Goa

There is only one reason that people go to Goa and that is for the beaches. They are considered some of the best in India and evoke a time of partying & laid back hippie love that the rest of the world has forgotten about. Unfortunately so has Goa. They seem to have decided that it is time to mix big city/resort life into the offering in Goa.

The locals off for a swim

Our journey from Mumbai by train was comfortable, we shared the bunks with a German couple who gave us a few ideas on where to stay and a Japanese guy that did say a word until we were leaving and then it was hugs and kisses! We decided to stay in Calagute as it was the largest beach and better connected with the rest of the region. The hotel we decided on was a 5 minute walk into the town and 10 minutes to the main entrance of the beach. The town of Calagute is now connected with the neighboring of Baga, which has a nicer feeling to it and more beach bars. We had expected beach life in Goa to be beach by day and party by night and we got half of what we wanted. We did head to the beach during the day time, we ended up staying at the section of beach under Baga rule as there seemed to be more life there. The sand was very nice (not hot) and the water was warm (not clear and blue, but warm even at 1am). When you enter a beach in the state of Goa you are accosted by sun lounge sellers, but in fact they don't cost a thing. However as they are all attached to a beach bar you have to eat and drink from there. The beach bars offer everything from water & food to massages, 'full service'. Once you find the one you like (this will take a long time as everyone wants your business you settle in for a nice relaxing day at the beach, WRONG... Every minute someone is coming up to you trying to sell you something... DVD's, Watermelon, banana's (try them mmmmh), t-shirts, jewelry, pineapple, catapults, lazer pens, manicures, peanuts, Bombay mix, rice cakes and so on. they never leave you alone. We spoke to one couple who decided they wanted to get away from this so they asked a tuk tuk driver to bring them to a nice, quite, beautiful beach and he did, they were the only ones on it except for the 20 beach sellers that had nothing else to do but spend their time selling to the only 2 people on the beach. So much so that when the lady started to fall asleep, one of them that was still trying to sell to her started to poke her and tell her she was falling asleep..

What we had for dinner!

We found that there were 3 main tourists types in this area, Indian, English & Russian. Of course most of the people that work in the resorts speak all of these languages. All of the menus are written in these languages and with that of course you have typo's (well at least in English) Snakes (instead of snacks), Sandwitches (well you can guess this one), and the list does go on and on.

So that was the beaches, so now to the night life. Well it was not what we expected, it was still nice but we had wanted to party on at least one night. We tried different parts of town, different parts of the beach and different towns and it seemed to be the same everywhere, subdued, focused around karaoke (now there is nothing wrong with karaoke except for the same drunk English women singing for 3 hours out of tune to the back catalogue of Mariah Carey) and then very loud techno/dance music (again nothing wrong with this normally except when you have 4 bars right beside each other playing different music all mixing into each other). One of the nice things is that all of the beach bars have tables out and they all put on a fireworks 'display' each night, some also dig fire pits and place fireworks in there so they go off at different times. We did see a few go shooting down the beach and exploding beside romantic couples out for a cuddle (nothing more i am sure) by the beach. One of the 'displays' involved them taking box of 250 fireworks and setting fire to the box, so be careful and stand well back. Some of the bars also have fire dancers as well, of course they come around with the tip jar afterwards.

Our favourite

While we are on the subject of night time a strange thing happened, although we were only there for a short while, in the entire time we did not once see the moon. Millions of stars, but no moon. It looked odd.

One of the days we decided that we should do some sightseeing (and book our train tickets) so we took the local bus to Panaji (bought the ticket on the bus), another one to Margao (had to get into a crazy Indian line to buy this one but they go once a bus is full so no real panic), one back to Panaji (same system as previous bus) and then one to old Goa (you pay this on the bus once the ticket guy has climb all over the place, this bus had all seats full (each seat took 2 people and most had 3) and the bus took 11 people standing, last count – because i couldn't see anymore there was 30 standing). Panaji is the capital of Goa and thats really all that can be said for it. Margao had a nice market, main square and a train station that has all of the trains heading north stopping at it (again that is all there is to the town). Old Goa is amazing, we loved, loved, loved here. The only thing to do is sightsee, but they are all free. There are loads of fantastic Churches and the entire site is surrounded by gardens. There was a novena and loads of people had gathered for mass, there was also a “fair” in the city and loads of people around. It was such a lovely afternoon.

We were very sad to leave Goa in the end, we would have loved to have spent more time and gone further south (however we have heard that this is much more expensive as all the big resort hotels have opened up here). But as the journey from Goa to Northern India is a main route not alone for tourism we had to take the next train available and cut out stay by 2 days.

What is Incredible about Goa, Well number 1 is Old Goa & number 2 would have to be how relaxed it was. It wasn't complete tranquility, it was just a slower pace.

The not Incredible part is the constant hassling to buy, the other that did really bother us personally, more disgusted us was some of the mens attitude towards women and the way they stared at the foreign women. We were sitting on one beach and 5 Indian's sat in front of us. To our right was these 2 Russian girls, at one stage 2 of the guys were sitting on Mariano's  sun lounger (while he was asleep) and they were staring at the girls sleeping. Of course this is not just an issue with Goa, but it was most oblivious here. You do have the usual issues, dirt etc, but as we have said before this is India.