Goa Trip Part 2

I see your hair is burnin'

Hills are filled with fire

If they say I never loved you

You know they are a liar

Drivin' down your freeways

Midnight alleys roam…

Cops in cars,

The topless bars

Never saw a woman...

So alone,

So alone,

So alone,

So alone

Motel Money,

Murder Madness

Let's change the mood from glad to sadness… 

The first thing we did next morning was to return the Santro which we’d gotten as a replacement for the Swift. We exchanged it for 3 more Activas.

At Emmanuel's

We had brunch at BAGA beach in Emmanuel’s Beach Café and the food was yummy. The vegetarian sizzler, the tomato and cheese pasta, the spaghetti bolognaise pasta were some delicacies which were appetizing. Although the food is similar to what we get in Bangalore, the Goans sell their food with a heavy price tag! The brunch at Emmanuel’s costed us approximately 300bucks per person. But I shouldn’t be complaining because the food and service was appreciable.

:-(

While I was still contemplating about entering the water, my friends had already entered the sea deep enough that I could only see their heads from the shoreline. The number of beaches I’ve been to during these 3.5 years of my college life has made me weary of them and therefore I decided to sit this one out. I sat down on the sand on a shaded spot and I was left with no choice but to guard my friends’ footwear!

The racist Lifeguard's stool

As I sat there in my vantage point checking out some bikini clad women, I noticed that a wide part of the beach had only foreigners swimming in the water. The lifeguard who sat on an elevated stool would shoo away anyone but foreigners, who went to enter the water. And this, he would determine only by the skin tone of the people entering this part of the beach! Outright Racism!! The ones who were shooed away had to swim in the remote and more crowded parts of the beach. Helpless as I was, watching this bigotry, I was ticked off by how people sellout so easily just for a little money! We weren’t allowed to swim at a beach in our own country! Disgusting!

An Interesting side story – Four of my friends were put up in a guest house which was let out by a lady by name Mrs. N. And the remaining three of us (my twin, one of my friends, and I) were put up in a guest house which was a stone’s throw away from Mrs. N’s guest house. This guest house was also rented out by a lady...I’m gonna call her Mrs. Uncooperative. The guest house which Mrs. N had given us was much more spacious and cleaner than the one which Mrs. Uncooperative had given us. Hence, the 3 of us wanted to move in to Mrs. N’s guest house to join the other four. But Mrs. Uncooperative, as her name suggests, wasn’t willing to refund our deposit so that we could move into Mrs. N’s. So we were literally stuck at Mrs. Uncooperative’s guest house for 3 days.

On the second day, when we got back to our guest houses after playing at the beach (luckily for us) we found a used something in our room (probably left by the previous occupants of that room) and I’m not sure if we were sickened or delighted more! :-D We used this as a reason to coax Mrs. U to refund our money and we gladly moved into Mrs. N’s ten minutes later.

Mrs. N's guest house

It was 3.30 by the time all of us returned from the beach to our guest house and got ready. Meanwhile, our (new) landlady, Mrs. N, a very garrulous but good-hearted woman bored me for half an hour with her subtle but cutthroat business principles and how she never wished to offend the other landladies in the area. This conversation sparked off only because I’d gone downstairs and knocked on her door requesting her to fill up the water jugs in our rooms. Clearly Mrs. N didn’t believe in the principle that a conversation must have equal contribution from both parties. Nevertheless, it was a nice chat!

Chapora Fort

Our next place for sightseeing was the Chapora Fort. Located strategically high up on a hillock, this fort overlooks the Chapora river on one side and the Sea on the other side. The Chapora fort, though mostly in ruins today, gives a spectacular view of the Vagator Beach and the Anjuna Beach. Two of my friends discovered a pathway and trekked down from the fort onto Vagator Beach. The rest of us reached Vagator beach by road. Vagator beach doesn’t have as many cafés and restaurants and it’s more tranquil than any of the other beaches.

Trying to trek down Chapora
Fort onto Vagator Beach

At 5.30 in the evening we were still jobless and didn’t want to head back to our guest house this early. Therefore we took up a wild-goose chase to find this pub by name CURLYS (on my brother’s insistence… sigh!) located on Anjuna beach. After maneuvering our Activas through narrow alleys, a Tibetian exhibition, and someone’s private land, we made it just on time to CURLYS, to gaze at the setting sun while we enjoyed a drink.

Curlys pub definitely gives an answer to the question why foreigners from all over the world, leaving all their luxuries behind, choose to put up in beach-side shacks and holiday in Goa!

After all the eating and drinking we’d been doing throughout the day, we decided to eat something light for dinner. We ate at a budget hotel by name “Spicy Idlys” at Baga. Although we were glad to meet a Kannada speaking waiter, he stoically asked us “yen order thogoLLi” in a heavily accented Hubli-Kannada. Dinner was ok.

What we did the rest of the night shall remain untold!