Continued from Part 1: Here.
Freshly back from my birthday trip to South Goa, I only had two weeks to survive before I was upping out of the city once again, this time to North Goa.
As I looked at the details for our upcoming, much longer, 4-day stay by the beach with my sister Alice, I uncovered significant details, hidden in plain sight, that suggested we were headed for a more rustic set up than any of us were expecting. I have to admit that, as Alice knows all too well, I have form for muddling my priorities in pursuit of beach beauty. In Myanmar, back in 2019, when my two sisters and my mother all coordinated their various visits to overlap around Alice’s 30th birthday, I had proudly booked us three nights at the ambitiously named Paradise Beach Bungalows, away from our usual haunt of Ngapali in Rakhine State. Located in the lesser visited Tanintharyi State in the south of Myanmar, this turned out to be a ramshackle row of stilted bamboo huts with flimsy doors and torn mosquito nets, accessible only by motorbike. My idea of paradise, this was not. Sure, the beach behind which these huts were huddled was vast and untouched, but then again, so were the gargantuan spiders who had colonised the bathroom. I say ‘bathroom’; it was a room, but there was certainly no bath. The toilet was probably about one rotting beam away from a long drop and a sponge-wash on the beach would have delivered better results than the shower. Worst of all was the menu in the restaurant hut. The menu appeared so promising on initial perusal, with page after page of options but on deeper inspection, it actually only had 3 base options of rice, noodles or vermicelli, each and all of which were available with squid, fish (which they never had), prawns or veg, for breakfast lunch and dinner. The only saving grace for the Paradise Beach Bungalows was that they had a fridge, into which I unloaded the booze a helpful friend had advised me to bring.
With this (and other missteps) in my travel planning history, faith in my choice of destination for the Diwali holiday was at an all time low. I was probably the most optimistic, but I will admit that when I read the words ‘no TV, no air-conditioning and no room service’, I began to wonder if my marriage was strong enough for 4 nights at the enigmatically-named Elsewhere. And when I remembered that the hotel also had no pool, I wondered if even Jasper might join the unhappy masses. All signs pointed to my having somehow managed to book the exact opposite of what we now knew to be a winning holiday formular: private pool, air-conditioned cave, room service and a TV to encourage Jasper to take a break from swimming.
We had no idea what to expect from North Goa. By all accounts it is the party side of Goa, and yet, here we were heading to a hotel which prided itself on being remote and untouched by mod-cons. We certainly weren’t expecting the modern miracle that is Goa North airport, with all its sophisticated lift shafts and centralised cooling systems (you can guess who spotted these features). Arriving into Goa North was ten times more civilised than navigating the old Goa airport. And so the trip began on a note of pleasant surprise.
Photo: Jasper - seasoned traveller.
From the airport, we were collected by a hotel-arranged taxi and a lovely driver named Francis. Christianity has a strong presence in Goa, with large numbers of Goans having been converted to Catholicism under the Portuguese colonisation in the 1500s. Churches dot the landscape, names are often biblical and much of the architecture is distinctly European. Elsewhere, the hotel towards which we drove with some level of trepidation, is a collection of restored, colonial beach houses, huddled on a spit of land between a semi-private beach and a creek. We were booked into one called The Priest’s House, with The Piggery, The Bakery, The Captain’s house and The Creek House also available on the property which has been in the current owner’s family for over a hundred years. As we wound our way through tropical farmlands and villages towards Elsewhere, we took in our surroundings and more specifically, the people.
Dylan and I have long wondered what people do in Goa. Not the tourists: we know that Goa is a popular domestic tourism destination for party holidays and that it apparently boasts some of the best fusion restaurants in India. I mean that we don’t understand what the people who live in Goa, do in Goa. How do they justify and afford such a liberated, laidback lifestyle? Especially the high numbers of foreigners rumoured to be hidden somewhere in the Goan backwaters. On previous visits we haven’t left our resort hotels and so have seen nothing but glamorous, glossy Indian holidaymakers who appear to roll out of bed looking salon-styled. But, as we drove towards the coast from the inland airport, past signs for yoga retreats and advertisements for pottery workshops hanging on market stalls selling elephant pants, we started to see them: the great unwashed. And they weren’t Indian.
