Go Goa

Call to Goa is always welcome. I love going for shorter duration each time and discovering some part of the city. Last year, we went to south Goa, Paloleum beach, not very crowded and beautiful clean beachline. It was wonderful, very rustic setting, very few people. It was off season also. The first impression was the simplicity of people. We hired a two wheeler from a family who also runs a hotel there, they didn’t even ask for any identity proof or any other document. They handed over their brand new Honda Activa to us. A good start. We leisurely spent time moving around in vehicle and on the beach.

This time, it was official cum pleasure trip. Till friday, we stayed in Panaji, in the center of the city. In the weekend we moved to an ancestral home converted into hotel. The owner is friend of one of the colleague in the office. The house is huge, very high ceiling, old style, with mother of pearl decorations on the windows and antique furniture. It had a very big garden with flowering plants, mango plantations, pineapple plants and many other variety. It was a favourite with birds also, specially sunbirds moving around the flowers. The caretaker of the house took all care to make us feel at home. The place was little inside, not many houses. Lot of fields around, and also some ponds nearby. In the morning, we spotted lot of water birds and kingfishers near the pond.

This place was very near to Calangute beach. We stayed there for two days. Daytime we spent on the beach, basking in the sun. In the afternoon, the parasailing activity starts. It was quite interesting to watch, 2 minutes of fun high up. We enjoyed good pakoras and hot tea in the evening. Not the thing people go for in Goa, but luckily tea was available at all the small shacks selling eatables.

It was saturday and we discovered that near Baga beach, which was some 20km from the place where we were staying, every saturday night, the flea market which is very popular among the tourists, is open. When we reached around 8 pm, it was already jam packed with hardly any place to park the vehicle. Driving in Goa on two wheeler is best part. One can rent out the vehicle at most places in city. With vehicle, half your problems are solved. With a good map, one can navigate easily. I wish many other cities have this concept. In the flea market, there were shops selling indian handicrafts and there was music and dance performed by a musical group mainly consisting of foreigners. Happened to see a belly dance live for the first time. The only negative part was the smoking crowd. Almost everyone there was smoking and on food stalls, getting vegetarian food was very difficult, they hardly had anything for people like us. It was a different experience to be in the midst of high spirited crowd. We normally do not frequent pubs or dance clubs, maybe that is why we were having this kind of feeling. We had a hired two wheeler, so we left before it was midnight, to avoid any problems of late night. It was a memorable event. On sunday, we wanted to leave by afternoon. We were surprised to find that all the markets are closed on Sunday so we could not do our cashewnut and mango shopping. Felt sad that we are not taking back anything. Next time we will do the cashew shopping the first thing. Goa is also famous for its teracota wares. We left that also for the next trip.

Some more pictures of this trip are Here.