Goa: The Magic of the Monsoon

Though small, Goa has loads to see. The beaches that fringe the Indian Ocean are its biggest attraction. Among the best-known beaches are Dona Paula, Miramar, Calangute, Anjuna, Baga, and Vagator in North Goa; and Bogmalo, Colva, Benaulim, and Cavelossim in South Goa. In the monsoons, the sea’s choppy and swimming’s prohibited, but you can walk along the shore or wade in a bit if you’re hell-bent on wetting your feet.

Other than beaches, Goa’s known for its history- the state was a Portuguese colony till 1962, and Portugal’s left its stamp almost everywhere. Check out the churches and convents of Old Goa- the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where the remains of St Francis Xavier lie; the Sé Cathedral; the Church of St Francis of Assisi; and the Cathedral of St Catherine, among others. Look in at the incredibly well-maintained Menezes-Braganca Mansion, where nearly everything--furniture, crockery, chandeliers, silver--is more than three centuries old. Drive up north into the wooded hills around the Swapnagandha Valley; binge on seafood and spicy Goan cuisine at the hundreds of shacks across Goa; have your fill of beer--or, if you’re more adventurous, try feni, a liquor brewed from cashew apples and coconut.

Quick Tips:

Goa is, by and large, easy on the traveller--nearly all signs are in English, almost everybody speaks some amount of English, and there’s loads to choose from in almost every budget category when it comes to accommodation. Some stuff to remember, though:

1. Haggle. Especially during the off-season (around July- September), when tourists are few and far between. Accommodation and hired vehicles, in particular, can be gotten cheap.
2. Take along loads of sunscreen--even in the monsoon. Those gloomy grey clouds are deceptive; I came back looking as if I’d been in a furnace.
3. If you’re visiting the hills in the monsoons, carry mosquito repellant--the nasty creatures are everywhere.
4. Be prepared for rain--any time, anywhere. Goa gets around 100 inches of rain annually.
5. If you’re going to be using a motorbike or scooter and driving yourself, make sure you buy a good map. The deeper you head into the state (away from the beaches), the more confusing the bylanes can get.

Best Way To Get Around:

Goa’s a comfortable size--just about every place in the state is a few hours’ drive from the state capital, Panjim (Panaji). Public buses and minibuses link the towns, cities, and villages; and there are a few trains passing through. Within towns, autorickshaws and motorbike-taxis are available (Goa is India’s only state where motorbike taxis ply). Most towns are, however, so small, you can easily walk around--and it’s a great way to see Goa at close quarters.

Between towns, the best bet is a hired vehicle. Motorbikes, scooters, and cars can be hired just about anywhere--ask at your hotel, or stand around looking lost; someone’s bound to come and ask if you need to hire a vehicle. Shorter distances--50km a day or so--would merit a bike or scooter; for longer distances, opt for a car, or you’ll end up with a stiff butt (this, by the way, is from experience!). Cars will generally be chauffeur-driven and not self-driven; hiring motorbikes or scooters will require you to produce an international driver’s license. Expect to pay about Rs 250 a day (eight hours) for a motorbike or scooter, fuel extra. Cars are about Rs8 per km.

A relative (whom I shall never trust again!) assured us that the Calangute Residency was a "very good place". Run by the Goa Tourism Development Corporation (GTDC), the hotel has two sections: the main hotel on the seafront, and the Annexe, which contains the dormitories and is further away from the beach.

I had misgivings from the moment I saw the place--the courtyard leading to the rooms was grown over with weeds, and the dining room on the ground floor of the building looked one of the shabbiest I’ve seen in over three decades of wandering about. Three moth-eaten mattresses were stacked against the wall of the corridor outside our room, and inside our room, things got--if possible--even worse. A couple of insects had died on the bedsheets (no bedspreads, by the way), and--horror of horrors--a former occupant’s swimming trunks were hanging on the bathroom rail. Ugh. What was worse was that we were shelling out all of Rs 1,000 a night for this trash.

As for the facilities--they were pretty meagre. Our room was moderate in size, with a comfortable double bed, table and chairs, adjoining sitting area with sofa and table; a rather grubby bathroom; and a balcony overlooking the beach. There was a TV in the room, so that at least was a bit of a relief.

