The last time I was in Calangute, a man on a Bullet rode past me playing a Honey Singh song through a phone speaker balanced on his thigh. It was 11 in the morning. I was trying to buy chai.
I have been going to Goa from Bangalore for twelve years. The first three times were a North Goa thing. Baga shack, Tito's, scooter to Anjuna for the Wednesday market. Like everyone else. By the fourth trip I started noticing that the music was louder, the seafood was worse, and the lady who ran my favourite breakfast cafe had been replaced by a chain that served avocado toast.
So I stopped. Not for some moral reason, just because the trip wasn't fun anymore. Now I go south. Below Cavelossim. The Goa most people on the Bangalore-to-Dabolim flight don't see, because the taxis from the airport mostly turn north.
The first time I drove down to Galgibaga, I thought I had taken the wrong turn. It is the southernmost beach in Goa, almost at the Karnataka border. It's a protected turtle nesting site, so there are no shacks pumping music, no jet skis, no parasailing operators yelling at you in three languages. I walked for forty minutes along the wet sand and met one fisherman. He nodded at me without smiling. That was the social interaction of my morning.
There is one place to eat at Galgibaga, on the south end, run by a family whose grandfather still goes out in the boat. Tiger prawns, butter garlic, no menu, the price is what they say it is. The whole transaction takes about ninety seconds. I paid around six hundred rupees and tipped a hundred because the woman who served me asked how my mother was, having seen her with me three trips ago. I don't know how she remembered.
The next beach up is Talpona, separated from Galgibaga by a creek you cross in a wooden canoe for twenty rupees. The boatman is usually asleep when you arrive. You whistle. He wakes up. He paddles you across.
This sounds romantic. It is also genuinely inconvenient if you forget which side of the creek you parked your scooter. I have done this. I have also slept in a hammock at the Talpona-side shack for three hours waiting for the tide to allow a small ferry to return. The owner of the shack, a Goan in his fifties who wears a Liverpool jersey under his apron, kept feeding me bhajis and would not take money for them. The world has not entirely gone wrong, I remember thinking.
People will tell you to go to Palolem. Palolem is the famous one. Crescent beach, photogenic, on every Indian travel listicle since 2013. It is now too crowded. I will not say "I don't like crowds" because that's everyone's excuse, but I'll say specifically: Palolem has the kind of crowds where every shack now does mediocre Israeli food because every shack thinks the customer wants it. That tells you what's happened.
Patnem is the small beach next to Palolem, the one most people don't bother to walk to. It is cleaner. It is quieter. The guest houses are run by Goan families, not Mumbai start-ups. There is one place called Bawa's that does fish curry rice for a hundred and eighty rupees and the curry is properly made. Bawa is not the owner's name. I asked. Nobody knows.
The strangest beach I'll recommend is Cola. Cola has a freshwater lagoon behind it, separated from the sea by a strip of warm sand. You swim in the lagoon (cool, the colour of weak tea), walk twenty steps, and you are in the Arabian Sea. There are about ten cliff-side huts. No big resort. To get there you need a scooter or a determined taxi driver, and you should leave before dark because the road back is a single lane through the forest and nobody comes if you break down.
Honestly. That's most of what I know about South Goa.
I plan a lot of Goa trips for Bangalore clients at the office. The honeymooners almost always go south. The bachelor parties go north. The families are split. If you are with kids and parents, mid-south (Benaulim, Varca) makes sense, it has proper resorts. If you are two adults who want quiet, go below Cavelossim. The drive from Dabolim airport to Galgibaga is two hours. Most people are surprised. They thought Goa was a smaller state.
The food I keep coming back to: Martin's Corner in Betalbatim for one nice dinner (the kingfish recheado is still the best in the state in my biased opinion). Sao Tome cafe in Margao for chorizo pao breakfast, run by an old uncle who tells stories about how the church across the road used to be a single room. The beach shacks south of Mobor for everything else. You cannot mess up a catch of the day at five hundred rupees on a wooden table on the sand.
The cost is the easy part. Four nights in a guesthouse with breakfast, a scooter, and dinners out comes to around eighteen to twenty-five thousand rupees per person from Bangalore including the flight. Half what people spend in North Goa. Twice the experience, I think.
The reason I'm writing this post and not the standard "10 hidden beaches" listicle is because I want people who are tired of North Goa to know that the answer isn't to go to a new country. It's to drive forty-five minutes south of where everyone else gets out of the taxi.
If you do go, leave the cafe-with-avocado-toast version of Goa behind. The state still has the older version, just slightly out of the way.