Goa Beaches

Walking along the beaches of Goa, India, one is harangued by young men (mostly; we did see at least one young woman), urging us to follow them to a beach chair with umbrella. We don’t know if they were employees of the cafes/bars that line the upper tiers of the beaches, or if they were freelancers, working off tips from drink and food orders. Probably the latter. The chairs were public, so they were apparently offering an ad hoc service. As we walked along the water’s edge (Arabian Sea), they would swoop down the sand, ardently urging us to take refuge in a beach chair in front of their respective café or bar, sometimes ardently, relentlessly, sometimes to the point of imagined homicide. And often they would be a mere 50 feet or so from each other, close enough to see and hear our refusal of the offer from their colleagues. They weren’t incessant beggars, but most often soft-sell, even charming hawkers, though they never tried to differentiate their particular venue from the next. We understood their situation in general (this was their meager living), and we even grew to find it amusing (“Congratulations! You’re the 100^th to offer us a beach chair on the last half mile of this beach!”), but it was hard to comprehend the incessant badgering. Yet as we walked back up the beach later, we noticed that there were fewer beach-chair-hawkers and more doughy tourists in the beach chairs (mostly over-aged and overweight Brits in bikinis and Speedos, requiring the adverting of eyes). So apparently the hard sell works.