It’s eight in the morning in Salcete, the old Portuguese heartland of Goa. As sunlight floods the paddy fields, church services are coming to an end. Congregations file out among the palm trees, gossiping and shaking hands. The men sport dark suits and crisply ironed shirts; the women wear satin dresses. They drift off, ready to go to school or begin their working day. At Jila Bakery, a family business built into the Antaos’ ancestral home in the jungle-shrouded village of Ambora, everyone has been hard at work since 5am. Soon a steady stream of customers will enter the hushed front room to collect their orders. In the kitchen, Reginald Antao, master baker, is still busy, deftly cutting pastry into rectangles in preparation for their spiced chicken filling.
“This,” Reginald waves a hand at everything around him, “is the real Goa.” He pulls a fresh batch of eclairs from the brick oven. “The north,” he chuckles, “that’s not Goa.”
Like many in his part of the world, Reginald regards north Goa, famous for its tourist beaches and hedonistic nightlife, with a healthy dose of suspicion. But, of course, the north – my home for the past six years – is the only Goa many outsiders know. It’s home to the legendary beaches of Anjuna, Vagator and Calangute, the latter a golden stretch of sand that entranced the hippies arriving overland in the 1960s, but is now better-known for large hotels, package tours, congested roads and alcohol-fuelled nights.
It’s this rampant commercialisation, and its recent, rapid spread to other once-pristine beaches that leads many like Reginald to be so dismissive. But one positive outcome of the beachside saturation is that increasing numbers of residents and visitors – including a fresh wave of creative, enterprising men and women from India and elsewhere – are now looking inland, north and south, for sanctuary and inspiration, opening up to tourism a side of the state that used to be difficult to access, and reigniting interest in places like Jila, that have been quietly going about their business for years.
Satish Warier, the self-taught chef/owner of Gunpowder, a south Indian restaurant that used to be in Delhi, is part of the new generation. Two years ago Satish, a former journalist, moved his operation from the capital to Goa, along with Orijit Sen and Gurpreet Sidhu of ethical clothing and lifestyle store People Tree. He took over a residential plot in Assagao, a picturesque valley village a few miles inland from Anjuna beach, which in recent years has grown into something of a creative hub. The old Portuguese house on the property became the People Tree shop and restaurant kitchen, while the sprawling gardens were transformed into a dining area.
“I never considered the beach‚” Satish tells me over beer and pork curry, as the last of the monsoon rains fall beyond the veranda. “Beachside is madness.” He’s right. Despite the promise of income guaranteed by the prime real estate, the downsides of a seafront business in Goa are many: the sheer volume of bodies; the hyper-competitiveness born of the huge number of venues; and the sometimes messy local politics, which favour villagers over outsiders.
And anyway, the beach season is short, less than six months long, and intricate environmental laws mean everything on the beach has to come down in the monsoon, only to be built again at the start of the next season. Satish decided from the start to avoid this circus. “We wanted somewhere quiet and stable that would be open throughout the year,” he says. “And we wanted the locals to start coming.”
It’s a high-risk strategy in many ways: a restaurant that’s unlikely to be stumbled upon by most visitors, lives and dies by the strength of its food. But for Gunpowder the idea paid off. Its often fiery, tamarind and coconut-informed peninsular cuisine balances dense meat curries (Keralan Syrian-Christian beef) with fresh seafood (backwaters prawn masala) and plentiful, often unusual vegetarian options, and is uniformly exceptional. Which means the locals did come, as did the expats and urbanites who already knew and loved the Delhi incarnation, and tourists who were excited to discover a new kind of Indian food. It is now one of Goa’s favourite restaurants.
As the coast gets louder and ever more crowded, many visitors are also looking inland for places to stay, for the peace Goa traditionally offered. Southern parts of Goa remain resolutely local, so it’s the inland areas of the more cosmopolitan north that are increasingly fulfilling this need.
Adrian Pinto, a Goa-born, Mumbai-based wine consultant, originally bought and restored The Only Olive (doubles from around £40 B&B) with his family in mind, but on a drunken night with friends he hit on the idea of a homestay, offering three simple but beautiful bedrooms and a taste of real Goan village life. It is a delightful century-old Portuguese house on the edge of the mainly Catholic town of Aldona, 10 miles from Vagator.
