A Return to Goa

Goa, 25th October - 3rd November 2006

Goa was the only place in India that we were returning to but it represented more to us than just familiarity.  It was our haven, our sanctuary - a place of escape to "easiness" if things became too dismal, too dirty, or, dare I say it, too "Indian".  During those first miserable four weeks when Vic and I suffered seemingly endless stomach upsets we had often reassured each other that if things continued like that we'd just say "f*** it" and get on the next plane to Goa.  It kept us going during those 'diarrhea days' and invariably, when we recovered, we soldiered on. 

We knew that Goan food was consistently clean and excellent whilst the food elsewhere on the continent was often VERY hit and miss.  When you have five shit meals in a row from five different establishments it can really get you down.  Even at the best of times we'd longed for huge Goan tiger prawns, bathed in the rich coconut curry gravy we'd enjoyed at Sam's "Shining Star" shack on Baga beach.  These beach shacks are temporary structures that are rebuilt each year.

Once we found some suitable accommodation we wasted no time in taking showers, getting changed, and making our way to the Shining Star.  Vic and I were so excited as we trudged over the sand, marching purposefully to our shared mantra, "tiger prawns tiger prawns tiger prawns" - neither of us had dared touch seafood anywhere else in India ... we were so focused on this much missed cuisine that we didn't really notice that something was quite different on Baga beach.   As we arrived at where Shining Star should've been only to find ... well ... sand ... it dawned on us that we might have arrived in Goa a few weeks too early.  We discovered later that the beach shack owners in North Goa had only just been granted their licenses and construction had barely begun.   After a little more disappointed double-checking we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would have to look elsewhere for our tiger prawns.  It turned out that they were not difficult to find but it was still a great disappointment not to see Sam again and taste his excellent and unique coconut based masallas - despite him being kind enough to give me the recipe and spices I'd been unable to replicate the taste since our first visit.

It was the Diwali weekend and hordes of Indian tourists had descended on North Goa from Mumbai.  The beach huts of Palolem were beneath them so they opted instead for the shabby hotels of Calangute and Baga.  The beach was an odd sight.  The older men strangely retained their city attire (full sleeve shirts, trousers, socks and shiny black shoes) as they strolled endlessly up and down, sometimes with a friend or two, or with their families.  The younger Indian males, whilst 'dressed down', tended to roam the beach in packs of ten or more - the spectacle for them being the scattering of western women brave enough to exhibit themselves in a bikini.  I immediately took a dislike to these 'packs' of young Indian males.  Fortunately their numbers did not appear to afford any of them sufficient bravado so that they actually talked to any women they encountered - they only managed to muster enough courage to ogle at women as they passed them.  Despite Vic being very well covered (and, let's not forget, sat next to me!) she was not exempt from the staring and, more than making it impossible for either of us to feel relaxed on the beach, it quickly started to aggravate me to the point where it was clearly a good idea for us to leave for the sake of Anglo-Indian relations!

We arrived in Palolem to find that most of it was still a building site.  We later found out that the government had delayed issuing beach hut licenses until the eleventh hour and had turned up the previous week with bulldozers to flatten all the 'illegal' beach huts along a four kilometre stretch.  Besides the debris you wouldn't have known any of this had happened from the attitudes of the Goans we met who were stoically rebuilding their huts (after acquiring appropriate documentation and paying due baksheesh of course) with all the philosophical resolve of those whose property had been destroyed by a freak wind or other act of God, rather than as a result of an insanely bureaucratic and bullying government which tries to act like God.

We'd thought that accommodation would be cheap at the start of the season, but, due to the government's intervention it was still in relatively short supply.  We found Fernandez bar and beach huts and opted for a beach-facing premium hut available at a premium price.

We quickly established a good relationship with the staff at Fernandez.  Ritesh seemed to take charge of waitering responsibilities. Ajit played a lot of frisby, Sanjay concentrated on wooing new (invariably female) clientele and Vijay the tandoor chef who, in the days to come, very kindly revealed his chicken tikka recipe to me (perhaps the bribe of a bottle of whisky helped!).  Watching all this invidiously was a ginger haired man who claimed to be from Glasgow.  He told us that he spent six months of the year in Goa, and the other six months traveling.  However it quickly transpired that all this was bollocks when he claimed that he made amazing lamb kebabs when he was “at home”.  Traveling for six months of the year my arse.  He was such a try-hard, and he appeared to hate the way Vicky and I hit it off so quickly with the guys at Fernandez – those poor guys who had to humour this sap for 6 months each year.  This guy did nothing except get up late, order some food, and pretend that he went to “wild parties” and with equally fictitious women who, surprise, surprise, were all after a slice of Glaswegian pie. We lasted a further six or seven days in Palolem when we decided that it was definitely time to move on.  With the amount of people I could overhear loudly discussing their travel plans to journey south to Kerala, we decided to leave this out on this occasion and take a flight to Chennai instead, so we could take a further flight to the Andaman islands.

We said our goodbyes to Nitesh, Vijay, Ajit and Sanjay, (and the various beach dogs that kept us awake on many nights barking and biting each other).