Gokarna to Mysore, Karnataka

After a nice restful stay in Hampi, I made my way to Gokarna. Gokarna literally means cow's ear, because the piece of land on which it sits resembles a cow's ear on a map. The town is about an hour and a half south of the infamous ex-Portuguese-colonized-beach-haven state of Goa. Gokarna is known primarily as a pilgrimage town for Hindus (and the occasional westerner). I took the deluxe luxury sleeper bus from Hampi, (I'm not entirely sure if there was an intended sarcasm in the terms used in the marketing), and I arrived in the wee hours of the morning. I had met a couple girls going to one of the beaches (Om Beach) relatively close to the main town and I decided that it would be best to try to share the rickshaw at 5 am with them. After an hour of being crammed into a rickshaw winding around pothole-filled roads, we made it to the beach. I promptly began looking for places to stay and realized that there were no ATMs or any other places for exchanging money near by. This meant that I would have to walk to town and I was somehow under an original impression that it would only be a 20 minute walk.

Well, 20 minutes was right, but only for the short trek to the next beach, Kudle, and then another 25 minutes onwards to town. There were plenty of decent looking deserted places to stay on both beaches. It's not quite high season yet, a couple more weeks and these beaches will both be packed. The path ends as it descends down a hill, from which the town merely looks like a palm tree grove, and right in front of the important temples in town. The temples are quite plain on the outside, and I have no idea what they look like on the inside, as non-believers/followers are not allowed to enter or take any pictures.

Most of the guest houses and hostels were, well, mostly unsuitable for life other than roaches, mosquitoes or bacteria (and usually I'm not a very picky person). I finally found one, Hotel Nimmu and made my way around town. Hotel Mahalaxi did not have such nice rooms, but it had the best food in town by far (if you are ever there, try the banana lassi)! There really is not much to do here other than relax on a beach, and seeing as the sun isn't really so kind to my skin, I don't usually last too long. I did a bit of shopping and writing, and meeting some fellow travelers along the way.

I vowed to head to Mysore to meet up with some fellow Bollywood extras and continue on together to Kerala. There were no seats on any of the trains heading south, since it was the couple days preceding one of the largest festivals in India, Diwali*. Everyone is traveling home for the celebration, most people have a break from school and work for the festivities. It was just like China all over, competing with a billion vacationers for train seats!

I was lucky enough to discover that the KSTC (Karnataka state) bus starts at 6:45 am from the central bus station to Mangalore and continued onto Mysore reaching at about 9 pm. I went for it, and after 12 lovely, sweaty, cramped, and bumpy hours I made it to Mysore. I think we even hit another bus or truck at one point; I didn't pay much attention as this is quite the usual occurrence here. The bus merely backs up for the other to pass and keeps cutting around the sharp cliff-side turns (still not as scary as the Bollywood bus, it was daylight and even if it was night we had headlights). The view of the Western Ghats from the bus window was lovely. This area is one of the last areas where large stretches of the mangrove forests have not been completely decimated, and those areas that have are replaced by rubber and palm farms. The small, quaint, and relatively-clean towns where the bus would occasionally slow down so people could push on and off, were lit up with chains of white lights. This created a somewhat serene atmosphere in these hill-topping towns, which tempted me a couple times to stop and stay at one of the many hotels and home stays, but instead I pushed onwards to Mysore.

There are often so many things I would like to write about, but have not yet found the perfect adjectives to explain the real India. I have plenty of pictures I intend on uploading to this blog and showing people upon returning home, but even those lose the real olfactory and tangible sensations that India elicits. I best describe India as a country of dichotomies, meaning that often the poor and the rich are situated next to each other in extreme contrast; or meaning that there are just two things that in most countries would not have such a close association to each other. There are always surprises here, and I'm not sure much will surprise me elsewhere. Even ordering food is like Christmas, you never know what you're going to get, which as you can imagine isn't always a good thing. India is good, bad, wonderful, tiring, colorful, tasty, diverse, old, new, and every other descriptor you could think of, all rolled into an explanation of one country. Perhaps you just have to travel to one of the other diverse-mini-country-like states to experience it all.

*Sidenote: Diwali is a festival celebrating the victory of good over evil. Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists and Jains all celebrate this holiday often with very bright and loud fireworks. (You can read the wiki article from some background knowledge here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali).