Lexus Luxury Trail Bandwidth To Unwind

Lexus drove us to Amaraanth in Goa in the RX 350h, just in time to recalibrate for the upcoming chaos and humdrum of festivities

- Kanaad Chatterjee

The drive to Goa usually has a predictable rhythm. A rite of escape that has been repeated enough times that the mind already knows what it is supposed to anticipate: frenetic WhatsApp notifications, badly curated playlists, a deadline sliding somewhere between resentment and resignation.

But, perhaps, there's a point in everyone's lives when Goa stops being chaos capital and starts becoming the centre for calibration. It becomes the place you go to put the world back into sequence, not the place you go to break it.

I realised that shift this month, somewhere between Mumbai and the sea, behind the wheel of a Lexus RX350h at 7am — not chasing speed, not chasing the night, not chasing the Goa I used to think was the only Goa that mattered. This trip wasn't fuelled by sleep scarcity, club guestlists or last-minute table politics. This was a Goa reserved for someone finally old enough and secure enough to not need their leisure to scream.

The RX 350h set that tone the moment we pulled out of the city. Its hybrid hum made silence feel expensive. The PR manager in the co-driver seat kept a respectful distance — enough conversation to keep social presence intact — but with the understanding that silence is a perfectly valid form of company. The road opened up after Lonavala. Satara arrived like a textural shift. The hum of the hybrid system, the comfort of the cabin and a companion willing to let silence sit between conversation set the right emotional preface for what was about to come.