“Screw it. I’m over it,” I said, suddenly possessive of my newfound free time.
“Okay, ladies, where are we going out tonight?” asked Cliff as he and Stephen returned from the beach. “What’s the plan?”
Stephen explained that on any given night in Goa, you could party at one of dozens of bars, lounges, and nightclubs—and over the past couple of weeks, the guys had explored them all. They’d smoked hookahs in the back room at Tito’s, gotten bottle service at Shore Bar, raved to trance anthems at Paradiso, and gone skinny-dipping with a cast of hundreds in the swimming pool at Club Cubana. The pool wasn’t open tonight, but the guys offered to take us somewhere even better to check out the Goan underground culture. We all agreed to let them lead the way and headed back to shower and change before our big night out.
After a couple of hours of barhopping, I was ready to raise the stakes and go dancing, but was shocked when both Jen and Sarah begged off.
“Are you guys kidding?” I was stricken. “You don’t want to stay out?”
“Well, yeah, we do, but maybe not tonight.” said Jen. “I mean, we’ve been drinking all afternoon and…I think Sarah and I are just wiped out.”
“Tomorrow we’ll be rock stars, I promise,” said Sarah.
I was disappointed, but I knew there was no sense in pushing them. Cliff, Stephen, and I put the girls in a rickshaw and headed to the next location.
About an hour later, we approached the entrance of Paradiso, a massive multitiered nightclub built into the limestone cliffs perched above the Arabian Sea. Slipping past the velvet rope, we walked under a darkened passageway cut through the rock and emerged into an outdoor section bathed in lantern light.
At our feet, local women had covered nearly every inch of ground with thistle mats. Most were arranging candy and mints for sale or brewing small pots of chai on miniature burners. Clubgoers wearing thin cotton shirts, loose pants, and colorful sundresses were spread out on the mats, lounging on their elbows, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and sipping cocktails from little plastic cups. The unmistakable, pervasive aroma of hash mixed with sweet tobacco hung like incense over the crowd.
The club was aboveground, but the dense saltiness of the air, the exposed rock walls, and the swath of darkness gave it the feel of an enormous grotto. The skittering electronic beats of Goa trance swelled and reverberated through the cavernous space, and the revelers moved to the waves of sound like an enormous jellyfish. Watching from the fringes, I felt energy firing through my muscles and out my fingertips. We worked our way into a crush of bodies, moving for what seemed like forever to a song that had no beginning or end.
“So, here’s what I’m thinking…” Stephen shouted over the music as he surveyed the crowd. “I’m not really sure if I can handle this place tonight if all we’re doing is drinking, you know?”
Cliff nodded in agreement, wiping his forehead against a T-shirt sleeve to clear the sweat. “Totally, man. It’s a full-on rave in here.”
“Well, if you guys are down, a friend of mine thinks that she can get us something a little stronger.” Stephen looked directly at me. “You know what I mean, right?”
Yes, I knew what he meant. Thanks to Jen’s Lonely Planet research, I’d learned that drugs were as easy to come by in Goa as cups of chai and that travelers down them just as casually. I hadn’t specifically planned to delve into that side of the local culture, but I didn’t want to stand in the way either. I shrugged in response to the question, which the guys took to mean that I was down with whatever.
We walked back upstairs to the area where the chai ladies sat on their mats, and Stephen introduced me to Anna, a skinny German chick with steel-wool dreadlocks, chewed-up fingernails, and a raggedy cotton skirt that clung to her bony hips.
“Hey. This is my boyfriend, Jack,” she said, motioning toward the first beefy Indian guy I’d seen. “He’s gonna come with us.”
“Come with us? Come with us where?” I asked as we started moving toward the exit. “Where are we going?”
“Not far,” said Anna breezily. “Just gotta make a stop to visit my guy.”
I grabbed Cliff’s forearm and sent him a “what’s the deal?” expression.
“I know where we’re going,” he assured me, grabbing my hand. “It’s okay.”
