Kerala (Southern India)

We spend my birthday a little differently this year!

We are on the move from Delhi to the coast. We take an Air India flight to Trivandrum amidst a very tropical storm and, it is with some relief, that we arrive an hour late at the local airport. Luckily, we had organised a taxi from the hotel to pick us up. I say luckily because it is very late when we arrive in Kovallam and it appears that we have arrived in a ghost town – so it is just a well that the driver knew where we were going. Our worst fears are allayed the following morning when we are able to explore a little more and find that there are some restaurants and shops etc. just down the road and around the corner. It is very early in the season here and the hotel we are saying in is sprucing itself up. Which is just as well because it is a dump. The overworked and under-serviced air conditioning in our room wafts the occasional puff of lukewarm air over us. I say occasional as the power cuts in and out regularly and, as we haven’t adjusted to the heat and humidity yet, our first night is a challenge. We decide that 2 days is enough here and decamp to Varkala, a much more relaxed and prettier beach 60km further north.

Varkala Beach

A week here is lovely and we relax for the first time in months (yeah, I know – it’s tragic and you all really feel for us!). While the beach is very oriented towards Western tourists it is nice to get off the beaten track with a couple of trips. We see various temples and buildings along with some lovely waterways.

Working on the river

Anyone for a coconut - or two?

I love the definite preponderance of kitsch – just as you think you have seen the most brightly coloured temple, something new comes along.

Island Temple

I am interested in the local backwaters as it gives me a chance to see what life is like when there aren’t 16 million other people around. While the amenities are fairly basic the houses certainly have more space. As ever, the buildings look as if they are only a centimetre or two from total collapse. Roofs, walls and doors are very rickety and often seem to consist of wooden planks or bamboo reeds patched up with tarpaulin or plastic sheets. Any concrete structures are covered in mould with fading paint most of the time. I wonder if Dulux have found a way of making outdoor paint mould-resistant??? I know the paint we use at home has to be stored in temps less than 30 degrees and not applied in damp conditions; so not really suitable for here at all. Granted the original colours must have been very colourful – they do like their colours here. Lots of houses are pink, purple, yellow, bright green or various combinations thereof and Brett is very worried that I’m picking up decorating tips here.

Brett has mentioned that he felt as if he was being voyeuristic during the backwater trip but I wondered if travelling per se is not voyeuristic and the least we can do is to be a sensitive about it as possible. If we didn’t want to see how people live then we would just stick to the resorts and not venture off the beaten track. The alternative was to take a tourist houseboat to experience ‘real life’ on the river. These have been proliferating over the last few years and some of the locals were mentioning how they were not being managed well so that noise, diesel and congestion on the river was now threatening the delicate ecosystem. So, we drift through the tiny backwaters

guided by a local man who manages to avoid taking us through people’s backyards too much - rather than chugging up the diesel polluted main waterways.

He took us to his house to pick up his boat and proudly showed us different plants etc. that his family grow locally. We didn­­­­­’t know tapioca grew on trees until now and it was interesting to see how they use the abundance of coconut trees! If you are getting your coir rug for Xmas then chances are it comes from around here.

Our guide greeted all of the others on the waters, many of whom were relatives, and – it seemed to us at least – chastised a few younger men for not maintaining their boats properly. Here too we could see the transition from the older style huts

to the more modern houses where local people now live. Around the houses each family has enough land to cultivate so the standard of living is relatively good.

I feel that our stay here has given us the opportunity to see a more relaxed and sustainable way of life for some Indian people. While there is still huge poverty with many, many people living in subsistence conditions, there are communities who live more comfortably, without belonging to the privileged middle classes.