Backpacking in India in 1997

I had only ever travelled to the resorts of Europe before my girlfriend and I decided to take ourselves to India on a backpacking trip in 1997, In fact it was 20 years ago today that we set off and I haven’t been back since, so what I write about is 20 years old and might have changed. But knowing India, it won’t have changed much.

Travelling in the 90s was very different from what it is today. There was no Internet then, people had to carry guidebooks with them, mobile phones were just becoming popular but to think to take one abroad was crazy. Digital cameras weren’t out then. Everybody had polaroid cameras and you had to wait to get your photos developed when you got home. Imagine that. As a consequence, people didn’t take anywhere near as many photos, and many people had shit photos, too. But somehow, the excitement of getting the odd good photo out of a spool of 24 or 36 was better than seeing your picture instantly.

Our first port of call was Mumbai. Wow! As soon as we stepped out of the airport, I looked at my 18-year-old girlfriend, remembered the promises I had made to her dad and took a deep breath and hoped for the best. I don’t remember much about Mumbai apart from it being a big, chaotic and dirty city that was drenched in pollution and the biggest setting sun I had ever seen.

We were shocked, to be fair. And we decided to head to Goa to try and acclimatize. We got the overnight bus there, found some digs in Anjuna and checked in for a couple of months.

Anjuna was a great place. A very chilled out place, where the hippies settled when they first moved east. The Wednesday market was the best day; you could buy all sorts of local constructions, and the bars were busier on Wednesdays. The one thing that stands out, however, is a family of beggars.

India has many beggars and you get used to it, but this family of beggars were all Indian albinos and they used to go there every Wednesday, because it was the busy day, and just the sight of them was, without sounding awful, disconcerting. I heard rumours they were completely shunned by Indian society. Beggars have no place, but these were deemed to be possessed, I believe, and life was harder for them.

We had many a night out in Goa, but the Full Moon nights were the best. Unlike Ko Pan Ngan in Thailand, the Full Moon parties in Goa were in the woods. They were amazing! So primitive! An luminously painted palm tree wood with enough open space to dance around in while a DJ blasts out some top techno.

The dance florr area had a load of luminous strings tied to each other and I first wondered what they were for. Primitive decoration at best, but at least they tried, I first thought. Then as the sun dropped and the LSD began to take effect the luminous strings overhead became laser lights. Amazing! Genius! It really was amazing what they thought of back then.

Each full moon party was something different, but they were all stopped by the local police in the early hours. They’d been paid off each time, but they only allow so much, and when the sun is up they don’t want innocent hikers coming across a small group of revelers dancing away to techno with painted string above their heads. And so it was onto the bar overlooking Anjuna beach to drink and smoke ourselves into a come down. Top nights/days.

We hired a scooter in our few months there, and we used to go to Panjin. It’s the biggest city in Goa, and I believe the population back then was about 2 million. It wasn’t the most interesting of cities, but it was big and busy enough to acclimatize us towards India, which we had slowly become to love. And so after 3 months in Goa and 1 day in Mumbai we were ready for the cities of the north.

Check in with me tomorrow and read about how we got on in the north of India.