In the 1980s, I used to spend winter holidays in Goa, sunbathing in a bikini on the beach at Calangute, dining on freshly barbecued prawns, and picking over trinkets from Tibet sold by disarmingly charming Kashmiris. I would rent rooms in old Portuguese villas and borrow bicycles to wobble down sandy lanes to white baroque churches adrift in green rice paddy, where a decent congregation would still sing hymns on a Sunday.
When charter flights from the UK arrived in the 1990s, I moved on to Lamu in Kenya. But last month, nearly 40 years later, as I cast around for a last-minute winter break, I decided to return. I hoped the headlong rush into tourism would have steadied and that Goa’s laidback charm hadn’t been entirely buried by concrete.
First impressions were not promising. The road from the airport was lined with billboards advertising casinos and building supplies. Amitabh Bachchan, India’s most famous actor, grinned down at me, holding a length of steel pipe.
But once we left the highway, the road ran beneath palm trees to the Portuguese-style Marbella Guesthouse set on a bluff above Candolim beach. Like the villas I remembered, it had large rooms with tiled floors, hand-carved furnishings and big, lazy fans.
The soft, pale sand was cleaner than I’d expected. The fruit ladies, ear cleaners and cows were gone, replaced by foot masseurs who tended to British snowbirds snoozing on padded sun loungers in front of makeshift wooden shacks, several of which displayed the flag of St George and had beer on tap.
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