Love to hate Goa

Goa has always been tedious for me because we are:

1. Not willing to take flights to save money and why the hell are the train stations in Goa so far from everywhere
2. Not willing to be duped by taxi drivers and the Goa heat is ideal only for beach bumming and not for bus rides
3. Not willing to live in cheap beach huts for howsoever much beaches are fun but after sunsets we need four walls around us
4. Not able to go with recommended guest houses because you see our definition of budget doesn’t include dirty shit hole of a room

Therefore, getting to Goa, getting to someplace when you are in Goa, and then finding a room was a challenge I didn’t feel I was upto. I remembered Goa for:

1. the beaches full of young couples parading the tiniest clothes in their wardrobes
2. the babies of IT boom buying beer after beer
3. men displaying their recently waxed chest and new sunglasses
4. the tiny lanes around Calangute and choked with SUVs of wealthy families from surrounding cities breathing smoke and stress
5. and the shack owners not happy to serve brown skinned Indians and giving extra of what we call footage to the fair skinned cientele

For those operating businesses in Goa, you are just another wave in the many million waves that hit Goa beaches. There will never be smiles to welcome you. They look at you, size you up and blurt a number quoting a price, take it or leave it. The room, the service, the food quality doesn’t matter. Forget it. You can’t reason with them. This is Goa. If you leave someone else will come and take your place.

But Vikram was convinced that if we have been traveling for over a year, then we have to get to Goa. And things happened just as I had expected. When we first got into Goa, we got off at Swantwaadi, a tiny little ghost stop on the border of Goa and Maharashtra. It took us two hours to get to Arambol. Wow! I thought, how could it take any lesser. Once, we got their, we placed ourself in a beach shack where some guy not very happy to serve brought us food that was very promising on the menu but disgusting on the plate, followed by a search for a room that took us around the slum like developments in Arambol.

Goa was turning out to be what I had expected. Yet again, it was unable to live up to the promise it always made.
Where are the:

1. quiet beaches
2. budget places
3. great food

They are nowhere, I don’t see them. All I see our bunch of hippies with dreadlocks and weekend vacationers pretending to have fun by playing music on the beach and drinking beer after beer. Somehow after traveling the world it felt cool to look down upon Goa. I looked at the beach and had to acknowledge that it beautiful, stunning even. The sun was setting, guiltily I admired it while my husband was navigating the tiny lanes of haphazard mess around Arambol to find us a clean room to stay in. The shack where I was seated had perfect ambiance, great music but the carrot juice that was served to me was a load of shit mixed with water. I mulled at the 120/- I will have to part with for the mess I was served in a glass with a straw. This is what Goa is, I thought, contrasts of ugly and beautiful. The question is how much of the ugly can I take for the beautiful. Forget it, I will stay here and let my husband have his anniversary wish.

Read the love part here: https://www.emptyrucksack.com/falling-in-love-with-goa/