Goa Travel Diaries: A Beach Getaway

Everything that could possible go wrong went wrong before this trip. All our original plans completely fell through. We were supposed to be a group of 6, and we had all booked tickets for Sunburn Goa months ahead. Sunburn is a huge music festival that takes place in Goa every year in December around New Year’s Eve. It has happened in Goa for the last 10 years but the one year we decide to go, it gets cancelled at the last moment. By then I’d already booked my flights, hotels and everything. So even though the rest of the group cancelled, Maddy and I decided to go anyway. It was Goa, how bad could it be?

Turns out, best decision ever! From the minute we landed, things just started falling into place. Since we’ve both been to Goa a few times before, we’ve seen and done all the touristy things already. So this time we decided to just chill and do whatever we felt like, and not follow any strict plans. Since it was the last week of  December, and thats peak tourist season in Goa, there were an insane number of people there. We stayed in North Goa near Baga beach which was literally the busiest place in whole of Goa at that point. As soon as I reached the hotel I realized that we needed to figure out a way to avoid the crazy crowds.

So that’s what ended up being our plan for the trip. We avoided the popular tourist spots, went to the quiet and peaceful beaches, swam in the sea, ate at cute cafes and beach shacks and drank till we literally couldn’t anymore. And we saw some breathtaking sunsets. I tried to capture some in photographs, but they honestly don’t do them justice. Doesn’t even come close to the real thing. In the evenings we tried out a few nightclubs the first couple of days, but they were way too crowded so after that we just ended up having dinner on the beach at the beach shacks.

This was honestly the most peaceful and rejuvenating vacation ever. In hindsight I’m extremely relieved that Sunburn got cancelled. While traveling with a group of friends is always super fun, I’m so glad that we were able to take this one week and it was just the two of us. We stayed for a whole week and it was extremely calm and relaxing. It gave us this perfect break from our city lives that we didn’t even realize we needed. And to think our plan had been to attend a music festival packed with a million people! I can’t even fathom how annoying that would have been. I’m not going into details about the beaches etc that we went to, as we’ve already covered that in our last Goa post. Do check that out if you are planning a trip, especially if you are looking to experience an offbeat side of Goa.

This post basically turned out to be a photo diary of our trip. I’d originally planned to do a post for our Five Things series, but I honestly couldn’t pick just five and got quite carried away. Just looking at these pictures makes me happy! I am already planning our next beach getaway 🙂

Hope you enjoyed the pictures. If you liked them do follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, all our vacation pictures end up there first. Subscribe from our home page to see all our new posts first and let us know what your vacation plans are for this year in the comments! Till next time 🙂

–Sat

A big thank you to Maddy for taking these awesome pictures!