Daman

Every time an outing is planned with friends, it somewhat goes like it happens in the above video. I can vouch that at some point of time each of us might have experienced it at least once or more.

It so happened that I was talking to my friend on the phone and that we need to go out for a outing. My friend spontaneously came up on the idea of going to Lonavala. He called up another friend, hooked him up on concall. He also said yes. Now we needed a driver for the car so called up another friend and he too agreed. 

The energy for the trip got build up as we were going on the same weekend. I was excited that in such a short moment we ended up planning an outing that was crazy.

The D-day came and I was all set to go. When I called up my friend for the meeting point, he said the plan is cancelled as he was down with dysentery. Nothing got me more mad than this as we were taking his car and without him the trip had to be cancelled.

We ended up making another plan which again got delayed by two months and then we ended up in Daman instead of Lonavala. Why, you ask. Well, we never had been there before.

The irony of this trip was that it also almost got cancelled. My friend kept pushing the dates and we never did any booking of our transport or hotels. When the D-day came near, we ended up booking our train tickets and hotel booking just one day prior our departure. 

We were supposed to reach Vapi at around 1:30am in the midnight but ended up reaching at around 3am thanks to the heavy downpour of rains. We hailed a Ambassador car taxi that dropped us at our hotel.

I thought I would catch up on my sleep but my friends wont let me. After all they were out of Bombay and now they can do what they do best and that was drink. 

Later on we ended up going to the beach on the early morning. Since our hotel was beside the Devka beach, we went over there but soon realized that it was not that clean kind of beach like in Goa. We decided to embrark towards Jampore beach by taking an auto rickshaw.

When we reached the beach, the water was nowhere to be seen. It was drizzling and being alone in the beach on an early morning had just made our day. 

We ended up walking quite a distance to find water so that we can drown ourselves but it certainly took a beating out of us. We also had a group of dogs that followed us. Finally when we could see the water, it was all muddy and yellow. Not the kind of water I would like to get myself dirty with. On our way back, we made halt at a shack for our morning breakfast.

There were no auto rickshaw and we decided to walk a little. With the little walk, we ended up walking at least half the distance to our hotel as there were no buses & auto rickshaw to take us back to our hotel. We also had a doggy who joined us in our dandi march.

We finally managed to get an auto rickshaw and had to bid goodbye to the dog which came along with us from the beach. Back at the hotel we had a proper breakfast and then went on to catch up on our sleep.

In the evening we visited the Moti Daman fort and the beach alongside it which was better than the Devka beach least to say. The Motil Daman holds all the government offices inside it. We also saw Cathedral of Bome Jesu. We then decided to retire for the day.

The next day we went to Nani Daman fort and then to the jetty wherein we tried to capture the beauty of this place. We then headed back to Vapi to get on our train to Bombay.

I was little disappointed by Daman from what I had heard about it. Especially the beaches, they are not that clean. What the point of living near a beach if you cannot go in the waters of it. All and all the tourist places can easily be covered within a day. It can be said that its a paradise for those who love their drinks, wont even call it a mini goa.

We did though had our fun and ended up checking off this place from our list.