Hello! Good to see you again! Happy new year! After a break for Christmas, David and I have set off on the next leg of our Senior Gap Year. We’ll be on the road for the next five months and look forward to telling you all about the ups and downs of our excellent adventure. We have graduated (or regressed…?) from suitcases to backpacks since we plan to do some more ‘proper’ travelling this time round.  We may even do some hiking. So move over Gappies and let us show you how it’s done. Or at least give us points for trying!

First destination – Divine Beach Resort in Agonda Beach in Southern Goa. A couple of weeks on the beach to ease us back in. The accommodation was all booked and paid. but first of all we had to get there…

We arrived in Goa’s largest city Vasco de Gama. David had booked a night in a hotel near the airport as we flew in late. After a long wait at customs we hit the official money exchange, and were handed large piles of notes. We headed out to the baggage drop, feeling slightly addled by the flight, trying to work out the rate of rupees to the pound. At the baggage drop, an airport attendant swept in and loaded our rucksacks onto a trolley. Before we could protest, he headed for the exit, leaving us trotting in his wake.

Outside the airport, it was chaos with dozens of taxi drivers competing for our attention. Our airport attendant steered us to the official taxi rank where a complicated series of administrative tasks took place very quickly. Before long we found ourselves in a fixed price taxi, heading (we hoped) for our hotel, but not before David had pressed far too many rupees into the airport attendant’s hand.

The taxi ride to the hotel was surreal. The driver made a quick stop to buy a single cigarette off a man by the side of the road but otherwise he kept his pedal to the metal and didn’t seem too fussy which side of the road he was on. As we crashed over speed bumps, an array of Christmas lights, Nativity scenes and Santa’s Grottoes went flashing by. Clearly, Christmas is big in Goa. Still, he got us to the hotel and was honest enough to tell David he was trying to pay him far too much. We’ll get the hang of these rupees eventually…

The next morning, we set off in another taxi for Agonda Beach in Southern Goa, but first we asked our driver to head into the city. I realised on the plane that I had forgotten to bring my keyboard. I use a Surface Pro, which has a separate bluetooth keyboard. No keyboard = no blog.

Our lovely taxi driver phoned a friend who knew about computers and took us to the right part of town. He parked up while we ran about looking for India’s equivalent of Dixons. We soon found ourselves plunged into a warren of tiny backstreet shops, selling watches, batteries, mobile phones – but no computers. I took the opportunity to get myself a new battery for my watch and had it fitted on the spot for less than a pound. Meanwhile, mopeds weaved round us, one laden with a family of four, another with a woman on the back carrying a tower of cardboard boxes. A woman in a sari balancing a bag of rice on her head walked elegantly by whilst a man in jeans talked urgently into his phone. All this may be commonplace to those of you who have visited India but neither David or I have been to India before. Yet to an extent it feels familiar, in the way that Los Angeles feels familiar, because you’ve seen it on TV and the movies. Familiar but not quite the same.

We soon discovered that we were in the wrong street for computers and were helpfully directed to a nearby shopping centre. We crossed a road, passing fruit sellers with their wares laid out at our feet, and cobblers sitting cross legged mending shoes held between their feet. We spotted some computer equipment crammed into the window of a shop on the second floor and ran upstairs to find ourselves in a tiny, dark room.

The shop keeper was on the phone. After waiting for him to finish, I put in my request for a blue tooth keyboard and he pulled one straight off the shelf. He showed us it worked by linking it to his computer. Two minutes later, I was running back up the street with the keyboard tucked under my arm. After a false start – trying to get inside the wrong taxi – we made it back. But no sign of our taxi driver. Just as we were starting to wonder what had happened, he ran up, breathless. We’d been so long he gone to try and track us down.

The rest of the journey went smoothly enough. The driver kept the windows down. It was pleasant whizzing along the highway with the wind in my hair but as soon as we came to a town the traffic came to a halt and the car filled with fumes. After a couple of hours the traffic started to thin and instead of billboards and construction sites we began to see paddy fields, the women bent double and ankle deep in water as they planted the rice. A sharp right and we were in narrow, twisty lanes, weaving our way through the countryside. Palm trees gave way to houses and shops and the road became congested with mopeds and taxis as we pulled into Agonda Beach.

The taxi driver stopped to ask some locals the way to Divine Beach Resort, but received blank looks. He stopped again and explained that we had booked and paid for a stay in Divine Beach Resort and was told ‘Divine Beach closed.’ A little bit more consultation and we were directed to the site of Divine Beach Resort. But there was no sign to indicate where it was.  A final enquiry elicited the response ‘Divine Beach gone, Divine Beach not here any more.’

What happened to our resort? Where would we stay? And how would we get our money back? Answers to these questions and more will be revealed in the next exciting installment!