Day 156 - Just Beachy

We arrived at the station at 6:30 AM - not just on time, but half and hour early. This never happens. We waited around until 7, when our train was supposed to have arrived, because there was a chance that M and V (his college friend who is Indian and whose family owns a house in Goa) were going to meet us there. They didn't, so we gambled that the apartment was in North Goa, and caught a cab up the coast.


After a lovely breakfast at a beach resort, it was a reasonable enough hour to dial V's cell. Turns out the house was in South Goa, so we hopped in a cab, and headed back the way we had come.

The beach where the house is located is a lesser known beach. We drove down to Palolem, the main tourist beach of the south, and were directed back north AGAIN to Colva beach, which is still in South Goa, but only just so.

Meanwhile, V sent the cab driver a text message that we should get off at the Radisson Hotel and walk south along the beach, and they would wait for us there. We did so, and followed the path towards the water.

The path dead-ended at a swampy inlet with no bridge.

We hacked our way through the scrub until we burst out on a different path which spilled directly onto the beach. The sunbathers gave us some weird looks. I don't know why - surely sweaty, fully-clothed, backpack-toting foreigners crash out of the woods all the time...

We trekked our way down the beach, and sure enough, V and M were heading down to meet us. They wore nothing but swim trunks, and I was very jealous.

Carmona Beach, where we will be spending the weekend, is an unbroken, largely uninhabited stretch of palm-fringed white sand on the Arabian Sea. It's pretty much paradise.

We spent the afternoon doing not much of anything. Dinner was an event, at a restaurant with its own fishing trawler. We feasted on a smorgasboard of fresh local seafood - crab, fish, curries, and Goan Sausage.

With a local (V) to guide us, a brilliant apartment, and a swimming pool for the turns of tide when the sea currents are to strong, it promises to be a terrific few days!