Kerala, the Karnataka Coast and Mumbai: Beaches, backwaters and life in the slow lane

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Varkala, Kerala

We arrived in Trivandrum at close to midnight to an ambient temperature in the high 20's. After checking into a spick and span guesthouse 50 metres from the airport terminal, we got some sleep before catching a train up the coast to the town of Varkala the next day.

Kerala has a completely different feel to North India, and not just because of the temperature. The houses are often single storey, brightly coloured and separated by dusty roads and palm trees (on the coast at least). Generally things seem a lot more laid back, and hassle and aggressive sales techniques have been replaced by gentle encouragement to buy things or visit places.

Varkala, our first stop, probably attracts as many Indian tourists as foreign ones, being the home of a 2000 year old temple and shrine which non-hindus are not allowed to visit. Further to this, the nearby beach is thought to be holy and so hundreds of Indian pilgrims congregate here every day performing rituals or jumping the waves. Given that Western tourists often have very different reasons for visiting Varkala, the main beach has become somewhat segregated, with Indian tourists at one end (all women fully clothed) western tourists at the other (very much not fully clothed), and a police cabin inbetween the two to monitor and manage any disharmony. All in all, it feels like quite an odd set up. Fortunately we found a nice spot a couple of kilometres further along the cliffs which had a nice garden with sun loungers and a beautiful beach that rarely had more than 10 people on it. Having not bared so much as a knee or an elbow for the last few months, it took Emma a day or two to get used to the idea of wearing a bikini in India, where conservative dresscodes are very much the norm, but she soon got the hang of it when it seemed that all other Western tourists were managing without any problems. Staying away from the thick of things, we walked to the tourist area most evenings for dinner and even managed a beer or two, served surreptitiously in mugs and poured from bottles wrapped in newspaper so as not to offend local sensibilities. Unfortunately Emma got a touch of food poisoning, quite probably from eating a pizza, and so this wiped out a day or two of our beach time.

Keralan food is a bit different to that in the north. Dishes tend to be less rich and served with mounds of rice rather than breads. They often contain a fair bit of coconut and come with a thin, watery vegetable curry called sambar. We found a couple of really nice places and so feel that we've given Keralan cuisine a fair bash, even if it hasn't been quite as spicy as we would like.

Aside from general relaxation, Varkala is also a large Ayurvedic treatment centre. Not something we usually subscribe to, we did have a look at some of the stuff on offer and it was all a bit odd (as were some of the people staying in Varkala). Not wanting to be coated in oil, swallow lengths of cloth or induce vomiting, which was happening to Emma anyway what with the pizza incident, we gave this particular aspect of Varkala's tourist scene a miss.

After four or five days of lazing around, reading and playing cards, and with Emma nearly recovered, we travelled by bus up the coast to Alappuzha (commonly known as Allepey). Since things are so warm down south, government buses in India don't even bother with windows and so they are pleasantly and naturally air conditioned (provided you're not stuck in traffic). They also generally have a separate area for women at the front so Emma could ride separately from Chris, receiving only minor harrassment from the driver and conductor. Actually, to be fair to the people of Kerala, levels of hassle generally seem to be much lower and Indian women here are much more visible than many male-orientated parts of the North.

Allepey, Kerala

After three buses, we arrived in Allepey and stopped for a big thali at a local dhaba. The main reason anyone goes to Allepey is in order to go on a boat trip through the Keralan backwaters on a modified rice barge. We had been warned by people who'd been there before that from the minute we arrived we would be hassled by one and all to get us to take a trip on one of the many boats. Surprisingly, this didn't happen, and after lunch, Chris was sent off to investigate and look for boat companies whilst Emma drank tea and looked after the bags. An hour later, and having tried and failed to find several agencies listed in our guidebook, he discovered that the local government had taken over most of the boats, charging a uniform price, and dispatching each one of the hundred or so boats available according to who was next on the list to go out, ensuring that each boatman had his fair share of the business. Unlike many things on our travels through India, it was all surprisingly logical and stress-free. Unfortunately Chris found this out a bit too late for us to go out that day and so we subsequently checked into a guesthouse with Chris and Bob poised to go and look at boats first thing in the morning (while Emma had a lie in).

