Itching to start our week of chilling-out on the reportedly beautiful beach of Pololem, we left Panaji, stopping off briefly in Margao, the main town in south Goa, to pick up Lisa (a friend of my sister’s), who is joining us to do some traveling for a few weeks. Lisa is living in India at the moment, working with her aunty who is setting up a community project a few hours south of Bangalore. Our backpacks piled in the front cabin with the bus driver, we bumped our way along the country roads through the coconut groves and paddy fields and rolled into the little village of coco-huts running along a gorgeous little white beach – it was like walking into a postcard!!! Leaving Nige snoozing under a palm-tree with the bags, Lisa and I walked the length of the beach but disappointingly none of the little coco resorts had two huts free, so we ended up staying in a lovely little hotel set back from the beach. This turned out to be such a blessing as the monsoon hit that night and we were nice and dry, unlike the poor people in the huts!!! We’re having a brilliant time here, although we haven’t really done too much besides lazing on the beach, eating and enjoying a few lazy beers while watching fisherman haul in their day’s catch. It’s by no means undiscovered but it’s still very small and there’s only a few hippy-looking travelers here besides us - even the touts are good-natured – the same guy calls out to us to “look at my shop?” as we walk past each day, greeting us with “G’day moiiiit”, to Lisa and I and “Awight?” to Nige! The only thing that’s put a bit of dampener on it (besides the nightly downpours) is that Nige, in his excitement at seeing something non-curried, forgot where he was and ordered a holy steak, rare, and Nandi rained down his fury, leaving poor Nige confined to his room for a full day! Once born-again-vegetarian Nige was back on his still-shaky feet, we decided to hire bikes and head off around the coast for a bit of an explore – Lisa proved that yoga does in fact get you quite fit, and spent a large part of the day waiting under shady trees on the other side of hills for us to appear, red-faced and panting, pushing our bikes! We finally got to a gorgeous little beach called Agonda, which was probably what Palolem was like 5 years ago. No hotels or even cocohuts besides the ones the villagers live in, and a pristine coconut-fringed beach. Lisa and I braved a dip in the huge swell and successfully cooled off and got back in our sarongs before inevitable crowd of men came trooping down the beach for a gawk. Although we could quite happily just stop here for the duration, we decided we’d better move on before the monsoon gets too ferocious...