Fontainhas – My Favourite Things

Raghav of the Traveling Ticker asked me for a Guest post more than a year back. And though I agreed to write one, I could not find a topic suitable for his blog. Till I visited Fontainhas in Goa last year.

Fontainhas is a charming little area in Panaji, Goa, known for its traditional Portuguese style colourful houses. Though I would have loved to spend more time there, I could only manage an hour walking its many lanes and delighting in its unique architecture. Needless to say, I fell in love with Fontainhas.

I sent of the post and accompanying photographs to Raghav yesterday, who posted “The old world charm of Fontainhas” on the Traveling Ticker short while back. Do click on the link or the collage below to read my impressions of Fontainhas.

And you will let me know what you think of Fontainhas, won’t you? 🙂

Fontainhas, Goa, Travel — Please click on the picture to read the full post

It took me 4 trips over 27 years to come close to understanding what people say about you.

It is said that you are not just a destination or a place, but a state of mind. Rarely a day goes by without coming across a write-up about you in a newspaper or a magazine or a blog. Many of these write-ups are so gushy that it is almost embarrassing to read them. But it does reveal one thing: it was love at first visit and an almost instant attainment of that “Goa” state of mind for those who wrote the articles.

Goa, Colva Beach, Travel Not for me though. I visited you 4 times between 1986 and 2013, and you have always been a destination for me, and memorable for all the wrong reasons (for the first 3 trips, at least). I wasn’t impressed with you after the first trip or the second or the third trip… As for the fourth trip, we’ll come to that a little later. Let me tell you a little bit about the first three trips.

The first trip was organised by my school in December 1986. It was a road trip and I was one of the 90-odd students who travelled in 2 MSRTC buses from Pune to Goa. My recollections of that trip are largely of motion sick co-travellers and vomit all over the bus; smell of fish, wherever we went in Goa (yeah, I’m a vegetarian); a blur of church and beach visits, each one indistinguishable from the other; diarrhoea and the hunt for public toilets with water… It was a poorly organised trip and I know that you were not entirely to blame, but… I didn’t take to you at all.

The second trip happened four years later in December 1990, a mandatory field trip in my third year of college as part fulfillment for a BSc in Geology. This time I travelled by train with 20-odd classmates and 3 teachers.