Team Goa

With news of Ella and Chrish's imminent arrival to visit us in Goa, we had a fairly quiet few days saving our energy. We were enjoying our routines of taking Flora to school, walks on the beach, Yoga (Cat), and hanging out with friends. Apart from meeting new people and attending some of the events on offer, like film exhibitions, birthday parties, kids yoga or ballet for Flora, nothing much else changed! Late on the Sunday afternoon Chrish and Ella arrived and settled into their garden cottages before we headed down the beach for a walk, a swim and dinner at Salida. We had spent so many afternoon and early evenings at Salida so it was quite a surprise when suddenly a DJ (one of Flora's friends' mums) starting banging out tunes so loud it was hard to hear each other talk.
We spent the week in Patnem with them hanging out at the beach, eating in the local restaurants, and exploring the local area. We went to watch a music performance at Flora's school which was lovely, and then followed it up with a gig at the Blue Bus, which was pretty lively for midweek

in Patnem! It was lovely to hang around with these guys in part because we were missing them (it was more than a full year since we last saw Chrish) but also because after travelling around for so long, always meeting new people, it is so comfortable and easy to enjoy our old beloved friends. Before we headed East to Hampi during Flora's half term holiday, we all also attended an Indian cooking course with Rahul in Palolem. The course was loads of fun, extremely well organised and it was excellent to enjoy the wonderful food we had prepared. On the same day, taking advantage of Mark and Zoe's offer to look after Flora, we went to Agonda to have a few drinks and dinner on the beach with Andrew and Sarah that were leaving Goa the

following day.
Despite our efforts to book train tickets to Hampi in advance, we could only manage to get them for the way back. Therefore we rented a taxi to take us there. The journey, despite our driver's best efforts, was long and tiring. Nine hours door to door with two stops for food felt like a very long day. So as we arrived to our lovely guest house, we decided not to go out for food and to order in while having a few beers on our balcony before going to bed for a good night rest.
We awoke relatively early to begin our day of sightseeing with Ragou, who alarmingly has a picture of Modi as his WhatsApp picture, and annoyingly, the deal was for us pay him what we thought a fair price, as opposed to it being set and agreed by him in advance. We had breakfast at our guesthouse before heading out to visit a variety of temples dotted all over the surrounding landscape. Ragou's rickshaw was quite fancy and we all managed to squeeze in as he whizzed us around.

The temples were beautiful and relatively quiet, although it was very hot and some of them were particularly exposed. We went to a very beautiful temple where elephants had been housed many hundreds of years ago, and the grounds had lots of playful monkeys leaping around. We had lunch in the centre of the old town in a cute but very busy restaurant before heading out to more temples.
In the late afternoon we embarked on a climb up one of the hills overlooking Hampi. It was quite an adventurous climb with some precipitous edges, especially for Ella who didn't have her glasses with her. Flora loved it and we were rewarded at the top with spectacular views and a beautiful sunset. After a very long day of sightseeing, we

decided to head home to have another take away and a few beers (which are not available generally due to the holy nature of the area).
We had another early start so that we could head straight down to the river to see one of the temple elephants be bathed. We sat down on a little stone structure jutting into the river and watched while the beautiful elephant was bathed, quite rigorously at times. There were also otters playing in the river too, which as a big fan of otters, Flora really enjoyed. Ragou then took us to a very authentic little place for breakfast. If anyone says that going to Goa is not the 'real India', then this little place was definitely the real deal. It was out on a road by a school (the little kids kept on sticking their heads in to say hello) and was only frequented by locals. We ate what I can only describe was an exceptionally spicy breakfast and thankfully had brought cereal for Flora. We headed on to a local village for a look around. It was pretty cute, but incredibly hot, so we sought refuge in a couple of craft shops where we bought some items made from banana plants and home made paper. We really needed some respite from the heat so we asked Ragou if he could take us somewhere to swim. He dropped us beside a river where a man with some unusual round boats wanted a small fortune to row us a short distance, so we opted to swim from the bank nearby, which a few other tourists were doing. The water was so beautifully refreshing that we hung out there for an hour or so before heading to Hippie Island for

lunch. It's not technically an island, and had also been given orders to shut down within 10 days as there were many businesses operating without licenses, so many places were in the process of closing down. We went to a gorgeous spot for lunch. Very chilled, nice views and very expensive beer! It was so relaxing and the weather so hot, we hung out there for a couple of hours. Flora made friends with a girl there who made her a friendship bracelet and we chatted to them for a bit as they were freelancers just travelling and offering art workshops around Asia. For the sunset, we had another big hill to climb. Flora lamented the lack of 'adventure' on the climb as it had proper steps rather than precipitous drops. The summit was not as beautiful as the one the day before. It was more

developed and on the top had some unattractive concrete structures and loads of monkeys. The area for the sunset however was quite large and we attempted to find a peaceful spot to sit. We were successful for a while until three guys with speakers loudly playing simply awful Arabic music came and placed themselves close by. It was so bad we left before the sun set and headed back down to Ragou.
We let Ragou know that we wanted to go out for dinner that evening rather than stay at home, so after a shower at our guesthouse he collected us and took us to a restaurant. We were both dismayed and amused on arrival at the restaurant to discover that the menu was exactly the same as that we had used for take away the two previous evenings. Effectively, we had having every evening meal from the same restaurant, and the food was okay, but nothing special.
We had to be up at five in the morning to get to

the train station for our train home. We arrived at the station at around 6 am to discover the train was two hours late. The wait wasn't so bad in the end, and we bumped into Gemma, Flora's teacher on the platform. When the train arrived we found our compartment and Pedro and Ella headed for a snooze on their bunks whilst Chrish and I entertained Flora. At one point we stopped at a station and Chrish got off to buy some food from the platform sellers. There was a point when the train set off again and I was really concerned Chrish hadn't made it back on....but fortunately he had. After about three hours I managed to convince Flora to go for a nap and joined her. The second half of the journey was beautiful, winding through forested mountains with waterfalls. We entertained ourselves by playing who wants to be a millionaire on Chrish's phone, and Pedro got the hump as Ella and I were beating him and Chrish pretty convincingly! Nine hours later the train finally rolled into Margao where we got a state taxi back to Patnem. I immediately regretted not using the taxi hailing app as the driver drove so fast and overtook everything.
The next day was our final one to enjoy their company before Chrish and Ella headed back to London. They chilled out, went to the beach, did some shopping, and then we went to Kala Bahia for our last dinner together before their taxi to the airport. We loved having them visit and share our experience of life in Goa.
The following day after their departure, we met

Mark, Zoe and the kids at Chaudi train station and boarded the crowded train to Margao and then jumped in a taxi to a water park to spend the day. The park itself was okay, certainly nothing amazing, but not bad and the kids loved it. It was good enough for them and they had loads of fun on all the slides and in the pools.