One month in a Goan dream
Sometimes The Best Plan Is To Have No Plan At All
Why it’s better to ride the wave rather than swim against the stream
If you’ve read my previous blogs on Medium you’ll know why I left the UK in 2019 and never looked back.
I had thrown some clothes in a backpack, said goodbye to my friends, and sold nearly everything that I possessed (save a few items too precious to my heart; the complete Star Wars and extended edition Lord of the Rings box sets, which I stashed away in my parent's attic).
You’ll also know that within a month of leaving home I had had a life-changing experience at a yoga retreat in the tropical jungles of southern India.
What you might not know, however, is that apart from the first four weeks at the yoga retreat I had made zero plans and had no idea where my travels were going to take me.
Just a glint in my eye
In all honesty, the actual ideas for my escape had begun to formulate around age 16, after I read Alex Garland’s The Beach, a book that has inspired so many travelers and explorers to up sticks and venture out into the world that it’s become a frowned upon cliché amongst backpackers to cite this as your motivation to leave home.
But life had got in the way.
College, relationships, jobs, businesses, personal finances; all excuses that I clung to avoid making the leap. But eventually, the time was right. After a few years of saving, and scrolling enviously through the feeds of travel bloggers on social networks, I was on my way.
I had watched many friends on Instagram travel through the world, and a few of them had planned their journies meticulously; flights and destinations pre-booked, jumping from location to location, working themselves through a checklist of the world’s most desirable locations.
I wanted to do things differently.
Apart from the first month in the yoga retreat, I had nothing planned.
No itinerary whatsoever.
Stepping into the unknown
I even refrained from searching online for information about Goa. I knew that it was famous for its beaches, but that was all. I didn’t want to restrict myself in any way; I wanted a completely open schedule to do what I like, to go wherever the energy felt right, and to have nothing to hold me back.
So when the month-long yoga intensive was drawing to an end I began to think of my next step. All I knew was that I wanted to make my money and my travels stretch for as long as possible.
But one drawback to having your options completely open is that it can actually make it more difficult to make any choices whatsoever.
Having a whole world of possibilities available makes it harder to land on one option than only having one or two.
At this point, I was given a great piece of advice from a wonderful French girl named Jennifer, whom I had grown close to during my time at the retreat.
‘Download Workaway,’ she said. A platform that connects hosts who are willing to provide food and shelter to volunteers who will work for a few hours a day in return.
It sounded too good to be true.
I downloaded the app then and there, put together a profile and cringetastic bio, advertised myself as a yoga teacher (I had a grand total of sixty minutes of teaching experience under my belt), and sent out an identical pitch to every host within a 50km radius of my location.
I left it completely up to chance and took up the offer of the first host that replied; a beach hostel with zero feedback on their profile, a few miles from where I was staying, who said they wanted someone to help out with guest for a few hours every day.
‘Perfect!’ I thought. Sun, sea, and sand, and new people to meet every day, and I had even avoided having to live up to my self-proclaimed yoga teacher title.
My first volunteer experience
So when I arrived at Back 2 Basics hostel a few days later and heard the host say, ‘Ah Namaste Ji, you must be the yoga guru,’ every possible shred of anxiety my body could muster was brought to the surface. ‘There’s about six or seven of us who would love to have daily lessons with a teacher. Can you start tomorrow?’
Luckily for me — a ‘teacher’ with no experience of how to plan, structure, or host a yoga lesson, and who could barely touch his own toes — when I walked into my dorm room a fellow volunteer on the bunk above mine introduced himself.
Thank the heavens for JC, a Spanish martial arts and self-defense instructor, who also had a decade of yoga teaching under his belt, and for Jennifer — my fellow newbie yoga teacher who joined me at the hostel a few days later — for helping me cobble together my first few slap-dash yoga lessons, and for giving me the most valuable feedback of my teaching I’ve received to date.
After a few sessions, I got into the flow of it and realised that I really enjoyed teaching, and it was an invaluable skill that opened the door to many volunteer opportunities on my adventures that otherwise would have remained close.
All in all, I didn’t teach that much at Back 2 Basics. The thing is about Goa in December is that it's so hot that if you haven’t got your days business done before 10 am you’re likely to drown in a pool of your own sweat if you so much as lift a finger, let alone move through a few rounds of sun salutations; so my rooftop lessons started before the sun got too high.
Coupled with the fact that most of the guests at the hostel stayed up drinking and partying until the small hours of the morning, meant that after the first few days there weren’t that many takers.
Living the dream
So for one month, I lived out a dream existence at Morjim Beach, Goa. I would wake up and teach yoga for an hour and a half to anyone sober enough to crawl out of bed at 7 am (or anyone still lingering around after pulling an all-nighter).
Then to cool off, we’d make the two-minute stroll to the beach and dive into the calm waves of the beautiful Indian Ocean. On the way back I would stop at a local fruit stall and eat a fruit salad with a variety of exotic fruit I’d never seen, most of which I cannot name to this day.
The rest of the day would be spent hiding from the sun, trying to make a minimal amount of physical movement as possible, deciding what to eat, and swapping life stories with travellers and holidaymakers from all corners of the world. It was an amazing time, some of the people I met there I still count as some of my most valued friends, and I barely paid a penny for the experience.
There is one vivid memory that I often recall; floating in the ocean one morning, laughing with friends, looking up at the spotless blue sky, and thinking to myself how unbelievably lucky I am to be living this experience. I vowed at that moment never to take anything for granted, to live firmly in every moment, to be grateful for every breath and step I take, and to soak up every experience in life, good or bad.
And it wasn’t all good for that one month, there were painful times as well.
Seperation anxiety
You see, one thing I’ve learned about travelling is that for every great personal connection you make and every location you fall in love with there is a relationship that you have to walk away from and a location you have to leave behind.
Leaving the yoga retreat behind was an emotional time; saying goodbye to my fellow students, the teachers, and the dogs. Especially the dogs.
There were many tears of sadness and joy, group hugs and vows that we would all meet again, somewhere, someday.
But getting us all together again would be nearly impossible; British, German, Texan, Ibizan, Italian, Indian. Vast distances would soon come between us.
And then there was Jennifer, a beautiful mix of French, Vietnamese and Madagascan, who stayed with me for some time at the hostel, who I came to love dearly. We connected over so much; travel, yoga, relationships, spirituality, our joint desires to escape the rat race and competitiveness of modern western life. We were both at major crossroads in our lives with no idea what direction to take.
Our last night together we went to watch the golden Goan sun setting into an ocean that was particularly wild and vicious. The waves crashed and smashed into each other, the wind and salty spray rippled our clothes and hair.
We stood for some time often in periods of long silence, contemplating our severed future and unknown paths, the unruly and chaotic sea providing the perfect metaphor for the random, unstoppable force of the universe that had thrown us together and was now tearing us apart.
Sometimes you just have to admit that this is your last goodbye. That people temporarily come into your life and touch your soul and leave just as abruptly as they arrive. You have to learn to appreciate their presence in the there and then, and be grateful that you even had the chance to know them in the first place.
Soak up every moment.
Jennifer doesn’t know that later that evening after I saw her into her taxi, bound for a flight to Sri Lanka, that I walked in the darkness back to the unforgiving Indian Ocean and sat for an hour and wept, feeling lost and alone in a strange country with no idea what to do next.
Eventually, I made my way back to the hostel and someone immediately handed me an ice-cold beer and a joint and I thought, hell, how miserable can you be living for free in a tropical beachside paradise?
Life, as it always does, goes on.
