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Published: April 17th 2006
blog by Dave & Bronia From Chandigarh our next destination was Goa and it's famous beaches. To get to Goa we booked a cheap internal flight with
www.SpiceJet.com from Delhi direct to avoid the otherwise 36+hr train ride which we didn't much fancy. We spent one last night in Delhi in another awfully noisy and grubby hotel with a small temple outside our bedroom window that began morning prayers at 5am with loud chants and the continous clanging of a very large metal bell and chimes. No need for the travel alarm that morning.
We were very excited about going south in India, especially after many favourable reports from travellers we'd been meeting along the way who all spoke of a more chilled atmosphere to the north.
Goa is a province of India with a coast of sun-kissed, palm fringed beaches with a Portuguese history still very evident in the architecture, street and town names and some of the dishes that are served. Goa is divided into North Goa (more the party beach scene) South Goa (less touristy and more laid back beaches) and Central Goa (spice plantations and wildlife sanctuaries).
Stepping out of the airport at
Panjim/Panaji, we were braced for the customary onslaught of taxi and rickshaw drivers waiting to claim our custom and charge us far too much. How pleasantly surprised we both were when none of this materialised. Instead the scene as we exited the main terminal was positively serene and orderly with staff who stepped forward, asked if they could be of help, and then didn't ask for a tip in return. We purchased a ticket from a booth which would get us by taxi to our destination - Palolem.
This is a beach resort town recommended to us by various fellow travellers who started in the south, and judging by the lavish descriptions of the quiet golden stretches of sand in the Lonely Planet bible, it seemed like paradise. You can see from the pics attached that it was indeed just that.
The taxi ride was lovely and picturesque with little of the usual traffic and pollution to which we had become accustomed and we arrived at our first choice hotel within the hour. Indeed it was such a painless taxi ride and the countryside was so dynamically different that we joked to ourselves that the flight from Delhi
had not been internal and that in fact we were in a different country.
"This is not India" we kept saying to one another shaking our heads in wonder.
Upon booking into our room at the Palolem Guest House, we soon learnt that this would be our only night here, as it was very popular and subsequently booked solid for two weeks. Despite this minor setback, our only night here proved very restful and the accompanying dinner in a tropical garden setting under a bamboo hut roof with the sounds of birds flying from palm to palm was also fantastic, leading to our return on several other occasions during our stay to dine here.
The following day we got the chance to fully explore the area and our first glimpe of the beach in between the grass huts was absolutely breathtaking. "Picture postcard" are the words that spring to mind. Palm trees lined a wonderful strip of white sand in a crescent cove up to which the sea gently lapped. This was exactly what we had been hoping for when we had pictured it and we wandered bare foot on the white sands wading into the warm sea
and exclaiming how we were not leaving this place and we could spend the rest of the year here! Closer inspection revealed an unbroken line of restaurants and bamboo beachhuts from one end of the beach to the other to fulfill tourist demand, which could be pointed at as the only negative factor but in our case, as the height of the season is normally Nov-Jan and it was now March, there were few people and so the cove had the peace and tranquility we craved.
We climbed the rocks at one of the headlands and stumbled into a nest of beautifully made huts with a private beach and a quiet aspect that was incredibly soothing (see pics). We didn't need to think twice and booked up the next nine nights on the spot.
It was incredibly relaxing to sit on the balcony of our hut overlooked by no-one and watching the waves lap the shore below our hut.
Over the next week that we spent there we passed our days lazing on the beach reading, going for walks, finding favourite restaurents to frequent with names such as "10th Planet" and "Rendez-Vous" which served endless supplies of
cold beer, pineapple pancakes, sweet lassis (yoghurt drink), prawn and curry dishes. The evenings we would sit on our balcony with books and music playing out of our iPod speakers and watch the sunset over the Indian Ocean which was a fabulous ball of red fire every night with fishing boats etched in shadow on the horizon as they returned to the harbour with their daily catch.
One afternoon we happened to walk by a barber shop - a small concrete hut with corrugated roof owned by a sweet man who gave cut-throat rasor shaves which is the standard barber service in India. Dave, tempted by his multi-day stubble went in and submitted to the full experience of skin pulling, shaving, massaging and general eblutions. It was, he said, the best shave he'd ever had and consequently we went back a total of three times.
Bronia in the meantime submitted herself to an Ayurvedic massage - well known and promoted in this area - which was great but ended with her having so much oil on her that she slid off the massage bed to the floor and when returning to our beach hut to shower found that
Our small cove next to Palolem Beach
Our roof is the one in the bottom left cornerthere was no water as the pipe had burst requiring a quick bathe in the ocean to wash.
March 14 in India is known as 'Holi Day'. Holi day is the Hindu Spring Festival and it lasts several days. In Goa they celebrate by throwing coloured water and powdered paint on everyone and everything, including tourists. You'll see by the attached picture that we got caught by an Indian sales woman who walked up to him with a handful of blue paint and proceeded to smear it over Dave's face and my arms. All day we kept passing tourists who'd been painted multiple colours of red, blue, yellow, purple etc.
