Last week we took a road trip that started at a nearby village of Varca where we visited the famous Momo place – Tibchi’s. A year or two before BBC came to India and named it the number 7 restaurant to eat at, which is amazing considering the amount of similar bunkers all around Goa. Momos resemble Chinese dumplings and you can get them filled with pretty much anything; steamed or fried. The restaurant is held by a Goan man and his Nepalese partner. And everything is prepared on the spot, by hand and with love and the taste was absolutely fantastic – gooey goodness. Bad thing is, unless you know about it you can’t find it!
Spice farm
En route to our next destination I noticed a peculiar thing. A group of people had laid down red sheets on the edge of the motorway. They’d poured hundreds of kilos of rice on them and were stomping in it… They were drying the rice… The only reasoning I could think of was, there must be some beneficial nutrition coming from the car exhausts…
I was not comforted by the fact that it most likely is the same rice we have at our grocery shops in the Western World… At least now we know where the soggy dust on the rice comes from! (sic)
We had arrived at the Sahakari Spice Farm in Ponda. For 400 Rupees a guide takes you on a tour around the 130 acres of vegetation and introduces all the trees and plants on which most of the Indian spices and herbs grow on. So it is a fascinating lesson if you didn’t know for example that peanut is a legume and grows underground, cashews are actually “appleseeds” or that cinnamon is a piece of tree bark.
After the tour there is an open buffet included in the ticket price with a wide selection of local rustic food served on bamboo plates. Before you get to eat your selected meal though, there’s a welcoming shot you need to take… It’s called Cashew Fenny and they advise to drink it without smelling… I can’t really describe it any other way than if you simply enjoy a straight glass of petroleum on a hot afternoon then this is for you!
Palolem Beach
The final stretch of our adventure took us to Palolem Beach in Canacona, Goa. Depending on where you’re staying, the road to get there can take a few hours. We chose a taxi but many people just rent or use their own Vespas or scooter bikes. The winding road up is through the mountains and the sights from there are indescribable. We’re told that the jungles are known for a high population of monkeys and at night time the tigers come down to the villages looking for food.
Palolem Beach is about 1.6 km long and because of it’s crescent shape, you can see the whole beach from either end. It ranks as the number 1 beach in India and number 2 in the world. The beach was also used as Jason Bourne’s residence in the Supremacy film. The strip is filled with shacks placed up on the rocks, locally called Monkey Island, and they’re built leaning on each other with no breathing space in between.
From afar it looks as if a thousand rainbows are stretched out on the sand. The shacks there are either restaurants or shops but behind it all are tiny bungalows and huts. These are habited by foreign travellers, pilgrims and some local fishermen families. It is crazy to believe that all those bamboo and wood constructions are ripped down at the end of spring and built back up at the end of summer – as I mentioned before, nothing on a beach survives the yearly monsoon season.
Heaven on Earth
It is something of a marvel walking through the little community – there are people from all around the world living there, most staying for months. They rent a bungalow and retreat there or they’ll teach yoga or do pilgrimage. It looks like something out of an old film, a place where people went to spend their summers… Towels drying over the porch rails, flip-flops and swimsuits left in the sand and music playing in every corner.
There’s endless activities in this little village – shop for anything your heart desires and body needs for living, kayaking, dolphin watching, surf, parasail, work out or spend the night dancing at a silent disco or sipping cocktails in a hidden bar… It is one of the most serene places I’ve been to. It changes your views on what’s needed in life to be happy.
