Tuesday 5/6/2008- Friday 5/9/2008
Our trip to Goa was very long…catching our 6:20am local train into Delhi, then having a 5 hour layover to get to the airport to fly to Goa. We decided to head back to see our friends at Google in Gurgaon. We were able to grab lunch with Megan and Austin, and we were able to catch Heather for a few quick words before heading to the Domestic Airport (oops we went to the International first…. Which is a good 8-10 km away)
Our flight was about 2.5 hours from Delhi to Goa on one of the low-cost carriers “IndiGo.” Very similar to Jetblue, everything cost $ to use, but we were very satisfied with arriving safely… for only $86/ per ticket. We had a very nice gentleman waiting to drive us 1.5 hours south to the Oceanic Hotel in Cancona.
We arrived at the hotel to find an expat party, where we learned that:
1.) We’ve arrived in Goa just as everything is shutting down
2.) Our hosts, Les and Sheila, are flying back to Europe tomorrow to escape Monsoon season
Regardless, we had a very tasty dinner with our expats who filled us in on the local scoop. The mix of folks from England and Ireland provided great company before we sadly retired while the party was still raging at 11pm.
Very excited to have ‘high speed’ Internet (as Les told us, its Indian Broadband, so have patience), we got a large amount of our trip planning done for Dubai and Africa. We made phone calls, paid bills and tried to get back on track before moving on to our next city. We sadly realized that with ‘monsoon’ season coming in…any second (we were very lucky to not have any rain…) most of the Indian folks in the neighborhood were hopping on the trains and heading north. Unfortunately, we wanted to do the same, but were just too late in planning.
After spending three days in lovely Goa, we made it to the beach and dinner with a beautiful sunset. Katie had one king prawn that was the size of her forearm, while Dermot tried the local seabass cooked Tandoori-style. We very much enjoyed the downtime of Goa away from the sights and sounds of India, and it would have been perfect … if they only had A/C.
Our last morning consisted of having to hodge podge money together from Euros to Indian Rupees, as the hotel’s credit card machine wasn’t working… soon enough, we were off to the airport to head to our last Indian city, Mumbai (Bombay).