#rajbagh

We loved the southern beaches of Goa and we didn’t want to leave, so we didn’t. We hunted for a house to stay for a month or two and after the usual trials and tribulations we found a winner; the Purple Palace (pictured above). It was a two bedroom stand alone house in the village of Rajbagh.

The house sat on a river but was 5 minutes walk from one of the nicest, quietest beaches for miles; the private beach of the very swanky Hotel Intercontinental Lalit. The house was newly built by a lovely family who lived across the dirt road behind it. They were building it for the oldest daughter to live in with her soon to be husband when they got married later in the year.

The first week there we achieved the impossible; installing internet in less than seven days. Trying to do anything in India is at least five times more difficult than you’d imagine, so you can imagine how fun this undertaking was. The main issue is that Indian people don’t often say ‘no’, it’s either ‘yes’ or ‘possibly’, and even ‘yes’ really means ‘possibly’. So getting the internet guy to come went like this; we’d call him to see when he was coming to install the receiver on the roof and he’d say he’d be there in 15 minutes. Four hours later we’d call him again and he said he’d be there in 5 minutes. After a few more hours the answer was that he’d be there at 9am in the morning. This would go on for days. Then, finally he would come out and instead of installing it he’d ‘just take a look’ because he didn’t have his tools with him and the fun would start again. In the end, we got high-speed internet installed in 6 days which we now realise was nothing short of a miracle, other people have said it has taken six months. Just goes to show persistence pays off.

But once we were set up life was sweet, and for a month we worked hard, sat on the roof/balcony and watched night fall while the birds came to nest in the palm trees that surrounded the place and life was good. Dave came back from Mumbai and spent an extra 10 days at the Purple Palace. This was both a lot of fun and very productive as we were working on all sorts of projects together that had started in Kerala with the whole team. It was great having our own house again which we hadn’t had since Bangkok. We enjoyed the simple things like taking our scooter into the closest, very Indian town Chaudi to do the shopping. And the beaches! We’d spend hours a day walking along the beach and swimming, it was bliss.

After a month on the beach we decided that it was time to move on or we may never leave. On our last night we checked in to the Hotel InterContinental to spoil ourselves for Valentine’s Day. The next morning we bade farewell to Goa and got on a plane to Bangalore.

The view from our rooftop terrace.

We loved having Dave with us for a few weeks.