Kerala: Varkala, Kochi and the Backwaters

Varkala- we’re in love

Another infested train traversed us across the country, with a connecting one leading us to Varkala.

One look at the cliff toped beach and line of friendly café’s and our disenchantment with India began to fade with our speckled bites.

Varkala is wonderful, a Dharamsala in the sun. It has a lovely beach although a swim is a work out against the crashing waves.

Atonement for the body and mind can be reached through courses in yoga, Ayurveda, meditation and a host of others, with an on site guru and ashram. We could see ourselves living here for some time. We stretched our stay from a day and a half to three, reluctantly leaving the spectacular sunsets. We highly recommend here for your holidays, great food, chilled vibe, friendly locals and accommodation available to suit all budgets.
Bliss.

The Backwaters

We're such train geeks! A crack-of-dawn train brought us to the town of Alappuzha (Alleppey), the best place to organize a house boat to cruise the backwaters (a 900km network of waterways) and catch a snippet of local life.

These houseboats don’t come cheap, they have their own chef, double bedroom, living room and mod cons, taking you out on the canals for a night under the stars. We couldn’t afford the luxurious option and anything cheaper … well you probably remember we’d already had our starry night in Jaisalmer and paid the price!

Instead we opted to take the public ferry for a whopping 10 rupees each (20 cent) which like a water bus cruised the varied beautiful landscape collecting and depositing villagers along the way. After three lovely, if a little sleepy, hours we reached Kottayam. Really, how different could the scenery be on the 150euro cruise?

We talked to a couple who after their trip were disappointed that they only drove for a few hours, moored for the night and returned the next morning. Sure they had a nice room and food, but I don’t think we would have been satisfied with the splurge.

Kochi

From Kottayam we made our way to the train station, met a nice German girl on her way home, discussed India over lunch and continued onto Kochi. Our extension in Varkala was to the expense of Kochi, but not a travesty. We arrived via the mainland at Ernakulam and took a short ferry to the island of Fort Cochin/Mattancherry. Here they have not heard about queues! The ticket box is opened five minutes before the ferry docks creating a mad scramble, then after purchasing your ticket you’re pushed by the crowd to the gate, which opens and everyone runs down the jetty to the waiting boat. One man took the opportunity, as I was separated from Mal in the crowd, to reach through the anonymous throng and grope my inner thigh trying to aim higher. I managed to thump his shoulder but with my rucksack holding me back and the loud screaming mass of people around he slipped away not to be seen again.
Dirty bastard.
I was fuming and naturally upset by the incident. But these things happen; now my weapon is a full plastic water bottle in crowds and I’ll pound it down on the head of anybody who tries that again. I’d choose glass, but I’d probably be thrown in prison.
Fort Cochin is recognisable by the Chinese dock side fishing nets which paint a pretty picture against the lovely town.

Visiting is like wandering through Europe. It’s influenced by the Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and British. It has a Hindu muraled palace, mosque and a synagogue in Jew Town. The restaurant selection is vast and they like to call their guesthouses ‘home stays’ but you’re kidding yourself if you think that’s what you’ll get! Kochi is a well discovered place and as we travel up the west cost of India we are beginning to see where all the tourists are hiding. I think most people just skip the east cost, and perhaps the midlands, and most of the north… actually the south and west cost are where they confine themselves to and from travelling all around we can see why.

Puducherry: Bon Jour India

On reaching for our toothbrushes, the first morning back in India, I found a huge cockroach had made his bed upon the damp bristles during the night. I wonder what the French think of their old colonial town now, fifty years after the hand back? We were curious enough to make the five hour bus trip from Chennai after touching back down again in ‘Incredible India’, had the French treated the place differently then the British?

Puducherry, formally Pontichery, isn’t much different to the rest of India, but along the promenade was nice. Walking it reminded us of home, Salthill, Galway more specifically, on a summer’s day – hosting an Indian convention! We walked along with all the Indian tourists, surprised by the amount of international foreigners actually the most we’d see gathered together since the Taj Mahal. Turns out the annual International Yoga Festival was starting the next day. Presumably also why accommodation was so scarce and we had to settle for a crawling room in a crappy guesthouse.

On our second morning Mal awoke to the carnage of his night’s molestation. In the dark hours we sensed the creepy crawly presence and continuously purged the beds, finding strange black bloody (on squashing) bugs. We hardly slept and they loved Mal, he was covered in bites, I also had a few.
Sick and disgusting.
This was a very low point in our trip. We questioned was it worth it, stretching our budget for months staying in latrine-esque rooms where we could just have a few weeks of niceness? But the problem as experienced is that the mid-range places aren’t much better than budget. To stay anywhere nice you have to hand over a lot of money. Should we skip the next part and head straight to Goa? We’d have taught of heading straight for the airport only that Malachy’s dream of hand making his own guitar lay in Goa. On sleep depravation, hunger and crawling skin the best decisions are not made, so we headed out for some food and antihistamines.

