Another Irrelevant Blog
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So several things have happened since New Years, but out of respect for the linear nature of the universe, I’ll begin with the first event of noteworthy proportion, which was New Years, and how Sam killed the hippy vibe.

There were two options available to us on Om Beach. The first was to go over to the nearby beach on the right, Kudlee, where some trance party organisers who were organising a big party from the 5th to the 7th were going to blast some electronic tunes from the backpackers they were staying at, and the second was to go to the hippy beach of Paradise, where neither Sam nor I had been.

I was veering towards Kudlee, but whilst having a nap, the other 7 or so South Africans that happened to be in Om at the same time as us, who we were chilling with for that period, came to the consensus that Paradise was the way of the future, and so I woke up from the concrete slab that was under the paper thin mattress, that we so lovingly call a bed, to Sam telling me to get the hell up or else we’ll miss the last boat.

The last boat goes just before sunset and there is no escaping from Paradise until the morning.

Paradise beach is small, barely a couple of hundred metres wide, and all the hippies there dress up like hippies, complete with hairflowers, strange face painting, and annoyingly technophobic attitudes.

There are a couple of shack style restaurants, and verdant palm trees creating a large shaded area just before the beach begins. Our group threw down cirongs and blankets in the corner of the shaded area and proceeded to drink vodka (after dinner of course.)

Aside from us, there was a horde of hippies cloistered in a tight group around a circle of drummers, who were very reluctant to let me get involved, surrounded by another group of people who were taking dancing to the drumming very seriously.

This was fun for a while.

This got boring by 10:30.

After New Years had come and gone, the drumming was still going but only halfheartedly, and Sam decided to ask the nearest shack-restaurant if she could attach her i-pod to the speakers, and I went to sit on the steps to keep her company.

As her pop hit indie rock (crap) blared from the crackling speakers, the hippies, slowly at first, and then in droves, fled from the false sanctity of the palm trees in all directions, as, in equal proportions, extremely drunk Indian locals appeared from nowhere to have their idea of a good time. This idea seemed to consist of being a part of a large group of men aged 16 to 25, and dancing suggestively with each other, and screaming at the top of their lungs incoherently.

This was not ideal.

Eventually the entire area was deserted of hippies, and ultimately someone came up to Sam, tapped her on the shoulder, and explained this isn’t really the vibe.

Once the music stopped, the locals happily screamed nothings into the sky for the next few hours until they got tired, and the hippies slowly returned to make a big fire on the beach, where they all looked like rejects from the set of Pirates of the Carribeans.

Sam later received a lecture from a hippy explaining that technology is bad, and that only natural music is good. I suspect he was a ketamine addict. Apparently you can buy ketamine over the counter in India, and lots of people come specifically to paradise beach to take horse tranquilizers and do nothing for a while.

We didn’t totally buy the hippies there, especially not the American ones. It’s hard to take a hippy seriously if they have an American accent. I don’t know why that is.

Everyone fell asleep on the beach except for me, and I stood with my feet in the sea until the sun rose, thought about hopping the first boat which appeared from the twilight darkness, decided against it, thought about hopping the second one, and then kicked people awake for the third one, where we hastily made our departure.

Don’t get me wrong I like hippies. Just not the hardcore right wing extremist ones, although listening to the drummers (“sure man, in a second, we’ll lend you a drum in a second,” whatever) and watching the rather average firespinners (“sorry don’t have enough fuel man, don’t have enough fuel,”) I felt a great deal of satisfaction knowing I could out-hippy any of these guys with one arm tied behind my back and still listen to my i-pod, catch buses, and use computers.

I wonder how they got into the country.

Maybe they caught a pony.