In Anjuna I met Florian my former neighbor in Wiesbaden, we haven’t seen each other since 5 years and he happened to travel south India right now, perfect timing brotha!
First we explored the beach area, a lot of things happened in the last 5 years so we sat at one of the many beach side bars/restaurants and had a beer enjoying the ocean breeze and of course everywhere you’ll hear music on the beach, mostly goa trance as this kind of trance music originated right from this spot. Sometimes you’ll hear house or more chilled electro tunes, reggae sounds reached our ears too but it’s not that common, the faster electronic music seems to govern here, it must be bloody disturbing for the locals and we haven’t seen any on the beach same as hippie like looking people – they all live away from the beach if they’re still here, many went to different spots as Goa in our days is quite touristy, foreigners as well as Indians come to enjoy the comparably mild climate and the almighty ocean and they want to wander on the hippie trail to get a glimpse of what it was like back in the days, well it’s different now, we met some guys coming to Goa since 20+ years, at that time the beach was empty, no bars/restaurants the prices were cheap and the western people often not as nice as today, stealing food and other commodities from locals and fighting as they hadn’t had any money.
The beach is rocky, when I went into the warm waters the first time I hurt my shin bone, I didn’t see the big rock in the shady waters, this is all a result made by humans, sand was taken away from the beach for decades and used to bind with other meterials to build houses. This has stopped now – tourism is the most important income in Goa and they come for the beach! As a tourist you’ll feel it, shacks that sell clothes, sunglasses, and many more souvenirs can be found all along the back roads “Come look my shop”, “You promise you come tomorrow?!”, “Cheap price, only 100 rupees!” – the prices vary though, the slogans don’t ;). “Walking shop ladies” roam the beach during the day times selling jewellery and the light guy selling lasers, glowing sticks and other blinking stuff pop out at night, it’s a big business!
We even had a nice encounter with the police for smoking up on the northern hill during sunset, it was an awkward moment but it relaxed quite a bit as I calmly explained we don’t want any trouble and of course not want to be arrested we paid the baksheesh and went down to the beach, over there the police is paid by the restaurant owners so they don’t linger around and tourists are safe 😉
We enjoyed the easiness of life in Goa although it might not sound so.
One day we even rented a scooter and explored the beaches adject, Vagator, Calangute, Baga and Chapora none of them had the same look and feel as Anjuna, either they had no rocks or packed with all-inclusive tourists or they were a bit dirty, had no shade or sitting at the river mouth so you don’t want to swim in there… it felt like coming home when going back to “Our beach”
Whole Anjuna is a music festival, having 20+ bars/restaurants in any size, ranging from small wooden shacks to big 300+ people fitting concrete buildings, every spot is a stage, some more loud than the other, also some bigger festivals happen in between then the music won’t stop playing until the morning – usually the play until midnight. It’s nice to see and feel but after a week we just wanted to escape, the patterns were repeating and we had enough party, I knew that Agonda would be the antipode so we went, it just took 4 local buses and 5 hours to go 100 km further south…