Pluses: No crowds, great deals at hotels, the landscape a whole shade card of green (especially central and south Goa) and lovely weather (if you love the rains like we do :-)
Minuses: You can't swim in the sea and quite often, resorts shut their pools during this time as well.
This time we decided we would try something "different". So we swapped South Goa for the North and the rains for early summer and made our bookings for February quite early, in December last year.
Having paid for a non-refundable, airfare-inclusive package at a four star resort in Candolim, we found ourselves forced to take time off smack in the middle of an impossibly busy February.
I worked through the flight on my laptop (and would continue to do so in bits and bobs, through our break). A pleasant hour long pre-paid cab ride from the airport, we were at The Whispering Palms. First shock: It seemed to sit right in the middle of a busy, noisy area - all shops and roads and crowds... and no whispers.
Everything seemed scaled down from the pictures on the website - the whole resort was a miniature of its web avatar, especially the pool, which was like an amoeba out of a school textbook and I'm not takling about just the shape.
The real whammy however, was the number of red, old, overweight East Europeans, lying around the amoeba pool in various states of undress. If ugliness could blind, I would be typing this on a braille keyboard. (I've spared you guys - almost all the pics are of the good stuff :-)
Anyway, we soon realised that they were not limited to our resort alone. Everywhere we went in North Goa, it seemed that we were in the middle of an East European invasion; a joint-forces landing party, lead by the Russians, with Polish and German folk all thrown in as part of the geriatric budget coup.
The apparent strategy was to first blind us, with various forms of jiggling cellulite that fabric could barely contain, then crush us, under their sheer weight.
Every row of shops was like a budget tourist's impression of a Noah's ark of Indian stuff: tea, spices, handicrafts, leather, aromatics and textiles. As you would expect with most traps, the things on offer were very mediocre examples of each category.
Even the signs were in Russian and shopkeepers called out to them in their pidgin East European accents.
For food, there was the bland, all-European fare at most restaurants (with quadruple-bypass-oily, terrible tasting Indian food as the alternative).
On the beach, the larger-than-life Russian Ship, seemingly run aground, rounded up the scene and made us Indians look like we were the foreigners there.
some of the fitter teletubbies watch their mother ship
(I'm sparing you the really gory stuff)
If all this wasn't enough, we added our personal idiosyncrasies of vegetarianism and sobriety to the final mix. We might as well have been green with antennae buzzing, for the reactions we got.
So I rant-rant, but was it all bad?
Na...here are the highlights of the good stuff:
We hired a scooter and armed with sunblock and shades, were able to escape Southwards everyday, to parts less infested by European telly tubbies.
We greatly enjoyed our many swims in the sea, at the calm Sinquerim beach.
In central and south Goa, we found enough examples of shops selling lovely Goan crafts and sweets.
We also discovered this truly delightful Italian restaurant in Candolim called Tuscanny Gardens, run hands-on by a lovely Dutch-Jain couple.
They had a great selection of vegetarian dishes on their menu. All the food - from the starters to the main course to the dessert - was perfect. Wonderfully simple, flavourful fare. A treat for the soul.
But before any of the good stuff listed above came my way, I went for a run by the sea, with the sun setting over the horizon. And that made all the difference.
Let me explain.
Having suffered a near-death experience at being exposed to the oversized human lobsters and feeling very much cheated by the zoomed-out dimensions of the resort, I wonder how I will find the motivation to act and make the best of the situation.
Then I remember that the Sinquerim beach is hardly a minute's walk away. So I get into my running gear, sans shoes, and go for a barefoot run.
I leave my ipod back, so I can think in peace.
I run by the water's edge, letting the waves lap around my ankles at times. It's a funny feeling, the sand under my bare feet; harder where the water does not reach it, softer where the waves have just washed over. I concentrate on my running form, my breath and the sound of the waves. The rhythm takes over and I find my own "thing" in this otherwise strange land. I find peace.
An interesting aside: I ran into these giant brown-black tubes of canvas that looked like giant leeches bloated on sea water. I looked curiously at the first few to my right, and saw that they were breaking the impact of the waves, allowing for a small strip of beach to still run on. Then I reached a point where they are the last bastion against the crashing waves - so now, I had to jump onto one of them and run.
They were hard, as if tightly packed with sand. (I later learn they indeed were, and placed there by the authorities to prevent erosion and save the beach) In places, they are full of sea water, which must have gotten in through a leak and stayed trapped. In those, it was like running on a water bed.
But it was all good, like running an obstacle course.
Heart pumping, synapses firing, gray cells ticking, I began to hatch the various parts of the plan to avoid the European Barbapappas (am I the only one who remembers these German shape-shifting cartoon characters from the DD era of the eighties?) and the world created to cater to them.
Moral of the story: (quoting Peanuts) No problem is so great it can't be run away from. Cheers!
You missed Igor exotica:-))
ReplyDeletesahi! It reads like tons of fun. The experience itself must have been much better!
ReplyDeleteLage Raho Mahesh-bhai!