I.N.D.I.A. - (I'll Never Do It Again_)

Varkala: 19th May

I’m staying at the Hill Palace Hotel for 300 rupees a night; my balcony looks over the cappuccino-coloured sands of the beach and the copper-red cliffs shrouded by misty sea-spray. The soothing sound of crashing waves is all I can hear. To my left, a parade of restaurants stretches across the cliff-top, even one that sells French gateaux. It was a special time at the resort, a short window at the end of the tourist season but before the monsoon, which left just a handful of foreigners milling around. They are a motley collection of foreigners, here for various reasons, like Rick’s café in Casablanca:

- Walter is a Dutch student on an exchange programme with the University of Cochin. We play beach football with 15 locals practically every evening at sunset.
- There’s a Canadian called Sarah who is taking advantage of a two month break from the corporate world of management consultancy to learn Ayurvedic Medicine and Yoga.
- Alan is from Seattle and spends his time in India to top up his tan on the beaches of Goa, Varkala and Kovallam. He doesn’t sound too impressed with his experiences, India to him is an acronym that stands for :


I’ll Never Do It Again.

.

- A couple of Irish ladies are here to end their travels around Asia, having been in Thailand, and Nepal before coming to Varkala. In Thailand one of them had slipped and had fractured her ankle, and ended up in a knee-high plaster cast for 6 weeks. This didn’t stop her from enjoying herself, her burly six-feet-high friend carried both their rucksacks as she limped around on crutches. Life backpacking with a plaster cast brought her several problems which she surmounted. In the humidity of Thailand, it itched manically and she had to stick twigs down there. Showering became practically impossible as the cast had to be kept dry, so she innovated and showered with the metal-hose bidet found in some hotel bathrooms. The toughest thing to do, according to her, was to use the Indian style toilets; once she fell in one and couldn’t get out so the staff at the hotel had to break down the door to get her out. The joys of one-legged backpacking! And as soon as the cast was cut off in Nepal she trekked the Anapurna Himalayas for 12 days.

It’s very difficult to swim in the sea here, a vicious under-current drags you along, so swimming is more like drifting along like a jellyfish. At least it is cooling so we just float around in the warm sea water like foetuses. Three lifeguards sit all day under a large umbrella watching out for people who swim too far out; they frequently blow their whistles when they do. At sunset they leave the beach, and there are usually a couple of fatalities of night-swimmers who get carried away in the current every season. Varkala is beautiful, devoid of the worst excesses of beaches no litter, no gawkers or hawkers, except for the “pineapple lady” who slices a whole pineapple for 20 rupees. I wonder of it will stay this way in 10 years time.