Goa, with Merryl.

March 2nd - March 5th,

Merryl and I spent the next few days in a fantastic little hotel with a huge room and beach-beds outside our room. It was reasonably priced and only 25 metres from the beach. It did have the unfortunate drawback of having a group of teenagers staying next door. They were constantly stoned and drunk and played loud music and stayed up all night. Bloody kids!

Marcus had taken to running on the beach every morning. We’d usually meet him for breakfast and then we’d all head down to a spot somewhere and grab a deck-chair or beach-bed and chill out all afternoon. Most places served food and drinks to where you were sitting on the beach. All you had to do was whistle. It was pretty much what you imagine paradise to be.

… We are all sitting outside Lilliput’s bar on the beach. We are drinking cocktails. The sun is gorgeous but I am sitting in the shade of a beach umbrella playing with my new i-touch Merryl has brought out for me. The sea is full of people jumping into the surf. The waves are nothing on Varkala's beaches but they are still pretty frisky. Cows casually amble up and down the beach in search of free food. If they catch you eating your dinner you end up in a game of musical deck-chairs as they are impossible to get rid of. Unlucky for the people a couple of chairs down as a white cow, with a huge sticky string of drool hanging out of its mouth, is trying to eat their lunch. The barbeque-cum-reggae evening is on tonight and the staff has just started the setting up the music and camp-fire…

Merryl managed to last a whole day before getting ill. I was impressed. She’d done better than us. I think it was probably mild food poisoning coupled with a complete change in lifestyle. She was laid up for two days in bed feeling very ill. It was a shame because probably the last afternoon rave was being held on the beach whilst she was ill. Marcus and I both headed up and grabbed some beers but I had to duck out to see how she was. It was quite fortunate as she’d decided to go for a walk on the beach and, shortly after I’d met her walking back to our room, she had a complete whitey and fainted in a café. After that we took things easy for 2-3 days.
When she was feeling better we decided to hire some bikes for the day and explore the north beaches again. Marcus was itching to try out a geared bike and Merryl was itching to get up and do something interesting. There was only one Enticer available which Marcus wanted to ride so we took a Honda GT 100. They are nice enough little bikes. A two-stroke engine has a slightly less cruisey feeling to it but it did have a cool little power-band at the top end of each gear which gave it a real kick. We headed up to Mandrem and then worked our way down back along the beaches to Anjuna. We also headed over to a tiny little town called Chapora. It was supposedly untouched by development but turned out to be overrun with European backpackers, Israelis, and aging Russian hippies. One with half his head bandaged up wandering around drinking vodka. It was an interesting place. It had a nice restaurant called the Yak bar in which we decided to eat dinner. I was pretty happy. Afterwards we had a little ropey ride home as Marcus’s bike had no back light so we had to shadow him and be his back light. I then dropped Merryl off and took the bike for a rag over to the nearby town of Baga to get some cash.