General Tour Information
TRAVEL TO INDIA: This tour is organized by our British company, Sunbird, and starts and ends in London. The cost of the group flights between London and Goa are included in the tour cost. You can choose, however, to make your own travel arrangements to Goa. You would receive a corresponding discount in the tour cost should you decide to do this. . Please read the Important Travel Information for Participants on Sunbird Tours.
ENTERING GOA: INDIA: United States citizens will need a valid passport and a tourist visa. These can be obtained from the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. or Consulate in New York. Visas can also be obtained through a visa service, such as CIBT. As a general rule, your passport should be valid for six months after you plan to return from India.
MAPS AND COUNTRY INFORMATION: You can review a tourist map of Goa here. You can review the U.S. Department of State background notes on India here.
CLIMATE: Goa is warm. Mid-day temperatures between November and the end of February are frequently in the high 80s°F-mid 90s°F and rain at this season is rare. Any that does fall is usually as a brief convectional thunderstorm lasting only a few minutes. Rain wear is hardly necessary on this tour.
Night-time temperatures hardly ever drop below a comfortable 65°F. Arabian Sea temperatures are similar to those of the Mediterranean in summer. All our hotel rooms at Baga have ceiling fans and can be kept comfortably cool. With the temperatures and coastal location Goa is moderately humid. Away from the coast, particularly around Molem and Bondla night-time temperatures are a few degrees cooler, though it can still be quite hot around mid-day.
PACE OF TOUR AND DAILY ROUTINE: We’ll be staying in the same hotel throughout the tour and xploring areas in the coastal belt as well as well inland from there. We’ll start early most days as birds are most active in the early morning. There will be no fixed itinerary; instead Paul will use his knowledge of the area to decide each day how and where the excursions will run. At the same time he’ll ensure that all the main birding habitats in Goa are visited - some of them several times. The aim will be for the excursions to be good fun, with a relaxed pace and with the accent on obtaining good views of the birds. We’ll have very few breakfasts at our own hotel preferring instead to head off birding for a few hours before having breakfast elsewhere. On occasion this will mean leaving the hotel between 5:45 and 6:30am and not having breakfast until 9:30am. On two or three occasions we’ll head well inland to the base of the Western Ghats. This involves a drive of two hours or more and an early start — perhaps as early as 4:30am. On these days we’ill have picnic breakfasts in the field. On a number of days we’ll return to our hotel for a break during the heat of the day, and most days we aim to be back at our hotel before dusk. Our hotel offers some excellent poolside birding, and this is often particularly productive in the last hour of the day — from 5:30-6:30pm. We usually manage to have about a one hour break before the checklist and dinner. There may be one or two days when we get back after dusk, and we may therefore require a shorter break before dinner. On one evening we plan to offer the option of staying inland for a couple of hours after dark in search of night birds. This will mean that we won’t arrive back at our hotel until around 9:30pm and will not have enough time for a shower before having dinner. We’ll have dinner together each evening, and do a bird list at that time.
This is a relatively easy tour, and while a couple of the days will be long and tiring, many will not. Moreover, none of the walks are particularly strenuous. On most days we’ birdwatch from little-used, paved roads. While most of our walks will be of one or two hours in duration, some will be longer, and when we visit Bondla Wildlife sanctuary in the Western Ghats, we expect to spend all morning walking slowly down the park’s approach road. We’ll cover a distance of perhaps four kilometers with the vehicles catching us up at intervals of between one and two hours. Many of these walks will be flat and over good terrain, and we do not anticipate doing any strenuous up hill walking. On a couple of occasions we’ll walk through the fields immediately behind our hotel; in years where the monsoon has been particularly substantial, these fields will be damp underfoot. We’ll explore other areas if we consider this area is too wet. All of the sites that we’ll visit in Goa are at a low altitude — none are about 400 meters (1312 feet).
HEALTH: The CDC are currently recommending the following vaccinations: Hepatitis A or immune globulin (IG); typhoid vaccination is particularly important because of the presence of S. typhi strains resistant to multiple antibiotics in this region; as needed, booster doses for tetanus-diphtheria and measles, and a one-time dose of polio for adults. You can review the latest CDC advisories here.
ACCOMMODATION: In Goa we will be staying at the Beira Mar Hotel, Baga, near the northern end of the popular tourist area. Baga offers what is undoubtedly the best doorstep birding anywhere in the state and perhaps as many as 100 species could be seen in the two weeks solely on foot from our hotel. The Beira Mar is a reasonably comfortable, fairly modern and clean two-star hotel. Each simple room has a private bathroom and a ceiling fan. The hotel has it’s own restaurant and a swimming pool. The raised platform immediately around the swimming pool provides a superb vantage point to view the neighboring fields, which regularly hold a wide selection of exciting birds.
DRESS: Dress is informal throughout the tour.
TRANSPORT: Our international flights are from Gatwick to Goa. They take approximately 11½ hours and sometimes includes a one-hour stop-over in the duty free haven of Bahrain. In Goa we will be transferred to our hotel by taxis. We’ll use a fleet of taxis for the daily field trips. These taxis can negotiate coastal Goa’s narrow streets better than a tour bus and offer greater flexibility in that anyone wishing to return to the hotel early can usually do so.
SMOKING:Smoking is not allowed in the vehicles or when the group is gathered for meals, checklists etc. If you are sharing a room with a non-smoker, please do not smoke in the room. If you smoke in the field, we ask that you do so well away and downwind from the group.
GENERAL INFORMATION & CONDITIONS: Please take a moment to read the WINGS General Information & Conditions. This section contains important information about how we conduct tours, e.g., what is included in the tour price, refund and cancellation policies, pace of the tours and other information that will help you prepare for the tour.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: A more complete General Information for tours to Goa will be sent to each registrant on receipt of their booking. Final information with instructions for meeting the group, hotel addresses, etc., will be mailed about three weeks before trip departure. Other news will be communicated as necessary. If you have any questions, please contact us.
Updated: January 2007