Nearly nirvana

I have now entered phase three of my Indian journey. Let's call it thelying-in-a hammock-on-a-washed-up-hippie's-paradise-with-agang-of-soap-dodging-Israeli-backpackers-sipping-coconuts-and-smoking-extremely-strong-Indian-charis-phase.

I am staying on the aptly named 'Om Beach' in Gokarna, about 12 hours away from Mysore, 5 hours away from Goa and about a million miles from anything resembling real life. It's the kind of place where you might be having a bowl of fruit for breakfast in a beach cafe quietly reading your book, only to look up and find a middle aged woman stripped to the waist, saggy breasts sweating in the morning sun practising an orgasmic beach yoga on a rock, flinging her dreadlocks to the heavens in an ecstatic sun salutation. Of course there are also the crusty white men in loin cloths playing wooden flutes on thebeach, who look like they may have been there since 1968 but who I like to think, are actually cashiers at HSBC Crawley on a two week package tour - and picked up their clip-on dreads at the high street joke shop before they arrived.

But without doubt, my favourite new friend here is a Canadian fellow by the name of Jonathan. He looks like an albino sadhu, with a knotted ginger beard almost a foot long and a pair of oatmeal fisherman paintstied at his sinewy hips. He has the uncanny ability to catch your eye in a moment of weakness, hold your gaze with his intense pink little eyes and regale you for an entire evening with monologues on merits of Canadian lawns vs British lawns, to scaffolding, to the rules of chess. Sometimes I think people come to the beach in India, grow a beard and an intense-seeming gaze, simply to compensate for the absence of any real personality - but that's probably just me being cruel and unforgiving again.

You might think that all I do is sit about in cafes and on the beach all day sunbathing and bitching about my fellow man - but there is alot more to reaching nirvana than that. At night we try to light bonfires, but usually get too stoned and end up flat on our backs gazing at the stars for a few hours, and then walking up the rocky path to my beach hut in fits of hysterics about the cow on the beach who got it's horns stuck in a hippies' sarong... or about when you try and order banana and nutella pancakes for pudding and it arrives with complimentary pieces of carrot and cauliflower.

That's the best thing about an Indian beach holiday: you may be sitting on the most beautiful white sandy beach in the world, looking out into the tranquil Arabian sea, eating fresh salty pineapple - until a cow comes and craps on your towel, a 60-strong group of Indian men gather aroundyour boobs and ask "madam one photo please?" and you get back to your hut only to find that your bikini has been eaten by rats. So you see, it's nearly nirvana - but not quite.