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Published: March 15th 2010
Happy Christmas
be careful leaving these 2 at home with your catTravellers guide to Goa
step 1 - find a nice quiet beach and book a hut
step 2 - scope out places to eat cheap fresh seafood and eat it
step 3 - scope out places to have a nice few cheap drinks and drink them
step 4 - wake up next day, have a swim and repeat steps 2 to 4 for 10 days
(maybe hire a scooter one day to really mix it up)
What can we say about Goa? We arrived here late on the 23rd after having quite a lot of trouble with our train tickets. We had booked an overnight train from Kollam to Varkala but unfortunately we were on a wait list. What we didn't know was that if we had talked to the supervisor, we could've gotten on the train, but the train staff didn't tell us till it was too late. So we ended up on an overnight train that would get us halfway there. Once we arrived at our halfway point, Mangalore, we went straight to the supervisor there who managed to get us on the next train to Goa - it's amazing how much special treatment you get being
a westerner.
So we got to Goa 8 hours later than planned, but it was so worth it! We spent a wonderful 10 days here in Patnem, sleeping in, eating lots of very cheap seafood on the beach, and generally relaxing on the beach. We were lucky enough to be joined by some friends from home, Drouyn, Timmy, Tash and Matt. We had been so looking forward to Goa as it was our rest stop after flying through the south of India, plus our last stop on our year long trip, and it was everything we had hoped.
As we said, most of our days were spent lazily chilling on the beach, but we did adventure out of our little pocket of Patnem once or twice. We rented scooters for a day and took a drive south to a place called Turtle beach which was beautiful, and we saw some fabulous views on the way. We also took the 15 minute walk a few times to the larger beach next to us, Palolem. Palolem was the big party centre but our beach was much quieter, less people, cleaner and no cows or touts so we were pretty happy
to stay around our beach most days.
Christmas day was celebrated with a fantastic seafood feast on the beach with all of us wearing our Santa hats. And New Years was spent in a similar way, but with one major difference - lots and lots of fireworks! Anyone and everyone was letting off fireworks on the beach and it is definitely one to rival Sydney. There's something special about watching the fireworks going off just over your head, feeling like you're going to end up in hospital from a fireworks disaster, as nearly happened to a group of people sitting in a restaurant when one of the fireworks ended up rushing towards them! All in all it was a fantastic 10 days, and we've thoroughly enjoyed Goa.
Due to spending these 10 days with famous travelling photographer Drouyn we have some of his fantastic photos on Our Facebook page. Look for the Goan Extravanganza if you are interested.
We are now back in Australia. We've spent 3 weeks holidaying in Western Australia visiting Garry's family - everyone needs a holiday after a holiday right? We are now back in Sydney having just finished our first week back
at work. It's been a fabulous year, we've enjoyed every minute of it and we hope that you've enjoyed checking out what we've been up to on this blog!
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