Last beach stop

In Goa, we stayed in Panjim for two days, then Calangute Beach for six. This was our last stop before an epic six-hundred-kilometre, twenty-five hour train ride back to Mumbai where we’d fly out of India to Thailand.

Kovalam Beach

From the tip of India we ventured north to Kovalam Beach in the state of Kerala. Have you ever dreamed of having a tropical beach to yourself? When I arrived at Kovalam Beach in the mid-seventies, that’s exactly what I found. Tourists began flocking to Goa, but Kerala was still under the radar. There was one empty resort on the southern point, and beyond stretched a deserted beach. The surf thumped and sizzled over the sand enticing me into the pristine sea that I shared with no one but my children. 

An appetite for goan pig? not me

Featured photo courtesy: Portugal Editor Exploration — Wikimedia Commons https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Colvá_beach.jpg

When I stayed at Colva Beach in the 1970s, there were only two other tourists — one from Australia and an English guy who’d been travelling for seven years. No hoards of Europeans or drugs governed the quiet backwater beach back then. The biggest high we got was watching a local climb a coconut tree to retrieve young coconuts.