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There is a modern sickness in Goa, the coconut palm-petticoated tourist trap on the west coast of India. It is the same febrile condition that has eaten into parts of Thailand, most of Ibiza, once innocent pockets of the Himalayas, in fact in most parts of the world that get talked about in hushed tones in sixth form common rooms, places where hemp is grown as a cash crop.

In these places there is a parasitic relationship that exists between those westerners who, bored of their current state, spin out time between one invention of themselves and the next, and those who really do live there. In Goa the former are represented by a certain kind of traveller. They are the variety who would spit in your face if you called them tourists, who would laugh at you for wanting to stay in a good clean hotel, despise you for not wanting to get down and dirty with the local people, accuse you of not
understanding India while they live in local houses, and among the people who make them feel ‘Indian’. They think you and I have no idea. But they do not see themselves.

They do not have to watch their own sad, pathetic downward spiral through disease and wasting as they eat their bodies away in a round of drug abuse and alcohol. They do not see the worn out expressions on the faces of those local people who have to wash the vomit off their restaurant tables because the ‘travellers’ have decided that it is a good idea to have a beer, in spite of a fever and a good dose of the delirium tremors. They do not see how their bids to be different, the dreadlocks, pierced belly-buttons, nipples, noses and eyebrows, the tattoos and tattered clothes, have become a uniform, a depressing advertisement for the fact that they despise all things established and conventional. And in that grubby uniformity lurks the sickness, the genuine belief that they are on some great quest that will lead to the key of life. In pursuing this their tunnel vision seems to block out the ugly reverberations around them, the impact that they have on the structure of the village life in the places that have become ‘raggy taggy’, as the locals say.

This is not an implication that the raggy taggys are the representation of evil. For the past 30 years they have found in Goa a place where they could explore all India’s trove of spirituality, massage techniques and narcotics in the balmy comfort of a seaside state enjoying a higher standard of living than most other Indian states. Of course they want to stay on, and the local people have made it possible for them to do this. They saw the market opportunity in the seventies and started to open up bars, seafood restaurants, cheap hotels, beach huts and bakeries where the raggy taggys could get chocolate cookies and croissants, and so achieve almost a complete escape from rice and dhal and the rawness of the rest of India.

So Goa has become a destination divided between the extremes of the raggy taggy areas and five start resorts. Those who stay at the resorts are protected by high walls and high prices. They rarely stray beyond the high walls, except perhaps to go and look at the raggy taggys, who in themselves have become a bit of a tourist feature. The result is that people are beginning to stay away. They are going instead to next door Kerala because it is better promoted and has more of a variety on offer to the middle income
western tourist.

But Goa still has its moments of glory. There are still almost deserted arcs of beach at the northern and southern points of the seaboard. If you walk far enough down most beaches you will still be able to sit at a little restaurant, under the stars and next to the sand, eating stuffed king fish or masala grilled giant prawns, with the romantic notion that you could almost be the only ones there. And beyond the extremes of the mosquito-plagued £1.50 a night beach huts, and the £150 a night resorts, there is a small band of clever people who are opening the kind of hotels that are a new notion to Goa. One of these is Siolim House.

It is an old Portuguese casa de sobrado, a 300 year-old manor house that once belonged to the governor of Macau. Varun Sood bought the property in a state of crumbling decay. With his drive and his French wife’s very good eye they have restored Siolim as a place that is part palazzo, part home, part air, part light. It exists in a bubble, removed from the rest of Goa on the edge of Siolim village, one of the rare coastal villages that has somehow managed to escape the interest of the raggy taggys. The only time I have had a bigger room than the muslin-aired polo field that was mine at Siolim was in a major suite at The Ritz in Paris. But then perhaps César Ritz, the governor of Macau and Varun Sood share the same ethos: to survive the ugliness of the world the human condition needs space and light tempered with luxury.

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