We were in Goa for 3 nights and 4 days. The hotel was right on the beach. The weather was absolutely wonderful.
You cannot truly soak in the
life style and adjust to life the Goan way in 3 or 4 days. You need to stay for a bit longer (like a couple of months!) to really get into the way of the land. That's probably why a lot of people I saw in Goa were from elsewhere and were dreading their flights home. The last of the charter flights back from Goa to England, Russia and Sweden were ending at the end of April.
The nice thing about the beaches of Goa (unlike so many other beaches in India) is that it is clean. There are plenty of scantily clad foreigners and a little army of locals who are trying to sell everything useless under the sun to these tourists at exhorbitant prices. And for the most part these tourists convert everything to their respective currency and say oh wow, what a bargain! Now I do agree that they are a bargain and that's probably what keeps these locals employed but still... some of the prices I heard quoted surprised me immensely.
The other nice (and maybe not so nice) thing was that these locals avoided me. I guess they figured I was local enough and wouldn't bother with their sales pitch.
I also noticed the huge numbers of pie-dogs (see my post on Indian dogs) all over the beach. These little critters seem to ha
ve no home and owner and yet seem to have a wonderful time on the beach! They travel in huge packs and live off the charity of the people around them.
Our hotel, the Marquis beach resort was right on the beach (mind you the beach right outside was not much of a beach, but you could take a short walk and get on better flat beach) and was a decent place to stay in. The service, especially for breakfast, was a little trying at times. Thankfully, there were a lot of good food places close by and we took full advantange of it.
There are quite a few food places around where we were. The returning favourite by far was Flambe's. The service was good, the food was good, the seating was good. There was even a helpful fellow named Suresh (from Haryana, who visited Toronto at some point in his life with his uncle who was in the navy...) who gave us ideas on what to do, see and eat in Goa. Nice fellow. There was also the fellow selling some clothes etc from various parts of North India there who was quite helpful.
We also went to a couple of other food places that made it into some traveller magazines. The food was good there too. One of them was closing down (something to do with an Octopus I think).
We did manage to go to a night club one night. It was not quite Tito's (that place advertised with a truck driving around the area blaring music and had dancers on top of the truck), but was a bar none-the-less. It was called Ten Downing Street and featured a (forgive me, politically correct people) white girl dancing in front of the mirror. It was rather odd to see her dancing by herself but that seemed to be the rule. The bouncers were quick to stop any male attention toward this lady. The bar upstairs was tended by Mizo girls. Strange where one ends up... Mizoram is about as far away from Goa as possible and yet these people seemed everywhere.
You cannot truly soak in the
life style and adjust to life the Goan way in 3 or 4 days. You need to stay for a bit longer (like a couple of months!) to really get into the way of the land. That's probably why a lot of people I saw in Goa were from elsewhere and were dreading their flights home. The last of the charter flights back from Goa to England, Russia and Sweden were ending at the end of April.The nice thing about the beaches of Goa (unlike so many other beaches in India) is that it is clean. There are plenty of scantily clad foreigners and a little army of locals who are trying to sell everything useless under the sun to these tourists at exhorbitant prices. And for the most part these tourists convert everything to their respective currency and say oh wow, what a bargain! Now I do agree that they are a bargain and that's probably what keeps these locals employed but still... some of the prices I heard quoted surprised me immensely.
The other nice (and maybe not so nice) thing was that these locals avoided me. I guess they figured I was local enough and wouldn't bother with their sales pitch.
I also noticed the huge numbers of pie-dogs (see my post on Indian dogs) all over the beach. These little critters seem to ha
ve no home and owner and yet seem to have a wonderful time on the beach! They travel in huge packs and live off the charity of the people around them.Our hotel, the Marquis beach resort was right on the beach (mind you the beach right outside was not much of a beach, but you could take a short walk and get on better flat beach) and was a decent place to stay in. The service, especially for breakfast, was a little trying at times. Thankfully, there were a lot of good food places close by and we took full advantange of it.
There are quite a few food places around where we were. The returning favourite by far was Flambe's. The service was good, the food was good, the seating was good. There was even a helpful fellow named Suresh (from Haryana, who visited Toronto at some point in his life with his uncle who was in the navy...) who gave us ideas on what to do, see and eat in Goa. Nice fellow. There was also the fellow selling some clothes etc from various parts of North India there who was quite helpful.
We also went to a couple of other food places that made it into some traveller magazines. The food was good there too. One of them was closing down (something to do with an Octopus I think).
We did manage to go to a night club one night. It was not quite Tito's (that place advertised with a truck driving around the area blaring music and had dancers on top of the truck), but was a bar none-the-less. It was called Ten Downing Street and featured a (forgive me, politically correct people) white girl dancing in front of the mirror. It was rather odd to see her dancing by herself but that seemed to be the rule. The bouncers were quick to stop any male attention toward this lady. The bar upstairs was tended by Mizo girls. Strange where one ends up... Mizoram is about as far away from Goa as possible and yet these people seemed everywhere.
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