It's Goa, 1979. Very different from Goa 2008. For one thing no package tours go there. Life is slow, travellers arrive in Panjim (or Panaji) off the Konkan Shakti 24 hours after it sails out of Bombay, not on a Boeing 777 direct from London or Munich. As for hotels …
I took a room in a house in Calangute, not that far from Mapusa (or Mapça, whichever is in vogue now). There was a cluster of mud-walled, thatch-roofed houses sitting together in a palm grove that gave onto the beach. No electricity, no running water. An idyll. The family was most proud of one facility they had installed recently for the comfort of western travellers - there were no holiday-makers back then - they had installed a toilet. Pure, gleaming white porcelain it was, sitting like a throne on a raised mound of hard earth behind the house with a straw fence around for privacy. Never yet been used.
I think the family were a bit annoyed that I chose to use their own original arrangements on the first day - a hole in the ground secreted in a less conspicuous corner of the yard and screened off by a mud wall. I knew that as soon as I would have sat on the porcelain a crowd would have gathered to peer through the generous gaps in the fence to catch a glimpse of … well we get the picture, and it wouldn't have been a pretty one.
That night however I decided to ingratiate myself with my landlord so I ventured out to use his toilet. By then I knew that all the children were asleep and that no-one would have eyesight good enough to be able to penetrate the darkness well enough to see much. So off I went.
I took a torch, the one luxury item I allowed myself when travelling. I took my little jar of water as well, having forgone the luxury of paper.
My fear was snakes, and I intended turning the torch off once I had found my way to the toilet. Inside I shone the beam all round the walls and floor making sure no reptile was lurking. Then I turned the light into the toilet bowl itself just to be certain, and resting just where I would have expected water, was a large pink and black wet living thing. It moved. I moved. It wasn't a snake.
Round the back of the hut I found an enormous water buffalo, its tongue stuck into the open pipe leading from the toilet
The arrangements where that everything deposited in the porcelain bowl would slither on out the back of the hut into an open drain, which in turn led on into a stream that flowed into the sea. Problem was the buffalo had got there first.
Now I don't know how far a buffalo's tongue can reach, but I wasn't risking lowering my butt onto that seat.
