trip to India

I'm not quite sure if i told anyone this but when I travelled to India - Goa (a beautiful little place along the west coast below Bombay / Mumbai) I stayed in this share house and every morning i would get up early and go down to Vagatore beach and have breaky and go for a stroll until one morning whilst taking a journey around the rocks to cross over to another beach to meet a friend I smelt a horrible smell. I thought perhaps a cow must have fallen from the cliffs overhead and died, i was looking to see if I could find the source of this horrid smell and to my horror I found a dead body - human. At first everything seemed so surreal and I wasn't sure what to do - who do I tell, should i tell anyone etc will someone maybe think I had something to do with it. I felt frozen whilst staring at this body and then I was slightly curious, who was it? what was it doing here? I realised it was a female foreigner, just like myself. She had been floating in the water and drifted ashore maybe a day or two later, I won't go intoto many  details about the state of her body - it was quite shocking. I felt sad and nervous and scared all at once and decided to return to where I had eaten breakfast and inform the Indian guys that I knew there what I had discovered. I think I must have seemed quite casual but honestly it would have been that I was still trying to take it all in. Anyway the story i got later from the guys who spoke to the police was, she was a Swedish tourist only my age (which at the time was 21) and they weren't quite sure about whether or not her death was an accident i.e. drowning, and that they would investigate further. Later that evening all I could think about was, did her family ever find out, who was sad about her departure, why did this happen to such a young girl etc, and it gave me a little kick in the ass to remind me that life is precious and that death is no closer to the aged as it is to the young. We need to treasure that thought and make the most out of the time we have on this crazy planet.

Jo

P.S. My story is quite long and a little intense but I needed to get it off my chest and share, it's one of the first things I think about when I remember my 3 months in India.