Anna led our group out the front doors of Paradiso, past the electric lights, and up a road that gradually narrowed into a dirt path. Walking away from the beach, we entered a section of Goa where I was sure backpackers weren’t meant to tread. In the watery light of the moon, I could just make out the outlines of tiny shelters, roughly constructed shacks made from wood, cardboard, and corrugated tin. It was some kind of shantytown village tucked away among the trees. What were we doing here?
Up ahead, without fear or hesitation, Anna was shoving back the plastic tarps and gauzy thin fabric that covered the doorways, hissing the name of some guy called Devraj. I could hear muffled sounds and voices inside the shacks, but Anna ignored them. She was a woman on a mission. I willed myself not to freak out, convinced that her raspy voice would act as a bullhorn beckoning local police looking to make an easy bust.
To my relief, Anna finally found the guy she’d been looking for. Together, the five of us ducked our heads and crossed the threshold of a sagging hovel, entering a room lined with emaciated men draped across one another like a litter of abandoned kittens. As we made our presence known, they stirred, rubbing their sleepy eyes and staring at us like the weird white specters we were. The air here was as dense and humid as the inside of a dishwasher and laced with the musky, spicy aroma of too many bodies pressed up against one another.
Devraj, a shrunken man with a tangled gray beard and hollow eyes, wasted no time getting down to business. “You want red pill or blue pill?”
He knelt down before us, holding out the options in gnarled hands thick with calluses, an ersatz Morpheus in my increasingly bizarre Indian-Matrix world.
Cliff paid $5 apiece for a couple of the red pills (which Anna had assured us would be “mellow” and “pure”) and gave one to me. For a second, I was convinced this had all been an elaborate setup. Any second now, the cops would step out of the darkness and haul the idiot Westerners (or maybe just me?) off to prison to rot.
I stared sharply as Anna and Jack, then Cliff and Stephen casually tossed back their pills and chased them with a single bottle of beer passed among them. Okay, so we weren’t getting arrested, but still…did I want to do this? I could have backed out—pretended to take the pill, dropped it on the ground, handed it off to the dirty German girl, and just run back toward the ocean, but I stared at the pill, torn between fear and fascination. What would happen, exactly, if I just stopped thinking so hard about everything and took it?
“I think maybe you better do half that thing.” Anna paused long enough to drag off the cigarette she and Jack were sharing. “That shit is pretty strong.”
I glanced down at the red pill in my hand, then back at her. Gouging my thumbnail into the butterfly stamp in the top, I watched as it split cleanly along the wings. I sat there, contemplating the halves, trying to figure out which of the two was the smaller one. Willing my brain to divorce itself from all rational thought, I grabbed the bottle of beer from Jack’s outstretched hand and allowed myself to get sucked down the rabbit hole.
Anna had not lied—the stuff we’d taken mellowed me out completely. The next few hours passed in a warm, incandescent haze. Once back at Paradiso, our group leased a parcel of straw mat real estate from one of the chai ladies. As the first waves of sensation hit, I looked up at the Indian woman’s face and swore I could feel her disapproval. She poured the milky brew into tin cups, and I watched intently as the liquid landed smoothly in the bottom. Nobody drank.
As the club filled, people came to join us, friends of Anna’s, strangers who wanted sweets, randoms seeking a place to chill. We talked with our new friends, conversations about extremely important issues, none of which I can remember now. I gaz
ed across the endless landscape of the concrete floor, carpets affixed like patches across its bald face, and wondered what the other groups of people were talking about at that moment. What were they thinking? I wanted to find out, absolutely needed to know what was being discussed, but I was superglued to my spot, alternating between incredible swells of warmth and feelings of being sucked into the floor.
Minutes or hours later, I didn’t know, I looked around, glancing at all of the strange faces. I recognized nobody. Where were the dreadlocks? Where were the other new friends I’d just met? How could they all be gone? My watch read 3:08 a.m.
Streaks of reality started to pierce the fog. Cliff and Stephen had already gone home—they’d tried to take me along, but I’d told them I wanted to stay. I couldn’t find Anna and Jack, and even if I could, then what? Arrange a ride with my drug dealers? It was the middle of the night, and I had no idea how to get back. Then I remembered the rickshaws parked in front of the club.
