So for the ones who don’t know, I got married last year and due to work was unable to go anywhere for honeymoon or for a vacation either. Perks of working for yourself can be strange sometimes. Wifey says that she understands but everyone knows how these things go. So when this trip got planned, I had to hurry up and tie up some loose ends at work very quickly.
Packing a 70 liters rucksack for vacation after 3 years, that too with a wife to give instructions was a new experience. 11 months back when I was on my own, I had put all my stuff in a 15 liters backpack for a 5 days trip to Rishikesh and mountains nearby. This time, a rucksack five times the size was nearly not enough and she had her own 35 liters rucksack too. Since Delhi to Goa plane tickets were too expensive, we took a plane to Mumbai and then a train to Goa. Longer travel time, but at half the price. The flight to Mumbai was uneventful apart from the fact that the we landed about 25 minutes sooner than what was printed on the ticket. So when we were in the air, over what I thought was some inland area near Gujarat-Maharashtra border, I saw a gray glimmering water body. It was too huge to be anything but the sea, which confused me about our location. A few minutes later, pilot informed that we were about to land. Before that I spent a fair amount of effort trying to find the possible route that the plane had taken without success.
Cities look interesting high up from skies and Mumbai with it’s coastline even more so. The water divides the city in a number of places and without any knowledge of city’s map and landmarks, it was a lot of guess work. After landing, we went to house of relatives who lived within 5 minutes drive from airport. After some rest, lunch and chatting, we went on a short walk in Vile Parle area. Our train left at 11 pm from Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CSTM) and we had some time to take a short walk in the area but not enough to explore the city in any meaningful way. The place was too hot, humid and crowded to do so. Turns out that traffic is as bad, if not worse as Delhi which was no surprise seeing how narrow the roads were. After dinner, the family took us to Dairy Don, a famous ice cream shop in the area. The ice creams were quite good but I still prefer the Delhi kulfis anyday. We decided to take the local train to CSTM as I had heard a lot about it but never had the chance of riding them. Also, we didn’t want to take a chance of taking the road route and getting stuck somewhere. The stations and trains were fairly crowded even after dark, but not as much as we see in photos. The train was virtually empty and got full only after 5-6 stations. After an enjoyable ride, we arrived at CSTM and found the train and our seats after running around a little.
A and M bhai left after getting us water with some difficulty as there was no shop on the platform on which our train was. The train ride was just like the flight in the way that we arrived about 20 minutes in advance.
There are no pictures in this post as we used our camera only to take pictures with family in Mumbai.
Next part will have details about our first day in Goa.