Girona City Transfer Tips & Options

Located within sight of the Pyrenees in the northeast of Catalonia, Girona city is a great place to start a journey to some really exotic locations. This is due to Girona’s proximity to Barcelona – a main Spanish hub from where many flights depart in the direction of South America and beyond.

In our case, we were looking for an inexpensive way to travel to the Canary Islands. We also quite liked the idea of a stopover in Spain. When we found Ryanair flights to Girona for €27, and ongoing flights from Barcelona to the Canaries for €71, we had the makings of a perfect trip.

Barcelona is 99 kms south of Girona, so we just needed to find the easiest connection between the 2 locations.




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Palolem Beach Guesthouses

It was through circumstances rather than planning that we ended up spending around 10 days in a variety of Palolem beach guesthouses.

Cancelled trains and poor or overbooked guesthouses meant we had to change our itinerary on the fly. However, this all turned out for the best, since Palolem is a pretty good place to spend some extra time.

Location and …Location

The vast majority of cabins belonging to the Palolem beach guesthouses are located just behind the resort fronts, so are not actually on the beach and have no sea view or sea breeze. They typically ask 1,500 rupees (€20) for one of these cabins.

For a cabin on the beach with seaview they will typically ask for 2,000 to 3,000 rupees (€18–27). However, with good timing and negotiation skills, these can occasionally be had for 1,800 rupees.

Goa Beach Hopping

One of our favourite activities on visits to Asia is beach hopping. Just pack a lightweight bag with a picnic, grab a hat and plenty of water, and head out to discover whatever is beyond that distant headland. We spent some really enjoyable days doing this in Sri Lanka and Borneo. Now it was time time to see what Goa had to offer.

Colomb Beach, Goa

Starting from the southern end of Palolem beach, we crossed over to the far side of an elevated rocky headland to reach Colomb beach.

Colomb Beach, Goa

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Palolem Beach

A few kms south of Agonda beach is Palolem beach.

Palolem Beach stretches across a 1.6 km curved bay. The beach is pretty much built up from end to end with a large variety of accommodation, restaurants and shops. Rooms and cabins range in price, for anything between 200 to 5,000 rupees per night.

With Monkey island constantly in view to the west, for us Palolem was the most striking of all the beaches we visited in Goa. Here there is a good balance between peace and quiet and things to do.

The place is also very cinematic. No wonder this location was chosen for the filming of the opening scenes in The Bourne Supremacy, back in 2004 (see “Running in the Footsteps of Jason Bourne”).

Palolem Beach – Northern End

At low tide you can wade over to Monkey Island (also known as Kankon Island by the locals). If you do, you should take some good walking shoes with you as the island is rocky and overgrown. There are some good views back to Palolem beach from there.

Despite the name, don’t expect to find many monkeys.

The rocky beach of Monkey Island

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South Goan Beaches - Agonda

When we arrived in South Goa, fresh off the night train from Kochi, we hadn’t yet decided on our destination: Agonda beach or Palolem beach. We had nothing booked, so left it to chance. As it turned out, our first experience of the South Goan beaches would be Palolem beach.

After an hours march from the station we were happy to dump our backpacks and grab a couple of beers. After that, it was back to business and the (semi-) serious task of choosing our next guesthouse.

They say you have to kiss a few frogs before you find your prince(-ess), and we certainly had to pucker-up for the next hour or so. Eventually, we settled on the Abel Cressinda. It seemed a bit basic, but would do for 1 night whilst we got our bearings. We paid 800 rupees for one of several cabins located in a pleasant garden setting behind the resort.

South Goan Beaches

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Night Train to South Goa

AC2 to South Goa

There are two main train stations in Kochi. To avoid confusion, we made sure to instruct our rickshaw driver to take us to the Ernaculum Junction station (we had arrived at the Ernaculum Town station the day before).

This time there were no delays or cancellations: the train arrived a little after 10pm. We had our coach and seat numbers, and were quickly able to find our berths.

Oddly, one of our berths was inside the 4-berth compartment, and the other was in a 2-berth bay on the other side of the aisle! (in each section, there are 6 berths in all). Two Indian guys were also booked into our bay, and fortunately for us they spoke English. Between us we changed seats, and we arranged to sleep on the lower 2 berths of the 4-berth compartment. Luckily, the extra berths in our bay remained unbooked, at least until after Goa (the train would carry on well into central India).

AC2 Class to South Goa

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