After Hampi (read here), we headed back towards Goa
to do yoga for a week in Arambol. Before our course started, we stayed just south, in Mandrem, for a few
days because it's a much quieter beach. The two different towns are accessible
by about a 30 minute walk along the beach where you pass hippies twirling
sticks, hawkers, and plenty of beachside shacks where you can order food and
drinks while relaxing on a beach chair. We decided to splurge a little for our
time in Mandrem because we were both desperate for a hot shower after sweating
like crazy for 3 weeks. So, at $30/night at Cuba Retreat, we were looking forward to the royal
treatment. Unfortunately, we were a bit disappointed in our room. It had a
great, hot shower, but the room was pretty depressing, and it wasn't even on
the beach. Still, we both decided it was worth the stay for the shower alone
and spent 3 nights there before moving down the beach to Arambol. We spent most
of our time in Mandrem lounging on the beach and boogie boarding. It was really
hot, and we were pretty lazy. It was great!
Steph and I are, by no means, yogis, but
we've both done a bit of yoga in San Francisco, and found that we prefer
Iyengar yoga more than other practices, as it uses props to help us get into
the positions and we reap the benefits more. It's kind of a rite of passage for
long-term travelers in India to claim they "spent some time doing
yoga" somewhere along the way, so we had looked into Iyengar courses and
found a great center in Arambol. So, after moving from Mandrem to Arambol, we
began our 5-day course of yoga and the Himalayan Iyengar Yoga Centre.
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| Arambol Road |
Though we had reserved a room at a guest
house on the cliffs side of Arambol at a guest house (actually, a slew of guest
houses and beach huts of varying quality) called Ludu, we arrived later than we
had planned and told the manager so, when we arrived, he told us that he had
given our room away for the night, but had another room available for the night
and that we could move the following day. The room was pretty much a storage
closet. There was a broken and rusted refrigerator in the corner, old boxes and
trunks stacked against a wall, and piles of dust everywhere. Steph was pretty
disgusted and (attention Bernie and Todd) it became our first argument of the
trip when Steph really wanted to find a new place and I said she was being
picky. Eventually, we both agreed to just spend the evening at a nearby
restaurant and return to our room to sleep. Mostly, we didn't want to be
bothered with finding something new, since our yoga course began the next
morning at 9am. And, besides, we can handle almost anything for one night. No
biggie, right?
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| Playing gin...something we do a lot. |
We played cards at the restaurant for
awhile and went back to the room to sleep around 11pm. Steph got the sleep
sheet set up and laid down to relax before bed. Immediately she hopped out of
bed and said she felt bites on her face. At first, I didn't believe her but,
with a better look at the bed it was evident we had bed bugs (and lots of
them). Disgusting. We realized staying wasn't an option, but it was too late to
contact the manager at Ludu, so we grabbed our sleep sheet and the things we
needed for yoga the next day and set out to find a new room for the night,
leaving most of our things in the Bed Bug Room. After about 30 minutes we ended
up down by the beach where we found a clean, but cheap room for the rest of the
night. It took a bit of reading to relax enough to get to sleep. We were
finally ready to get some rest for yoga when, directly outside our window, a
wannabe John Mayer started strumming and singing, and not well. At first it
sounded like a bad open mic night. As the night wore on he had gathered a crowd
of drunken people around signing horrible renditions of Adele, Guns n Roses,
you name it. It was loud, it was bad, and we had left our earplugs with the bed bugs. Needless to say, it was a
rough night.
We arrived for our first day of yoga
tired and pissed off. The yoga center is in the middle of woods tucked back
about 300 meters off of the beach. The whole structure is built with bamboo and
is lined with mosquito net. We had a quick introduction with our instructor, an
Argentinian named Leo, and got started. Leo is a great instructor as he does a
great job making sure everyone is in the correct pose and using the appropriate
props to avoid injury. There were about 15 other people in our class, some of
whom we became good friends with; Richard the Australian, professional rugby
player who also practices tantric meditation; Alistar, a funny Welsch guy and
the former owner of the self-proclaimed "best fish and chips shop in
Wales"; Anne the woman from southern France taking some time off from her
job with Johnson & Johnson; Vanessa the Canadian heading to get her
advanced SCUBA certification in the Andamans; Brittany the Australian who
volunteered with Mother Teresa's charity; Katherine the American from LA
traveling solo around some of the toughest parts of India; and Alec the
Australian surfer.
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| Leo, our instructor |
After our first day of yoga, we asked for
a new room at Ludu, which we were very happy with (Rs400, or about $8/night).
