The end is nigh

Well our lovely traveling time is nearly up. We have had a fantastic 15 months on the road and we can't believe it has gone so fast. It will be great to see everyone again but very hard to drag ourselves away from the fabulous Palolem beach and get back to a cold, grey February in the UK! We have got a month back in Blighty though before the dreaded work starts again, so we'll be able to spend some time with Si's family in Wyrley as well as my family in Torquay and we'll then have a few weeks to get ourselves sorted out and moved back into the flat in Birmingham.

We have really enjoyed being back in Palolem. It definitely wins our award for best Indian beach.

It has just the right mixture of laid back and chill out attitude and some great bars and restaurants. We enjoyed going to the open air cinema again. It is in a fantastic location and setting, even thought the film (Paranormal Activity) was a bit poor. Unfortunately the Silent Disco was canceled on Saturday apparently due to problems with the police, so that was a shame as we really enjoyed our silent boogie last time. Off to the open air cinema again tonight to see Zombieland.

Well it it has been a tough last week here in Palolem. We have been swimming, sunbathing, doing some light shopping, catching up on out last few paperbacks and enjoying having the full range of cable channels. All the restaurants we have been to here have been really good, especially the Cheeky Chapati and Magic Italy. We also had some in-restaurant cow related entertainment the other night. They just couldn't keep this particular cow out of the restaurant and it was fascinated by the open kitchen!

They seemed to have more luck tempting it out of the restaurant with a chapati than by poking it with a kebab skewer. I'm all for fresh produce but a cow actually walking into a restaurant of it's own accord is pretty strange! Perhaps they need to install a cattle grid.

We will miss the whole Indian beach experience. Vendors wandering up and down the beach will sell you anything from a sarongs, to fruit, to stone elephants, to massages, to henna tattoos, to boat rides and fish, to drums and stickers. You have got kids on tightropes, beggars, Indian women swimming fully clothed and Indian men swimming in huge shrieking groups all with inappropriate small brown pants on! The beach cows are always entertaining and will occasionally have a fight with the beach dogs. I don't think it will be quite the same back in Torquay. We will miss it all.

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!

Feet on the sand and hands in the air - must be Sunburn

As we've mentioned on a previous posting , the reason that we've come to Candoliom is to visit the Sunburn music festival. The festival takes place on Candolim beach and is billed as Asia's premier music festival.

It's a little bit like a mini Glastonbury only with more palm trees and less mud.

It's primarily a dance music festival and features a lot of international DJs including John 00 Fleming (the happiest man in dance music), Roger Sanchez (excellent as always), Armin van Buuren (dull), Sultan (an excellent Canadian DJ) and some bloke called Nick Rafferty from Lichfield.

We had a great time over the three days of the festival. The only down side was the usual festival problem of toilets, or in this case, the lack of. 16 toilets for 5000 people doesn't go . . . and neither could you without a long wait!

Costa del Candolim

Candolim is only about 10 minutes drive down the coast from Anjuna but feels a whole world away.

Anjuna has a very laid back and fairly relaxing atmosphere, where Candolim feels like it's smack bang in the middle of the Costa del Sol (but with more Russians). The whole resort feels like it's packed full of chip eating, loud mouthed package tourists.

We're not sure why someone would choose to come here for a holiday as Candolim is famous for being home to the rusting tanker the River Princess which was grounded on the beach during a storm in June 2000. It's not exactly what you'd call picturesque.

The only reason why we've come here is to visit the Sunburn music festival which happens on the beach over 3 days between Christmas and new year.

Christmas in Anjuna

We've come back to Goa so that we could spend a week at Christmas relaxing on the beach at Anjuna.

Well, that was the idea before I got bed-ridden by a mystery illness. We're not quite sure what it was but initially thought it was a monster hang-over as we had been up until 4 in the morning having a wee drinky after meeting back up with Leigh and Nicola. However, when it hadn't cleared up after three days we realised that perhaps I hadn't gone soft after all but had picked up a seriously debilitating man flu type virus.

By Christmas eve I was beginning to feel better and was helped along by some of that wonder medicine called beer! We again met up with Leigh and Nicola and tried to make our Christmas eve night out as festive as we could.

It wasn't easy though as this was the first time that we can remember a Christmas without any Slade!

We didn't see any reindeer flying through the sky on Christmas eve but we were lucky enough to see some dolphins from the beach at sunset.

On Christmas day I was well enough to venture out for some sun bathing (and to put a Santa hat on a cow).

We could only find one restaurant in the whole of Anjuna where you could get a traditional Christmas dinner. However; it was a bit of a grubby shack stuck on the side of the main road so we decided to give it a miss. Instead we had to settle for that other traditional Christmas meal . . . a chicken and paneer tikka kebab - very festive!

Merry Christmas from Santa Cows

You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to get a Santa hat on a cow!

Cows on the beach . . .

You don't get this in Torquay!

Silent Noise at Palolem

After 24 hours on a train (or two) we made it from Ellora to Goa, the former Portuguese colony on the Indian west coast. The Portuguese arrived in 1510 and retained control of the area until 1961, 14 years after the rest of India gained independence from Britain.

We're planning on visiting three or four different resorts along the Goa coast but our first stop is at Palolem, the most southerly of the developed beaches. We've not seen a beach since we left Aqaba 4 months ago and it's also only the 2nd time in 4 months where we've stayed in the same spot for a week. Hence we're making the most of sitting on the beach, not moving and doing no sightseeing! Essential tan topping up time before we head home.

Palolem is a really nice little village that hasn't been spoiled by over-development and retains a lovely ramshackle, laid back feel. There's no international hotel chains (all the hotels and beach huts are locally run) and there's no buildings over two stories high. It also has loads of great bars and restaurants. Best of all a big bottle of Kingfisher beer costs Rs60 (that about £0.78) and a glass of gin costs less than a tonic!!!

A few years ago Goa became well known for its night life and the party scene here got really popular. However; in order to calm things down the government banned loud music in open air locations after 10pm. To get around this problem the local promoters have opened several silent discos. A silent disco is a club that has no speakers, instead everyone is given a set of radio headphones which they use to tune into one of the 3 DJ's that are playing.

On Saturday night we went to an event run by Silent Noise who have an open air club at Neptune Point, on the cliffs overlooking Palolem beach. It was very strange when we first walked in to see several hundred people who appeared to be dancing to no music.

We had a great, if slightly surreal evening!