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Published: September 4th 2018
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After blowing the budget on dinner last night today was always going to be chilled we had a leisurely breakfast, checked our travel plans for later in the day and headed out to the Goa state museum. The museum is now shut. The collection has supposedly been moved to the Adil Shah Palace but on arrival there it also looked very shut....
Quick change to plan B - a walk up the hill and back around to our hostel. The walk took us past some stunning buildings and the higher ground is obviously where the more affluent inhabitants reside. The views from the top are beautiful and exploring the old Portuguese buildings a pleasure. Exploring away from the busy main roads I could understand why people like Panaji. We arrived back at the hostel in time for some late lunch.
In the afternoon we caught the bus to Magdoan, where we were to catch our train. There’s a shuttle service there so it’s relatively quick and seating only, no standing. It’s still pretty squashed and we ended up next to an American chap who was travelling after finishing grad school. He had obviously not enjoyed Mumbai which reassured us
Panaji
Pretty street & location of viva Panaji restaurant that our decision to stay 3 days in Mumbai rather than the original 6 was probably a good one. We altered our plans so that we’d have more time in Udaipur.
Magdoan is described as a transport hub and the only thing to do there seems to be to see the municipal gardens. Arriving with plenty of time to spare we walked from the station to the gardens to relax with a book for a while. Whilst pretty they are very small and surrounded by busy roads on all sides. It was a pleasure to see lots of local kids running around having fun though. The rest of the area we walked through was fairly uninspiring.
In the evening we headed to a recommended restaurant to find it shut. This was particularly frustrating as we are not usually organised enough to have pre planned where to eat. Dodging the rain we managed to find a reasonable restaurant on the way back to the station. This is not a nice city and we didn’t feel that we had missed anything by not spending longer there. Unsurprisingly the train was late but at least it arrived and we were on
our way again.
Our original travel plans hadn’t included any time in Goa but as Stephen didn’t want to fly from Hampi to Aurangabad we added it to break up the rather long journey by train. Overall I’m glad we went. It’s a relaxing place to be, relatively hassel free with plenty of places to eat good food. Had we chosen to we could have gone to see more beaches or ventured out to the spice plantations but these didnt particularly appeal to us (the sea isn’t safe for swimming during monsoon and we‘re not really sitting on the beach people). Overall we cant really understand why people choose to come just to Goa for their holidays, especially since most of the other travellers we met complained about how touristy the beaches are even in the off season.
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