After some tea and real French croissants Puducherry seemed slightly brighter. In the French quarter there are some lovely European buildings, fine restaurants and bakeries but the streets are consistently Indian in their squalor.

After seeing a watching pair of eyes follow us from restaurants, shops and doorways, we invariably had to investigate. They belong to The Mother, and like Big Brother, she is always watching, best to do as mother says (even if we’d already spent the night in room 101). She was a French woman who founded an ashram with Sri Aurobindo in 1926. The ashram seems a mix of yoga, religion and science. We did the obligatory walk around their shrine and were led into the gift shop and through to a photo gallery. Mother seemed to have a lot to say in her 97 years of life, with books of her opinion on everything from childrearing to science. She seemed incredibly intelligent breaking into the Indian and international psyche. They also set up Auroville a sort of 20 km commune with about 1800 residents of multi-nationality living in self sufficient peace and harmony. Sounds intriguing or cultish? We unfortunately didn’t have time to investigate.
We did however cross the divide from the French section (basically the tourist section along the beach front) to the more Indian side of town (everywhere else) to visit the botanical gardens; an extremely disheartening experience. It’s run down, over grown, dirty and the toy train circling the garden doesn’t run, although its little platform is scattered with as much litter as if it had been Mumbai’s busy CST station. A huge padlocked-at-night gate guards the gardens, but one of the back corner walls has been knocked down, leading directly to the river lined slums. Here we witnessed emaciated dwellers climb through and gather the rare species of trees they have previously felled for their fire wood! It’s an outrageous situation but hard to wear the environmentalist hat when the people aren’t fed, sheltered or educated. Conservation of a once beautiful botanical garden falls far behind their daily hard won necessities of life: all of which even further behind India’s space race.

I contemplated the irony of India on our door-less bus ride back to Chennai, thinking on one of my last sites of the town before leaving; a huge statue of Ghandi on the prom where rich kids ran between his legs, while their parents swat the beggars away like flies.

Dizzy diving

Cowboy Divers

Yea, we’re now Advanced Open Water Divers; a qualification that seems easily won in Sri Lanka! While we’re conscientious divers, I’m not sure the outfit we dived with share the same standards! Malachy likes to call them Cowboy Divers, I’m sure they had some names for us also, priggish probably being one. But honestly, we didn’t think it to unusual to read the accompanying manual, or watch the video; neither of which the dive shop had, having to borrow elsewhere. We also have this annoying habit of wanting full equipment, preferably in working order, oh and also wanting to follow world safety recommendations, they seemed amused at our worries and surprised at our request to discuss a dive before commencing.

We learned these outrageously high standards during our Open Water certificates in Thailand three years ago on Kho Tao island. There we had to watch endless safety and instructive videos, study diligently from the manual, answer written knowledge reviews, learn to use dive planners, compasses, practice and repeat skills in the water until everybody was comfortable and performing well; ending in a final exam having completed all our dives. We left Koh Tao knowing we had earned and won our certificates.

Our cowboys in Hikkaduwa worked by a different set of rules! We almost had to instruct ourselves. The premise seemed to be; do the dives, we’ll then sign for your certificates. However this is not what we had in mind. We’re not interested in just getting the cert, we want to earn it and feel confident in our diving skills. There are only two dive instructors and seven dive shops. We have the impression that they all run courses, and our dive instructor, or the other one, signs the necessary forms, but I’m ready to be corrected on this. Maybe this signing off is acceptable practice?

After locating the book and video, apparently we’re ready to begin. We told the instructor the dives we’d like to do, he agreed with our choice and said we could begin today with a night dive. We stole a look at each other having just read the section, where it implicitly said: know your dive site well before diving there at night, trust your equipment and partners. We’d barely been in the water in two years, had never dived with the instructor, didn’t know their equipment and had never seen the site, would we dive there tonight?
Ah we’d prefer to start with something else.
Really? Ok. Sure, how about peak performance buoyancy?
Perfect.
Let’s suit up and go, we’ll dive to ‘The Cave’, you were there with Sarath the other day, its nice right?
Yeah lovely but, we’ve forgotten how to use the recreational dive planners, can we review them?
It’s not necessary I know the site; you can do that tonight if you like. Here’s your wet suit and ..
Ok so what do we expect when we go down, what do we do first?
Jayathan, the instructor sits down again and looks at his two pedantic studious clients, seems like he hasn’t thought in a while. Laboriously he opens the book and talks us through the dive.
Feeling more confident, we readied our gear and headed for the boat.