I walked outside, in the direction of the drivers, and was almost instantly mobbed. Men were tugging at my clothes, snatching at my body, loudly demanding, pulling, and insisting that I get inside their vehicle. I could hear myself shriek as I reeled backward toward the entrance.
Almost at once, things turned completely lucid, and I immediately regretted that I’d stayed alone at some nightclub on a beach in India until after 3 a.m. without a safe way to get back. I had no cell phone, no number for our guesthouse, no way to get in touch with anyone who could rescue me. I returned to the club, frantically searching the floors for a face I recognized.
Several desperate minutes passed as I lurched between bodies. In a crowd filled with young people, I was hopelessly alone. I started questioning groups of girls—“Are you leaving soon? What town are you going to?”—aware that I must sound psychotic. Most shrugged or ignored me altogether. Then, from the corner of my eye, I spotted a guy I’d been chatting with for a few hazy minutes on one of the straw mats. He was in the middle of a conversation, but I interrupted anyway.
“So, hey. Hi. Remember me? I was wondering if I could talk you into coming home with me tonight?” I asked, racing through the words. “No…not like come home in that way, I just mean…look, I’ve lost my friends and I can’t take a rickshaw back alone. Could you do me a huge favor and ride with me back to Vagator?”
He shrugged. His hostel was a few streets away, and he wasn’t ready to take off.
“Look, I’ll give you every rupee I have left in my bag if you’ll just ride back with me. I promise. Everything I have after I pay the cab fare.”
He looked about as enthusiastic as a guy facing a vasectomy. It took several minutes and a visual confirmation of the cash—worth about $20—but I somehow dragged him outside and together we plunged into the hornet’s nest of rickshaw drivers. With a guy at my side the transaction and ride home passed without incident.
As I slid out of my seat and onto the ground, the club guy got out behind me.
“Oh, yeah! Here’s the money. Thanks for riding with me,” I said, shoving the crumpled bills in his hands. He took it but didn’t make a move to leave.
“Well, I figured now that I’m here, maybe I should come in with you?” he asked.
I didn’t even respond. Spinning around, I sprinted inside the front gate of Magdalena’s, past the dogs sprawled out on the driveway, and straight to my room (which, thankfully, my friends hadn’t figured out how to lock). Once inside, I shoved the door closed and collapsed next to Sarah in bed. Without bothering to change out of my party clothes, I slipped under the sheet and pulled the grungy top cover up around my shoulders.
It was a warm night, but I was shaking.
The hangover I had the next day couldn’t quite compete with the one I’d had senior year of college (the night I learned that chugging Jägermeister and Goldschläger shots straight from the bottle is a recipe for alcohol poisoning), but it was definitely in the top five.
I was so mortified to be passed out, stinking like a distillery, that I dragged my ass to the beach with Sarah and Jen. Lying on a chair with a towel draped over my head, I felt a little better but apologized to Sarah over and over again. I’d once been her supervisor at the magazine, and now I was a quivering, nauseated mess who’d screwed up royally the night before. Had I totally let her down?
“Of course not,” she insisted. “First of all, let’s get one thing straight. We are way, way past the intern-boss thing. We’re just really good friends now, you know that—right?”
I tried to nod my agreement.
“And second of all—and this you may not realize—you deserve to have a good time. You really do. Just remember that everyone goes a little nuts at some point, and considering how your night went, you must have been overdue for a serious bender.”
“I can vouch for that,” added Jen.
“Thanks, Sar,” I said, grateful that she was trying to make me feel better. “I just feel bad that I’m such a wreck. I guess I’m not the same buttoned-up girl you used to know.”
“And seriously, thank God for that. You know, I always thought you were a pretty cool chick and I totally respected you as a mentor, but yesterday—it was like hanging out with a different person than I knew back in New York.”
“Is that a bad thing?” I asked, and Sarah laughed.
“No way! Now it’s like you’ve finally given yourself permission to just let go,” she said. “Trust me—that’s a good thing.”
I smiled underneath the terry cloth and felt something bump up against my chair.
“Aye, it’s my America girls! How ya going today?” I recognized the voice as Rebecca’s. I was suddenly mortified all over again, especially when she lifted the edge of my towel and smiled when she saw my expression.
