My Trip to Goa: Day 4

This is last post in my Goa Trip series. I am posting this after a long gap of posting Day 3 experiences at Goa.

So back to Day 3 in Goa, we spent day exploring beaches on our Kinetic. Before evening, we realized that we hadn’t yet booked ourselves a return ticket to Mumbai. Trains were all booked. We were to spend the next day in Mumbai before catching the night flight to Delhi. We certainly could not miss spending one day with friends and family in Mumbai.

So we set out to Paulo travels office in Panjim on our Kinetics. Panjim is about 35 kms from Candolim Island. We had no clue about the roads. We asked around and used the ferry on Mandovi river to cross it. As soon as I landed in Panjim, my eyes fell on the movie theater in front. It was then playing Khoya Khoya Chand, a movie I had not watched and wanted to watch. My first instinct was, let’s watch this movie here. Of course, my friends berated me. You have come all the way to Goa just to watch a movie that you can watch in Delhi? I had no choice but to agree with them. 😦

View of a Panjim church at night. We just passed by them.

We asked around and rushed to Kadamba bus stand. To our dismay, there were no tickets available for Mumbai at either Raj travels or Paulo travels. We asked around and finally managed to book ourselves a Volvo for next day to Goregaon in Mumbai. Our main purpose fulfilled, we decided to buy goodies from Panjim for our families.

We went to a shop to buy cashew, feni and chocolates. There were varieties of cashew available: salted, spiced, peppered, plain and few more I don’t remember. We bought a traditional Goan dessert called Bebinca. This was perhaps the only Goan cuisine that we could take as it was available in vegetarian form, without eggs. In Goa, you can find every available world cuisine for tourists: German, Cantonese, Italian (we had trouble finding pasta though), American, British (scrambled eggs and bacon was a common offering). Sea food is famous. But we were all vegetarians in our group. Sometimes it was bit difficult to find good vegetarian food. We can’t say we would not find it, we did but it was expensive. And it was not always what we wanted. Our food preference seemed to be second in comparison to meeting food needs of the foreigners.

Back to the goodies, we were buying I wanted to buy liquor chocolates. There are some really good ones available there. But my friends dissuaded me, eventually the shopkeeper intervened to tell me, “Madam, your friend are right. These are actually very bitter. Most people don’t like them.” I then bought other chocolates instead. So much for liquor chocolates being Kajol’s favorite in U, Me and Hum.

After buying our goodies, we decided to take a tour of Mandovi river on the cruise ship. It was 31st night, most of the tourists and Goans had flocked together to take cruise ride. There were two cruise ships available, both were well illuminated and decorated with colourful light bulbs. During the ride, ship’s troupe performed traditional Goan dances. We were pleasantly surprised to see Goans of all age groups dancing, without any inhibitions, to the tunes playing on the ship. All in all it was a nice ride.

New year hour was approaching in few hours. We had been out of hotel since morning and had not had the opportunity to change our sweaty, sandy clothes at all. I did not want to enter the new year without putting on the best dress in a beach party. We rushed back to our hotels to change and join a new year party at our home beach, Candolim beach. Our this wish got us bit too late to watch the amazing fire works at the beach. All the beaches, as we had noticed in the morning, had accumulated huge amount of fireworks especially for the new year eve. We could only watch remnants of the fireworks at the beach. 😦

Nevertheless, we reached the beach dressed in our best clothes. There were parties going all round. But we realized with worry and dismay that all the beach shacks had run out of food after 12, all they had was drinks. Can you guess, who came to our rescue? Good old Dominos! (Dominos probably open there all night in this season and deliveries were also on at nights.) We gorged on Domino’s pizzas at night in relief. Imagine having new year dinner at Dominos in Goa!

We decided to be beach bum for next entire day on 1st January. We had our Volvo ride to Mumbai at 8 in the evening. Dressed in our beach gear, we spent entire day eating Chinese and drinking wines at the beach. We raced on the beach, dipped in water, walked in sand and lazed on the beach deck till the sun set.

It was easy to spot couples hand-in-hand at the beach.

I never could go very very deep in water.

My only regret: I could not go too deep into water as I did not know how to swim. I watched foreigner kids with envy as they went deeper into water. Nevertheless, I made best of beach. I collected sea shells at the beach, like I used to when I was at school. I danced, walked and ran in water. I lazed in sand, under shaded canopy and gorged good food and drinks.

It was heaven being a beach bum. 🙂

Read all previous day posts here:

My Trip to Goa: Day 1
My Trip to Goa: Day 2
My Trip to Goa: Day 3