Cut my life into pieces, this is my last resort.
If you know that song I’ll safely assume you were born between 1985 and 1993. It’s a relic of a time gone by. Like the Indian constitution.
Firstly, it’s a nu-metal song, which in itself is a misleading title given how old the genre is.
Secondly it’s by a band called Papa Roach. A name that I would now confuse with a weed shop down the street from me.
Like so many other rock bands that were popular in the late 90s/early 00s, they had a small but dedicated fan base in JP Nagar, Bangalore aka me and my brother.
We had parlayed everything from our thread ceremony to relatives visiting from abroad to amass a large collection of audio tapes, including this one. We would then spend hours every week listening to and cataloguing them with the same energy that I now reserve for making Coco Melon playlists before any trip with Amal where I foresee internet issues.
They also came in handy on family holidays. I remember entire trips based on which album I had carried with me. We would play them in the car if we were driving down or listen on a walkman.
A distant third to travel to visit relatives and temple tours were trips to holiday spots around south India.
Our holidays could have been recces for shoot locations for Hindi film songs from the 90s.
Mist? Check.
Mist with tea estate? Check.
Mist with tea estate with horse + handler having same hair? Khal nayak check!
There was a phase where my parents had a time share so we would stay at one of those properties.
It was with The Sterling group. Not to be confused with Rishi Sunak’s college band/the cricket team in Lagaan.
We stayed at two of their properties in Kodaikanal. One in Munnar and one in Yercaud.
These were my first real experiences of what a resort were like. They all were pretty similar despite being in different locations. They all had some sort of game room.
You’d have Carrom, table tennis, darts and some other board games. I would half heartedly give them a shot before trying to topple the table over after losing to my brother 4 times in a row.
They’d have a buffet. Three days in I’d develop a little bicep by lugging plates filled with Rogan Josh AND Fried rice.
And they would have some enthusiastic staff members who would be organizing activities. Some would have some entertainment organized near the bonfire, like music or a magician. Others would have more involved diversions, like that trek in Munnar.
It was a 4 hour affair where we spent equal amounts of time trekking up a hill or trying to get leeches off our skin that had ‘put kerchief’ on the same hill. You had to sprinkle salt on them or use a lit match to get them off the skin. I thought I had it bad when I found two on my ankles until I heard someone yelp “sir its on my buttocks, I still have to burn it ah?”
We even went to a few in Goa, where you had more of the same things but now with multiple swimming pools and sea food. My resort experience peaked at one called Berjaya. It was like all of the same things but on steroids. We went with my parents and three cousins.
It had more pools than you could count. It had kayaks that you could take in the ocean. It had tennis courts and basketball courts. It had shuttles to get you from the rooms to the resort. And the buffet served anything you could think of including sting ray.
STING RAY!
A few years later I’d pat myself on the back for doing my bit to avenge Steve Irwin.
I will never forget that holiday. Including that trek we did with a group of Japanese tourists who politely pointed at the 5 minors and then at my mom and said
“Mummy! Big family!”
This was one of the times when I felt that maybe these holidays aren’t as fun for my parents as they were for us?
Firstly, they were both vegetarian. Second, they would spend most of their time napping, reading or in the case of my dad, sneaking to the bar. The rare times I would see them animated would be when they would discover that someone else in the same resort was also from Bangalore. The further we were the more likely my dad was to trot out one of the four Kannada words he knew.
“Howdhah??”
I think the Berjaya experience was also where it peaked for me. Leading up to and the minute I hit majority, I turned into a millennial hipster stereotype.
Buffet? No thanks I am hungry for experiences.
As soon as I took my travel into my own hands, the holidays I was on looked very different.
A trip to Pondicherry involved watching a Vijay movie to get 2 hours of air conditioning for 10 rupees and a bus ride back to Bangalore shared with 25 goats.
This was only topped by my trip to Gokarna where a lack of a return ticket saw us hitch a ride on a truck to Hubli where we got last minute train tickets to Bangalore.
