It's Goa good! Palolem

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With Dave's stomach finally being stable, we were able to make a break away from Palolem and head somewhere a bit more lively, Anjuna. Apparently the only way to travel around Goa, other than hired vehicles, is the local bus. We had to get four buses, Palolem to Margao (60rs), Margao to Panjim (50rs), Panjim to Mapusa (15rs), then Mapusa to Anjuna (15rs). I've been to Anjuna before on my previous trip and it's the place to be for a young person in Goa.

It's one of the only places where music continues to play after the 10PM noise ban. There's a number of clubs down the beach front, Shiva Valley at the end of the beach (the most popular), and Nyex at the top of the beach.



We arrived on the 8^th, having planned to meet up with Cam on 9^th, but he got stuck in Varanasi then Mumbai! So we decided against the Shiva Valley rave we'd gone all the way for (in hindsight regrettably) so we could spend the money another night when Cam arrived.

So we chilled for a few days until he arrived, and then chilled some more...When he eventually arrived on the 11^th we were already ready to leave Goa. It's a nice place to chill out and party, but it's too expensive!.



On Friday (I think, I've lost track of the days) we rented out some scooters for the day (300rs each) and went to check out some local beaches and a fort. Driving on Indian roads is so fun! I might drive crazy at home, but that's how you're meant to drive here. From the inside of a taxi or tuk-tuk it looks so dangerous, but it's actually really easy. Admittedly it wasn't the middle of a really busy city, but still.

We saw a pretty cool ruined fort overlooking Vagator beach, the view somewhat spoiled by a big resort!

Fort Agueda was the next stop, a pretty intact “fort”. In fact it was more of a viewing station overlooking the bay with ramparts, nevertheless it was pretty cool and there was a good view.



We ran into trouble when we decided to head for Old Goa (colonial style buildings and churches etc) via Panjim. In hindsight it was stupid to drive into a city without the required international drivers license, but when we hired them the guy didn't even check if we had licenses. He took Cam's student card! So we were unaware that it'd be a problem. Anyway we're driving across this bridge, me and Cam are quite far ahead, so we get to the other side and pull over to wait for Dave...the problem was we'd just unknowingly voluntarily pulled over at a police check point. “Nish” (on channel 6) walks over and asks us to get our licenses out, so we present our UK/Aussie licenses to him. Obviously this doesn't hold up and he starts going on about going to court on Monday and taking the bikes away for the night etc...

This goes on for about 20 minutes, and we're just waiting for the inevitable price we'd have to pay him to get out of this. He asked for 15,000rs! (£150) we didn't have that much, and we told him so.

Nish then asks us how much we have, we count up and Cam's carrying 6000rs (£60) so we give him that. Nish then asks for an extra 1000rs! (£10) The cheeky c*nt. We cough up. He then tells us we're fine to continue the journey to Old Goa, no problem. If another cop catches us we have to tell them “Nish on channel 6 has them”. By the time we arrived in Old Goa after that fiasco there wasn't enough time to see any of it! Nice drive though.



We decided to go out that night, we went down to the local off license type place to buy two 750ml bottles of 42.5%!r(MISSING)um for 170rs!!! (about £1.70) madness!

We drink these in the restaurant before heading to the beach. As you can guess we had a good night.





We spent the next day planning our trip to Andaman Islands (Google image it!) which we'll reach via a 3-5 day boat from Chennai, stopping off in a couple of places on the way to Chennai. The next day we book a bus to Bijapur in Karnataka, our first stop. It's meant to be the “Agra of the south” (Agra is where the Taj Mahal is), The second biggest dome building in the world and loads of temples/citadel etc of antiquity.

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