My Many Indias. Part 6: Goa, Malvan Coast and goodbye India, I'll be back!

Goa is where I “go back” to when I go to India. It is where my parents live. I know, lucky me! There’s the incredible surf and sand bit that everyone visits Goa for. But here’s some of the less seen parts, the ones I like best.
Goa was a Portuguese colony from the 1500s to 1961, and everywhere across the state you will see fine examples of the architecture: from the grand churches of Old Goa to beautiful Portuguese homes like the one below in Fontainhas, a neighborhood of Panjim that most resembles the Alfama in Lisbon.
This is the main Church in Panjim city. I think whitewashed buildings, a clear blue sky and coconut palms are as picture perfect as it gets.
Littler chapels are everywhere, like this little one near my parents home.
And here is a view I sketched form my parent’s balcony, but really it could be a view anywhere in Goa: Palm trees, golden light, and whitewashed little homes with  terracotta tiled roofs…
A couple of hours drive north of Goa is my dad’s mango orchard in Deogad. He grows Alphonso mangoes. I wish I could describe the taste. There is nothing that quite compares to the experience of eating a sun-ripened Alphonso mango, wit the juice dripping down your forearms and off your elbows. And no, having eaten a different variety of mango will not help you imagine what it tastes like. To go to the farm in the winter, like I did, is to look at the beginnings of the fruit, little inch-long mangoes and to imagine what they will be in a few months…
More sketches of other things that grow around the farm:
One last day, spent on a beach on the Malvan Coast. Going to Malvan reminds me of the Goa I remember as a kid: empty beaches, fishing boats and clean sand. I sketched this first piece in the early morning, as the fisherfolk brought in the boat with the morning’s catch. They pulled the boat on the sand and then rolled logs under it to help move it up higher on the beach.

This next sketch is at midday in the blazing sun, when no one is foolish enough to get out to sea. Just the glare on the ocean would blind you. That was our last day before we packed up and headed back to Bangalore, to catch our long, long flight back to San Francisco. Thank you for having followed my 4 week adventure. Blogging it like I did, over 2 weeks made it feel like I was still on vacation.

If you have the patience to look through all 120 sketches, they’re here on flickr.

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