“Here,” Adrian says, “the water is purer, the air is nicer, there are butterflies around.” To illustrate the point, he walks me to the riverbank, with views to Chorao Island, home to the Dr Salim Ali bird sanctuary. As well as butterflies, there are birds of all kinds flitting between the trees, while cats and dogs laze happily in the grass. The lush river is lined with fishermen and crabbers, and we linger near a small riverside shrine to chat with a group engaged in the ancient art of khazan fishing, which involves a mastery of sluice gates, tides and lunar cycles. It’s a world away from even my own village, and a lovely reminder of the kind of atmosphere that can be fostered once consumerism is removed from the equation.
A different kind of tranquillity can be found a few miles south of Aldona, at Olaulim Backyards ( doubles from £40 B&B), the home of Savio and Pirkko Fernandes, their two children and many animals, including a fantastically obstinate donkey named Mantra. Like Adrian, they bought their property – a rambling house with gardens falling down a jungle hillside toward a bend in the Mapusa river – for themselves. But four years ago, with the children growing up and Pirkko missing work, they decided to open it to guests, building cottages, a dining area and a bar to complement the existing pool, and offering activities such as kayaking, fishing and cycling. They relied on word of mouth and social media to create awareness, watching the place grow organically and find its proper audience. “Most guests go to the beach once,” Savio says, “but they don’t go back.”
There’s a stronger taste of Goa’s colonial past in the south, beyond the capital Panaji and the airport, east of the national highway around Margao. Salcete is a land of paddy fields, water buffalo, narrow village lanes and whitewashed churches. There is little tourism here and the nights are filled with the sounds of insects instead of loudspeakers.
The area is home to the Seminary of Rachol, where the monks brew the best feni (a potent local liquor) in Goa. The main attraction, though, is the smattering of privately owned heritage houses. Many are open to the public – some of the best around the elegantly dusty town of Chandor – but the jewel in the crown is the superbly maintained Figueiredo House in Loutolim, presided over by the formidable Dona Maria de Lourdes de Figueiredo de Albuquerque.
“It wasn’t liberation – it was botheration!” Dona Maria is treating us to her version of Goan history, the botheration in question being India’s 1961 annexation of the state and the end of Portuguese rule. Though she feels Goa these days is “spiritually and mentally very down”, she stays here to protect and preserve the family home. The oldest parts of the house date back 400 years, but more than the building or its fabulous contents, Dona Maria herself is the main draw, not only for her encyclopedic knowledge of the antiques that fill every room, but also her charismatic and outspoken nature. She has a fascinating life story, and will talk of crying at the news of Gandhi’s death, serving as an MP in Portugal, and fighting with the authorities to secure the wellbeing of Portuguese POWs in the aforementioned botheration. She also cooks a mean feast (by prior appointment), with a unique Indo-Portuguese menu: highlights include bacalhau (salt cod) and rissóis de camarão (prawn dumplings).
In terms of local dining, she’s rivalled only by Celia Vasco da Gama who, along with her husband Reuben, has restored the exquisite Palácio do Deão in Quepem, 12 miles from Loutolim, and whose food is also a must-try (book in advance).
Hinterland tourism promises to be the next big thing here, with the state government waking up to the untapped potential of the rugged land and overcrowding on the beaches. But for now the area is still sparsely populated and with little in the way of accommodation or infrastructure, tourism is limited to day trips.
One man intimately connected to this land, however, is white-water rafting pioneer John Pollard, a Yorkshireman who has been resident in India for almost 20 years. Working with the tourism department, he has set up Goa Rafting, scouting the rivers himself before leading expeditions (£23pp) on rapids on the Tilari and Mahdei rivers.
In the past year he has also opened Off The Grid (£35pp full-board with activities), a remote smallholding within a tiger reserve high up in the Western Ghats, one of the greatest biodiversity hotspots on earth. It is, John says, “deafeningly quiet and so wild you can’t believe it”‚ with solar lighting, a gravity-fed water supply, a wood-fired oven for food, rooftop rooms, cabins and tents, a natural swimming pool beneath a waterfall and countless trekking routes in the cool, evergreen forests.
As I survey his land, all sense of history dissolves away, and time is reduced to the sun, the moon and the stars. It’s a Goa I never knew existed, far from the beach, and about as real as it’s ever going to get.
• Deepti Kapoor’s debut novel, A Bad Character, is published by Jonathan Cape, price £11.99. To buy a copy for £11.24 with free UK p&p call the Guardian bookshop on 0330 333 6846 or visit guardianbookshop.co.uk
