At the Beach

A few weeks back we went to the Devbagh Beach Resort, on an island in the Arabian Sea. To get here, we flew to Goa airport and then got driven two hours south to the town of Karwar. From there we took a motor boat on a five-minute trip to the island. The resort was fairly simple, with log cabins on poles, some tents, and an impressive, long beach. It wasn't roughing it, since the resort cooked all the meals, and the cabins were wired for electricity via a generator. The generator worked really well, until the last day, when the two cabins next to ours became occupied by a couple and a woman we collectively called the "VVIPs." I couldn't get anyone to tell us who they were (they weren't Bollywood stars!), but we think they were probably bureaucrats, or bureaucrat relatives (the resort is owned by the state). In any case, the preparations for their visits included the installation of air conditioners in their cabins, and when that AC was turned on in the middle of the night, our ceiling fan stopped turning. It started again after a few hours, but it made for an uneasy night.

The resort shares the island with a fishing village, and on our second day we went for a long walk to check it out.




We wanted to walk all the way around the island, but after going in one direction for 90 minutes and having a brief but intense encounter with a small herd of water buffalo, we had to turn back. We'd thought a guide had said the island was 110 acres, but I think we'd misheard, and it was just the nature preserve itself that was 110 acres.

Don had another memorable animal encounter when he went for a swim and some feral dogs started a tug of war with the shorts he'd left on the beach. Here he is simulating the concern he felt at the time.

The shorts (not shown) were recovered and were more or less unharmed.


For more Devbagh info, here's a post I did for Jaunted. And here's the Flickr photoset.