The wonderful world of Goa

  Goa, India
Friday, October 5, 2007

What can we say??? We have been named 'beach backpackers' for our love of Goa but it was oh so glorious. Apart from the endless dogs and cows theyre everywhere!

Cows vs dogs

We ended up spending over 5 weeks here, but before you think LAZY BASTARDS we are proud to have covered pretty much the entire Goan coast......heres how! (again this is the past tense, apologies!)
So, we got the train from Bombay to Goa, on which we met a superb dutch couple called Maria and Kasper and we swapped card games. The train took an extra 3 hours, making it 13hours in total and our first Goa stop was Anjuna/Baga, the north tourist place to be - in the season. It pissed it down 24/7 for the first few days but we were happy to see beach after the hustle and bustle of Bombay. We had a great day renting out mopeds in the torrential rain

..in torrential rain

and exploring neighbouring beaches, and spent many an hour in the swimming pool, watching TV, playing cards, drinking and generally relaxing. We also took a bike ride to Aguada fort and jail, and saw some tiny tiny baby pigs.

Tiny tiny pigs

Our next stop was the great 'Maggies place',

We lived in the green house

run by the lovely Simon. Here everything in the world was great and the scorching sun came out for 10days straight, and we had our very own teddy bear shaped pool all to ourselves, we couldn't leave. We had lots of fun on the beach playing in the sand,

Kate's smiley face

Darren's sacred work of art

Buried alive

We found 'Why not?' an English bar a 15 minute walk away ran by terry and his wife from Nottingham and we ate some good pies with gravy and played bingo and won 1500 rupees oh yeah!!!

In the english bar

An American man took us out to dinner, we saw many a sunset

Baga sunset

and even went to the worst water park ever! We went on an unnecessarily long mission to find a blowup ball, only for a small Indian kid to burst it within 10seconds of blowing it up. We also had many a rendition of a shitty aqua song that the local children were learning a cheerleader dance do for the village fete. On our first attempt at leaving 3 English people - Tom ,Charlie and James - turned up, so we couldn't really leave then could we? And another week of Maggies was had with the added fun of friends and poker, although we blamed them for the return of the rain.
We sadly left Maggies to do the 'tourist' thing in Panaji, Goa's capital.This was necessary as 'we're going to have a Kate and Darren day today' (ie do not very much) made us realise we should be more productive. We were so proud to go on our first Indian bus

This is why bus journeys aren't fun

, it wasn't until an hour in that we realised we had left the bloody passports behind, so we sheepishly returned to Maggies once more.
In panjim we ate dominoes Pizza, and went to the famous church and temples and art galleries in Old Goa, which was a good day out and made us feel good about ourselves.

Panaji Temple

Benaulim, a local fishing village was our next stop, with Colva a moped ride away. Here we got hounded by people selling jewellery and sarongs on the beach using their 'white-man radar' to perfection. Benaulim was a quiet fishing village and very pretty, we had the best tandoori chicken here.
On the bus to Palolem from Margao, we got a nice surprise when we saw some familiar looking sideburns approach the bus. Oh yes Tom and Charlie were coming too! Palolem was a mini paradise,

Palolem

small but ace and we met a real nice crowd there, most notably Karl, Jack, Becky and Kirsty.

The girls

With just one bar and after bar, everyone was always in the same place.

And the boys

We could body board in the surf, we took a boat ride

On the boat ride

which in retrospect was a bit poo but quite fun really. We got hassled even more on the beach for even more things and there were a lot of perverts around but we discovered throwing things at them was a good way to get rid. We had superb deadly nachos, a great poker night and some late night beach antics.
We were sad to leave Palolem but seriously realised we needed to leave Goa - there was no coast left to do! But we don't regret at all the time we spent here, we met some amazing people and saw the most amazing beaches in the world! So, now we were ready to see what everyone kept referring to as 'The Real India'.