After back rolling into the water, a loud hissing was heard from Mal’s BCD (Buoyancy control device, like an inflatable life jacket that houses the tank and keeps you afloat on the surface and helps regulate your buoyancy underwater). We had checked the equipment first but things are different in the water; no matter how many times Mal pressed the inflation button he began sinking. The hissing we discovered was coming from the back valves, a puncture or tear evidently, Mal was to swap with one of the Sri Lankan boys who accompanied us; they were diving for fish. So in the water, Mal had to remove his weight belt and BCD, change equipment and strap up again. Just as well we’d practiced previously!! This done, we checking our weights and down we went. We spent some time practicing skills in a sandy clearing at the bottom, Jayathan seemed satisfied and moved on. I wasn’t, while Mal was bobbing like a metronome lever up and down with every breath, I felt I hadn’t quite fine tuned myself. But follow Jayathan we must as he raced around the site. We looked at each other and shrugged, this wasn’t on the dive plan. The current was strong and our faltering had him meters ahead, he didn’t bother to check our progress behind. It was a lovely dive site, nice to swim around, but I’d have preferred to practice my lotus levitation.

On checking his air supply I saw Mal suddenly tapping his pressure gage anxiously. Our tanks were full on 200 bars of air, the gage needle drops as it depletes and on our last check we were about equal on 120 bars. Another check had me just below 100, where Mal’s was still high, he realised that unless he had grown gills- there must be a problem. He’s usually a few bars lower than me and considering he used a lot of air practicing his buoyancy, if must be les than shown. After a few taps on the glass front, the needle suddenly dropped to 40 bars, where 50 is in the red and time to surface! Shocked we catch up to Jayathan and show him, pointing to the surface suggesting we go up for our safety stop. Totally unfazed, he shows us that he has over 100 bars left and suggests they swap BCD’s. So Mal must swap his regulator (air supply mouth piece) underwater, with the instructors and then change BCD’s! We were confused about this as normal procedure would be to surface when your air is running out! Perhaps Jayathan didn’t want Mal to panic during the safety stop, hence the James Bond manoeuvre swapping tanks underwater? But alas, safety was far from his mind, he just wanted us to enjoy the dive for as long as possible and he would make Mal’s 40 bar of air last! Eventually it was time to surface and I wondered about a safety stop as he wore no dive computer, no depth gauge or even a watch, and was almost out of air! But I guess years of experience let you approximated 5 meters and three minutes, although I wouldn’t recommend this!
Considering the dodgy equipment, the lack of structure and recklessness to safety, we were apprehensive about the next day’s diving, particularly the deep dive!

On arrival to the dive shop the next morning, our equipment was set up and we appeared ready to go.

Am … are there any special safety issues to consider as we’re doing a deep dive this morning?
Don’t worry it’s like a regular dive, just deeper, Kiralagala’s a lovely site. Sarath will take you..
You’re not coming?
Sarath is a divemaster, no problem, I’ll go on the navigation dive with you this afternoon.
Can we talk about the dive, what’s the plan?

We discuss the dive, I ask about nitrogen narcosis and emergency procedures (our life is in their hands!). Also enquiring about the basic requirement of a first aid kit with oxygen on the boat, and the not so basic decompression chambers, where the nearest one was located, how to get there, helicopter? Ambulance? I was assured all these were entirely unnecessary but available. I was actually surprised when we were told there would be a full tank of air suspended at the five meter mark in case, as is highly possible on a deep dive, that someone could run low on air- this is standard practice.

The dive site was spectacular, the visibility improving the deeper we went, beautiful. It honestly felt like we were in the movie Finding Nemo. The aquatic life was colourful, abundant and immune to our presence. I loved it! We hit 34 meters, where 30 is the limit and 40 the absolute maximum dept for a recreational deep dive. The current was strong and dragged us far from the boat for our safety stop, Mal was down to 10 bars of air and dropping, but Sarath seemed to think this was ok; he had air to give if necessary. Even if we had reached the boat the tank was not suspended as it should, some of the lads had used it for fishing, hiding their booty of lobster and calamari in a t-shirt under the bench, where the first aid kit should have been. I hate this practice, if they pillage the site for fish, what will be the point in diving there recreationally?

The other three dives followed a similar pattern; the wreck dive was cool, visiting a 100 year sunken oil tanker. Unfortunately visibility was bad and current strong for our navigation dive and again the strong current hampered our night dive, followed by New Years Eve the next night, followed with us flying out, thus we had to change to a naturalist dive. This is not to be confused with a naturist, we were fully suited up, looking at the aquatic and plant life.
I think we had given ourselves a misleading view of the advanced course, instead of an introductory to five new dive styles, we were expecting to become fully competent in them, but that is not what the course is about, for that type of knowledge you need to enrol in a specialist course for each area. So apart from safety issues and reoccurring dodgy equipment the course was really good and we met some lovely guys. We even celebrated the New Year with them on the beach, where they offered to take us diving independent of the shop, highly discounted the following evening-
We do this for friends
Sounded great, until they elaborated on the description-
We’ll go out around sunset
Oh sounds nice
Yeah, we’ll have a few splifs and some beers, then talk to the fishes
Oh yeah, well we’ll see, we have to pack and there are a few last minutes things to take care of…

Humm, while we’d come to trust them, if not the dive equipment, the idea of stoned drunken diving was not really our thing; especially when Sarath proclaimed that he could dive to 100 meters and it would be no problem to him, you gotta love impulsive youth!

We left Sri Lanka telling it- we’ll be back.