On this one, fifty minute car ride we saw more foreigners than we have in the entire time we’ve been in India, which is impressive considering we have been here almost two years. They were helmetless on scooters, shopping at markets, congregating outside off licences stores and disappearing into alleyways between buildings. They somehow looked both lost and at home. We assume that they came to Goa to escape something or to find something, and have since been absorbed into the fabric of the various small towns in a puff of suspicious smoke and a cloud of scooter dust. They sucked on cigarettes as they sat, one bare foot up on the bench beside them, the other hanging down against a stray dog, at roadside coffee counters, watching the world go by. Their hair was in dreads, their beards matted, their piercings irregular and their skin parched and crinkled by the sun. These are the ones we can’t understand. And not from a human perspective, from an immigration perspective. What visa are they on?! What taxes do they pay?! We are professionals, with jobs and accountants and consultants helping us, and even we find it hard to live here. How do these people, who look like they tumbled out of a plane and landed sunny side up, manage to navigate the bureaucracy?!
We didn’t find the answer to these questions, but we did turn off the road, much sooner than we were anticipating and, with a Jasper (who conked out just minutes before our arrival at the drop off) slung over one shoulder, clambered out of the taxi and set off across a footbridge over a creek to meet our destiny. Once across the bridge, we were on a narrow footpath through a lightweight jungle of lush, green trees, bushes, shrubs and flowers. I say lightweight but on that first, short walk I almost trod on an enormous, bright green snake. To me, it was enormous anyway, and fast and made me jumpy for the rest of the holiday. To Dylan, of course, it was nothing. The hotel guide book told me I'd be 'lucky to see one', but I didn't feel very lucky.
We were led by our hotel host, Mark, and followed by our bags (carried by several porters), to the restaurant where we were to complete our registration and learn how things are done at Elsewhere. The floor of the restaurant was sand, the roof was neatly woven rattan, the walls, well, there were no walls, only some white, draped mesh curtains clutching the stilts which held up the roof. Extended from one corner was an area where a small cluster of people we took to be departing guests relaxed on wooden recliners and a four-poster daybed next to an ornate, antique teak cot and a cabinet full of books. Before you ask, yes: of course I brought a few books with me in case precisely such a bookcase should appear.
We exchanged our passports for fresh coconuts and were told that breakfast, lunch and dinner could be served at our convenience, we simply had to call ahead by an hour or so and place our order. I liked this place already. Furthermore, everything on the menu sounded delicious. Even if I failed to move past the fresh gazpacho, I imagined that everything else was equally mouthwatering. We opted to get Jasper to a bed as quickly as possible, in the hope that his nap would lead to some parenting downtime and so, despite it being almost lunch time, we left after our coconuts.
Getting Jasper quickly to our room, or house, as is a more appropriate label, did not lead to any parenting downtime. No sooner had Dylan crossed the threshold than Jasper was awake and full of beans, keen to explore and absolutely not interested in an afternoon nap. And so began our holiday away from the city, the smog, (in Alice’s case - the cold), and from Jasper’s regular nap schedule. Granted, it was hot during the afternoons, and without aircon in our house, I could appreciate his resistance to sleeping. The upside was that by 6:30 or 7pm (almost 2 hours earlier than his usual departure to the land of nod), he was out cold; often in the middle of the first sentence of a book, and that afforded us adults four wonderful, long, relaxing evenings of Catan, Scrabble and wine on the terrace.
Planning ahead for four days without a pool to exhaust Jasper, we had packed a lot of toys, including a new (and his first) big box of Lego, and a freshly hand-carried import in the shape of a Mini Yoto audio player—an early birthday present for him. While we all enjoy getting creative with the lego bricks, we actually needn’t have brought as many entertainment options as we did because the only thing Jasper really wanted to play with was the coconut shell on a stick at the entrance to the house: for washing feet. The only thing that drew him away from that was the tin bucket and cup in the outdoor shower. This water baby knows what makes him happy.
The Mini Yoto stormed to victory as the most successful gift we’ve given ourselves in three years. Jasper happily sat listening to his stories (which are loaded onto picture cards and inserted into the machine) during his afternoon non-nap times, at meal times, on car rides and while Alice, Dylan and I aperitive’d. It might sound like we didn’t want to engage with Jasper, but if I attract judgement for not wanting to read the same PAW Patrol book eleven thousand times while supposedly on holiday, I am here to take it. As I watched him load that PAW Patrol card in and out of the Yoto device (which is designed like an old fashioned radio and has no visual component save a small screen to show him which chapter or story he is on), I felt nothing but relief and joy that I had replaced myself with a small, plastic box.
