Well, what an adventure it has been. Currently, sitting at a beach shack eating and drinking in Goa, India 🇮🇳. It’s beautiful here and I highly recommend it but I will talk a lot more Goa on future posts.
Yes, I wasn’t supposed to be in India as some may know but I had visa issues (more on that below) with my volunteering project in the Maldives 🇲🇻 so I had to delay my volunteer project by 3 weeks.
Here I am in Dubai, UAE 🇦🇪 with one of my best buddies Marvin Avin aka Marvdog and his good buddy Cisco having a great time when I wake up to an email around March 15th with this bombshell of bad news. I was due to report to my volunteer project or NGO (nongovernmental organization) and get on a plane in like 4 days time. Are you friggen kidding me!?!?
How about you bring up the visa issue when I’m back at my home base of San Diego, California not when I’m around on the other side of the f-ing planet on my way there!!!! Not that this whole trip wasn’t planned for months and my NGO didn’t have all that time to inform me of any issues or anything. Obviously, I’m still a little bitter about this….
Regardless, I had to make a very quick decision on what to do. Either cancel the whole volunteer project or drop my time in the Maldives to 30 days or less and figure out what to do for the next 3 weeks before I could go to the a Maldives to volunteer. That is a much shorter abridged version because there was tons of angry, bitter emails from me to my volunteer organization trying to figure out how we could make this work and the terrible position they put me in after already traveling around the world but in the end we came to a compromise. I would volunteer for 30 days in the Maldives reporting on April 12th and then kill about 3 plus weeks traveling on my own somewhere.
I spent a few extra nights in Dubai (which I will go into more detail later as Dubai and Abu Dhabi are incredible and soooooo much to do). But the majority of my time I decided on India because it just made logistical and geographical sense since eventually I’m heading to the Maldives and it is about as close as anywhere gets to the Maldives which are in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Plus, I have always wanted to go to India since I was small boy and live out the real life Jungle Book.
My fiancée and travel partner also didn’t have much interest in India because of how hectic India is known to be with traffic and a massive ever growing population and widespread extreme poverty so it just made sense. I would go on a solo adventure to India.
So, I did a ton of research in a very short stressful period of time on how to get to India, visa requirements, how to apply for the visa online, where to go, what to do, where to stay, booking tours, plus changing my Emirates flight, etc. I accomplished this mostly after my friends left Dubai and I had a few much needed days on my own to really research and plan. I will get into more details about all this planning in later posts and I will dive much more into India and about going to places like the Taj Mahal and going on a wild tiger 🐅 safari. Uhhhh yeah you can’t go to India and not do those two things.
So, here I am in Goa, India for about 10 days after traveling all around India the last 8 days and I’m ready to relax before my volunteer project and the Maldives.
Next post, before discussing India, I will be getting into my time in the United Arab Emirates which includes Dubai and Abu Dhabi and recommendations of things to see, great places to eat and great places to drink alcohol, yes alcohol, which is very prevalent if you know where to go.
I’m nursing this Kingfisher beer 🍺 at the Marina Beach Shack in Goa so need to get back to it!
The Cubicle Killer out for now!
You ready to explore with me!? 