HOW DID GOA CHANGE FROM BEING A HIPPY PARADISE TO A SEEDY, DANGEROUS HELLHOLE?
The Beatles’ love for India sent backpackers f locking there in the 1960s but in the decades since, a sleazy underbelly has developed, one which sucked Danielle McLaughlin into its squalor
IN ONE photograph taken of Danielle McLaughlin during her first Indian adventure in March 2016, she is the picture of a relaxed backpacker, strumming on her guitar, her feet kicked out on a patterned sarong in the sunshine. In another, she peace-signs the photographer and enjoys an Indian friend’s flute playing, while in yet another she embraces an Indian tribeswoman, with Danielle’s bright, open face a swirl of painted tribal motifs. When a farmer found Danielle’s naked, bloodied body dumped in a field in southern Goa last Tuesday morning, her face was slashed by a broken beer bottle, disfigured by her slayer so badly as to make it difficult for her to be identified. She had also been brutally raped.
Just days before Danielle was brutally murdered, she posted a final post on Facebook: ‘I’m the luckiest person... off on another adventure.’ For a young, adventurous, free spirit like Danielle, it’s easy to see the lure of Goa.
Reams of backpackers and spiritual seekers have been flocking to the bohemian mecca since the 1960s, intoxicated by the promise of a hippy idyll far removed from the commercialised West.
But the recent tear-soaked scenes at a vigil for Danielle bore no resemblance to the Beatles’ loved-up ones during their first trip to India in 1968, before they returned home, heady on a rush of ancient Indian ideas and approaches to life and spirituality.
The band’s legions of fans were soon following in their sandaled footsteps, the dreadlocked masses weren’t far behind and a hippy counter-culture paradise was born.
Within a few years, the soft sounds of water gently lapping Goa’s empty pristine beaches were replaced with banging psychedelic music played by party-mad, all-night beach ravers. And Goa’s image as a bohemian paradise for the freaks and free spirits kept them coming.
Fast forward to the 1990s, and a new wave of Goa trance ravers arrived, giving the psychedelic scene a shot in the arm. The party people, many fed up with the mainstream parties in places like Ibiza, flocked in from all over the world, and forests and beaches reverberated with their electronic vibes.
In the last decade, the hippy’s counter-culture legacy and vibe on Goa turned it into a natural mecca for practitioners of the increasingly popular ancient Indian physical art of yoga, leading to an explosion in yoga and alternative health centres.
But visitors to the island can testify to its murky, seedy underbelly.
On a hot March day, Goa’s Palolem Beach — where Danielle spent her last night partying in the Green Park Resort — convulses with crowds in a heaving, nightmarish scene.
It’s package holiday hell here on what was once considered by many to be one of the world’s most beautiful beaches.
NOWADAYS, Goa’s charmless, plastic veneer screams tacky sun resort, more Benidorm than Bengal. The Goan paradise has been gorged on and spat out by the ravenous commercial rack and stack tourism industry that has been laying waste to this once unspoilt piece of heaven in recent years.
More and more horror stories have been circulating on online forums, travel reviews and sites such as Tripadvisor about Goa’s increasingly menacing vibes. Mass tourism and package holidays has led to filthy, overcrowded beaches, beer bottle strewn waters, rising prices and increasing stories of marauding opportunistic gangs of street thieves targeting female travellers like Danielle.
During a trip to India with his wife Melanie in 2009, in a bid to escape the stifling Mumbai heat, Eoin Murphy, the Irish Daily Mail’s Entertainment Editor, made the 24-hour journey to Goa. He paints a bleak picture of the ‘picture-postcard’ Anjuna Beach.
‘We spent two nights in Anjuna, where I was constantly harassed by beggars and hawkers. Lying on a beach lounger in the afternoon, a mother and her young daughter approached me with an ornate wooden box. She opened it and offered me pouches of heroin and cocaine as well as cannabis and marijuana.
‘When I declined, she became angry and started shouting. She eventually moved on to the next couple, who in a bid to earn some peace, bought a small bag of what looked like weed. Within ten minutes of completing the sale a local policeman arrived on the scene and searched the couple.
‘They were taken away and were forced to pay a €200 bribe to prevent them taking their passports.
‘It was a scam and one that we saw two or three times being carried out on that beach.’
WITH a bad taste in their mouths, Eoin and his wife left Anjuna and headed down the coast to Palolem near Canacona. They found powder soft sands, crystal blue seas and a relaxed, chilled-out vibe, but it was here Eoin noticed a change in attitude towards his wife.
‘We were enjoying dinner outside one of the many beach bars and a group of young Indian men who were drinking made repeated passes at our table, calling out. When we moved to a nearby pub they followed us in and while I was at the bar, the gang descended on my wife.
‘They jeered her and catcalled her. One went to grab her bum while another, pretending to dance with her, attempted to grab her chest. I was watching this and hurtled down from the bar and as is the case with cowards, they ran out of the bar.’
