My World of Food and Travel

I have been away for a long, long time from blogosphere now. Maybe the longest time ever since I started my blog. For the first time I have not been able to balance my work life, home and blogging, all thanks to someone’s terrible planning at office. Before I turn this into a rant-post, I should also tell you that despite all the unearthly hours of office work that I am putting in, I have been travelling a lot and gone birding to my heart’s content. I have been using every spare minute to recharge myself with things that I love, or the stress would have busted me for sure.  And so, even though my work schedule is still pretty tight, I am taking a breather and refreshing my memories about my second back-to-back Goa visit – this time for Christmas. ( The earlier one was in Diwali. ) The last time we were in Goa, we did not have a proper notion about the region’s rich birdlife – where to go, what to expect, et al. This time, we were a bit prepared, though the visit was not stric...

There is a cheerful rabbit on the calendar on my office desk, standing up on its hind legs and prancing around with joy, a toothy grin plastered over its face. The caption says ‘Dream’. Overleaf, there is a delightful gang of pixies, riding iridescent snails. The caption – ‘Life’. I sighed and turned away my eyes from the calendar. An excel sheet lay open in my computer, splattered with various graphs and charts. “Hey, wake up, sleepyhead,” my colleague looked over at me through the cubicle partition. “Why are you staring at the calendar like that?” He peered at it closely. “Want to go on a holiday, do you?” “Yes,” I replied wearily. “A holiday every month, if you please.” “In that case, you have the wrong calendar,” he said, smiling warmly. He then carefully opened a brown envelope, took a calendar out of it and placed it on my desk. “Here,” he said in a low conspiratorial voice. “This is a magic calendar. Now you can go on your holiday for every month of the new year...

“So, we are in Goa,” I said to the husband, who was lazily lounging around in the four-poster antique bed at Cancio’s House. “And the beaches are over.” “Now for the birds,” he replied sleepily. Goa’s susegad air seemed to have worked well on him. “But where?” I nudged him. “You are the researcher, you do the research.” He then rolled over and started snoring. I quickly browsed through some sites and before I knew it, I had fallen asleep, too. It was 6.00 am when I woke up with a start. The husband, surprisingly, was already awake. “Where to, then?” he asked. Morjim beach is what I found myself saying and Morjim beach was where we found ourselves at around 7.00 am in the morning. The beach is a nesting and hatching habitat of the endangered Olive ridley sea turtles. The Tourism Department has strived to aid conservation efforts by restricting temporary seasonal structures (like shacks) to a portion of the beach and requiring them to operate only during daylight ho...