On that first evening, once the sun had lost its bite, we made our way to the beach which was less than 50 metres from our front door. Somehow, and we aren’t quite sure if the stretch of beach in front of our hotel was private, but our section of coastline was almost empty, while we could see far larger crowds both down the coast to our left and up the coast to our right. As we squinted at the people who we did see, wandering along the shoreline, we again noticed a certain look to them. The same sort of look that the stray dogs had about them: raggedy, underfed and oversunned. Some of them greeted the mangy mutts like old friends and walked with them for a while. Others did yoga while staring out at the ocean. For the first time in our Goan adventures, we felt like the glamorous ones, the clean ones, the glossy ones. (And none of us had even showered yet for the day).
The sea was warm but incredibly salty, as Jasper discovered when he took in a mouthful and promptly vomited it back up again. But the sunset was stunning and the air balmy and pleasant. This was the kind of beach environment I love: expansive and calming. And the beach became our evening routine; playing cricket and swimming, before retiring to the house for a quick wash in the outdoor shower just as the mosquitoes emerged for their evening feast which, if I wasn’t quick enough to get dressed and slather on repellant, consisted mostly of my bare bottom. The mosquitoes were an inconvenience every evening at apertivo hour but, for the most part, didn’t seem to bother coming indoors, despite the open windows with poorly fitting wooden shutters, and were certainly not enough to dampen our enjoyment of the place.
Our four days at Elsewhere was magical: for those of us who don’t mind the heat. Our schedule was our own, our toddler mostly behaved himself (once we gave up trying to get him to nap), the food was delicious and we relaxed sufficiently to consider a couple of explorative expeditions out and about in Goa. The first was an early morning (early morning for other people, normal morning for us) boat trip out into the fishing waters to look for dolphins. We looked and we looked and we laughed at Alice when she said she saw one and then, suddenly, we were surrounded by them. The boat driver seemed to think there were around two hundred of them, surfacing and puffing and occasionally leaping around the boat. Jasper is a big dolphin fan, and was so excited to see them, shouting excitedly every time he spotted one (which was every couple of seconds). Even for the grown-ups, all of whom have seen the odd dolphin before, this was a memorable morning.
Our second foray into Goan life was for lunch in one of the famed fusion restaurants, to sample the much-celebrated Goan cuisine. Unfortunately, our lunch was somewhat overshadowed by a tongue-biting incident just a few moments before our reservation. We had stopped into a lovely clothing boutique, which Alice had spotted on our drive past, and were merrily trying on shirts and twirling in dresses when Jasper decided to gallop like a horse, over a marble step, downwards, face first, onto the marble floor. As he raised his head from where he was splatted in the middle of the shop, I could see the blood starting to bubble out of his mouth, even before he had time to gargle the words ‘mouth bleeding’ and clutch his hand to his face. Between us we managed to catch all the blood and soak it into our clothes before it hit the shiny, white floor. To an outsider, I may have appeared strangely nonchalant about my son having clearly just taken a chomping great bite out of his tongue. But what an outsider wouldn’t know is that at roughly the same age, I bit all the way through my own tongue. I have grown up with the story of how my poor mother rushed me to hospital in Jersey and how, despite the first opinion being that stitches might be required to ensure the tongue reconnected, a second opinion confidently confirmed that even a tongue that was barely hanging on by two threads on either side would, in fact, heal itself in a matter of days. Jasper’s bite was deep and the fall had clearly been a shock but, sure enough, after 48 hours, the wound had healed and he was back up to full appetite and range. I did check in with his doctor to ensure my 1980s wisdom still carried weight and was told that, together with a gel, it did.
The remaining day of our stay at Elsewhere passed uneventfully and I, for one, was very reluctant to leave. I deposited a few books in various bookshelves, took a last look at The Priest’s House and set off down the jungle path after the others, all of whom were discussing just how much they were looking forward to getting back to the world of air conditioning.
If you now ask me what I think of Goa, I will tell you that we judged too hard the first time we visited. I am now convinced that there is exists the perfect place for us: one with a remote enough feel and peaceful enough surrounding but with air conditioning*, flexible dining, delicious food, space for a tag-along visitng us in India (hint hint) and a coconut to wash our feet with.
*I have since found out that our house is pretty much the only house on the property with no aircon. Like I said, travel planning miss-steps!
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