Cliffs of India

Varkala

We arrived in Varkala late at night and exhausted. After an hour of trying unsuccessfully to haggle we got a taxi for the four of us and our bags for 80 rupees about 2 dollars. We just had him drop us off near the cliffs and then Christina and Sofi went in search of a place to stay. Seeing as it was 5 in the morning nothing was really open. They found a few places but they weren’t really what we were looking for so we decided to sit at a closed cliff side restaurant that had chairs out and waited for things to start opening up. Not long after daybreak Christina and Shalom had found us a nice breakfast place and a great place to stay.

typical tourist clothing shop

In Varkala we were meeting up with two Dutch girls we met during our Bollywood adventure so we called them up. It just so happened that one of the girls (Liz) had broken her foot when she jumped from a moving train. She did not know that she broke it until later after an x-ray. Since it is illegal to jump from a moving train she had to continue walking like nothing had happened until she was off the platform. The foot injury led to a lot of eating at the same restaurant since she was limited in the distance she could walk.

Christina and the Dutch girls

Staying at the same hotel as the Dutch girls was a German guy named Tino. He had just arrived to India and was traveling alone. We kidnapped him and got him a room at the place we were staying and convinced him to do yoga with us in the mornings. He was and is a really funny guy with lots of backpacking experience. He can also partially levitate but that is another story.

The wolf pack eating thalis at a local spot

Most of our time there was spent lounging around either on the beach or in hammocks and eating all sorts of food. We tried a typical Kerala food at a dinner party with this Swiss German woman. She was amazingly nice and opened her home every week for this food experience. If you are there then you must try and make it. You can find out more at the restaurant The Coffee Temple (Our usual breakfast place since that first morning) The food was amazing and if you love coconut then Kerala should be a must see for you. The region in India is known for their use of it in everything. Seeing as the word Kerala means coconut it is not hard to believe they know how to use it. If it is not fried in coconut oil then it has shredded coconut in it. Not to mention the amount of coconut water they drink.

Woman selling coconut water

Shasha in front of some fishing boats

 

After so much eating we decided that maybe we should learn to cook some of this stuff. Although we did not learn Keralan dishes we did learn some of our favorites: palak paneer, vegetable masala, coconut rice, and chia. They were so easy to make that I cannot wait to try them out at home or maybe at the next kitchen I get to. I volunteered to go first with the cooking and ended up making all the dishes while Kiki and Fifi took notes and pictures.

The town was a little too touristy but it was beautiful. The cliff with beaches, coconut trees everywhere and the breeze off the ocean; it was an amazing combination. This did not change the fact that in Varkala we found out that Anna, Sofi’s friend, earlier referred to as whooping cough did in fact have whooping cough in Goa. We all started taking meds and luckily no one developed severe symptoms. The day we left Christina woke up with a fever and flu like symptoms. Sounds like another hospital visit in the future.




Varkala at sunset


Laura