Trivandrum
After saying goodbye to Chiang Mai, I started a 24-hour travel day: a quick flight to BKK followed by a six-hour layover, a 3-hour flight to Sri Lanka followed by a 9-hour layover (most of which was spent sleeping in an impressively uncomfortable position in airport lounge chair), then finally a short flight to Trivandrum. Getting out of the airport was a challenge as I had to wait to get my visa on arrival (a very recent program within India’s immigration system), leave the airport building to use the only ATM, reenter the airport, break the large, effectively unusable bills dispensed by the aforementioned ATM, buy a SIM card, and get a taxi into town.
Buying a SIM card in India is a bit more difficult than other countries as it requires a passport photo and a lot of personal information, which I would soon learn is common practice throughout the country. After filling out the paperwork, paying, and putting the card in my phone, the woman behind the counter informed me that it wouldn’t be activated for another 36 hours because it was Sunday. As I found out later that day, most of India shuts down on Sunday. With no working SIM card and no WiFi at my hostel, I walked around town desperately trying to find a telephone or Internet cafe so I could let Ayu know I arrived safely. After covering a lot of ground on foot in the mid-afternoon heat amid the incessant honking of traffic, I realized that almost every business in town was closed. Because… Sunday.
The only open Internet cafe was somehow both full and unstaffed, so I vowed to return later that evening after a much-needed nap, only to discover that the cafe closed two hours before they were supposed to. With literally no way to contact anyone and nothing to do in a provincial town in a strange place, I laid on my bed at the YMCA, sweating in the hot and muggy room, and watched the ceiling fan blades make their rounds for a while. I treated myself to some Indian soaps on TV before passing out for about eleven hours.
The next morning, the country was running normally again and I was able to use the Internet cafe to contact people and let them know I was alive and well. It wasn’t the end of Indian bureaucracy though, as the rest of the day included another frustrating trip to the foreign registration office for Ayu and some excessive interrogations by hotel staff. In fact, the staff called up to the room multiple times and pestered us over the phone for inconsequential visa details and then demanded more money because two people (oh the horror!) were staying in the room.
Frustrations aside, Trivandrum felt like an authentic Indian city and I can count the number of Westerners I saw on one hand. I visited several local vegetarian restaurants and had some very cheap, very spicy, very delicious food. A satisfying veggie thali from a family restaurant cost fifty cents.
Varkala
After a day and a half in Trivandrum, it was time to head to the coast to the beach town of Varkala, a friendly, quiet holiday destination by the cliffs filled with the usual assortment of restaurants, bars, beachside resorts, ayurvedic massage, vegetarian food, hippies, EPL chicks, palm trees, auto rickshaws, and shops full of clothes and trinkets. When we weren’t relaxing or sleeping at our excellent guesthouse (Om India Om), our time was pleasantly spent eating, reading, travel planning, walking the beach, swimming, and more eating.
While I was walking the beach early one morning, I came across several groups of local fishermen who were pulling in their nets from the sea. For a long while, they methodically and slowly pulled their heavy ropes from the ocean, coiling them neatly on the sand. They sang and chanted, both on land and in the water, as they worked. A few tourists, myself included, would stop, take a few photos, and watch for a little while before continuing on their morning walks. Reasonably fit Western men, again myself included, were recruited by the fishermen to help out for “just two minutes”. Pulling those ropes is much, much harder than it looks; within a few minutes, I was wet with seawater and sweat, my arms were overworked, and my hands already felt chaffed. Just a short time with the fishermen was enough to make me appreciate how physically demanding their work is.
Kollam
After four peaceful days in Varkala, we took a taxi to Kollam for our overnight houseboat trip through the backwaters, a must-do activity for any tourist in Kerala. Our staff of three (captain, chef, and general assistant) took us to Ashtamudi Lake and then through many miles of the connected channels before docking for the evening. Most of our time was spent sitting in comfortable chairs on the upper deck, sipping masala chai, and watching the palm trees on the shore slowly pass by as the houseboat puttered along the quiet, empty canals. We’d occasionally pass other houseboats or fishing boats, but for the most part, the backwaters were free of traffic. We passed Chinese fishing nets, high-end hotels showing off their waterfront locations, simple homes and villages, trash fires, groups of young men practicing on musical instruments, children playing and screaming, and men in canoes running their daily errands.
Another major selling point of any houseboat cruise in Kerala is the food. Our personal chef cooked us three massive, amazing vegetarian meals, including many dishes I had never seen or tasted before. Sugar, rice, and chapati made their usual appearances, as they have in all the food we’ve had in southern India, but there were also welcome appearances of lentils, onions, carrots, pineapple, and coconut. Trying our hardest, we could eat only half of the excessive amount of food; though our taste buds were overjoyed, our stomach sizes were unfortunate limitations.
