As wrong places go, Goa isn’t the worst. But after a quick weekend visit there, we decided it is definitely the wrong place for us.
Indians and anyone who has ever visited India throng together in a unanimous chorus of praise for Goa. “Oh you must go to Goa!” “Goa is amazing!” “Goa is my favourite place to holiday in the whole world.” “Ooh you’ll love Goa!” come the cries of Goa’s seemingly endless diaspora of volunteer tourism ambassadors. And I am sure that if you are in the market for what Goa has to offer, it is indeed perfect. The trouble seems to be that we aren’t really buying what Goa is selling. Namely - a vibe.
We went to Goa for my birthday weekend at the end of October and at the tail end of the Diwali holiday this year. Diwali is lunar, so it’s a relief to know that next year, for the big four oh, my birthday won’t fall at the one time of year when everyone fancies a festive break. We spent less than no time selecting our hotel, because it happens to be owned by one of the partners on Dylan’s project and we didn’t look further than their offer to reserve us a room. This made the whole thing a lot easier for me, because after several attempts at searching for accommodation, I still couldn’t even quite pinpoint what is Goa and what isn’t. Goa is a state about an hour’s flight south down the western coast of India from Mumbai. It has a strong Portuguese heritage, a long coastline, and many, many, many hotels.
The word ‘pristine’ appears on a lot of Goan tourism and travel websites, accompanied by the word ‘beach’. And that is exactly what we were after. A pristine beach. The kind of pristine beach we used to visit at least once a year in Myanmar. Rakhine’s Ngapali beach is a pristine beach. Big, empty, sparkling and pristine. In fact, so utterly under the spell of Ngapali’s pristineness were we, that we used to stay at a hotel called the Pristine Mermaid. Other pristine beaches in Myanmar included those down in Dawei and further south near Myeik, in Myanmar’s secluded, barely touched Andaman Islands.
This, for the record, is what we were after:
Photos: Myanmar's Andaman Islands, Ngapali Beach and Paradise Beach.
It's not only Asian beaches which we know and love to be pristine. Dylan's home in the Gold Coast and my home in Jersey have also helped to set the rather high benchmark for our perception of what is and isn't a worthy beach.
Photos: Portlet Bay - Jersey, St Brelade'sBay - Jersey, Ecrehous reef near Jersey, Coolangatta - Gold Coast
Having read the websites and heard Goa’s praises sung ad finitum every time I mentioned that I was hoping to go to the beach for my birthday, I decided that Goa was worth a look see. Sadly, from one look, I could see that I had been talking at cross purposes with absolutely everybody. The ‘vibe’ Goa brings is not one of being stranded alone with my loved ones on a beautiful desert island with nothing for miles but white sandy beaches, turquoise waters, gently waving palm trees and a surprisingly well stocked beach-front cocktail bar. No. The ‘vibe’ of Goa seems to be more nightclubs, casinos and food trucks. Don’t get me wrong, there have been incarnations of me who loved two out of three of those things (I’ve never understood the fun in gambling - if I wanted to hand my money to someone and get nothing in return I would donate it all to charity), but those versions of me are not the me who was looking for a pristine beach to get sunburned on.
The drive from the airport to our hotel, which was neither in North Goa, where I now understand the real party to be, nor in South Goa where some people still maintain there are beaches I might consider worthy of a second exploration. Our hotel was in Middle Goa, which is not really a thing. It was a nice, short drive from the airport, which was good because, as I learned from our previous holiday in Rajasthan, we don’t really enjoy car travel with a free-range Jasper. His newfound love of aeroplanes transcended his tiredness from our 9pm flight and he wiggled the whole flight, but finally crashed out three seconds into the car ride. We arrived at the hotel late at night and had to push through a crowd of young people falling out of the casino within the hotel grounds in order to reach the lobby. Once checked in, we were transferred into a golf buggy, henceforth to be known by someone as ‘Japper’s buggy’, for a moonlight tour of the hotel grounds.
Photos: Grand Hyatt Goa grounds
I’ll hand it to ‘em, The Grand Hyatt is a fantastic looking hotel, with sprawling gardens, a huge swimming pool, a fire pit, indoor and outdoor water features, shade from towering, ancient banyan trees, a vast marble atrium and mock-european architecture. What it lacks, however, is a good stretch of beach. There is a chunk of sand which runs between the hotel property and the water, but the sand is brown, with the damp, clinging consistency of mud, and the water is actually an estuary, rather than the sea. It’s also brown. Before arriving, I had done some googling and had established that unedited photos of the views tended to be in more of a sludgy palette for land, sea and sky, rather than the brilliant whites and vibrant turquoises I was hoping for. And the reality was exactly that.
