Unlike other occasions, this time I had decided to plan a family vacation (wife and 1.5 year old son). And this time it was our third wedding anniversary. Had to make it special and also compensate for last 3 years. There were two product releases to be done by 5th of Feb. So it was kind of right time, given that the we could complete the release on time with no major issues. And so it happened.
5th Feb, Friday night, Pune, Sleeper Bus, 10 hour journey
I booked two seats of sleeper bus on 4th night. That was risky as Neeta and other good transports were already full. I should have done it at least 2-3 days in advance. But anyway the trip was excellent. It comfortable. The transport was from Raj Travels.
We boarded the bus at 9 but it did not leave before 10 pm. We reached Mapusa at 7 AM. The bus ticket costed INR 650 per ticket.
6th Feb, Saturday morning, Goa
Took a taxi INR 180 from Mapusa bus stand to Calungate, our hotel Villa Goesa.
Villa Goesa is almost 200 Mtrs off the calungate beach reachable via baga beach road. Its a 3 start and the location is almost perfect. From the hotel you can walk upto beach, there is a nice trail upto the beach with greenary on both the sides.
After breakfast we went to the calungate beach. Went for Dolphin search for INR 500. I was not aware that there are so many dolphins so close to the beach. We then came back to hotel and had lunch. Food was not so great at resort. Especially in the
whole trip I never got good seafood on calungate and baga beach. Did not like kingfish at all.
6th Feb, Saturday Evening, Goa
We took a scooty and went to see beach Anjuna. Its a rocky beach and the tides were strong so we just spent some time at the table top restaurants. Hot tea with mix veg pakoras and the view. amazing! Of course if Vihaan could sit at one place and we
could enjoy. :)
Btw, I wanted to go to beach Aksha but I could not recall the name of the beach that time. It was the beach I had visited last time I was in Goa with Akshu and other colleagues.
Saturday market
We then moved to Saturday market on the way back to Calungate. There are two big saturday markets. When coming back from Anjun beach, the bigger and famous one is on left hand side. The other one is right hand side but not sure how far from this
one. I had visited this market last time also so I knew how it was gonna be. Crowded. We reached the market at around 6. It was getting dark. The crowd was building up. The lower level is mostly indian shops with typical indian stuff. My wife got stuck at a
wooden item shop and had to shell out INR 3500 for few wooden things which looked like utensils but I dont feel that can be used for that.
Note: We had only 5000 cash and we were left with 1500. So we actually had to spend very cautiosly as it would not be possible to go out, find an ATM at night and get more cash.
The upper level was mostly shops by foreigners. Not sure how it was setup but it seemed like we are in some other country as there were hardly any indian shops but even more less indian buyers.
We spent almost 2-3 hours almost done with all cash and finally came out at around 9. That was the crowd then. The entrace and parking were jam packed.
Finally we reached the resort and headed for dinner on the beach. Dinner was ok. Surely depressed me with the seafood.
7th Feb
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Breakfast was complimentry but has few choices limited to bread butter and jam. Dont forget to order tea if you done like ready-mix tea. Again to the beach. the beach was excellent. Very clean. Just relaxed on the beach shacks. On repeated request from a massage wala had a full body massage with coconut oil which was almost money waste.
Evening we went to baga beach. I had a choose a good shack as I had planned to celebrate my wedding anniversary on baga beach which was 4-5 hours from then. The people on shack were very helpful and friendly. They managed Vihaan all the time. In fact he got mixed so much with the people that I decided to spent whole evening on this shack. at 9 pm we decided to come back to resort, freshenup and come back to same resort. I requested the shack manager to arrange a cake. Of course Anju never knew about my plans.
We were back on the beahc by 10 pm( Anju went shopping on the way). As expected baga beach is more of young crowd. Less of old retired foreginers uncle and aunties. lots of water sports. I would recommend to stay on Baga beach rather than Calungate beach.
at 11.59 pm the cake was ready on the beach next to bonefire. Anju had never expected that I had been carrying gifts for her all the way from Pune and there were 2 gifts. We enjoyed the evening at lot and finally the day came to an end and a new year in our married life started.
8th Feb
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Day to checkout. The plan was to checkout of hotel , go around places in Goa for whole day, go to a south goa beach and then take a train to Mangalore at 12 midnight. Train ticket was already booked so least the train part was decided.
