In the past three weeks, we have been to two Goas and have learned one thing: we were a little judgy on our first visit.
Geographically, we have visited two parts of Goa: the south, flying into and out of Dabolim airport, and the north, flying into and out of MOPA or Goa North airport. But experientially we have visited two very different Goas too: one of which I like to call ‘low-key billionaire’ and the other which might be better described as 'upmarket beach bum’.
The first of our trips was for my birthday. Having grown up in the UK where ‘late October’ is synonymous with ‘cold, wet and carpeted with conkers’, I insist on taking a trip to a tropical beach every year, now that I live in warmer climes. This year, I had dabbled with gathering a group of revellers together into a villa or large house to celebrate my 40 years, but I got so overwhelmed by the logistics, prices and the persistent inclusion of ‘open, mezzanine balconies’ (aka trips to the toddler hospital) that I decided to give up and book a couple of nights away for just we Raes, instead. With our reduced numbers, I flirted with the idea of the Maldives because, on a map, it’s right there, but again, the logistics and the need for extra holiday days to accommodate the hop to and from a remote, island resort put me off.
I wanted Beach and I wanted Convenience and so Goa it had to be. This time, I did a little bit of research which involved me scrolling through booking.com for the most luxurious-looking (but child-friendly) rooms and then assessing my short list of hotels for proximity to the beach. I very quickly identified ‘villa with pool’ as something I would like and without much further consideration, landed on the Taj Exotica as the perfect birthday destination. (That’s EXotica, with an X).
My only mistake was not to give us more time to enjoy our pool villa and our introduction to the low-key billionaire lifestyle. As I have bemoaned before, while Goa may be ‘less than an hour’s flight from Mumbai’, the door-to-door travel is more like 5 hours, once you factor in unpredictable travel to and from the airport in Mumbai, check-in speeds (or slows, as might be a more appropriate descriptor), hanging around in the airport for 2 hours before a flight and then the hotel transfer at the other end. I was conscious that Dylan was running out of holiday days, what with our trip to the UK earlier this year and our trip to Australia coming up in December and so I tried to be economical with the workday hours I ate into with our travel. Sadly, the result of this was that we arrived on a Friday afternoon and left on Sunday morning: a stay of less than 48 hours in pampered luxury.
Still, less than 48 hours is more than no hours and I came away feeling satisfied that we had made the most of it. In short: we barely left our villa. Accessed by chauffeured golf buggy from the lobby or a self-guided meander through the cobbled, tropical village of private and shared villas painted in vibrant, primary colours, our azure blue residence wouldn’t have looked out of place in Spain or Greece. Inside was cool, dark and spacious, despite the heavy, ornate wooden furniture, under which many a toy car was almost lost forever. And outside, where I spent most of my time, was a picture-perfect scene of dazzling blues, brilliant whites and rich greens. The blues were the sky—uncluttered by clouds, the walls of the villa—mottled and matt, the pool—rippling and shimmering in time to the music of the waterfall at one end, and the soft blue stripes of the towels, fading against the sun’s glare. The whites were the columns—framing the retractable doors to the villa and the gently undulating rise of the roof. The greens were the foliage—strong, tall palm trees silhouetted against the flawless blue of the sky behind, thick luxurious grass and a tangle of birds-of-paradise flowers with their long, reaching leaves.
Jasper, of course, went straight for the pool. Which meant that I also went straight for the pool. So confident is Jasper in his swimming abilities that we have had to train him to wobble on the edge just long enough to shout ‘Mummy, are you watching?’ and for me to respond ‘Yes, I’m watching’ before he hurls himself in. The trouble with his confidence is that it’s misplaced. Or, perhaps not so much misplaced as premature. He can’t swim. Yet. He can move his legs as though running in the water, and he loves to submerge his face and look through his goggles at what is beneath the surface but he hasn’t quite mastered the art of propelling himself forwards or raising his head out of the water without his feet sinking underneath him. But these technical setbacks have absolutely no bearing on his unbridled love of the water. There is a strong chance he is part fish.