Photo: Goan mud beach
We decided that for just three nights, we could do with a simple room with a balcony, rather than a suite, with the ambition of eating dinner and enjoying a relaxing glass of wine on the balcony after Jasper went to sleep. As with all the best laid plans, this didn’t exactly work out as we hoped. On the evening of my birthday and our first full day in the hotel we did order room service and we did scoff it down on the balcony once Jasper was asleep, but the choreography required to transport the food and the thousand and one clanking plates on which it was served from the door, through the bedroom and out onto the balcony, in the dark and without disturbing the almost-sleeping baby wasn’t worth the hassle. So the next night we decided to eat early with Jasper.
Something we have noticed in our limited experience of hotels in India is that the service doesn’t come close to the service in South East Asia. Now, I know I am generalising here, so to narrow it down, at this stage I am referring specifically to the 5* hotel style service. The kind that is meant to make you feel like you are the guest and that the server is there to make your stay as comfortable as they are able. The kind that is meant to make you feel like you cannot, no matter how hard you try, inconvenience them. In South East Asia, nothing is too much trouble. Even if you are asking for the moon on a stick (which, for the record, I have never requested), the reaction of the staff will make you feel as though maybe you should have reached a little higher with your request. Been a little more outlandish. As though you are playing it positively safe. Here in India, we are finding the opposite; everything is too hard.
Take Jasper’s dinner, and ours too on the second night, for example. At 6pm we were too early for the Italian or Indian restaurants to be open, so our food choice was limited to the All-Day Dining restaurant, the pool cafe, or room service. The room service menu had a kids’ section. The All-Day Dining and the pool cafe did not. But no, we couldn’t order some kids’ food off the room service menu to eat in one of the restaurants. We couldn’t order a drink from the all-day dining menu, that had to come from the pool cafe or the bar. The pool cafe didn’t have a full cocktail menu and the bar wasn’t open until 7. Even sticking to basics with a beer was met with a sigh and a grumble. No, the pool cafe couldn’t deliver the beers to anywhere outside of the pool cafe, but no we couldn’t order room service or all-day dining food to the pool cafe. After a brief stalemate, I signed myself up as a waitress. I brought beers from the pool cafe to the fire pit, and placed a food order at the all-day dining restaurant while Jasper and Dylan played on the lawns. I scurried back and forth between cafe, restaurant and my family in what was by no means a relaxing sundowner with snacks as we had hoped, but we were at least all fed and watered by the end of it.
What the hotel did have going for it was child-friendly entertainment. Or more specifically child-exclusive entertainment. Jasper had a whale of a time. Under a particularly impressive banyan tree were a bouncy castle and a trampoline. The first time we investigated it, Jasper was nervous on the bouncy castle and a little mal-coordinated on the trampoline, but two and a half days later he was kind of both the castle and the trampoline. Besides the bouncing, Jasper enjoyed the pool with the addition of an enormous inflatable swan, a very brief game of cricket with some hotel-issue stumps, his first trip out on a sailing boat and delighted everyone with his impressive volleyball skills. There was a big playground right outside our wing of the hotel which Jasper found it difficult to walk past on his way to breakfast every morning. When I say difficult, I mean impossible. Pre-breakfast swings became the norm for the duration of our stay.
Photos: Kids' activities under the banyan, sunset bouncing, swanning around in the pool, Jasper's first sailing trip, cricket with a view.
Given the range of activities for Jasper on offer at our hotel, we didn’t even consider leaving during the short time we were in Goa, which, I admit, means we didn’t so much as dip our toe in either the sea or the ‘vibe’. Maybe there will be a next time for that, but it’s just as likely that there is not. It was a lovely break from Mumbai; from the noise, the crowds and the lack of balcony at our apartment. But it was also nice to come home at the end of it, which for me, makes it the perfect break.
More than perfect, in fact, given that I was the first ever recipient of a 'Hatty Birdy' from Jasper.
Photo: Matchy-matchy for my birthday.
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