Poker in GOA, INDIA Part 1 Preface

It's been a while since my last post. Sorry, I've been busy. In fact, I'm posting this out of order -- skipping over two tremendous poker trips -- one to Colorado and another to Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Missouri. They'll have to wait. (Or you can check them out in Poker Player Newspaper and on www.pokerplayernewspaper.com). I want to write about the trip I just came back from in Goa, India.

If I took hallucinagetic drugs like LSD or mushrooms and had a wild trip about some tropical world with people who didn't look like, sound like, or act like me, with the strangest driving I've seen -- it might look something like India. But that's as close as I could get to imagining what this place was really like. I'll describe it in more detail as I go along. But know this -- inside of this completely foreign and strange cocoon is a poker room that is complete familiar. It is the comforting aspect of being a poker player. One can swim in the most foreign waters and find these islands of the familiar.

I flew to India on the day after Thanksgiving -- leaving at 11PM on Friday night -- after celebrating a Sabbath dinner with my older daughter Rebecca (of poker dealing and poker writing fame) and my lovely wife Debi. I wanted to experience, first hand, poker in the small state of Goa. My younger daughter Hannah had been studying in Delhi and wanted to take a vacation when her term was over. So this beach resort of a place, with what I thought was the only legal poker in India, seemed like the logical place for us to meet up. It turned out to be ideal.

The flight from New York to Goa is not for the faint of heart or antsy of foot. I have restless leg syndrome (RLS) -- a real disease that afflicts millions I'm told. It's symptoms are exactly as its title describes -- feet and legs that can't rest for very long. Diet and medication can make a difference -- but I'll be damned if I'll take any more pills -- and I haven't figured out what to eat or not eat to lessen the ailment. So I look at a two hour concert as a very difficult experience. A flight to Vegas can be torture. So 14 hours followed by 4 hours seemed like complete, unbearable agony.

In reality, thanks to the wonderfully distracting luxury of a seatback TV screen and 300 movie to choose from -- it turned out to be bearable agony.

I arrived at 4:00 AM on Sunday (Indian time is 10 1/2 hours later than Eastern Standard time -- so my trip only really lasted for a total of about 18 hour). My beautiful daughter Hannah (whom I took to the Rio in Las Vegas for her 21st birthday) greeted me at the airport. We immediately got in a cab to go to our hotel in Baga Beach, about an hour north of the airport -- and about 15 minutes north of the casinos in Panaji. The drive was something surrealistic.

First of all, I was in INDIA -- this complete foreign-to-me land. "I'm in India" I kept saying to myself as I looked out the window of the cab. I tried to soak in all of the sites. Though it was dark, there were many. First, there was the vegetation. It was lush, over grown, filled with palm leaves and broad fonds of many varieties I couldn't identify. There were all of these dilapidated buildings and shacks by the side of the road -- storefronts in English and Hindi and languages I couldn't identify (I later learned they were local dialects of the region). And there were signs in Russian of all things! (I later learned that there are many Russians who regularly vacation in this area). I couldn't get enough of the many people either -- many walking in sandals and barefoot, carrying baskets on their heads -- at 4:30 in the morning no less. And the cows! Big ones, horned ones, humped ones, all sorts of cows -- not just one or two -- roaming everywhere I looked -- crossing the street, eating by the side of the road, stopping traffic, wandering through traffic. I had heard about this but to see it -- amazing.

But as fascinating as all of these sites were, I hardly noticed them because of the driving! It seemed insane -- maybe even suicidal at first. The roads we traveled from airport to hotel were, at their widest, about 18 feet of pavement wide. And yet, often, there were at least four vehicles abreast. Cars passed each other with little or no regard to oncoming traffic. Cars were often squeezed on to the dirt shoulder or forced to quickly apply their brakes to avoid onrushing traffic.

All this while my daughter was eagerly sharing her experiences with me. So I had one eye on my daughter (and both ears), one eye on the scenery, and both eyes watching for what I feared might be a fatal head-on crash. You can see why I was nauseated and had a headache during the trip.

Even so, no worse for the wear, roughly 60 minutes later we arrived at the Colonia Santa Maria, our lovely hotel in Baga Beach, Goa. Unfortuately, since it was about 5:15 in the morning, and check in wasn't until noon, they didn't have a room for us -- even though both of us were completely exhausted. Even so, we set out to walk along the road and then the beach to kill time. We walked for two hours, as the sun finally rose and we got to see the beach. It was weirdly beautiful -- with a slightly frown sand, beautiful and fairly large waves (about 6-8 ft I'd estimate). There were also dozens -- perhaps even hundreds of stray dogs running up and down the beach. They weren't threatening or aggressive -- very timid actually. Still, they were annoyingly plentiful. There were also cows on the beach -- and even a ram! It was early, so the hawkers weren't yet out. But there were already quite a few walkers, as we were. Only most of them carried thin sticks -- about 5 feet long. I learned that they were for the dogs.

No one cleaned up after the dogs or the cows (or the ram) so we had to watch where we stepped. There was also quite a bit of refuse and garbage among the shells and waves. And the aroma was more of a dump than a beach. Cape Cod it surely wasn't. Still, when I focused on the waves, and I contemplated that I was in India, it was a beautiful and awesome experience.

Still, I was happy to be back the the airconditioned, tidy lobby of our hotel.