“Ooooh…rough night?” she asked in a way that made me want to laugh and cringe at the same time. No fifteen-year-old girl should understand the meaning of that phrase.
Jen jumped in and explained that I’d eaten some bad chicken tandoori and wasn’t feeling well, which Rebecca seemed to accept.
“Well, I won’t be botherin’ ya long, just wanted to say ’ello…and oh, I made something for you.”
I squinted upward and saw that she was holding out a little fabric bracelet, the kind with the knots that I used to make by the dozens as a kid. This one was done in a chevron pattern of scarlet red, orange, and white. One again, she waved me off when I tried to reach for my cloth bag, saying that she’d made it for me as a token for lunch the day before. I thanked her back a few times, clutching the friendship bracelet as she dashed away from our chairs, sprinting like a kid on her way to recess. I watched as she disappeared down the slope of the beach, off to sell more trinkets to tourists, now feeling more awed than anything else. My new buddy Rebecca had a harder job—and a tougher life—than any young girl should have to endure, but she still ran, laughing as though she didn’t have a care in the world.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jen
VIENTIANE, LAOS
DECEMBER
You know you’re an overly seasoned globe trekker when you (a) have six outfits to choose from, but you wear the same two, (b) forget what day or even what month it is, (c) carry several currencies but have long since forgotten their dollar value, and (d) have to remind yourself what country you’re in when you wake up in the morning. Considering our ambitious time zone crossings, this last item was our biggest challenge of late. In less than a week, Amanda and I had gone from Goa to Bangalore, flown from India to Thailand, and hung out in Bangkok for a couple days before voyaging eastward to Laos, an impromptu addition to our itinerary.
While the backpacker trail guaranteed certain hassles—competing for the same Lonely Planet–recommended hostels, squeezing onto overcrowded buses, and learning to tolerate frosty showers—it also bestowed a hip crowd of international vagabonds who provided an instant circle of friends and gave us the inside scoop on everything from the cheapest meals to common tourist scams to which pockets of
the planet were most worth exploring.
Many fellow travelers we’d met in India had also explored Southeast Asia, so Amanda and I peppered them with questions about must-see sites and how to best divide our time in that region. Many were quick to tout the southern Thai islands, Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, and Halong Bay in northern Vietnam, but the one location that rolled most enthusiastically off everyone’s tongues was Laos. And it was far from a “it’s a cool place if you can fit it in” or “I had fun there, but you could skip it” reaction. Anyone who’d spent even a modicum of time in Laos professed their undying love and devotion and suggested we immediately run, not walk, to the closest border.
Despite a steady influx of tourists in recent years, Laos was still a fairly untapped travel resource and represented a chance to legitimately fall off the beaten track. As one of only five lingering Communist states—along with China, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea—Laos had been open to foreign visitors only since the mid-1990s. So although Amanda and I had less than two weeks before we had to meet our friend Beth in Phuket, we were determined to squeeze in a field trip to Laos, starting with the country’s capital, Vientiane.
Armed with spare passport photos for our visa application, a secondhand Lonely Planet: Southeast Asia on a Shoestring, and a wad of Thai baht to exchange, Amanda and I hopped an overnight train bound for Nong Khai on the northern border of Thailand. Fortunately, the Thai rail system was as delightfully quiet and orderly as the Indian one had been chaotic. Exhausted from our whirlwind cross-continent jaunt, the second our heads hit the plastic bunk pillows, we were down for the count and peacefully remained that way for nearly ten hours.
With promises of crumbling French mansions, bougainvillea-shaded sidewalks, ancient Buddhist monasteries, and steaming noodle stalls awaiting us in Vientiane, Amanda and I were as keyed up as little kids at Disney World as we stood in line for our Thailand exit stamps. After journeying over the Friendship Bridge across the Mekong River and into Laos, we exchanged two photos and $35 U.S. for a thirty-day visa. A stoic official in a Soviet-style uniform inspected our bags, then waved us through to the other side, where we teamed up with a few other tourists and negotiated a cheap passage into the city. Forty-five bumpy minutes later, our van veered off the dusty highway and onto a sunny, tree-lined boulevard.
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