Around the the last week of September, when the rains in Goa ended, I finally quit procrastinating, got on my bike and lugged my camera around North Goa to photograph the many interesting lions that people had on the gate posts of their houses.

They had piqued my interest forever it seemed and I finally did what I had been planning to do for months, cycle around Moira, Nachinola, Aldona, Assagaon, Carona, Olaulim, Pomburpa and Britona and photograph as many of them as I could find. It turned out to be a hugely rewarding day and I came home tired, sunburnt, with a sore ass, back and neck but I ended up with many photographs I am actually pleased with. 

Click on the picture to go Flickr and see the complete set of photographs.

Random Aldona, Assagaon, Bardez, Britona, Carona, Goa, Lions of Goa, Moira, Nachinola, North Goa, Olaulim, Pomburpa

Since I will be leaving Goa in about a week and don’t know when I will return I have been trying to make the most of the time I have here. One of the things that I have enjoyed the most this year has been to rediscover the thrill of cycling and do it on a regular basis like I have never done before.

I’ve been cycling at least 50 K a day and on many days as much as 120 K or so during a couple of trips to Sawantwadi in Maharashtra and many trips to the Maharashtra border check-post.

The rains though put a major damper on my habit and after a few weeks of cycling in a downpour everyday and coming home like a drenched rat I tired of it and the cycling got sporadic. A week back though the monsoon disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived in Goa. I woke up one morning with the sun shining brightly at me through the window and not a cloud in the sky so I decided to do my early morning cycling trip to the lighthouse at Fort Aguada. This is a 48 K or so trek I was doing every morning for the first few months in Goa but the monsoons threw a spanner into the works of my well maintained habit.

It was the morning after I had booked tickets to Mumbai and then to Delhi so I decided I ought to get back in the saddle regularly and make the best of the few weeks left. So here’s a description of my daily ride from this morning. This may only be interesting to other cyclists at best and will surely be thoroughly boring for pretty much everyone else but I’m writing it as much to put down the memory to savour later for myself as for anyone else to read. So here goes…

Read more…

Music, Random aguada fort, calangute, candolim, Cycling, Firefox, Goa, mapusa, Moira, Moira Church, Nachinola, parra, pirazona, Shimano, sinquerim, St. Jerome’s Church

So, (I have to stop starting posting posts with that word) on a recent vacation in Goa that lasted nearly a month, I cycled around pretty little villages in North Goa like crazy (I also decided I would “Go For A Run” but that just ended with my thighs screaming “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO US?!“ at me and having to heave myself off the toilet the next morning by pulling my body up using the door handle because I was pretty much paralyzed from the waist down, but I digress…)

One of the  many joys of cycling around was being able to listen to music with earphones in and be reasonably confident that I wouldn’t get run over by a bus or an SUV tearing around a blind corner in the opposite direction. Other joys included blasting down a hillside, free-wheeling at 45 or so, silently whooshing past little old ladies on Honda Activas, while resisting the urge to yell “Outta my way Jesus Lover! Comin’ through!”

Ahhh Goa!

I also managed to borrow a reasonably decent camera from the same charitable people who lent me their house and took a few photographs which are on ‘the flickr’ here. Mostly old houses, abandoned and gone to seed, being slowly reclaimed by the undergrowth and some churches.

So, the song. Besides a ton of Goldfrapp and Tosca, this song by Groove Armada was playing in my ears a lot of the time and boy did it fit the setting. Its called At the River and is from the album Vertigo. If you want to hear Groove Armada’s best album though, SoundBoy Rock would be a better bet. Please ignore the video, which is a mash up of some footage including an Nvidia graphics demo from a few years back, when we would actually go out and buy a new graphics card and slot it into a desktop PC and then run the demo and ooh and ahhh (at the rendering not the chick, okay maybe a little bit at the chick)

Anyways, vacation over. Back to the mines. Same shit, different day. Repeat. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum .

Music, Random At the River, Corjuem, Cycling, Flickr, Goa, Goldfrapp, Groove Armada, Moira, Nachinola, Nvidia, Soundboy Rock, Tosca, Vertigo