India / Goa / Dudhsagar Waterfalls / Tropical Spice Plantation & Elephant Sanctuary

We both clearly *are* morning people! Sunshine Feyza 🙂

Dudhsagar Waterfalls 

It takes about 3 hours to drive from Mandrem to where the jeeps take off up the mountain to our first stop: the Dudhsagar Waterfalls.

We are not able to go up the hills in regular cars and need to hire a jeep. It takes about another 1.5 hours of waiting before the jeeps materialize. We should have left quite a bit earlier it seems to catch the first round of jeeps going up the hill. We now have to await their return.

It is a long wait with nowhere to sit. We are surrounded by loads of tourists and we have become one of them.

We make like sheep and look for shade.

We also make new friends.

Uday – polite, kind, honest, patient, gentle soul. We were lucky to have ended up with him as our guide and driver for the day. Let me know if you need his details 🙂

Seems that the jeeps need to have a total of 6 passengers. Uday helps us organise and we end up with a lovely old Indian couple and a not so lovely young Russian couple. The male half of the Russian couple is very angry at being kept waiting and is having a bit of a hissy fit in Russian denying us the pleasure of knowing what he could possibly be saying.

Finally, the 45 minute journey uphill begins. Very pretty drive through the forest, crunching over little rocks in shallow lakes – feels very tropical indeed.

We finally reach it! We are given an hour to return to the jeep. Takes us about another 20 minutes to get to the actual waterfall.

Many of these around, They had very strange growths on their chins and necks.

Here we are: Dudhsagar waterfalls.

Feyza takes regular dips in the freezing lakes of Switzerland where the water is around 10 degrees centigrade! She is like a mermaid back in water, splashing around and giggling like a child. Her enthusiasm is infectious!

I am a desert girl and like my swimming water as hot as my soup. It baffles me when people are happy to get into such torturous coldness and consider it to be ‘fresh’ and ‘reviving’.  It baffles me even more when Feyza convinces me take a dip and I am actually happy to try. I LOVE it! She was right: it did feel cold for only a few seconds and then felt warm immediately after. Was so fresh and reviving.

There are no changing rooms. People are changing behind sign boards. Yep, this means all the monkeys get to see your bottom and you are only sheltered from the crowd in the lake. There are vendors selling bottles of coke, water and Kingfisher – so this is where it ends up if not in the lake.  Yep, stinky pee pee smell – yuck! Perhaps best to  cover up with a towel and change in the car.

So the young Russian couple have decided to get their revenge for being made to wait by making us all wait for them! They are almost half an hour late coming back to the car. The driver says, ‘These Moscow people are always like this – angry.’ We keep ourselves entertained as we are shiny, happy Turks.

Finally, we start heading back. If I had a choice I would do this again but I would wake up earlier to avoid the crowd and the wait.

Lovely Indian couple from Pune whom we shared the jeep with. The gentleman had retired some time ago and they were now traveling all over India and making the most out of each other. Married for over 40 years, I asked them what the secret of a good marriage is. Apparently it is ‘adjustment’. Of both sides – just to be clear! Bless them both.

Tropical Spice Plantation & Elephant Sanctuary

This is our next stop: Tropical Spice Plantation. Uday says this is one of the best ones in the region. We bump into many of the same faces we had seen in the waterfalls.

Lunch is included on the day trip, scrumptious! We do that first before our tour of the spice gardens.

The guides are perfectly fluent in Russian! Thankfully our girl speaks perfect English. We are taken around and given the low-down on all things botanical. Did you know that a pineapple can be a girl or a boy?? We get to smell and touch vanilla, cinnamon, pepper, chili and many others and learn all about their habits.

Hindu Temple

Our next stop is a Hindu temple. This lady was selling flowers for 10 Rupees a bunch outside. This broke my heart and made me wish I had enough money to save the whole wide world so she could be sitting in her comfortable home and baking cookies for her grandkids…

We are running out of steam – it has been a very long day. Nature’s magic drink, we take a coconut juice.

We still have the churches in old Goa to visit however we are officially pooped. We have a look from a distance, take the obligatory tourist shot and move on.

We return to the resort 11 hours after our early morning departure. We rush to get dinner at 7 pm and are told there is a meditation session straight after. We tell each other it will be the perfect last-thing-to-do-before-you-sleep and off we go.

Incredible! We both go into the meditation hall feeling like zombies and come out of it feeling like Beavis in his Great Cornholio sugar rush! The hour-long session feels like it only took 15 minutes and we are so energized that we join Cassie and Rihannon, our new friends from the resort, and have a girly dinner out, Kingfisher and all. Meditation is magic and my note-to-self tells me to get deep into it, pun fully intended.

Zzzzzzz…