Three weeks on the Konkan coast with two kids and no itinerary
We took the local bus, stayed put whenever a place was good, and let the kids pick half the stops.
The plan was to reach Goa in four days. It took nineteen, and the only thing we would change is the part where we kept apologising to people about the delay. Between Mumbai and the border there is a strip of coast that most itineraries treat as the distance between two places worth stopping at, which is exactly why it is worth stopping at.
Buses leave when they are full. Ferries leave when the tide allows. Neither of these facts is a problem unless you have booked something on the other end, so we stopped booking things on the other end. With a five-year-old and an eight-year-old, the slower plan turned out to be the easier one.
Getting there without a car
The Konkan Railway runs the length of it, and the state buses fill in everything the railway misses. Four seats cost less than one coffee at the airport you flew into. The catch is timing: two services a day in each direction on the smaller routes, and the second one is theoretical.
Every place we rushed through, we remember as a photograph. Every place we waited in, we remember as a week.
What it cost
Nineteen days, two adults and two children, no flights within the trip. We ate almost entirely at places with plastic chairs, which is both the cheapest and the best food on the coast.
| Item | 19 days · 4 people |
|---|---|
| Guesthouses and homestays | ₹41,600 |
| Buses, trains, two ferries | ₹9,800 |
| Food and chai | ₹24,300 |
| Everything else | ₹11,400 |
| Total | ₹87,100 |
If you only have a week
Pick two towns, not six. Ratnagiri as a base for the north, Malvan for the south. Give each of them three nights and let the last day go wherever the morning suggests. The coast does not reward coverage, and neither do children.
We went back in March for four days and stayed in one village the whole time. It was better.