Downstairs, the hotel had a huge dining hall--very ugly place, with loads of flies, as we realised when we had breakfast there one morning. The food was so-so, and we chose other restaurants to eat in for the rest of our stay.

All in all, this was a none-too-good experience. About the only redeeming feature of the Calangute Residency is its location (it’s right on the beach--less than a minute’s walk, and you’re on the sand). The staff at the reception is helpful--they’ll arrange for vehicle hire, offer fairly good advice on how to get about, and so on. The housekeeping staff, though, probably needs some refresher training--pronto.

We can never afford really posh holidays--shoestring is more our type. But the good thing about off-season (other than the blessed lack of crowds of tourists) is that many otherwise pricey places can be had very cheap. The Wildernest Resort, for instance--which charges a whopping Rs13,000 a night during the winters--drops to just Rs3,000 a night in the monsoon. And it looks awesome too.

Wildernest lies tucked away in the densely wooded hills on Goa’s border with the neighbouring state of Karnataka. It’s 60km from Panjim, on the highway to Belgium. A bunch of 18 cottages, all plate glass windows, thatched roofs and wooden interiors, spread across a hillside that’s thick with bamboo and dozens of other species of vegetation. On the hills surrounding the resort are bison, leopards, monkeys, and other wildlife, and from the dining room and the wooden machan, there’s a splendid view of the Vazra waterfalls on the hill opposite.

And this being the monsoon, everything was utterly gorgeous. The foliage was a thousand shades of green: emerald-green, grass-green, apple-green, just-budded-green, olive-green, silvery-green. And through it all flitted butterflies: large black-and-electric blue ones, small orange ones, powder-blue and black ones, and even some that looked like neatly-turned out bits of lace.

Our room, a Jungle View Cottage called Mogra, was approached through a long (and rather slippery path) that wound its way up the hillside. The cottage was lovely: it had plate glass windows on three sides, so we could do loads of bird-watching from inside our room. The cottage, with its attached bathroom, was neat and clean and had an elegantly rustic feel to it.

There’s no room service (since the cottages are so far apart), but the buffet meals at the dining room were mouthwatering. The food was traditional Maharashtrian delicacies: lentils cooked with grated coconut, gently cooked spinach, fried fish, salads, yoghurt, rice, and prawn curry with a very typical and unusual Indian vegetable--the somewhat fibrous drumstick.

We spent most of our time at Wildernest wandering through the jungle paths in the resort. We didn’t see much beyond butterflies; one day, we were lucky and saw a stunning pair of yellow-browed bulbuls and one red-whiskered bulbul, but that was about all. This is really, when you get down it, a place of extremes; it’s amazingly beautiful, the people at the resort--all of them in jungle gear--are very helpful and friendly, and the food’s fantastic. On the other hand, it can be downright dangerous during the monsoon, when the paths are treacherous and slippery as hell, the bed linens dank and musty, and critters of all sorts try to make their way into your room. There were some ants in ours and--a repeat of my last holiday, which was in Northern India--even a scorpion. And the undergrowth crawls with large and hairy centipedes that gave me the creeps.

But despite all that, Wildernest is a fantastic place.

We first spotted Capricorn when we were approaching Calangute Beach--and it looked so inviting, we decided we’d go have a meal there at least once. The restaurant stands on the main road (which, by the way, is pretty narrow), surrounded by quaint souvenir shops, palm trees, and hibiscus. Like a lot of eating joints in Goa, Capricorn too has a low wall punctuated by pillars, and tables are lined up right against the wall, so you can look out on the road and do loads of people-watching while eating.

The place is neat and clean--pretty blue or red-checked tablecloths, photographs of Goa, coconut palms, and buffalos on the walls, and (inexplicably) posters of Zermatt next to the kitchen door. The day we arrived for lunch, it was particularly humid, and the busily whirring fan overhead was a relief. The staff, who’re friendly without being obtrusive, brought us chilled colas (we ordered those as soon as we arrived) and helped us choose Goan specialties from the menu.

I ordered a fish curry with steamed rice, and my husband ordered a prawn curry, also with steamed rice. Both were good, though the gravy, which was rather spicy and had its fair share of coconut, was the same for both dishes. We topped it off with lemon pancakes--thin crepes sprinkled with sugar and limejuice and folded over. Very nice.