After the overnight, we enjoyed a delicious breakfast illuminated by the low, early-morning sun while the houseboat slowly made the short trip back to port.
I
After disembarking, we hired a taxi to take us to nearby Amritapuri, the ashram and birthplace of Amma, a female Hindu spiritual leader known for her marathon hug-bestowing sessions. We checked in and planned on staying the night before catching a train the next day, but changed our minds after a few hours. The ashram is quite the complex, perpetually filled with thousands of disciples and pilgrims and hippies, which was a bit overwhelming considering how limited the property boundaries are; I was expecting a college campus and instead found a high school. Or a prison. Actually, the comparison to a prison is not entirely unreasonable: the accommodations are small, dingy rooms with bars on the windows, everyone wears an identical outfit (all white), and lunch was a metal plate of bland food supplied by an assembly line of serving-spoon-wielding men standing behind massive pots containing watery, food-like mixtures.
After a few hours, we decided we had seen what we needed to see and changed our plans for the evening. I had just come down with a cold as well, so I wasn’t feeling very excited about sleeping on the floor in a dirty room, negotiating large crowds, or trying to keep my energy up with bowls of slop. I think the elevator ride is the straw that broke the camel’s back; every trip to or from our room in one of the highrise buildings was a lengthy, claustrophobic affair. Without fail, the elevator would stop at more than half of the ten floors separating us from ground level and someone would insist on trying to cram their body into an already packed metal closet.
As we were gathering our bags and leaving in the late afternoon, the cult-like vibe of the place became palpable as we heard snippets of conversations:
“Have you seen Mother yet?”
“Are you going to see Mother today?”
“Mother is coming at 5:00.”
Yikes.
We happily hired a car to take us back to Kollam, where we thoroughly (and I mean thoroughly) enjoyed the luxuries of aircon, a soft, fluffy bed, and an actual hot shower. Nurtured by a long night’s sleep and an excellent dinner and breakfast from the hotel’s rooftop restaurant, I felt my cold fading away.
(Side note: I’ve been very surprised at how little I’ve gotten sick – by which I mean catching a cold or the flu – while traveling for the last year and a half. And the two times I have gotten sick, I’ve recovered in only a few days, which is incredibly fast compared to my normal recovery time. My working theory is that no longer spending four or five days a week in a sealed office building with recycled germs is doing wonders for my health, but who knows if that’s actually true.)
For the last week or so, we had been stressing a bit about our upcoming train trip from Kollam to Gokarna, another holiday beach town up the coast. Train travel is massive in India and no trip to the country is complete without at least one ride on the rails. However, demand greatly exceeds supply – at least in the high season – and so trains sell out weeks or months in advance. Also, given the number of routes, trains, classes, and ticket types, just buying a ticket can be an overwhelming and frustrating process for foreigners. After talking to a lot of people, trying in vain to buy tickets in person at the train station, and reading many websites, here’s my advice to future train travelers of India: get an Indian SIM card for your phone and use Cleartrip (the website or the app) to view train schedules and make bookings.
We had booked a train that was already full, but our waitlist numbers were #3 and #4, which we were told were very promising. It’s expected that some booked passengers will cancel their tickets the same day they are supposed to ride, so a low waitlist number stands a good chance of being bumped up to an assigned berth. I had been checking our waitlist numbers multiple times a day (via the app) and not seen any movement, but was able to stay calm by reminding myself that all the waitlist movement tends to happen in the last 24 hours before departure. And right on cue, three hours before our train was scheduled to leave, I received a flurry of texts and emails saying we were now officially ticketed passengers.
Our overnight train left at 8:00 pm, so the train station and platforms were already dark and sparsely populated with small groups of Indians. As trains arrived, waited for a few minutes, and left, people scurried on and off as food vendors sold their snacks and treats to passengers through the train windows. We climbed on one of the first-class cars and found our small, sterile room with two wall-mounted beds, one above the other. Shortly after setting our bags down, train employees stopped by to drop off pillows, sheets, blankets, water, and our dinners.
The train we booked had a minimal number of stops, so the ride was mostly smooth and pleasant, that is, once our neighbor finished watching his loud action movie and the neighbors on the other side stopped arguing about who had the wrong ticket and didn’t belong there. I slept pretty well on my bed (which wasn’t too short for me, as I was dreading) and got up in the morning with enough time to have breakfast and enjoy some daylight views of palm trees, hills, and lakes as the countryside flew by our window.
