A Small City with Heritage

The Tanish Hotel proudly heralds itself as “the best place to stay in town”. We’re not so sure about that but there were no cockroaches so we were happy. The room boys there were so young that they still enjoyed skidding along the polished floors like schoolboys but when I inquired about their ages they all said “17”. The Tanish Hotel is basically on top of a shopping centre so we were right in town but weirdly our window looked into the shopping centre rather than outside.

Margao was nice but hardly seemed like a city. In the few days we were there we saw most of it I think. We spent some time in the municipal gardens, wandered around the old Portuguese part of town, explored the market and did a spot of shopping.

Right outside our hotel we met a group of children who were working on the streets polishing shoes and offering head massages with one of those wire contraptions. As we had just been talking about the state of our shoes Henry opted to have his done (mine are not leather and they only had black or brown). They had a good level of English for street kids and when I got the camera out they loved having their pictures taken. One of them kept doing cartwheels but I never quite managed to catch it at the right moment. They did an excellent job of it and even gave Henry some insoles to stand on while they worked so he did not have to stand on the street.