Eoin continues: ‘Later that evening, as we walked down the narrow streets we were briefly separated as Melanie window-shopped at a stall. She found herself being followed by a silent group of young men, who we believed were the same group, and she had to duck into a coffee shop and wait until they left. We called it a night after such a shock and went back to our hotel.’
The following day Eoin and Melanie decided to leave for Kerala. He says: ‘I don’t mean to paint a negative picture of such a tourist area, and there was much to like about Goa.
‘The markets and the beaches are incredible and the majority of the locals seem friendly but at night in particular there is an undercurrent of danger that is simply not worth the risk. Had my wife been travelling there alone, who knows what would have happened?’
It’s horror stories like Eoin’s that are having a decimating affect on tourist numbers, which are plummeting as a result, down 20 per cent in the last two years, with five million visiting last year.
Last Monday evening, Danielle joined thousands of revellers on the beach for the Holi celebrations, a relaxed, beach party tradition carried out since the 1960s. The day after the Holi party on the powdery sands, four miles away from Palolem, in a field separating Palolem and
Agonda beach, a local farmer found her naked, bloodied body.
Police immediately swooped on a local small-time criminal, Vikat Bhagat, after CCTV showed him following Danielle as she walked along a popular strip, just before nightfall.
Reports say Danielle, who had just returned from the quieter, northern part of Goa, had met some British tourists at Palolem on Monday night. They said a group of around five local men would ‘pull her back and say, “you’re with us remember?”’
A female friend who was with her on the night told the Mail a group of men seemed to be ‘glued’ to Danielle and told how she was groped by a male member of the group. The Londoner, named Susan, said: ‘One of these guys smiled at me and then came up and groped my breast. I was stunned.’
The last known photos of Danielle show her holding hands with a local man in a bar and it has been reported that an hour later she left a party with her alleged attacker.
According to police, Danielle had met Bhagat — a local gang member and criminal with a lengthy criminal record — on previous trips to Goa and he has since confessed to her murder, a development that will at least afford the thousands more backpackers holidaying there a night’s rest without the fear of a murderer on the loose. There were flowers and songs and an emotional rendition of Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry when hundreds of locals, travellers and ex-pats gathered at the scene of Danielle’s slaying for a vigil earlier last week.
Decades after free love anthems and the music of The Beatles — hugely instrumental in creating the spark that lit the fire of interest by Westerners in the soothing spirituality of the sub-continent — wafted through the humid Goan air, travellers faced into a terrible new dawn.
Unsurprisingly, many of the earlier dreamers are packing up and looking for beaches new. Startling figures released last week confirm a darker, menacing side to this paradise island. Danielle was one of more than 245 foreigners to die in four Goan districts in the past 12 years and police records released to a British newspaper last week reveal six other foreigners’ deaths were classified as murders in the decade leading up to August 2015.
But questions posed by grieving families linger over some of the 157 tourist deaths classified as natural or accidental.
In April 2010, 34-year-old British mother-of-two Denyse Sweeney was found in a distressed state outside a bar in Goa. A few hours later she was declared dead.
Police ruled her death the result of a drug overdose but an inquest found no drugs in her body and evidence of 20 unexplained injuries on her body. A campaign by her family forced Indian authorities to reinvestigate but late last year they were left devastated when Goan detectives said they were closing the case, ‘due to lack of evidence to establish an offence’.
And there are many other families also fighting for justice for their lost loved ones. Finnish Felix Dahl was found dead with skull wounds in Patnem, Canacona, not far from where Danielle was found, in January 2015. A Goan post-mortem put his death down to an accidental fall while a second in his home country found he died as a result of a high impact force of some sort, according to his mother.
JUST over two weeks later, the badly decomposed body of Londoner James Durkin washed up on a Canacona beach, showing possible signs of mutilation. Although listed in Goa as a drowning, back in the UK the coroner came to an open verdict.
When the bruised body of 15year-old British citizen Scarlett Keeling washed up on Anjuna Beach in early 2008, her death was ruled as ‘accidental drowning’ but her mother’s insistence on another autopsy showed evidence of drugs in her body, more than 50 cuts and bruises and signs she had been sexually assaulted.
Speaking last week, Manni Pirhonen, the mother of Felix Dahl, speaking on behalf of families who lost loved ones in suspicious circumstances in Goa, said: ‘We suspect that murders of tourists are actually quite common in Goa. Anyone who’s found in the water, they say has drowned.’
Although police say Bhagat has confessed to Danielle’s murder, they’ve already come under fire amid claims of blunders.
Danielle’s friends say they watched dozens of people trample over the crime scene after her battered body was found.
But the family are in good hands with the high-profile lawyer Vikram Varma, who worked with British mother Fiona McKeown on Scarlett Keeling’s murder.
One can only pray Danielle’s bereft family won’t have to endure years of similar hellish trauma in the pursuit of justice for their beloved daughter, lost in paradise.