Mumbai was a treat, but it was nice to be able to escape the city once in a while, and
where better to escape to than Goa? It was a short flight away and somewhere
I’d always fancied going. We arrived almost
at the end of the busy period, since although the monsoon doesn’t kick in until
the end of June, the season is more or less over by mid May. We had booked a beach chalet in Palolem
beach, a couple of hours’ slow drive from the airport, slow not so much on
account of the traffic, but due to the fact that the driver couldn’t seem to
bring himself to shift out of second gear.
Still, it gave us ample time to gaze at the beautiful, brightly coloured
Portuguese-inspired villas that line the route, many of them slowly crumbling
yet still magnificent.
When
we finally arrived at our destination it was dark and we were led by or driver
down an unlit sandy footpath and over a load of rocks (me, rather comically,
with wheelie bag in tow) wondering what on earth we had let ourselves in for,
until we arrived at a tiny cove backed by idiosyncratic wooden bungalows amidst
the coconut palms. Our home for the next
two nights was Green Park resort, right at the end of the beach nestled on the
foreshore of a tiny bay. The bungalows
were what could be described as basic – in these circumstances the sentence is
usually followed by ‘but clean enough’ – which wasn’t really the case either,
but the location more than made up for it.
It
being so close to the end of the season the restaurant at Green Park resort was
closed but fortunately a short rock clamber away there were many more to choose
from, so our first evening saw us dining well on Kingfish and, it must be
admitted, a plethora of extremely inexpensive alcoholic drinks including a vicious
local spirit distilled by Sonny, the laid back owner of the place who appeared
to do nothing other than watch cricket twenty four hours a day.
The
view from our hut in the light of the following morning was sublime – to lie in
bed and peer through the mosquito netting to see waves silently lapping on the
shore just metres away was rather special, despite my tender cranium. It was a
slow start but we managed a walk down Palolem beach, passing fishing boats,
multitudinous beach dogs, sarong sellers and hundreds of places offering yoga and
massage – Goa still lives up to its hippy reputation. The beach huts lining the sandy beach look
fairly substantial, yet incredibly are all carted away lock stock and barrel in
advance of the monsoon season, to be built up once again the following
year. The monsoon is so fierce the huts
would otherwise never survive. We’d had
quite a surprise come daylight upon stepping into the bathroom in our beach
bungalow to find that it didn’t have a roof, just a bit of dark muslin. Luckily no rain was forecast. It was quite unnerving but also quite marvellous
to shower with the treetops swaying above you, hoping that no-one had shinned
up them to collect coconuts. The basin was
interesting; the water ran straight out onto the floor, lapping around your
feet. It didn’t do to dwell too long on the state of the electrical wiring…
At
the end of the beach we stopped for some caffeine and noticed how incredibly
laid back the Goan people appear to be.
It seemed to be a lot of effort to take our order, even more effort to
go and make the coffee, and a step too far to give us our bill. But it’s done with a disarming half smile, a
shrug and a complete lack of concern.
Sunday
saw us heading out in one of the fishing boats for a dolphin-watching
trip. We weren’t really expecting to see
any and it was just very pleasant to be floating about past the stunning
coastline, no buildings in sight, just rocks and scrub falling down to the blue
sea. We had almost given up looking when
suddenly we spotted them, rather larger than expected but most definitely
dolphins, doing their dolphiny thing.
Our
second trip away from Mumbai was to colourful Rajasthan, and was a weekend of contrasts.
Our
main aim was the search for the elusive Sumatran tiger at Ranthambhore National
park, although our journey began – and ended – in Jaipur. Kicking off our
weekend of two halves was an overnight stay at the Umad Mahal hotel in Jaipur,
a confection of a building adorned inside and out with frescoes, mosaics, heavy,
elaborately-carved oak furniture and other paraphernalia worthy of any
museum. It also had a rather splendid
rooftop bar and a nice line in Spanish white wine. We were up early the
following day for the three-hour drive to Ranthambhore, a 1334 square kilometre
of wilderness, originally a Maharaja’s hunting ground, which since 1970 has
been a Government controlled National Park providing refuge to a total of 61
tigers. The long drive abounded with
colour. In The ‘Land
of Kings’, colours bear
deep significance, and exotic colours are celebrated everywhere, a maelstrom of
vibrant hues. Women are clad head to toe in saris of fluorescent orange,
electric blue and canary yellow, whilst men sport saffron yellow, orange or
pink turbans, all denoting their place in society. Tractors trundle down the
long straight roads adorned with sparkling tinsel and gaudy plastic flowers, music
constantly blaring. Lorries are painted
a myriad of colours and patterns, all displaying the command ‘horn please’
which our driver obeyed with gusto.
The
National Park could not have been more of a contrast. The scrubby, rocky
landscape adorned with stunted trees, occasional waterholes and rocky canyons was
more reminiscent than the African savannah than the India I was familiar with. We
spent a fantastic few hours bouncing
along in an open topped jeep haring after possible sightings of big cats. Did we see a tiger?
Well, a safari park it is not, and whilst there are plenty of jeeps roving
round, the park operates on a quota system whereby a defined number of jeeps
are allocated into a certain zone in order to avoid overcrowding the animals.
This, combined with the lack of radio contact between the various guides
inevitably lessens the chance of seeing a tiger but in turn reduces any impact
on the wildlife. So no, we did not see a tiger. As compensation, the landscape was
hugely beautiful, particularly at the waterholes and most especially when the
driver turned off the engine and we were enveloped in the still quiet,
punctuated by the shrill mew of a peacock, an ever-present cuckoo, the staccato
bark of a deer or the comical chattering of a lapwing. To discover such
stillness and quiet in India
is a rarity. We did however spot jackal, wild boar, a crocodile, storks, a
golden oriole, an iridescent kingfisher and lots of other birdlife too exotic
to identify.
Back
in Jaipur were plunged back into the frenzy that is more usually associated
with India.
The return drive had been equally colourful, with herds of sheep in the road,
cows walking serenely down the middle of dual carriageways without turning a
hair, camels pulling wooden carts, and finally brightly coloured lorries laden
to bursting with rice, trussed up in oversized, bulging fabric bags that
dwarfed the body of the lorry and took up almost all of the road.
Jaipur
is popularly known as the Pink City, owing to the fact that rather bizarrely in
this land of riotous colour, its buildings are painted a demure salmon pink.
Pink symbolises welcome, and the city was painted thus on the occasion of a
visit from the Prince of Wales back in 1878. Aside from being aesthetically
pleasing, the colour serves a practical purpose too as the matte pink colour
reduces the glare from the sun off the buildings.
As
hot as it was, we wandered around and saw the Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the
Winds, an elaborate building in the turrets of which the royal concubines used to
sit away from lascivious eyes in order
to view the royal processions in the street below.. We saw the City Palace
– from the outside at least, and we saw the inside of a fair few shops, soon
coming to the conclusion that everything is cheaper in Rajasthan. It was hot, it was tiring, and we felt
exactly like a jar of honey surrounded by wasps. I loved it.
