Goa Day 3

15/06/2013

Another very non-eventful day.  We headed down to the reception desk to arrange booking mopeds.  As usual they were 3 members of staff just sat behind the desk doing absolutely nothing whilst one guy was cleaning all the rooms himself.  One of them is an arrogant little sod too, we’ve taken a dislike to him and his swagger.  We wanted mopeds so we could explore the area but just as we were about to pay the heavens opened and it started chucking it down.  There’s no way we were going to ride mopeds in India on wet roads so the poor guy who had to ride a moped round to us in the rain had to take it back again and we just went back to our room.  We needed to arrange the Sri Lanka leg of our trip anyway so we spent the day deciding what we were going to see and how.  There’s a lot to see on the island, annoyingly Colombo airport is on the west coast which is the area affected by the Indian monsoon and we don’t have enough time to trek to the east side of the island.  It’s annoying as the beaches look incredible, some of the best in the world no doubt, but you just don’t appreciate a beach on a grey, cloudy day when you’re soaked through every couple of hours by a horrendous downpour.  The areas in the centre seem to be ok for weather and that’s where the main attractions are such as Sigiriya, Adam’s Peak etc so we should get a good amount of sunshine.   

There was a lot of Sri Lanka discussion, a little TV watching (from Will) and a trip to the cake shop to buy more chocolate fudge cake.  This time we upgraded to a dark chocolate truffle cake which was even better so Will cleaned them out for all the slices they had.  We’re not allowed outside food in the rooms so we had to smuggle it in.  What kind of hotel doesn’t let you eat in the rooms?!  Especially when they don’t serve food until 7pm at night.  We ended up getting chocolate on the white bed clothes so they will know what we did.  They’ll know we were bad. 

When you walk through the main streets in Goa all you get are people shouting ‘taxi’ at you.  I’m not really sure where they think we’re going?  We have no bags with us, we’re casually strolling along chatting; are we giving off the impression that we’ve just embarked on a reluctant pilgrimage but a pilgrimage that forbids us to ask for help and only allows acceptance of help offered by strangers?  “No thanks bud, think we can make the 100 yard walk to the bar on our own.  It’ll be a struggle but hey, burns a few calories!”

The funny thing about Indians is so many of them look like people you know.  If I’m not looking at one thinking I already know him I’m looking at one thinking that’s an Indian version of someone I know.  They say that everyone has a double, I’ve been to France and can vouch for that fact that at least half of them live in Paris alone wearing patent puffa jackets and I can now confirm the other half of our doppelgangers are Indians. 

We had decided the best option for Sri Lanka was to hire a car and driver again (the roads outside of Colombo are apparently pretty quiet but you can’t drive there on an international driving licence).  We’d emailed a few companies for a quote and just as Will was composing a confirmation email to one the internet rolled over and died on us.  With no sign of reincarnation we considered heading to the bar next door when the whole grid went down in a power cut.  I don’t think the locals of a small village in Goa are overly experienced electricians so I wasn’t expecting anyone to jump to the rescue so we just sat around and waiting for it to kick back in, which it did after about ½ an hour.  Then it went down again, then came back on again, then teased us with a few flickers.  The rain had stopped by this point so we went next door to the bar and ate large amounts of chicken nuggets and played ‘Pub Quiz’ on my phone (we were a good mix of surprisingly good and surprisingly lucky when it came to correct answers which served well in boosting our ego’s that we’re more clever than we realise). 

A weird dog followed us back, I didn’t like how he moved his mouth randomly nor how he had barked constantly the whole time we were in the bar.  (After 20 solid minutes I was heading outside with my fork to stab the thing to death).  I fended his advances off with my umbrella, worried he might have rabies (for no other reason that I hadn’t had a rabies vaccination so I’m a bit paranoid and obviously unlucky).  We managed to get back to the hotel without being bitten though.

Will snapped a coat hanger between his butt cheeks and that ended our extremely chilled out day and we went to bed. 

I’m quite unsettled sleeping under a ceiling fan, I can’t help but think it’s going to fall out of the ceiling and chop us up in bed.  The fittings are far from secure here too which doesn’t little to alleviate that fear and the first hotel we were in the whole fixture moved with the rotation of the fan, how it was still fixed to the ceiling after going all night is a small miracle.  Maybe they’d used some of that Taj Mahal glue on it.