My partner and I travelled to Goa in April’09 and stayed at the Lagoa Azul in the resort of Arpora. We travelled with First Choice and the flight was great, we upgraded to Star Class Premier and had the extra legroom seats too which was great for this long flight! When we arrived at Goa airport we were getting slightly frustrated as we were stuck in a queue for about an hour waiting to go through passport control and it was so hot! Once through, the Goa experience began. We went to collect our luggage and found our cases had been taken off the conveyer belt by men wanting a tip for doing so. After fighting our way through the crowds of porters wanting to carry our bags we jumped in a taxi and headed for the hotel. We were so pleased on arrival, the hotel looked lovely and our room was perfect, basic but clean and we had a fantastic view overlooking the pool and Baga River. This hotel is perfect if like us you want to get away from it all. It’s about 5 minutes from Baga where you’ll find a lovely beach and some great shops. This was my first time in Goa but my boyfriend Alex’s second so he knew what to expect, I on the other hand felt quite overwhelmed for the first few days but that soon wore off and I adjusted well. On our second day we hired a scooter for our 2 weeks stay from a lovely man called Sanjay who ran the taxi rank outside the hotel, this cost around £2 a day, an absolute bargain and well worth doing although not for the faint hearted as the roads here are crazy! If you do plan on hiring one then make sure you have adequate cover as it is important – we saw an accident in which a scooter had been ran over and was underneath a car, the car then began reversing trying to get off the man and scooter!
The pool at the hotel was lovely although as there was little to no breeze we found it hard to sunbathe here for long, so we jumped on the scooter everyday and worked our way around. Baga beach was lovely and the sea beautiful, you can have loads of fun here, the river joins the sea and you get swept straight through. We also visited Candolim, the beach here is beautiful although you do tend to get quite a lot of hassle from the sellers on the beach but you can use this to your advantage and get some great bargains. The sea here is fantastic although furious, I’ve never seen waves as big in my life! They knocked me over and I had quite a few embarrassing bikini incidents, but great fun for those brave enough! Our next stop was Sinquerim, which is the next beach down from Candolim, this beach was beautiful and very quiet with calm shallow water which is exactly what we needed. One of my favourite things we did was visit Dudhsagar Waterfall, we decided not to do the trip through the rep so we booked a taxi and headed to the hills, the jeep ride and walk up to the waterfall was great fun and feeding the monkeys was an unforgettable experience, especially for Alex when the monkey attacked him for his banana! Another amazing trip we took was up to Morjim Beach, we booked a night in a Luxury Beach Tent at the Montego Bay Beach Village. The beach here is unspoilt, there are only 10-20 sunbeds on this beach which stretches for miles and the shallow calm sea was just what we needed. We sat on the rocks and watched the sunset while the local fishermen were preparing their boats to head out to sea. There are lots of great restaurants here, some of our favourites were spice oven and all spice. There was one restaurant which stood out from the rest, The Lazy River Restaurant which sits on Baga River is a stunning, modern building with beautiful decor and food to die for! The last place we visited was Little Vagator, a beautiful, quiet, unspoilt beach with amazing calm sea. However we did have an incident at one of the beach shacks ” Lucky’s Shack ” I’ll cut this story short but basically we ordered our food, waited an hour for it to come, Alex’s came first and he’d finished his before mine arrived ( poor thing ) I cut into my vegetable cutlet and thought…What is that?! It was a very large black bug cooked inside! We practically ran out of their and back to the scooter where we hurried back to the hotel & felt ill for a couple of hours.
There are some great markets here in Goa, we got some great bargains at the main market in Anjuna but had loads of fun at the Saturday night market in Arpora where you’ll see old school hippies from everywhere, local bands singing and dancing and hundreds upon hundreds of stalls - the atmosphere is electric and I found it a real eye opener. All in all we had an excellent holiday, great people, great place and most of the time….great food. I will be returning to Goa the next chance I get and would recommend it to anyone, especially travelling in April as the weather is great and it is very quiet due to the season coming to a close.
By Laura Elliott
Sounds like a great place.
Sounds absolutely lovely!!