India – Goa Trance

Goa is a small state on the West coast of the Indian sub-continent. The Portugese controlled the area for a long time (around 400 years) before being thrown out by the British. You can easily spot the remains of their reign; the Catholic chapels on every corner and the old town of Panaji, Goa’s capital, where apparently some people still speak Portugese. We are staying in Calangute, one of the many beach towns along the long coast that has some 106 km of nice beaches. We spend most of our days here sitting at one of the many beach shacks having a drink and listening to their bizare mix of local and foreign music or by the pool of our tiny family resort. It’s off-season here; it’s very quiet and there are few western tourists. There are quite some Indian tourists though, mostly families from the big cities, but the taxi drivers are all complaining.

We try to find new places to have dinner every night and sometimes take a taxi to one of the nearby beach towns, Baga or Candolim, which are basically all the same. There aren’t any big raves going on and full moon is still weeks away. The music we hear is the most modern we have heard over the last few months but nothing comes close to what we know as ‘Goa Trance’.

The beaches are nice but not always very clean. This morning we decided to get up early and jump into the sea before it would be too hot again to even walk on the sand. It’s fun to see that the locals do exactly the same thing; whole families go into the water, playing the big waves, either in the morning or later in the afternoon, just before sunset. All the girls here, young and old, keep their clothes on as they enter the water while the Western female tourists sometimes walk around in very skimpy beach wear.. It’s a good place to relax and basically do nothing and get used to the heat. Tomorrow we will be leaving for Mumbai – by plane, because even after several trials with the online reservation system of the Indian Railways, we did not manage to get a train ticket. You would think that the world’s largest employer, with apparently 1.3 million employees, could afford to hire a couple of decent web programmers…