Baga in the off season. Review on Goa

Goa gets drenched to the bone during the monsoon months (June - July onwards). This is the off season and because of the heavy rains rain and the wet beaches, there are few tourists. Goa hibernates.

My wife and I thought we should check out Goa in the off season and went there in early July of 2002.

Well, we had a wonderful time. A sleepy Goa is still Goa and you get tremendous discounts from hotels. We stayed at Cavala Beach Resort on Baga, a hotel that during the season charges upwards of 1400 per day per suite. Cavala's have great suites with a Goan decor and great views over green fields. We bargained with the hotel manager and got a fantastic deal of Rs. 2800 for a week's stay with breakfast thrown for both of us.

Since the sea was generally choppy we could'nt go for a swim. But the beaches while wet were great for long walks from Baga to Calangute and beyond. We also had the beach more or less to ourselves, a novel feeling in tourist ridden Goa.

We also met, not other tourists in Bermudas and loud T shirts, as is the norm but Goans who seem to come out of the woodwork only during this season. Cavala for example had organised a Saturday bash with a live band and several Goan families came to listen to 50's and 60's numbers and shake a leg. It was wonderful to see elderly couples on a nostalgia trip, sing along with the band and occasionally get up to have a go around the dance floor. It all lent a very homey old Goa-ish touch to the proceedings and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Only the food remained pricey. We had just been in Kerala which seems to have the reverse problem, cheap but good food and expensive everything else. In Goa, the most humble dish of daal and rice gets labelled, ''Peagram soup spiced with fenugreek and mustard seed on a bed of white rice'' and as soon as you read it, you know you're going to get shafted once the bill comes. Of course, you could comfort yourself with several glasses of feni, which as always, was dirt cheap.

The best part of the trip was to have a more or less empty Goa all to ourselves, to be able to sit for hours in sleepy restaurants watching the sea, having the occasional beer, go for long drives on hired scooters on empty roads, the visual delight of a green wet Goa and the clinching attraction of great hotel bargains.

No negatives, none significant.