After spending a few weeks in the super chilled hostel in Palolem we moved north to another hostel that we had committed to volunteer at for about four weeks.

We knew the beaches in north Goa were a bit more ‘party party’ than its chilled cousins in the south but I don’t think we were quite prepared for how shit it was going to be!

For a start the hostel was really disorganised and we didn’t really know anything for the first two days as the hostel manager was rather elusive; we didn’t chase it as we were still getting a free room and breakfast. The room was actually passable, a seven bed dorm, and was cleaned every day. Our room mates didn’t appear to like sleeping during the night time hours and regularly came in in the wee hours, if at all. Nice bunch though.

The area we stayed was just a bit crap. For us there were not many nice places to eat, the beach was shocking (pumping psy trance allll day), and there seemed to be no central hub of the place. To say it wasn’t our scene was an understatement and I definitely missed the chilled vibes of the south and being able to walk around barefoot; on the beaches here I saw so much broken glass I was even wary in flip flops.

So, there was limit to my apathy and we decided we couldn’t hang around. The work was easy, showing people to their rooms, but super boring. And considering we weren’t going out every night we didn’t need the time for our hangovers to wear off and subsequently were bored out of our brains.

Luckily, fate intervened and we have somehow managed to get a volunteering gig at Goa Sunsplash – ‘India’s biggest reggae festival’! Up the coast we went and booked ourselves into a relatively new hostel, a private room no less after weeks in shared dorms.

Our excitement was short lived.

After a less than successful evening where we saw a puppy run over and had a bit of prawn on our veg momos that we had waited an hour for, we retired to our room defeated and somewhat heartbroken. Clearly more so over the poor pups than the food; seeing the sad Mumma dog howling just broke my heart and made me cry at the dinner table. The girl on the scooter who hit the puppy was equally as distraught and the restaurant assisted by burying the pups close by. An awful thing to witness.

After going to bed we were soon woken up by the shouts of drunken Russians and duf, duf, duf of their shitty trance music in the common area just outside our room. I eventually called the manager who asked them to turn it down, then we asked them to turn it down, then they finally either went out or went to bed about 3am. The relief was short lived and at 6am people arrived back from their nights out and played their music and were talking loudly about how they were a ‘hot blooded Russian’. They went to bed but then another person was there at 0730 watching something on their phone really loudly (I swear people here have never heard of earphones!). All of this was coupled with wafer thin walls and stinky drains.

Needless to say we cancelled the rest of our booking here and instead of a relaxing day today we are tired and moving on again to another room. Another day another accomodation roulette. What will happen?

Wish us luck!