Despite our houseboat being at the bottom of the price bracket (and technically out of ours), it was truly lovely, with two air conditioned bedrooms (we only used one), a dining area, television, DVD player (no we didn't), sundeck and three-man crew, all just for us. Having been served welcome drinks whilst laying on the sundeck and chugging along the quiet backwaters, it did feel rather opulant given our usual standard of living, but we got used to it fairly quickly. Each meal was served in our dining area with several plates of delicious curries. Having explained to the chef that we have been struggling to find food spicy enough and that we feel that most people dumb things down assuming we have sensitive western palates, he promised to cook us some spicy food. When the food turned out to be lovely, but not very spicy and he asked us how we'd found it, we explained it still wasn't terribly hot. He looked genuinely surprised as he explained that the curry he'd cooked would actually be very spicy for him and by Indian tastes. So it turns out, it's not them, it's us, and we've probably ruined our tastebuds by too many hot curries at home and chilli sauce overload in south-east Asia.

The only slight downside of being on the water was the abundance of midges which arrived in their hoardes at sunset despite mosquito coils burning up and down the boat. Fortunately, with the lights out and candles lit, they became less of a problem since it turns out that most small insects have a death wish and will repeatedly fly at candles until they expire. After a night moored up overlooking paddy fields and small waterside huts, we chugged back to Allepey whilst eating breakfast of coconut pancakes and pineapple, and wishing we had booked to stay for another night.

Kochi, Kerala

Back in the real world, we caught another couple of buses to Fort Cochin (fondly referred to as Kochi), where we had a quick trip to the post office (2 hours), packaging things up, filling in forms and then getting them posted, before finding ourselves a nice little place to stay in the back streets of town.

Kochi has been successively colonised by the Dutch, the Portugese and the British, with various settlers from other nations besides. With each of the occupiers leaving their mark, the city has become a hotchpotch of different relics and architecture including differnent styles of house, shops and places of worship. We spent many hours wandering round the backstreets of Mattancherry where the rice, spice and tea trade remains in full swing and decrepit European-style buildings are loaded full of hessian sacks from colourful trucks. Unfortunately, our one and only attempt at visiting a synagogue in India in the aptly named 'jewtown' district of Kochi was thwarted by it being closed on a Friday and Saturday, the two days on which we were able to visit, so we just had to appreciate it from the outside. We also went to the Dutch Palace, a large colonial building with a hindu temple underneath cataloguing the history of Kochi and housing relics from days goneby. The various churches of Kochi, having gone through successive colonisations, seemed to cover a hybrid of denominations with various aspects of worship Indianised according to local customs. Despite having a mutlitude of pughs, we still went to a church where most of the congregation sat on the floor at the front. As with temples, it's also mandatory to remove your shoes before entering Indian churches and not unusual to see people bringing small plates of food offerings similar to those seen being offered to Gods in Hindu temples.

No trip to Kerala is apparently complete without visiting a Kathakali performance of traditional ritual theatre. Traditionally these are held at night and can be staged for 10 hours per night for several days just to show one play. We went to the abbreviated version, managing an hour and a half exerpt of a play. It was quite good, but a bit hard to follow given that the actors didn't speak and all communication was done through various signs and expressions that probably take a lifetime to master and are possibly only understood by those living in Kerala.

A short hop on a delapidated ferry across the water from Kochi was it's big ugly sister city, Ernakulum, where we spent an afternoon and evening visiting cafes and bookshops before finding a restaurant to sample some authentic veggie Keralan cuisine. We thought the food might be good when we arrived and found that it was shared table space only and there wasn't another non-Indian face amongst the people eating there. As our ten dish thali arrived with a mound of rice, fellow diners on our table confirmed that they thought it was indeed the best place in town. And it was great. Fortunately we didn't need to walk very far after eating and were soon on a night train up into Karnataka, changing at the city of Mangalore, for Gokarna, a town on the coast, supposedly a bit of a refuge for those wanting some time on the beach but without the commercialism of Goa.

