Wash on 30 degrees and set to spin...

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Excited to be travelling by bus again (ha!), Stacey and Ross and ourselves boarded the public non air-con bus to take us further south in Kerala to Varkala - well Kallum Ballam to be exact. The conductor was a little to eager to help us get off the bus and we ended up standing for the last 20 minutes of the journey. Of course there was the obligatory scrum to get into our seats...we really hate it when this happens, people don’t even give you a chance to get out of your seat and they are literally climbing on top of you in their desperation to bag your seat.

So we finally get off the bus and got an autorickshaw to Papanasam beach - or better known as Varkala cliff top. After some serious haggling, several arguments in the rickshaw on the way where the driver wouldn’t let it lie about the fare he had given us, we arrived at the clifftop and set about trying to find somewhere to stay. Donna and Ross set out to find some rooms but strangely the place was packed - not at all like the rest of India we were quite puzzled at this - and after an hour or so of looking, suitable rooms were found for 800 rupees (£10) and we didn’t even have hot water, this was one of the most expensive places in India we had stayed. Although you could see where there used to be hot water boilers in the bathrooms and they had been taken out. Obviously business was so good in this little tourist town, why should they have to offer hot water as well? Varkala was not off to a good start.

We quickly got changed and rushed down the cliff top stairs to the beach, eager to get in the sea. We were amazed at the size of the waves coming in and we quickly started to look like drowned rats and Ross managed to lose his hat...but on the plus side he found a pair of kiddie jeans! Feeling a little battered around the head, we called it a day and re-convened to get food a little later. Now because Varkala was so busy, none of the restaurants could actually handle the number of customers they had in their restaurants. Instead of admitting this and not letting people sit down to eat, they kept welcoming people with open arms. We waited 2 hours for our meal that night and when it came they tried to pass off 1 piddly portion of rice as 4 portions, the fish curry had 2 pieces of fish in and half our nan’s/chapatis didn’t come. Of course they still tried to overcharge us and we had to argue about the bill - so fellow travellers, avoid Sea Queen restaurant, the food is bad and the service is even worse...we weren’t the only ones complaining either! So to fill our grumbling bellies we went and bought some cake to scoff...yes we know that’s not healthy but it was lovely!

The next day we went to the beach while Stacey and Ross went into Varkala town. We had great fun in the waves and this is where the title of the blog comes from. In between ducking/jumping a huge wave, being dragged by the current one way or the other and then waves heading towards the shore suddenly reversing and smacking the back of your head while another wave smacked in our faces we joked we knew what it was like to be in a washing machine. After a few hours in the water we were exhausted but had the best fun (Donna’s dad - it was reminiscent of the waves on Portugal’s Algarve). When drying off on the beach we noticed something quite different about this beach. From what we had heard from other people, Varkala used to have a bit of a problem with Indian men hassling women on the beach. As we were looking, the lifeguards started whistling at the Indian men which were standing around on the beach and started herding them down to the other end, shouting at them. This happened again and again during our stay here sometimes even the police got involved moving the men to other parts of the beach so it seemed to us like the authorities had decided to do something about Varkala’s bad reputation of pervy men.

It soon became apparent why Varkala (and the rest of Kerala) was so busy. After the Mumbai terror attacks, the Indian and foreign governments issued warnings about travelling to Goa, so all the package tourists who usually went to Goa were given the option to change their holiday to Kerala and they changed in droves. When looking for accommodation we were told that most places were fully booked until mid-January at least and the Keralan’s could hardly contain themselves with how much they could rip people off. A prime example of this is an issue we have with buying products in the shops on Varkala cliff top. In India all products, from chocolate eclair sweets (yes we were still addicted to these!) to shampoo to drugs like anti-biotics have a MRP or Maximum Retail Price printed on them. It is illegal to sell anything above the MRP printed on the product and also illegal to tamper or scrape off this price. The shops in Varkala though had no such qualms...looking for shampoo the shops wanted 100 rupees for 100ml of shampoo, when normally in shops it is about 50 rupees for 500ml. The same with bottled water, everywhere else in India we had been 1 litre of water was 10 rupees, in Kerala it was anything from 15 rupees upwards. Some shops even wanted 20 rupees for one tiny little banana. It was really annoying that shops were asking these prices and instead of stopping to think, tourists were just blindly paying their price. One shop we went into we bought a packet of crisps, the MRP said 20 rupees which is what we paid and as we had eaten them we went back later in the day to buy another packet. The guy that was working later on decided he was going to charge 50 rupees, Donna was not too happy with this and had a shouting match in front of the other customers resulting in the other customers leaving and the guy having to back down and accept 20 rupees for the crisps. Oh and the book exchanges either wanted 2 or 3 books to swap for 1 of theirs or they wanted 1 book and 200 rupees...what’s wrong with straight swapping or a modest profit?

After our first couple of days in Varkala we started to get really paranoid about leaving our stuff in the room. We heard of at least 5 people having things stolen from their rooms, all on the same day. Some people’s passports, all their money and credit cards were gone and from what they said the police were not very helpful at all. Added to this the guy who ran the guesthouse where we were staying - Silver Sands it was called - started to get a bit shifty. Ross caught him spying through a hole in one of the room's doors where two girls were staying and he got really funny with us once Stacey and Ross had left. We asked him for a toilet roll, at 800 rupees for the room we at least expected this, he wanted 50 rupees for it, so we told him it didn’t matter. We got up to the room and he hadn’t cleaned it like we had asked so on our way out we asked him why he hadn’t cleaned the room. First of all he lied and said he had cleaned it; then he got defensive and said we were leaving anyway so why did we want it cleaning - we weren’t leaving we still had 3 days of our stay left! So we asked him for the clean sheets and towels and said we would do it ourselves. We waited an hour and he still hadn’t given us the clean sheets etc, so Donna went down and asked (very nicely) for them. This guy lost it and shoved the clean sheets and towels into Donna’s hands and started shouting ‘happy now, happy now’ at her. We really didn’t think it was too much to ask to have our room cleaned once every 2 days when paying 800 rupees and Donna said this to him. At this point he mumbled something under his breath and stomped off. From then on he started hanging around our room - we caught him once when we came back unexpectedly trying to see through our window...creepy!

Before arriving into Kerala we had read so many blogs saying Varkala was a lovely sleepy little town with lots of backpackers, good quality rooms and that it was cheap. This certainly wasn’t our experience of Varkala. We did have fun in the waves and Donna finally managed to do her cookery course which was fantastic and once we found a decent place to eat we had a pleasant couple of days there. Maybe in low season Varkala is a haven for backpackers but when we were there it was packed to the rafters with people escaping the nasty European weather.

So our time in Varkala came to an end and we were heading to Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu, getting into our last days in India. We were quite relieved to be leaving Kerala as our experience in this Indian state hadn’t been as idyllic as we had hoped it would be. Our last Indian train journey lay ahead of us, much to our relief and we hoped Pondicherry was as quirky and interesting as it sounded!

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Comments

[Moses]

Reminds me of home
The pictures remind me so much of the many different beaches in our great state of florida. It's like having miami, west palm, st.pete, and daytona beach all rolled into one. I don't if this part of India that was hit by the tsunami, but if it is it's made a major come back.