Christmas at the Beach: North Goa (part 2/2)

Read Christmas at the Beach: North Goa part 1/2

 

Baga, Anjuna… and Gangnam Style!

Once Calangute wasn’t really that relaxing and now we had bikes, we decided to go and explore the beaches of north Goa.

Fist stop: Baga. This is where Goa’s fame as party land started, way back in the 60s. In good north Goa style, it’s overcrowded and even more during Christmas and New Year’s, considering this is the peak season.

 

Anjuna beach, on the other hand, feels like a good compromise between action and peace. During the day the beach is calm enough, there are cows lazying around and reminding you that you’re still in India, there are families, young people… a good mix of “a little bit of everything”. The Anjuna wednesday flea market is over-rated though. They have whatever other souvenir places have by the beach (clothes, hippie accessories, decoration items, etc), but just that there’s more of it! And at night Anjuna feels like a different world! The vibes go from chilled to psychotropic, the lighting goes neon and the crowds behave like they’re always hungry for more.

 

Talking about “hungry for more”, our friend Ayush arrived in the meantime, opening doors for the usual craziness that tends to happen when he’s around. Just to give you a preview, this is what one of our evenings looked like:

 

That was the night when Gangnam Style became the official song of this trip. Call me commercial or pop or whatever you want, but I do think that Psy (and this song) rock! Is it that special, is it such an out of the world musical composition? Probably not. But the fact that, for once, one of these pop phenomena comes from Asia instead of the USA, makes me happy. It means, on a fairly bizarre level, that the world is increasingly opening up to other cultures. So this phenomena is not as stupid as it might seem on the surface. And I like the happy contagious vibes of the track too!

 

Candolim

We spent some hours in Candolim beach on the same day that the famous Sunburn festival was taking place. Although Ayush was eager to go and shake it nicely like he only knows how to do [they say he probably learned with Shakira...], we opted for spending the evening at the beach, watching the sun go down and eventually stuffing ourselves with tandoori goods.

 

Vagator and warming up for South Goa!

Vagator was our good-bye spot for north Goa and it was actually a great beach to hang out at!

 

Not nearly as visited as the previous spots we had been at, it reminisced of the good old hippie times that Goa must have once lived but that have meanwhile been buried in the hype that surrounds this coastal area.

 

North Goa: you were good to us. But the south awaits us, with its chilled vibes that can’t ever stop luring us into that delicious thing that goes like “do nothing and enjoy every second of it“!

 

Read New Year’s at the Beach: South Goa