifically I want to talk about the place where I laid my head down to rest for the last 12 days. It was almost like being 21 again and staying on Ko Lanta, Thailand. There I stayed in a bamboo hut, on the beach with a view of the sea for less than five dollars a day.

Here I stayed in a bamboo hut, on the beach, with a hammock (some of the time) and it cost me about eight dollars a day. Not a terrible inflation rate in seven years, aye? My hut here was a ramshackle affair on stilts, which shook if you did anything too active inside. The walls were made of a mixture of criss-crossed bamboo lattice work and those reed mats that you’d normally find on the ground in poorer Asian households (they were on the ground too). My only electrical point was actually under my hut, which meant I had to run extension cords out of my front door, over my porch and under my own floor. Charging my laptop took a bit of inventiveness.

Every single day I fell asleep to the sound of crashing waves. Most mornings I woke up to the same sound, though on the last few days it was the sound of loud music from the hut next door. I guess they thought it was reasonable to play loud music at 10 in the morning. And it was, it was just that I often went to bed at unreasonable hours.

From my hut you could see beach, rocks, water and waves. That’s why I picked the place. I wanted to be able to see the sea when I opened my front door.

Most people wouldn’t have been caught dead living in a place like that. There were no amenities (the toilet was shared and about 20 paces away), there was no real privacy, you were basically almost sleeping outside, if it would ever have rained (which it didn’t) I would have got wet, sand got in everywhere and slamming the door too hard made the room shake. There were no cupboards, there was no night stand, there was only one light and often there was no electricity. There was a fan, but it had only two positions; off or way too fast.

Most people are fools. This will be one of those memories of a place I stayed in which I will cherish for decades. I miss it already.

On a positive note, though. The owners thought I was fantastic renter and said that when I come back they’ll drop the rent drastically, just as long as I stay there again.

Palolem, don’t forget me while I’m gone.