Eventually we started feeling slightly guilty for the lack of activity we were exhibiting, so one afternoon we booked ourselves onto a sleeper bus to a place called Hampi, about 200km inland, which had been mentioned to us by other travellers as being a cultural 'must see'.
After a rather gruelling trip of 11 hours being rattled around horizontally in a compartment the size of a single bed, we arrived in the bus terminus at Hampi, where we experienced the familiar Indian besiegement of rickshaw drivers and
Dave wandering on the beach by our hut
Our hut is the first left by the rock. hotel touts to which we were now immune. After adamently refusing all repeated offers of help, a hotel, a 'long' ride to town we wandered away and discovered the 'long ride' to town to be a two minute walk through the car-park!! We were lucky enough to find a room in one of the Lonely Planets top listings but the hotel sadly didn't live up to its billing and resembled a windowless prison cell. Still, it served our purpose for the solitary night and both days that we spent there.
The ruins at Hampi are spread across two sites of equal size. Hampi was one the capital of one of the largest Hindu empires in Indian history and was founded in 1336 rising to the peak of it's power in the 16th century. At one time it had a population of 500,000 and controlled the spice and cotton industry with the Raj/King importing stallions for his army from abroad that docked at Palolem beach but it was ransacked by Deccan sultanates in 1565 and never recovered. Much of the area is now deserted ruins amongst a spectacular landscape.
The landscape itself here is something of a sci-fi spectacle
Indian lads playing cricket on the beach
The craze for cricket here is unbelievable and they play everyday and anywhere - including the beach so there is alot of ducking by the tourists! as it is made up of a surreal moonscape of huge boulders, mountains and peaks of stones and rounded rock, oddly balanced stones as if they were placed on their tip by human hand (impossible) and sheer cliff faces.
The actual ruins cover a wide area and it is incredible to see the remains of temples, markets, houses and shrines scattered around amongst the boulders and perching on cliff tops. The Tungabhadra River runs through these sites to add to an amazing visual experience unlike anything we've ever seen and one which we are glad to have enjoyed.
While walking through the ruins we met a little girl, or rather, Dave met a little girl who clung on to him and begged him for his empty Coca-Cola bottle. As the advice to tourists is to say 'No' to children and beggars so that you don't encourage them we tried the 'No' tactic for a while with her dancing around him and begging in a cute voice 'Coke boattal pleeese...boattal pleease....' - eventually, and much to her joy, we gave in and she promptly ran off with the bottle to put it in a rack for recycling posing for
her picture to be taken by me. One of those sweet experiences to remember. (see pic)
During our brief stay in Hampi we met a lovely German couple Immo and Katya and chatted in the heat of the day recommending to one another places we'd been and sharing travel stories. It was they who shared the secret of the Hampi "Mango Restaurent" hidden down a banana grove and overlooking the river with a giant swing and terraced seating under the shade of the most enormous Mango tree. It was magical and we revisited it a couple of times. We exchanged email addresses and said we hoped we'd meet again either later in India, or upon our return to the UK.
Another lovely experience was visiting the Vittala temple (in the pic you can see it looks like an Inca or Mayan pyramid) and there we met Lakshmi, the 18 year old female temple elephant. Holding out a rupee she would take it from our hand in her trunk, nod, pass the rupee to her owner and then raise her trunk and with our heads bowed bless us on our heads with her trunk (see pic). The kind of
experience that makes you grin from ear to ear and feel like a kid.
We journeyed back by bus to Palolem just for one more night, and we almost managed to miss the bus, due to the wrong information being on the ticket and we were in the wrong town. It might have been better if we had - the sleeper bus had had it's windscreen smashed that morning and instead of getting a replacement bus they decided to use the same one (ah... only in India!) and drive it 11 hrs through the night with the driver squinting and keeping his mouth shut to avoid swallowing all the millions of flies and mosquitos that entered in the coach via the missing windscreen hole and milling around our bed and compartment all night.
It turned out the bus we were on was also not the right tourist bus stopping all night to collect unsavory characters and it was a bumpier ride than before - we think there was little or no suspension. Finally though, we made it back to the comfort of Palolem Beach for a couple of days - now beginning to feel like home being the
Bronia & Dave on 'Holi' Day
Dave covered in blue paint on his face after Indians celebrating 'Holi' Day got him. place we have spent the longest time at so far.
I think the only way to do these places any justice is by showing the photographs.... enjoy.... and we'll meet up with you again in Kerala, India.
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Cousin Sue
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Speechless!
You guys describe everything so well, the photos just complete the image! What a truly wonderful journey you're having.... All the Leverton's have subscribed now and we phone each other "have you read the latest installment?"