While lunching at Capricorn, we also discovered that they offer a 'full English breakfast', and that too for just Rs120 a person. We turned up the next morning, and ordered it for ourselves. What we got was two pieces of rather chewy toast topped with fried egg; baked beans; fries that had gotten a bit limp; a so-so frankfurter (I’d been hoping the 'sausage' they’d promised would be the spicy Goan chourisso!); and some very good, crisp bacon. The cold coffee I had along with my breakfast wasn’t great--it had a distinct taste of drinking chocolate--though my husband’s banana shake was good. It was an average breakfast, but very filling--and some of the other items on the breakfast menu showed promise. So we came back another day and treated ourselves to lavishly buttered toast, somewhat overdone ham-and-cheese omelette, and chocolate-banana shake. All better than the full breakfast, and all--like everything on the menu--fairly inexpensive; two people could easily eat a full meal here within Rs 500.

The man who drove us to Chandor and back again praised Infantaria’s food--great breakfasts, good dinners, fantastic 'pastries' (which, in India, doesn’t mean shortcrust or flaky or puff; it simply means wedges of heavily iced cakes). We decided to give the place a try at dinnertime and walked down to the restaurant, which stands next to the small chapel of Sao Joao Batista. If the number of occupied tables in the restaurant is anything to go by, this is a popular place. It has a large barbecue station--a well-like structure with a prettily tiled parapet all around it--towards the front of the restaurant, but that’s about all that’s interesting when it comes to décor. The tables, all covered with grubby red tablecloths, are very cramped, and the lighting appears more dingy than romantic.

Anyway. We got down to business and had a look through the menu. Like all the restaurants we ate at in Goa, Infantaria too has a menu that’s incredibly eclectic--there’s Indian (read Mughlai), Chinese (assuredly not authentic), Goan, and 'continental' stuff available. We settled for a grilled seafood platter and nearly passed out with hunger while waiting for it to arrive. Service is abysmally slow, and the waiter--a stripling in a blue T-shirt and scruffy jeans--pointedly ran off to chat with the cashier when we tried to attract his attention.

The grilled seafood platter, when it eventually arrived, was a mix of good and bad. The crab and the red snapper were excellent; the prawns were good, as were the mussels, and the squid was a horror--I’ve never had more rubbery stuff in my life. Along with the platter came assorted sautéed vegetables, all rather limp and unappetising. For dessert, we asked for apple pie but were told that it was over, as was almost every other item on the dessert menu. I finally ordered a tiramisu--a little too chocolatey for my taste, and with none of the delicate flavours I prefer in my tiramisu. My husband, who ordered a chocolate excess, liked his dessert more than I did mine.

All in all, not a great experience at all--the food’s average, the service is horrible, and it’s not as if it’s very cheap either--this, at around Rs600, was one of the most expensive meals we had in Goa.

Seventy-two years is a long time--long enough, at any rate, to establish a restaurant that’s really very pleasant. Souza Lobo, on Calangute Beach, was set up in 1932--the 'Since 1932' motif is there on the waiter’s uniforms, on the menu cards, and on the restaurant’s signboard. Today, it’s run by John Jude Lobo, the great-grandson of the founder, and is definitely one of the nicest restaurants in and around Calangute. We discovered Souza Lobo while strolling along the beach and decided to give it a shot for dinner.

At first glance, it seemed simply like a somewhat upmarket version of most Goan eateries: a ceiling of prettily woven coconut fibre, tables covered with red tablecloths, waiters in cheery orange shirts with a print of coconut trees, menu cards that look like they were printed in 1932, and the faint glimmer of moonlit surf a few yards down the beach. A little later, and we’d revised our opinion: Souza Lobo wasn’t just a pretty place.

The food, for one, was splendid. We had a lot of authentic Goan food while we stayed in Goa, and the best was at Souza Lobo. We ordered steamed rice, fish cafreal (very succulent fish smeared with a green paste--I think of coriander and spices, lightly cooked and served with crisp wedges of fried potatoes), and oyster xacuti, a dish with a beautifully creamy gravy of coconut milk. For afters, my husband had a fairly good apple pie with ice cream, while I settled for bebinca. Bebinca is a Goan sweet that’s made very painstakingly from pancakes. Each pancake is made of a batter of eggs, flour, sugar, and grated coconut--and then some half a dozen pancakes are piled one on top of the other and gently steamed. Not too sweet, and (as at Souza Lobo) usually very good.