The PTSD from this experience was enough for me to rant to a friend about how Hubli is the A**hole of Karnataka for half an hour before he gently shared with me that his family was from there.
“Howdhah?” I gulped.
As my budget increased, the digs and the travel got more comfortable but they were always secondary to maximizing on the food and experiences on that trip. Part of the reason this meant never being in a resort was the fact that the food was always average and they were never in the thick of things. They were usually aggregated all at the edge of town with nothing else around.
When I met Maliha, I quickly realized on our first trip together that we shared the same views on travel. We stayed in everything from a cosy bed and breakfast in Fort Kochi to a Zostel with pink and green lights that was a walk from the boat race, on our first trip. And we followed the same playbook even as we began to travel internationally. In Scotland and in Puerto Rico.
Even our honeymoon in the Seychelles we didn’t opt for a resort so we had the budget to rent a car and see more of the islands.
This continued up to the time we discovered we were pregnant. We made a trip to Goa for 3 weeks a few months into the lockdown and in the end of the first trimester.
We rented an outhouse of an old bungalow in Assagao. A trip that would be unimaginable once Amal came into the picture.
It was very clear from our initial experiences travelling with her that this apple had fallen far from the tree. On our way to Kodaikanal, we had halted for the night in Salem where we had booked a night at the Radisson. Half an hour in to Amal falling asleep for the first time in a centrally air conditioned room, we heard something unprecedented.
A deep sigh of contentment.
Since then we have travelled together a bit more but there is no pattern to when she will approve.
Algonquin park: Flop until she meets another kid in the playground who likes grapes.
Vancouver. Big hit but also doting baby sitters (our hosts) and unusually hot and sunny weather.
Halifax: Big flop. It was cold and wet and she was miserable. It was like asking Kamal to rate the latest Rajni movie.
Our first trip with her to a resort was our trip a few days ago to Cuba. It was an all inclusive. You pay upfront and while you’re there everything is on the house, from food to drinks.
Resounding hit would be putting it mildly.
She made a friend as soon as we landed at the airport, their relationship was solidified with skipping the queue and running through the metal detector.
The resort had multiple pools with one for kids. The swimming pool had water slides in it. The water slides were next to a children’s playground. The children’s playground was next to an ice cream parlour.
She played at different points with kids from Quebec, Russia and Colombia. She discovered a barbecue that made fried banana chips between 1 and 2 pm. She also would negotiate with us to pack chocolate cereal for her as a beach snack.
Maliha and I had a bit more of a mellow reaction. The weather was great and the people were friendly. But the resort was self contained and in a part of town which had only resorts. The food was average.
There was childcare in the resort but after seeing that it was kids of all age ranges in a room with Spanish caretakers and a TV playing, we held off on using it to get some alone time. We took to tagging the other in if one of us wanted to do something solo, like go to the sauna or read 5 pages of a book. It took us a few days to find a decent bar and get a spot at the good restaurant. We also finally bit the bullet one night on Amal’s insistence and left her in the kids club for 20 minutes, just after dinner. We used that time to get a cocktail before heading back to the kids club.
When we couldn’t find her or any of the other kids we hurriedly looked in different parts of the hotel before finally finding a large dark hall with a stage where we found Amal and eleven other kids playing passing the parcel in time to Despacito. We had to drag her back to the room.
To this day, if you ask Amal how you say thank you in a hotel, she says Gracias.
Overall we began to enjoy it more when we made our peace with the fact that we were not the primary audience for entertainment in that resort.
We leaned into the different activities/shows that were put up every day. Got banana chips everyday at 1 pm. Allowed an ice cream snack every day. And even took Amal on excursions, like the day trip to Havana.
As we were waiting to get on the bus, the only other Indians on board struck up a conversation with us.
“Where are you travelling from?”
“Toronto, but we are from India”
“Where in India?”
“Bangalore sir”
“Bangalore ah? Naavu Bangalore Indha!”
“HOWDHAH?!!”
P.S Happy new year to all you loyal readers. Here’s to a great 2024!