Gokarna, Karnataka

Gokarna was indeed a nice place to kick back and relax for a few days. We stayed in a nice beach hut on 'om beach', with little more than the sound of waves and the occasional 'ribbit' to get us off to sleep at night. As is so often the way with beach huts, we did have our fair share of wildlife visitors in the form of lizards, giant spiders and an overweight bullfrog, but the hut was quite big so there was room for everyone!. We managed to pass many days doing not much beyond eating curry, drinking lassies and lazing about on the beach. Aside from the obligatory herd of cows patrolling the beach, the only real down side was the occasional large pack of Indian male visitors, who seem to have turned watching western tourists on beaches into a rather uncomfortable spectator sport, whereby around 20 men crowd around any stationery female and stare menacingly or else take photos at close range. Fortunately they weren't there all the time, but at times it did look like a game of cat and mouse with women moving further up the beach to get away. As with many gender-related issues in India, there seems to be something of a double standard whereby Indian men are permitted to wear next to nothing, swim in the sea and stroll around the beach without a care, whilst the very few Indian women who get to the beach remain completely covered even if they want to go for a paddle and given that they are in a significant minority, unless they are chaperoned, they're unlikely to escape without hassle.

Interestingly, having previously looked around the Dutch Palace in Kerala, it seems that it was perfectly acceptable a hundred years ago for women, including nobility, to wander round topless wearing sheets round their bottom halves, without anyone batting an eyelid. Times have definitely changed. When it comes to women's rights, it often feels like things are going backwards in a lot of the places we've visited in India. Fortunately for us (or Emma in particular) the herds of men only materialised intermitently and so it was relaxing enough for us to spend several days there.

Margao, Goa

Lots of Westerners go to Goa. Most head straight to the beach, perhaps staying in beach huts and passing the days with a few beers or pina coladas while they soak up the sun. Not us. Rather short on time, we managed to spend a night in Goa without actually leaving the train station. We'd always been quite curious about the Indian railway's 'retiring rooms', and with very limited time, we finally had the chance to try one out, and it was actually pretty good. We had an aircon room with attached bathroom and minimal wildlife all at a bargain price, with the added bonus of being 50 metres from the station canteen which managed to cook up the best paneer tikka masala we had had in the whole of India. We were staying directly above the platform, which was a blessing and a curse. Although we didn't have far to crawl in the morning to get our train to Mumbai, sleep was interrupted by trains pulling in and station announcements which continued throughout the night as the automated voice asked at regular intervals for all passengers to 'please take your respective seats'.

Mumbai

After 13 hours of playing cards on the train, we arrived at the Victoria Terminus in Mumbai late in the evening and then had a short walk to our hotel. Most of Mumbai occupies a narrow peninsula and so space is extremely limited meaning that accommodation costs for a hotel anywhere vaguely decent are pretty high, even for a tiny room that stinks of smoke, has mould and damp, and a resident leach. Yes, it was definitely a leach. We called him Yusef.

Compared to other big cities, and probably owing to it's position on the coast, Mumbai did at least feel a bit less polluted than other big cities we've been to. It also had pavements around most of the city centre, which made a nice change. Dodging traffic and jumping open sewers does become a bit tedious after a while.

Having a day to explore, we wandered round the city centre, stopping at the maidens to watch a spot of cricket and visiting cafes, including the Leopold, which was one of the targets of the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008 and still has bullet holes in the walls. Heading down to the port, we walked around the huge 'Gateway of India' and the Taj hotel. Back in our slightly rougher part of town, our last Indian meal at a local dhaba was great and we finished on a high with some fabulous lassis before calling it a night, ready for an early flight to Bangkok the next day.

Things we have learned on the South-West Coast


All meals should be served with enough rice to feed a family of eight. If the customer finishes this, the rice should be replenished with a serving twice the size of the original.

We've ruined our tastebuds at English curry houses and as such now have a ridiculously high chilli threshold.

Do not go bodysurfing or try and jump waves wearing a small bikini. Bob and Emma did try to warn Chris it was a bad idea before he went in, but he just wouldn't listen.

If you are generally reckless and have difficulties with concentration and impulse control, you could probably do well as a Kerala government bus driver.

If you meet the requirements for a Kerala Government bus driver but prefer off-road, then you could consider becoming a Karnataka autorickshaw driver.

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