READY, STEADY, GOA!
With (private) a pristine beach, joyful staff and Old Goa nearby, this hotel is India’s best-kept secret
SOME of us simply can’t do a whole English winter any more. For me, there is the added business every December and early January of being on the panto treadmill, three shows a day, in Guildford. What’s more, this year, the Grim reaper had been scything like Poldark through my address book. I needed a break. I needed sun. Then someone suggested Goa is a goer. ‘Goa?’ said our son. ‘Isn’t that where you take stimulants and rave?’ Well, excuse me if I rave.
The Leela hotel is way ahead of Sandy Lane in Barbados and a third of the price. Putin visits. Sir Mark Tully, the BBC’s voice of India, stays, as does Sonia Gandhi, who arrived shortly after we left.
My wife, Kate, and I flew non-stop with Thomas Cook — a ten-hour flight and a 75-minute transfer.
Most of our fellow passengers were heading for the package hotels up the coast, rather than sweeping into The Leela’s discreet gates at the end of the peninsula. This is India airbrushed: Englishmen without the mad dogs.
Built 26 years ago, before stricter planning controls, The Leela is unrepeatable.
nowadays, hotels may park no more than a dozen or so loungers on the sands. Because its beach, uniquely, is private, The Leela has plenty for everybody and in faultless taste.
Croquet is the only nod to the raj, but the guests nevertheless are 50 per cent English: you can tell by their Boden linen. an elderly lady archaeologist from Pimlico, an accountant from Bromley, a yoga teacher from Hampstead. all regulars for decades, ‘ what makes this place,’ they chorus, ‘is the staff.’
The astonishing ratio is 3.5 staff to each guest, lifting your finger before you’re even aware that it needs lifting.
Of the rest? russians (in bling), Euro-randoms (Italians leading the charge ) and wealthy Indians. Their children are perfect: wellbehaved and invisible.
THE beach is perfect, too — no lacerating coral, the breeze cooling without sandblasting. at sunrise, there are dolphins. Sea eagles frame themselves beautifully between palm trees. Sandpipers dart. Beach guards keep hawkers away. at night, you watch the lamps on the fishing boats and owlets hunting. The huge rooms are scattered around 75 acres, overlooking lagoons where pink lilies bloom. There are private villas, too, within the — yet more exclusive — Club, for Bollywood stars and Mr Putin. Silent buggies convey the elderly from joy to joy.
Conferences are discreetly arranged, wedding pavilions erected and down by morning. Indian ceremonies are welcoming and their tribute bands do a creditable radio Ga Ga.
We attended not one, but two, Punjabi weddings of radiant couples we had never seen before, nor shall again, but may blessings rain upon them. My meditation class was too singsong to be intelligible, but the four-year-old Indian boy in front of me had it sussed. The gym is so deserted that the trainers are truly personal. In the top-flight spa, Kate had a holistic massage, with oils, bells — and probably whistles — for £50. all you Can Eat was never like this. Thyme- scented lentil soup with roasted walnuts? Goan kingfish? a bewildering vegetarian menu, creamy dhals, dhingri palak? Desserts? How about rabri (cardamom condensed milk) and dates in soft, white fudge? Trips to the Goan capital Panaji with your own driver cost £35, with a £1 per hour waiting charge while you shop for textiles, paper and incense.
Ten miles on and Old Goa, with its Portugese churches, is ummissable. ‘another day in Paradise,’ says the daily Leela newsletter. nonsense. Paradise can’t compete with this. Paradise won’t have so many staff.
TRAVEL FACTS
THOMAS Cook Airlines ( thomas cookairlines.com, 01733 224 330) flies to Goa from £430 return. Doubles at The Leela ( theleela.com, 08000 26 1111) from £247 B&B.