I really wanted to go to Panolem beach in south goa. Its almost the last goa beach andis near Karnataka border. This is supposed to be the most beautiful beach in Goa. But considering several factors we decided following plan.
We decided to go to St. Xaiours church in old goa, followed by Mangesh temple followed by Spice garden ( all three in old goa going towards east ). Then we could have gone to Panolem beach (extremem south of goa) or Colva beach (again back to west side but center of the coast line of goa). Colva beach is the closest beach to Madgaon from where we had to board our train at midnight. So we choose Colva beach to avoid too much late night travel and several other factors as I said.
If you are going to Goa, know that there is not only beaches to see in Goa. And the one thing that you must see is St. Xaviers church where the dead body of St. Francis Xavier is kept. To know the history follow these URLs
http://chronicleofameanderingtraveller.blogspot.com/2006/01/st-francis-xavier-history-of-his.html
To know about St. Francis Xavier, follow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Xavier
Mangesh temple is another famous place. Linked to the mangeshkar family, the temple is simple but worth going once.
Very close to Mangesh temple is Spice garden. Its a spice plantation area and they offer nice lunch for INR 300 per person. The food was excellent with right amount of fresh spices. Many foreigners. Must go place.
It was around 5 pm by then and we started going south-west towards Madgaon-Colva beach. Kept the luggage at Cloak room on madgaon railway station and then headed for the beach. The taxi guy dropped and we paid him INR 1800 for the day long trip.
Colva beach is mostly an indian beach, Meaning 90% indian and local crowd and 10% foreigners. there were not more than 6-7 shacks. Good no. of water sports activity though. and they rightly say that south goa beaches are much better than north goa beaches. The sand is completely white. We did not go into water as Vihaan already had cold. Tonight it was going to be more fun though the crowd disappeared after 7 pm when water sports were closed. So it was mostly non-goa crowd now who came to the beach for dinner.
The food had much better choices here. I was so bored with Kingfish that I could eat any living-on-sea-dead-on-land creature. here I got Tiger prawns , pomphrate and lobsters and crab. But they did not knew how to cook Crabs in tandoor. So I had to limit myself to Tiger prawns and some fish with red-wine.
There was bone-fire and crackers and so it was a long and enjoyable dinner for us.
We then took a rikshaw back to station and bought some port wine on the way.
I dont recall the name of the wine but the name started with C. The bottle costed me just INR 300 and it was very good. It tasted as good as Sula wine. We had it in coorg.
the train was on time and the train had good enough seats. It was 2 AC but I expected the cabin to be better. We left goa on 9th 00.30 AM to Mangalore where the next part of the trip was to be started.
Resort
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Villa Goesa, standard room INR 2950 for the room per day. Room was ok but it was good enough for the trip. Breakfast complimantry. Service was good. Staff was ok. Crowd? excellent. Seemed the resort was quite famous amongst germans. Strangly
the resort did not appear on any of the travel and trip organizer web sites.
How did I find this resort? I spent almost 2 full days searched for best deals on websites like yatra.com, makemytrip.com, tripadvisor.com, hotels.com ... and prepared a short list of most popular resorts on calungate and baga beaches. Then I researched
about these resorts on the moustshut.com and google maps . Mouthshut.com provided useful insights about wrong information flashed by different websites about resorts like their just-on-the-beach location, services, ambience. Real people reported more
accurate information. Google maps gave a better idea of the location of the resorts in terms of distance and view.
Interestingly I found one resort reported as the hot pick on all websites. It was Estelo de mar. not sure if I spelled it correctly. But I was getting this hotel at around INR 1800 per day kind of rate which was almost 30% less than the reported rate. It is the only
beach resort available on calungate beach as reported by all the websites. I had almost booked it but then I read more reviews on Mouthshut.com about it and then choose to drop this resort. The reason there was a cremation ground next to it and people
reported real bad service. I rather choose to book a costlier resort rather than taking any risk with the stay.
Not getting a good resort near beach I went to google maps and found a new feature on google maps. People can upload photos and put them on maps along with the description. I started looking for such markups on the calungate beach and found several
good resorts on the beach. Villa Goesa was one of them.
I would recommend to stay on Baga beach rather than Calungate beach. baga beach is more of young crowd. Less of old retired foreginers uncle and aunties. Lots of water sports, foodaries and shopping areas.
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