We arrived in Goa as the sun was setting, and expected the driver’s prompt arrival meant we’d be eating dinner at our hotel within the hour. We had looked at the map: Although the airport was in the center of the state and our hotel at the northernmost tip, Goa was India’s smallest state and the distance could not have been more than 25 miles.

But as we climbed in the van, we were informed that the journey would take two hours. The first revealed a charming, Caribbean-style network of villages connecting small farms, scrappy shops and palm-shaded vacationers’ villas. The second was mostly spent driving head-on into oncoming traffic on narrow, winding, unlit roads swarming with shirtless (or bikini-topped) hippies on scooters.

Eventually, the swarm thinned and we pulled onto a ferry to cross the Tiracol River that gave our hotel, the converted Fort Tiracol, its name. The silent, moonlit journey gave us a hint of what the Portuguese saw when they sailed up to these shores in the sixteenth century.

One of the things they left behind when they finally left in the 1960s was the tiny fort, just big enough to wrap around the ornate miniature church in its courtyard, which has since been rather ingeniously transformed into a hotel. The thick walls make air-conditioning unnecessary; the European-style buttresses make natural dividers between each room’s sunbathing terrace. In a place like this you realize you could be content to simply eat, read and look at the sea, which for several days is what we did.

We did not really see the Goa that exists in popular consciousness until the third day, when we descended from our hilltop paradise and checked into a hotel attached to a yoga retreat at Anjuna, one of the most built-up beaches on the tourist strip. We had come for the Wednesday market, a supposedly unmissable opportunity to see the state’s hippie community in its full dreadlocked glory. Although the wares were mostly uninspiring – endless rows of shops selling variations of the same palazzo pants and patchwork satchels – there were a few treasures, including a silver-plated goat’s skull that we were only dissuaded from buying by the thought of having to carry it around for the next 10 days.