It was large, decently clean and had a balcony that looked out into our own
little beach. At night we would fall asleep to the sounds of the waves crashing
against the rocks on the beach and the sea wall on our balcony. Arambol is a
much busier town with lots of guesthouses, beach huts, yoga/ mediation centers,
and plenty of options for food, so we had a lot of options for food and
entertainment when we weren't practicing yoga.
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| Our new room at Ludu was on the bottom floor of the white building |
We had planned on leaving Goa after 5
days in Arambol to start exploring Mumbai before flying to Delhi to meet my mom
for our friend's wedding there. But, after a great 5 days of yoga, we were
getting over our soreness, feeling stronger, and realizing we would be sad to
go so soon and give up the daily yoga practice. And we liked Leo, although
at times it felt like he was torturing
us, he was just trying to get us to use our mind to recognize the discomfort of
holding postures and to accept that pain and use our minds to focus anyway. He
has a great balance of being strict but not being too serious and had a way of
knowing the exact moments we were all letting our minds get the best of us, and
he would quickly direct us back to focusing on the pose and meditating. So,
because we made no plans before we left for this trip and we decided to pretty
much do whatever we want for this year, we decided to change our plans. We knew
we had to be in Delhi for a wedding in a week, but weren't ready to leave Goa
just yet, so we decided to stay another 5 days of yoga (going into the more
advanced class), skip Mumbai (for now) and, instead, fly straight from Goa to
Delhi in time to meet my mom and for the wedding. So that's what we did.
However, while we enjoyed our 30-minute walk each morning from the cliffs to
yoga for our 9am start, stopping along the way to buy bananas from a fruit
monger for breakfast, class began at 7:45 in the more advanced levels, so we
decided to move rooms to stay closer to the yoga center. Just a 5-minute walk
up the road from HImalayan Iyengar Yoga Centre is Magic Park, where we got a
nice beach hut on a beautiful property. Magic Park also had really delicious,
organic (and expensive) vegetarian food, as well as free and unlimited filter
water, which was great!
Unfortunately the two days off in between
yoga sessions I got sick. (Delhi Belly strikes!) It kind of ruined our time off
between yoga, so we never really got the crazy nights out that Goa is known
for. Still, we enjoyed the time relaxing on the beach and sleeping in.
The second week of yoga was even more
intense. We did more advanced poses and worked on headstands and backbends-
which Steph and I both struggled with. Steph had some pretty awesome
breakthroughs with her knees and, after only those 2 weeks, my back felt
stronger than it has felt in a long time. We were both much less sore than the
first week and felt stronger and more capable.
It was a really great 2 weeks. Each day,
we would wake up early (8am the first week and 7am the second week), walk to
class, and socialize a bit with our classmates before class begin. (The second
week, we were to begin practicing yoga before class started each day by hanging
upside down for 15 minutes.) Class went until about noon each day and, after,
we would grab breakfast/brunch with a few other people from class, then we'd
run any errands (buying toiletries, emailing, etc…) and then spend the rest of
the day at the beach. In the evenings, we'd shower off the sweat, sand, and
salt, and head to dinner, sometimes with our new friends, and we'd try to be in
bed and asleep by 11:30 or so.
One of the best things about spending
that second week in Arambol is that we became closer to some of the other
people from our class (both those who continued into the second week with us
and those who didn't); particularly Richard, Alistair, and Anne, and we enjoyed
our afternoons and evenings hanging out on the beach with them. When we first
got to Arambol, Steph and I, well accustomed to drum circles and dirty
dreadlocks in SF, were less impressed with the counter-culture than other
travelers were, and we would often roll our eyes at the hippies and weirdoes on
the beach. But after two weeks in Arambol fighting our inner hippies, we spent
our last night in Goa having dinner on the beach with our new friends. And, at
the end of the night, we were the ones twirling in the middle of the drum
circle.
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| Steph,Vincent (France), Alistair (Wales), Me, Anne (France), Richard (Australia) |
You can see all of our pics on our Flickr page
here. Or click to see pics from
Mandrem,
Arambol, and
Yoga (photos courtesy of our fellow classmate, Lee). Some more of our favorites are below.
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| Walking back into town in Mandrem from the beach |
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| Mandrem Beach |
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| Leo |
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| Leaving Arambol |
You can see all of our pics on our Flickr page here. Or click to see pics from Mandrem, Arambol, and Yoga (photos courtesy of our fellow classmate, Lee).
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