Goa

It was Heather’s Birthday this past weekend and to celebrate we went to Goa, a small coastal state on the western side of India on the Arabian Sea.

Our weekend started as typically as most of our traveling in India has. Our flight which was supposed to leave from Hyderabad at 11:40 AM left instead at 2 PM because of an airport closure. We were to fly through Bangalore, but just before our flight boarded a flight landing in Bangalore somehow lost its front landing gear and ran off of the runway, which closed the airport. I pieced this together later from newspaper reports. The information we were given at the time ranged from an aircraft had “broken down” in Bangalore, to an aircraft had “crashed in Bagalore”. One airline employee even told me that a plane had “bumped into the runway”. I knew better than to ask what exactly the hell that meant and just resolved to sit back and relax and we would fly to Goa whenever they let us.
As we landed in Bangalore for our short stopover, we passed the plane responsible for all the trouble as it lay helplessly off to one side of the runway. It was missing the front wheels, the propellers were bent up and the rear wheels were not looking to hot. It was surrounded by about 600 people, 555 of whom appeared to be doing nothing and probably didn’t even work at the airport to begin with.
Most of the passengers got off in Bangalore, but we and the other four people who were going on to Goa got to sit through the 15 minute shit-storm that is a Kingfisher Airlines cleaning crew. It was astounding. As with all jobs in India, there were WAY more people than there needed to be, and as a result there were basically a lot of people making noise and getting nothing done. The plane was left just as dirty as it was found even though there were at least fifty people running around the plane throwing things in garbage sacks, vacuuming, and replenishing magazine racks. Even with the five or six guys who appeared to be foremen or managers of some sort screaming and yelling at the cleaning crew, there was still just as much crap left behind as was taken away.
But after a half hour we were back in the sky and an hour later we landed in Goa.

Goa is beautiful. There’s no denying that. It was taken over by the Portuguese as a shipping port for the spice and silk trade in the early 1500s. It remained a territory of Portugal all the way until 1961.
It was a 45 minute drive from the airport and it was a great drive. We drove for a few minutes across red rocky ground a mile or two from the coastline which we could see past a seemingly endless forest that ran by below the left of the road. Then we turned off and plunged into the forest ourselves, driving along a winding road lined with palm trees. Occasionally a small white Catholic altar or Portuguese style adobe house would pop up through the woods. It was a small road without much traffic. Aside from the small truck we were in, most of the traffic was scooters and motorcycles. From time to time we would pass through villages which usually consisted of a bar, a general store, and some type of eating establishment clumped together against the road with a few houses scattered about the woods behind them.


We stayed at a resort called The Leela. The Leela is a HUGE resort covering acres and acres of palm forests with a small golf course, tennis courts, swimming pools, a spa. And even a little casino. One side is bordered by a large river, and the other side by the ocean. We lounged in the sun by the pool, on the beach, and on our own deck. Our room looked out over a manmade lagoon packed with brightly colored flowers and more palm trees. As we opened the doors to the deck we were engulfed in sweet flower scents and surrounded by birdsong from all sorts of tropical birds. The most abundant bird was the Miniature Heron. They swooped around the resort all day either lounging around the golf course, or on the island in the lagoon.

Even surrounded by all of this, it was something manmade that ended up being the highlight of the trip for me. Crème Brulee French Toast. They had it at the breakfast buffet, and they may as well have had nothing else. Although I enjoyed all my other meals, I found myself giddy waiting for the next morning so I could get my hands on some more. I cleaned out the steam tray every morning, and the nice Canadian chef even gave me the recipe so I can make it myself.

The first morning we were there the chef was walking around the seating area of the restaurant when he saw me and stopped me to ask if I had been there before. I said no and he told me that I looked exactly like one of the Secret Servicemen who had been there with Bill Clinton, who had visited the resort a few months earlier. That’s definitely a new one for me. I assured him it wasn’t me, but I don’t think he believed me.

And OH MY GOD the fish! How I’ve made it this long without fish I’ll never know. I miss it and I love it. And there was plenty of it in Goa. I had snapper, salmon, calamari, fish curries, and prawns, I shit you not, the size of my fist. When I get back to the U.S. I’m going to go completely ape-shit on fish and probably give myself mercury poisoning.

Going through every aspect of the weekend would take far more than I feel like writing, but all the highlights seem to be of things that, even though we were in India, struck me as being surprisingly non-Indian:

People in shorts.
Very clean facilities.
Easygoing locals.
Women in bikinis.
People who stared, but only after saying “hello” first and smiling.
Beef (Good beef at that).
Peace and quiet.
Clean Air.

We were sad to leave.

We ate one night at The Riverside Restaurant. It has a deck which was set right on the bank of the river I mentioned earlier. The deck was, of course leaning slightly towards the water, but I put this out of my mind. I ate salmon and fettuccini as we watched the fishing boats coming back up the river after being at sea all day. On the bank opposite of the restaurant most of the boats were docking and unloading. The river was wide enough that we couldn’t see exactly what they were unloading through the darkness. We could, however, hear the men yelling from the shore and listen to the music some of the boats had playing on their radios. Even though the restaurant was trying its best to be a bit on the fancy side, all the sounds of a working river dock combined with the sounds and smells of the surrounding forest made the whole thing seem pleasantly informal.