Last day

Claire had booked one last beauty treatment at Francisca’s on our last day so I shot off on the bike to Colva to put a couple of blogs on. Upon my return, as usual, her treatment had overrun so I got some petrol and had a drive around the corner to the beach at Betlabatim to see what developments there had been since our last trip.

Coconut Grove was there before and I think we put some of their tariffs on our previous blog. The other two I don’t remember, maybe they were being built, but they are Alagoa and Marshal Retreat. I spotted this water buffalo basking in the sun with a harem of birds looking after it. Or was it vultures?

Claire was good as she wanted to sunbathe all day on her last day so she could maximize her suntan but I had wanted a bike exploration day since we got there and she was good and let me have it. We had a bad start and ended up driving on the motorway to Vasco De Gamma, it’s a rotten trip so we turned around and came back stopping over at Cococabana for a quick drink. All Indian tourists here but there were plenty of them.

We then had to drive through the shanty town again to get to South Goa. We always are taken this way when you first get a taxi from the airport but have never had a camera at the ready so when taking off my helmet I gave Claire the camera to capture it. It is always a bit of a culture shock when you first get here as its noisy, very bust and with rubbish everywhere in this heat……! Good job you cant smell photos but the cows don’t seem to mind.

We stopped of at the Horizon Beach Resort for lunch but again were disappointed this year. Their usual great service had completely disappeared and the only way we could get any was to go inside to order or pay. The food was ok but not as good as we remember it. Like everywhere else they had been hit hard by the lack of tourists. The only tourists they have seemed to be from Mumbai or other Indian cities.

We dropped or stuff off and drove to Colva to drop our bike off and walk back to Majorda for the last time. The beaches were full of Indians, the only white people were from Russia.

This tree is outside the Majorda Beach Resort and I have been meaning to get a shot of it. These trees are all over, when the tree leans over because of prevailing winds, it drops down creepers that plant themselves so as to sure up and support the tree just like Dali crutches.

For our last night we decided on Fusion, especially as they had the group that they had on our last night last time. Can’t remember what hey are called but we call them the tree Amigo’s. They come round to each table in turn and play one that they like them take a request from the table. Last time we had them playing all our favorite Beatles songs so I tried to catch them out this time. I was disappointed as they didn’t know any Jimmy Hendrix so we had to settle for American Pie. Even our favorite Brazilian Chef joined in with a song on his mouth organ; no wonder the food was slow.

I nice way to finish off a couple of weeks in the sun; all we had left now been a very long horrible day getting home. While waiting for the staff to turn up in the morning Claire kept an anxious eye out for our taxi to take us to the airport. We ended up missing breakfast and had also forgotten just how awful Goa International airport is. You have the usual cue to get into the airport as security check passports and tickets before you can even join the check in queues. Once through the slow check in queue you have to join even longer queue’s to get through passport control. This one took 2 hours to negotiate before queuing again for the security checks and several more passport checks. They tried hard to cheer people up by have a live band in the main hall where all the queues are but unfortunately; no photos. Again we had the “family from Hell” in the queue in front of us and of course they were all sat on the seat behind us on the plane. There was only one thing for it; we had to pay for an upgrade but I am sure Claire will have more to say about this when she takes over form me once we are back home.