Kerala beaches - 1st stop Varkala

Well, we had to come to the beaches in Kerala as apparently they're famous, so the first stop was Varkala.



It was an easy 2 hour bus ride, yet again our bus leaving within minutes of us arriving at the station. Sarah met a German girl, Iris, on the bus who was going our way so when we arrived we haggled fiercely with a autorickshaw-wallah to take us to the beach. But in this case to no avail (seems to be a price-fixing thing going on), so eventually we got a ride to a recommended hotel near the beach, Bamboo Village. It turned out to be a lovely place, clean and cheap, and so I didn't need to scout out anywhere else.


The beach at Varkala is actually at the base of a large, long, shear, red rock cliff, at the top of which are most of the restaurants and hotels and shops and stuff. We arrived just before sunset, but the sun disappears into dense cloud (or pollution, I don't know which), well before it hits the horizon. But it's definitely a lovely setting, although along many places along the cliff the locals seem to just throw rubbish, which of course piles up into very unsightly heaps (in fact, the rubbish everywhere is probably worse in India than anywhere else I've seen in the world - and the small canals in many of the towns and cities seem practically guaranteed to be incredibly foul-smelling open sewers).


So the next day was beach day proper, for me anyway. Unfortunately there was practically no natural shade anywhere on the beach - in fact, I could only find one small spot that was up a slope a bit, and had a fair bit of rubbish strewn around. Sarah didn't fancy it much, so she just went back to a hammock at our hotel to read, while I stayed huddled under my palm-tree shade. You could rent expensive umbrellas and chairs on the beach, but they were very flimsy affairs, and after getting burnt under a similarly ineffective one in Thailand I didn't fancy risking that again! But swimming in the sea was gorgeous, although in reality the water was probably a bit too warm, so it lacked a bracing refreshment from the heat.


The temperature has been increasing as we've moved South, and it was here that we really started to feel it, although it got even hotter later. Anyway, the next day we had a free cooking lesson - one of the restaurants basically lets you into the kitchen and the chef explains everything as he cooks your order for you. He was brilliant, really friendly and patient and had good English. The curries he cooked up were great too (vegetable kadai (a Keralan dish), and a local fish curry, and also how to make a paratha). It took a good hour to prepare our order, as he was explaining everything, and I did a bit of chopping and stuff.


Sarah had also found a 2 hour cooking course, but that cost a fair few bob, and basically I thought we'd learnt a lot in the free lesson, enough to keep us going anyway without overloading.

Although it was kinda tempting to stay another day in Varkala, the beach really wasn't that great (the lack of proper shade for me being a real problem), so we decided to move on the next day to Trivandrum, further south.

Sarah did a yoga class from 8am until 9:30am - I wasn't interested really, as I've tried bikram yoga and didn't like it much. I could start another rant here about how I reckon exercise is only ever worthwhile if you actually enjoy the activity itself (which is why gyms don't work (nobody I know actually 'enjoys' the gym)), but anyway, I won't! So when Sarah got back and had a quick shower we checked-out and strolled out looking for a autorickshaw.