Recommended places - Benaulim (GA)

For me, Benaulim village and its beach are the best of Goa as it is today; still less developed and relatively quiet in comparison to the north Goa beaches, it strikes a good balance between the party animal overcrowding or rampant package tourism of Candolim and Anjuna, and the almost deserted beaches at Varca and Agonda.

Benaulim is in Goa's Salacete district, and lies 3 or 4 km directly west of South Goa's main town of Margao, in the middle of the long strip of beach that runs from Vasco de Gama to Mobor. The village itself centres around a crossroads, with a few smaller guest houses and restaurants strung along the roads that run parallel to the beach, as well as one or two of the larger 'resorts' that are beginning to spring up. The first hundred metres or so of the southerly turning from the crossroads is gradually becoming something of a shopping mall of Kashmiri trinket sellers, whose cheesy sales pitches and slightly overcooked bonhomie become a little like fingernails scratching on a blackboard after the twentieth "luvvly jubbly" of the day. There are better ways to walk to the beach, such as through the warren of lanes that lead under the shady palms, past scattered village houses and through the vibrant green rice paddies, often dotted with herons and other wading birds in search of food.

Arriving at the beach via the main road, the sand stretches off for miles in both directions; left (in the direction of Varca) is the quieter side, with most people sticking to the area in front of the five or six beach shacks, after which the beach is almost deserted until Varca. There is little in the way of shady trees in this direction, but most of the shacks have at least a couple of large umbrellas or a sunshade of woven palm leaves. Turn right at the car park and you head toward the busier nearby resort of Colva, about three km away, along a strip of sand with plenty of coconut palms for shade.

At the weekend - especially close to christmas and new year - the beach area around the car park is usually busy with Indian day trippers; families out for an ice cream and a paddle in the sea, or - in common with every other Goan resort - impressionable and hormonal young men, armed with binoculars and fuelled by whisky, optimism and tall stories from friends about what easy, promiscuous bitches western women are. It's far less busy during the week, when a five minute walk will easily find you a quiet spot on your own, with only occasional visits from Goan and Karnatakan women offering fruit, jewellery or henna skin paintings.

Night life is similarly laid back, with only a couple of relatively packed and noisy places close to the beach. There's little or none of the techno party frenzy for which North Goa is famous, and musical entertainment is more likely to be from a CD player, or occasionally someone on an acoustic guitar at one of the beach shacks. For some reason Benaulim is especially popular with German and Austrian travellers, many of whom have been visiting for many years and often stay for most of the season, splitting the year between Europe and India.

It's a good place to be for new years eve if you fancy something more than a travellers only party. We decided on a 'beach shack crawl' down to Colva, stopping at around half of the bars on the 3 km walk. By midnight the whole stretch of beach from Benaulim to Colva was heaving with revellers, both tourists and local people, many of whom had come from Margao or inland villages to celebrate, and turned into a large and extremely friendly party, with fireworks, music and dancing at many of the shacks, and of course a good deal of drinking and handshaking to welcome in the year.

Overall, it's an attractive and friendly place to spend a few weeks (or months), with a sociable travellers scene that lacks the glitz, frenzy and 'attitood' of the better known northern beaches. Prices are far lower than the north for both food and accommodation, although increasing tourism development will doubtless begin to change that in the years to come.

A note on scrambled eggs:

Anyone who has visited Puri in Orissa (east coast) and is an aficionado of eggs will recall that the Orissans have some particular knack of making the best (by far) scrambled eggs in India. They just seem to get the combination of butter (or possibly ghee), milk and eggs to just the right consistency and fluffiness and cook for exactly the right amount of time. I stayed in Puri for two months a few years ago, and breakfast, unusually for me, became something worth getting up for. As many of the cooks in Puri are Brahmin and vegetarian (eggs are usually considered non-veg in India), I could never quite get my head around this, and never got a satisfactory explanation.

Well, visit Benaulim and most probably you can try the joys of genuine Orissa style scrambled eggs without the long train journey. Orissa is a very poor state, and many of the young guys who have learned to cook in Puri's tourist joints on the CT road now come to Goa to work for the season, where they can earn far more money than they would at home. They all seem to be Brahmins, and several that I have met live close to CT Road in Puri, in the area popular with backpackers. They bang out the scrambled eggs to the same high standards, and seem to be just as good at cooking Goan and western dishes. Leonora's on Benaulim Beach is run by Orissans, and eggs apart they turn out a top notch bacon sarnie, as mentioned below, and other restaurants have Orissan staff. They also make excellent pukka chai, something that is otherwise a little thin on the ground in Goa. If you have visited Puri, their eyes light up, and they can talk for hours about home, a place they genuinely miss.

I still have never got a satisfactory answer to the origin of the great scrambled eggs - something Brahmins themselves presumably wouldn't eat - but many Indians rave on about Brahmin cooking in general; the key supposedly being that they use only 'pure' ingredients, such as the best ghee. Kulu Valley weddings and some other religious events are catered for by local Pandits, who stand out from the crowd in their saffron dhoti's and often cook great food for several thousand people a day. There are several well known and popular Brahmin restaurants in Delhi.