We ate at Souza Lobo another evening, when we ordered pork sorpotel (a dish traditionally made with pieces of pork, pig’s liver, pig’s blood, and spices) and fish reichado, a grilled fish stuffed with a mixture of ground spice and Goan vinegar. Spicy, but good. On both days, our bill--including cola and a beer, main course and dessert--came to less than Rs500. Great value for money.

And the icing on the cake is the ambience--Souza Lobo was the only restaurant we visited in Goa that actually had live entertainment. On the first evening, there was a singer called Emmanuel, who admitted that his stock of Hindi and Konkani songs was limited, but that he could sing English stuff. He had a gorgeous voice and was fantastic with country and soft rock. The next time we dined at Souza Lobo, Emmanuel was missing, but there was a trio with guitar, trumpet, and drum who sang loads of Konkani songs and a few English tunes. They did a particularly good rendition of When the Saints Go Marching In.

We were on our way back from a three-hour trip to the beaches of Baga and Anjuna and the hilltop Chapora Fort.

The jaunt had had its ups and downs. The view from Chapora had been splendid; the waves at Baga had been cool; the coconut groves had been pretty; and the many miles of bright green rice fields, with threads of gleaming water between them and the sheltering coolness of rain-laden clouds above had been exquisite. On the other hand, the bike we were on--a beat-up vehicle very low on power--had nearly thrown us in a ditch; Anjuna, which we’d visited simply to see the famed flea market, had turned out to be more or less deserted; and by the time we got on to the straight road leading to Calangute, we had sore butts and a craving for something cool and thirst-quenching. We stopped off at a roadside shop to buy ourselves some bottled mango juice, and while we were gulping it down, we noticed something pretty amusing.

The house next door had a flamboyant gate--the gateposts were about five feet high and painted a virulent red, with intricate drawings of dragons picked out in white. What was even more unusual was the fact that both gateposts were topped by two identical statues of large black goats. It was just as I was moving off towards our bike when my husband made an interesting discovery: the goats were alive.But after a while, Goa stops surprising you. You do continue to be amazed by its vivid beauty and by its somewhat not-quite-Indian feel, but soon enough, you start taking all of that in stride. You may just stifle a grin when you see a King of Kings Wholesale Dealer or a Holy Spirit Bar and Restaurant, and you may find something vaguely incongruous about a roadside shrine in which the large white-tiled crucifix has been smothered by garlands of marigolds and has a bunch of incense sticks burning before it. A large roadside statue of a sheep, made out of god along knows what material, but with a strange arrangement of stiff metallic rays giving it a backdrop, may take some while to register as the Lamb of God; but after a few days here, even that won’t surprise you.

In fact, it’s all quite charming.

All of Goa, actually, has a delightfully laid-back and happy air about it. This is a sunny strip of land running down the south-western coast of India, lapped by the waves of the Indian Ocean on one side and flanked by the densely forested hills of the Western Ghats on the other. To the north lies Maharashtra; to the south lies Kerala. And in the middle is Goa. Beaches, Bermudas, bikinis, bars, and bebinca are what Goa is famous for. It’s what thousands of tourists come seeking every winter.

But suntans and seafood aside, Goa has a lot to offer--all you need to do is dig deeper. There are beautiful old cathedrals dating back to the 17th century; typical Portuguese-Konkani houses, with wrought iron or carved wood balconies, terracotta-tiled roofs, and bright blue ornamentation; groves of coconut trees; and pubs, bars, and eateries down every street. It’s all rather crowded during the winter, when both foreigners as well as Indians descend on Goa in sun-seeking hordes, but try coming here in the monsoon.

The monsoon, usually beginning in early July and lasting up to late September, soaks Goa--the state actually receives some 100 inches of rain a year. With its deep red earth, its lush green fields, and its brilliant blue kingfishers (we saw about half a dozen on an average per day), Goa is perfect for a monsoon visit. You may not be able to soak up the sun or go swimming, but this is the best time to get a taste of a state that’s very friendly, incredibly beautiful, and very easy to fall in love with.