And even more so, since this trip, because he wasn’t required to wear swimmers. That is to say, with him jumping in and out of a private pool around ten times a day, we gave up on wrestling him in and out of wet trunks and so his experience was elevated by the sensory joy of skinny dipping. This, sadly, is not permitted back at our Mumbai home where, beyond bathers, even people as small and hairless as Jasper are required to wear a swimming cap. That first afternoon in the pool villa he swam three or four times, with brief breaks to explore the villa. And the next day, which was my birthday, he swam so much that he had to keep taking himself inside for a rest, declaring on multiple occasions, as he strode naked towards the villa: ‘I’m going to the big bed to lie down for a while’ and promptly disappearing somewhere under the super king covers.
If the villa itself was picture-perfect, then my celebratory ‘floating breakfast’ was the icing on the non-existent cake. We ordered it for 7:30am, wrongly assuming that this would be in time for our first swim. We were wrong in this assumption because a) Jasper woke up earlier than that, stripped off and beelined for the pool at the crack of dawn and b) because 7:30am on IST (Indian Standard Time) is more like 8am, by which point we had been up for hours and had worked up quite the appetite. At GG’s request and under Dylan’s sly management, a bottle of Moet accompanied the raft of pancakes, fresh fruit, omelette and precariously balanced coffee and by some miracle, the entire feast survived Jasper’s best efforts to capsize it all.
Any day which starts with swimming and champagne is bound to be a good day, but this one was especially special. Jasper’s water-based escapades meant that he was long overdue for a nap by soon after midday, and Dylan offered to accompany him. I don’t just mean Dylan helped to settle Jasper. I mean that I had two and a half hours of blissful solitude to read my book (not MY book, you understand, the book I am reading that was written by someone else) in the sun while the other two snored their happy hearts away in the cave. Once all our batteries were recharged, we regrouped for a few more dips in the pool and then wandered towards the main hotel for a sundowner and to investigate some sort of food in whichever restaurant was open. The main issue we have in combining Indian hotels and Jasper’s napping schedule is that the restaurants don’t open in the evenings before 7pm, or sometimes 7:30pm, which is the exact same time that our baby switches to full demolition mode. Our choice of dinners are therefore limited to whatever is on offer in the all-day dining brasserie at around 6:30pm, at the exact time that the staff are occupied setting up the evening buffet. We order one plate of fish fingers, let Jasper drown them in tomato ketchup and then wait until he's pushed it all around the plate enough to put himself of finishing it. Needless to say, we don’t exactly write home about what we eat for dinner while on holiday. (Except today, as I have clearly done just that.)
On this occasion, our situation was no different but we couldn’t have cared less. I wasn’t in Goa for a fancy dinner; I was there to spend a quiet, sunny day with Jasper and Dylan. My birthday stipulations had been threefold: that I would wake up near the beach, drink champagne for breakfast, and that I would not have to do the washing up. This birthday more than delivered (although I did have to wash up the champagne glasses we used at breakfast in order to finish the bottle later in the afternoon). As the sun set over the hotel’s private, tiny golf course, the cricket wicket, some palm trees and the Arabian Sea, we enjoyed some gin and juice aperitifs (not combined) and channelled Jasper’s devilment into wicket keeping training before hoovering up our family plate of fish fingers. And then we retired back to our villa for Jasper to take over the ‘big bed’ once more (carefully ignoring the cot) while Dylan and I sat outside, enjoying the peace, the quiet, the stars, the breeze and a bottle of wine gifted to us by the hotel. Five star family fun.
As soon as we returned to the dense smog of Mumbai, I started to look ahead to our next Goan adventure, coming up just a couple of weeks later, with my sister Alice when she came to visit. This next trip was taking us to North Goa and the next hotel came highly recommended by a friend in Mumbai, in response to our reminiscing about our love for Ngapali beach in Myanmar in all its white-sanded, clean-oceaned emptiness of hawkers and other tourists. What we apparently omitted in our description of what we enjoyed most about trips to Ngapali beach was a certain standard of hotel and specifically, for Dylan: air conditioning.
To be continued in Part 2.
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