The Healthiest Ive Felt in a Long Time

The Healthiest Ive Felt in a Long Time

2013-01-07 12:51:17-05

Wandering Earl

It’s all thanks to the beach. I’ve been planted here on Palolem Beach in Goa for 17 days already and this morning I realized that it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this physically and mentally healthy.

My daily routine since arriving in this paradise has been quite simple and it has barely changed at all during my stay. I generally wake up at around 9:00am, I head to the beach for a couple of hours for some sun and a swim, eat a late breakfast/early lunch consisting of muesli and fruit or an omelet, spend a few hours working on my laptop in order to avoid being out in the midday heat, head back to the beach around 3:30pm for some more sun and swimming, where I stay until just before sunset, which I watch from my beach hut at around 6:00pm. I then work another hour or so before showering and wandering into ‘town’, where I choose from one of the several local restaurants along the one main street for my dinner. After this meal, I might head over to a cafe for a fruit smoothie and then I’ll typically walk back along the beach to my hut.

I’ll finish the day by working another hour or two and then typically, I’ll go to sleep just before midnight. There are some daily variations to this routine of course but that’s the general outline.

Like I said, it’s a simple routine, but for me, simplicity is a most welcome change from my normal stream of constant traveling and travel planning, while trying to squeeze my work in as well. Here, I know where I’ll sleep each night and I don’t need to think about how I’m going to get to my next destination. I am free to simply enjoy my surroundings for a while, enjoy them to the fullest, without any worries whatsoever.

Palolem Beach is quiet, peaceful and apart from Christmas and New Year’s, remarkably empty for such a beautiful beach in India’s most touristy state, making it my ideal beach location. And because it is located in the far south of Goa, far removed from any major towns, it means that I have been far removed from the stress of city (or even town) life, or of the outside world as a whole for that matter. There is no traffic, there is no noise, there is no hustle and bustle to be found anywhere here in Palolem.

Instead, there are laid-back people who are never in a rush to go anywhere, laid-back cows, dogs and pigs who seem to be quite content with their lot in life, and a ‘slow down’ attitude that emanates from every interaction, every palm tree and every rolling ocean wave that can be heard from almost anywhere in the village.

In fact, on the one day that I ventured into the closest ‘town’, the small community of Chaudi located some 5 kilometers away from Palolem, it felt as if I had suddenly arrived into the chaos and intensity of Mumbai, even though this town mostly consists of one scarcely inhabited main street stretching for about one kilometer and its population is only 15,000 people or so.

After picking up a few supplies from the supermarket and pharmacy in Chaudi, I was quite happy to hop in a rickshaw and get back to tiny Palolem as quickly as I could.

And apart from physically being in the middle of nowhere (which I’ve mentioned my fondness for during my time in Romania) I also seem to have lost touch with the happenings of the world in general since I’ve been on this beach. I haven’t checked any news sources or done any random internet surfing in a long time and I’m quite content to keep it that way for the time being. With my head as clear as it is right now, I don’t want to cloud it with an ambush of information that I just don’t need to know.

For the next 7 days, which is all I have left to spend here on the beach, I prefer to maintain my routine, to eat my fruit, to walk and swim, to enjoy the sunsets, the star-filled sky and the warm ocean winds, to interact with locals, to listen to the waves…and most importantly, to continue improving my physical and mental states as best I can.

And this is why I can never get enough of the beach.