01 January 2010

Hello 2010

I don't think that we would have chosen to stay in Candolim once the Sunburn music festival had finished. The town is like Torremolinos, the beach is a bit bleak, its not particularly scenic and the rusting hulk of the River Princess isn't exactly inspiring. Unfortunately we had paid for a weeks accommodation in advance and didn't really want to waste the money by going somewhere else. Particularly as the room rates are usually double or treble the normal price over the festive period. Luckily our hotel was really nice and had a swimming pool, so we've spent the last few days since the festival just relaxing there and avoiding the ugliness outside whilst we wait for new year's eve.

We did venture out for a pub quiz one evening where Liz managed to win us some free beer thanks to her specialist knowledge of the West Country. We didn't do particularly well in the main quiz but luckily the bonus round was about Torquay's most famous resident, Agatha Christie, so Liz had a rather unfair advantage over the other punters.

We didn't have the most auspicious of starts to new years eve. We went to the local internet cafe to sort out the accommodation for our next couple of destinations, only to find an e-mail informing us that the final leg of our flight back home has been cancelled. Hopefully we'll be able to cancel the first leg, get our money back and book something else. Otherwise we'll have the pleasure of being suck in Istanbul airport for 24 hours.

After dinner we planned to spend the evening at a nightclub called Butter. However; we decided to go somewhere else when the guy on the door informed us that the entry charge was 3400 rupees, which is almost fifty quid!

We instead ended up at a bar on the beach called Boat Shack. They had turned part of the beach into a temporary nightclub by laying a dance floor, stringing up some lights and sticking a massive sound system on the sand.

Entry was free and it only cost £1.30 a pint. Much more in-line with our back-packer budget.

We ended up having a great night. Most of the shops and restaurants had closed early and the workers had hit the beach to party hard to the latest Hindi and bhangra hits. It made a nice change to be out somewhere in the evening where there were more locals than tourists as it made for a really different night out. I don't think we've ever seen quite such enthusiastic dancing from a huge group of men . . . they we're going absolutely mental!

Come midnight there was the usual assortment of dangerous low level fireworks followed by something called burning the old man (a little bit like a Guy Fawkes character who was set on fire).

The Sunburn festival and new year's eve have been great but we're quite looking forwards to getting out of Candolim and onto to our next destination.

Happy new year to you all!

No comments:

Post a Comment