Panjim & Old Goa

The town of Panjim is Goa's State Capital, described as a charming old town with Portugese style winding narrow streets - this is true for a small section of the town however the majority of the streets looked very much like normal India. We discovered this by doing the Lonely Planet's suggested Walking Tour that took all of 20mins and left us with no doubts in our minds it was going to be a struggle to fill our allocated three days here. Luckily we had bagged a room with cable TV so the nights were no problem. The downside of having a room with TV was that the guesthouse was run by a Stalin wannabe who was a real stickler for rules and regulations, annoying the hell out of us everytime we saw him, what a twit! With the first day under our belt we ventured out of Panjim on the 2nd day to "Old Goa" 9km away which is supposedly a must see part of any trip to Goa due to its many Portuguese Colonial style Churches which are a significant part of the areas history. Now we knew it only mentioned churches in the guide book but we were expecting them to be located in some sort of town (surely a church or 10 need local residents nearby), we were gravely mistaken as in a 1km square area in the middle of nowhere stood at least a dozen different churches, many which looked no better or possibly even worse than you see back home. This ruined our days planned activities seeing as neither of us are A) religious or B) interested in churches - damn! To fill the day we left after 30mins of trying to be interested in these churches and decided to not take the bus opting instead to walk the 2 hours back to Panjim along very busy narrow roads full of terrible Indian drivers - an interesting day to say the least! Our final day here took us to the nearest beach 3km away which was deserted, totally unbuilt up and frankly pretty boring - we made do instead with a wander around a local park (actually pretty well kept - by Indian standards), but all of this revolved around the day's main attraction getting ourselves a proper "Steak Dinner" as Goa is the only state you can buy beef! We were suitably impressed as it was pretty nice and pleasing two carnivores who have been living off lentils for 6 weeks ain't hard! We left Panjim early the next morning (thanks to our 8.30am check-out) heading to the beach resorts of Colva and Benaulim hoping to recreate a similar time to what we'd had in Calangute! We are slowly running out of beaches to explore in Goa.