The last three weeks have been spent in Goa, the beach holiday capital of India. We took a train from Hampi to Palolem, one of the southernmost beaches in Goa.

Palolem by day.

Staying in Palolem was a little like floating through a dream. It’s a white, sandy crescent bay tossed at either end with a handful of boulders. A palm-tree grove follows the curve of the beach, part-camouflaging temporary beach-front bars and coco-huts, most of which are dismantled each year during the monsoon and re-assembled. At night the whole bay turns a deep orange and the softly lit bars softly waft music, barely audible over the rolling waves.

Palolem by night…and us.

Sometimes it felt more like a farm than a beach: beach dogs continuously comb the beach for scraps; cows sunbathe smug and unmolested while their porcine cousins trot about terrified, lest someone should order a Pork Vindaloo from one of the beach side restaurants. Chickens, roosters, crows, frogs, lizards, even the odd monkey join the fighting, howling dogs and the fighting, squealing pigs in a nighttime cacophony so loud that, were it at home, you’d be banging bleary-eyed at next door.

Holy beach cow!

So how do you sleep at night? Why, you get drunk of course.
Goa, in it’s hippy hey-dey, was a place for hippies to come, take drugs, and dance to trance music ’til the sun came up (often naked apparently?). This, it seems, was fine until the Indians started joining in, then it became anathema to Indian conservatism; a place for Indians to come and behave in a decidedly un-Indian way. Laws were passed to curb the reveler’s enthusiasm, one of which was to ban loud music after 10pm. In Palolem they get round this law – brilliantly I feel – by running Silent Discos each night, where they hand out a set of head-phones as you walk in.

Partying in Palolem. Our last night with travelling pals Olly and Mel.

The only thing of note we actually did in Palolem was to hire out a 500cc Enfield Bullet (the classic Indian ride, yaar) and set out to find a local beauty spot, Cola Beach, which was 20km outside of town. Anyway, 40km down the road the guy we rented the bike from pulled up in a jeep and shouted “Where are you going?”.
“Cola Beach,” we replied.
“Well what the bloody hell are you doing out here then!?”

What a machine! And the bike’s not bad either.

We eventually backtracked and found Cola Beach, which was nice enough. But the real treat was gliding on the Enfield along winding forested Indian roads, Amy even enjoyed riding pillion. A funny thing – blind corners are irrelevant to Indians. In fact, it seems preferable to overake on a blind corner or the crest of a hill. So it’s quite common to round a corner and find a bus overtaking a lorry and only an Enfield sized gap to squeeze through.
We came to Palolem for a few nights. Eleven nights we later we left for Panjim.
Panjim is a cute little town whose Portuguese heritage shines through the centuries in it’s pastel painted houses with white-arched window frames, streets named after Catholic saints and its alabaster Catholic churches. This, coupled with the tropical setting, makes it feel like a South American city. We wandered about for a couple of days, took a trip to Old Goa (more of the same really) and then took a ridiculously packed bus – picture school children hanging from the outside – to Arambol, a beach in the North of Goa.

Amy in Panjim.

Arambol is like a bigger, dirtier, louder Palolem with no such qualms about playing music late at night. Almost immediately we arrived we fell in with a gang who we got to know so well in the 3 days we were with them that it felt a bit empty when they all left.

Arambol Beach.

Some of our new pals in Arambol.

Our beach holiday – a holiday from a holiday – is coming to an end. We need to rouse ourselves from our sea-side indolence and get on with the serious business of travelling. We get the sleeper bus to Mumbai on Saturday.

“It’s just totally naff and non-sensical.” We were talking to San, an Indian, about religion, often a touchy subject but we felt sufficiently comfortable – and drunk – to broach it.

English clock-tower. Indian city.

San had had be-friended us on the streets of Mysore. This is not so strange, Indians be-friend us all the time. What was different about San was that he didn’t seem to want anything in return. He had a strange, Frank Spencer English accent and an endearing buck-toothed grin and used words like ‘naff’ and ‘non-sensical’. He helped us find a hotel room (took no commission) and then paid for a rickshaw to take us to bar. It took us some time to get over the natural traveler’s suspicion but it turned out that San was a massive Anglophile, just a ‘nice bloke’ (his words) with an almost tragic longing to see England. Unfortunately we were the closest he was ever likely to get.

We got roped into buying some incense sticks.

Mysore is a terrific little city. Alongside the standard fare of advertising hoardings, wandering cows, rickshaw-wallahs and grim buses are to be found overblown Raj-era palaces, pastel coloured colonial mansions and ancient Dravidian temples. We were also – having eaten nothing but curry for some weeks – ashamedly excited to see a McDonald’s there! After wolfing down a McChicken sarnie (beef is off the menu obviously) we strolled round Mysore, then left for Hampi after a couple of days.

Yep, that’s our room and, yep, that’s a temple.

Hampi, wow. This place really has to be seen to be believed. Basically a vast concentration of half-millenia-old temples and ruins, dotted haphazardly around a landcsape made up of sandy boulders, some enormous, stacked in improbable formations, juxtaposed against green banana plantations, rice paddies and coconut trees. You stay in amongst the temples, in Hampi Bazaar, and can rent push-bikes to get round and see as many as you can before getting bored (commonly known as being ‘templed out’).

Great photography from Amy. Regrettably I dropped her camera in a rock pool shortly after this.

Across the river from Hampi Bazaar, and accessible only by boat, a surreal proliferation of bungalows and restaurants, shops and bike rentals has sprung up to service the needs of the ever-growing hippy population. Vying, along with the hippies, for the title of ethnic majority, are Israelis. Some inter-breeding has inevitably caused a number of Israeli hippies. They all hang around getting stoned, juggling sticks, banging bongos, juggling sticks, getting stoned; we even caught the Israelis doing some weird Yiddish hokey-cokey type dance. A great place to people-watch and we stayed on this side of the river for a few nights.

This is the ‘other side’.

After seven nights in Hampi we are off to Goa, back to the beach.

I call this one ‘Some boulders and a woman’.