Palolem
"Palolem is what you pictured when someone first told you about Goa — and the shock is that the reality matches."
The first thing I noticed arriving at Palolem was the colour of the water. Not blue in the generic sense but a specific layered blue — dark in the middle of the bay, going pale green as it shoals into the beach, then white in the shallows where the sand is fine enough to throw light upward. I had come from Margao by autorickshaw — forty-five minutes on a road that went through Chaudi market and down through coconut groves — and arrived in the mid-afternoon when the light was at its most direct and unflattering. Even so, the beach stopped me.
Palolem is South Goa’s most famous beach and it holds its beauty without obvious effort. The bay is a near-perfect crescent — maybe two kilometres of sand — backed by a line of coconut palms and the coloured rooftops of the beach huts and small hotels that pack tight in high season. At either end, rocky headlands close off the bay from the sea beyond, giving it the feeling of a protected lagoon. The water is calmer here than on the northern beaches; the Arabian Sea funnels into the bay with less violence, and in the mornings before the wind picks up it is flat enough to see the bottom at considerable depth.
I rented a kayak on my second morning and paddled south along the headland, through a narrow channel between the rocks, to Butterfly Beach — a smaller, entirely undeveloped cove accessible only by boat or by a difficult overland path. There was one other boat when I arrived. A family of dolphins appeared about fifty metres offshore and moved south in a loose group, surfacing and disappearing with a rhythm that seemed unrelated to anything I was doing. I sat in the kayak and watched them until they were gone and then sat a bit longer. Butterfly Beach has no shacks, no chairs, no anything — just the sand and the rocks and the forest above. It felt improbable to be there.
Back at Palolem, the evenings are their own specific atmosphere. The silent disco — headphones distributed at the door, three channels of music, a beach full of people dancing to songs only they can hear — is one of those Goa institutions I had been told about so many times I expected to be unmoved. I was moved. There’s something genuinely strange and funny and oddly beautiful about watching a hundred people dance in near-silence on the edge of the sea, their faces going through all the private emotions that music causes, with only the sound of the waves and the occasional involuntary lyric somebody sings out loud.
I ate well in Palolem, which surprised me slightly — the reputation of beach shack food in Goa is not always good, and on the northern beaches the menus are often pitched to a foreigner palate that has been educated on worse Indian food. But several of the places in Palolem get the Goan fish curry right: the kokum souring, the coconut milk making it thick without killing the brightness, the kingfish cooked just far enough. A place near the southern headland run by a woman named Savita served the best prawn masala I had in Goa — dry-spiced, slightly caramelised at the edges, the sort of dish that makes you order another portion before you’ve finished the first.
When to go: November through February. December is busy but manageable in Palolem if you book early — the bay is large enough to absorb a crowd. The silent disco runs most weekends in season. For dolphin kayak trips, go early morning, before 8am, when the seas are calmer and the dolphins more active near the headlands.