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Kevin Gilmartin's
Gone to INDIA pages
HOW DID THE 3 MONTH INDIA TRIP COME ABOUT?
Having been lucky enough to retire early, I had been taking at least two package holidays a year out of season and during January/February of both 1999 & 2000, I visited Sydney & Tasmania, where my youngest brother lives. In August 2000, I spotted a newspaper advert offering prolonged winter holidays in Spain at quite attractive prices. But as often turns out to be the case in my experience, those prices didn't apply to the single traveller, and so, whilst I was there at the Travel Agents, they started to look for alternatives for me, and Goa came up. I was unsure as it looked like being a quiet beach type of holiday, which doesn't appeal to me. But I wanted to see India and this seemed at the time to be the only way I was ever likely to do so. I wanted more than my usual 2 weeks package holiday, but fearing I would become bored, I compromised and settled for only 3 weeks instead of 4.
Grahame is a self-employed gardener and is idle for 3 months of the winter and he had decided he was going to get away for a month in January/February 2001. The travel agent had almost sold him a month in Malta but fortunately, a friend persuaded him that Malta would not be such good idea in January, and he sold him on a package trip to Goa.
And so it came to be. Grahame and I flew out on the same flight and I was in the row behind him. From there we ended up in the same hotel, the Riverside Guesthouse in Baga, North Goa. When we met we discovered that we both originated from the same town, Accrington in Lancashire, where he still lives. Together we got around Goa under our own steam, making our own arrangements and using the local public transport, buses and trains, and only when necessary, taxis. We made some mistakes, but invariably they turned out to be fortuitous and led us to places we might never have got to. I left a week before Grahame and he continued to get around Goa under his own steam. Had I been completely alone in Goa I would not have had the nerve to get around by myself and see the places we did.
We spent one day at an orphanage (picture opposite), Shekinah House near Mapsula, helping with interior decoration (that's painting). That came about after meeting their charitable workers and one of the charity's leaders, Anita Edgar, who were collecting funds at Anjuna market. Have a look at their web site, the El Shaddai Charitable Trust
www.elshaddaigoa.com .At the end of the holiday I was convinced that I wanted to and could afford to spend a much longer period in Goa during the winter of 2001/02. Grahame was going to be more adventurous and by May had booked a 3 month return trip to Delhi (actually whilst I was away in Cyprus). I had to do some quick thinking. It was either Goa on my own (possibly meeting Grahame in Goa at Christmas) or join Grahame and see much more of India. I chose the latter but did not fancy having to double back near the end of our trip to return to Delhi for the flight home. So I booked with Shri Lankan Airways (before the Tamil attack on Colombo Airport) to fly to Delhi via Colombo but returning to Colombo from Trivandrum in Kerala, giving me a bonus stay of 2 weeks in Shri Lanka. The drawback of having to go from & return to Heathrow rather than Manchester was a small price to pay for this advantage.
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Some Goa Photos, January 2001
© Kevin Gilmartin 2001. Page last updated 5 November 2001.