Goa Honeymoon in Four Nights — Agonda Sunsets, Palolem by Boat and the Quiet North

Your driver meets you at Dabolim and takes the coast road south through Margao to Agonda, about an hour and three-quarters, so a morning flight puts you on the beach by early afternoon. Agonda is a three-kilometre beach in a village that has kept its building rules and one of the four beaches in the state designated for turtle nesting, which is why it stays dark and quiet at night. The first sunset is from the sand outside your stay, and the candlelit dinner on the beach is arranged for this evening or the next, as you prefer.

Ten minutes south to Palolem for an early boat round the northern headland to Butterfly Beach, a cove with no road, before the day boats arrive; twenty minutes on the water each way, and an hour on the sand there is enough. Back at Palolem the rest of the day is yours — the crescent bay, the kayaks at its northern end, lunch at a shack. Return to Agonda for the late afternoon, when the light comes across the water onto the boulders at the southern end of the beach; this is the evening the package is named for. Nothing is scheduled after it.

Check out after a slow breakfast and drive the length of the state, about two and a half hours in all, broken in the middle at Panaji: an hour on foot in Fontainhas, the Latin Quarter, where the houses are washed ochre, blue and lilac by an old rule that only the church could be white, and lunch in one of its cafés. North of the Chapora river the coast changes again: Mandrem is twenty-one kilometres from the capital and the beach is reached across a wooden footbridge over the creek, which is worth crossing at dusk. Two nights here, at the quiet end of the north.

A free morning: the Mandrem–Ashwem strand runs for miles with the sea on one side and the creek on the other, and there is nothing to do on it but walk, swim and eat, which is the point. In the late afternoon your driver takes you twenty minutes south to Chapora Fort, a short climb to the ridge above Vagator for the sunset over the beach and the river mouth — or, if you would rather stay on the sand, to the palms at Sinquerim below Fort Aguada for the same sun from sea level. Dinner back at Mandrem.

Mopa, the northern airport, is about forty minutes from Mandrem, which is why the honeymoon runs south to north: no backtracking past Panaji on the last morning and a late breakfast on the beach before the drive. For a flight from Dabolim allow two hours instead. The package ends at the airport.