India’s Deep South: Varkala Beach and Trivandrum

Before I headed south to Kerala from Bombay, a part-time musician and full-time lover of cannabinoids I know told me that the state was like the Hawai’i of India, and he urged me to try the local weed as it is supposed to be the best in the country. While I haven’t been interested/crazy/stupid enough to buy any of the local marijuana, I can attest to the “hang loose” attitude of the locals and a vibe which seems to grow more laid back the further south you go. Add the swaying palm trees everywhere you look, beautiful beaches, and lazy backwater boat trips, and you have a version of the country that has been called India for Beginners.

Varkala Beach

A couple of hours north of the southernmost border of Kerala, Varkala Beach came recommended as a place I might find hard to leave. I can see why some might want to linger here, but for those same reasons I was ready to go after only a week. The path along the top of the cliff was lined with enough tourist traps to keep a traveler busy for a month, but after a few days, the food and spa menus, jewelry shops, and souvenir stores all started to look the same.

The beach below the cliff was a welcome respite from the noisy commercialism on the cliff above, and my early morning walks on the mostly empty shores never grew old. The red lacerite cliffs that soar 80 feet above the golden sand are dotted with intensely green palm trees growing from whatever root hold they can manage, and the stunning backdrop they made vied to draw my attention from the rolling waves and endless skies.

From far away, even the multi-colored heaps of trash that local businesses drop down the cliff face are beautiful against the red rock, but the smell of rotting garbage dispels that romantic notion as soon as you get close enough to the dump spot. In recent years, there have been several slides as the earth has eroded under the pathway along the cliff where growing numbers of humans, motorcycles, and rickshaws impact the soil. In an effort to preserve the cliffs, the Geological Survey of India (GSI) recently declared them a Geologic Monument, and the entire area is destined to be India’s first geopark. There is a moratorium on building new structures more than ten meters near the edge of the cliff, but change happens slowly when it means businesses will lose money, and there was no sign of any of the proposed improvements like demolition of the stairs to the beach or relocation of the helipad.

For now, the two sets of stairs are the only way to reach the beach from the north end of the cliff. The northernmost set is by the Tibetan Restaurant and about 150 meters south is another set by Cafe del Mar. Alternatively, visitors can keep taking the cliff trail south as it descends to meet the beach at Papunasum past the helipad. Rickshaws gather in the helipad/parking area to wait for fares, so it’s a convenient place to grab transport to the city.

Once on the beach, there are surf and boogie boards for rent, with or without lessons, and umbrellas and beach chairs for rent by the day or half day. Around the border of Varkala and Papusanum beaches there is a riptide, but the danger zone is well signed.

Do

Yoga

There are dozens of yoga places scattered around the cliff and inland, and many home stays offer yoga classes if they have the space. I went to a good class at my home stay, but only because there was a substitute that day; the regular yoga instructor there was creepy.

Namasthe Ayurvedic Mission
Check in the main office for yoga classes and timings. The class was small—just two attendees—and the view from the rooftop shala was stunning. The teacher taught according to Sivananda (Hatha) style, and his instruction was fine but he repeated the phrase “no pain, no gain” too much for my taste. His adjustment of my headstand was inexpert and reminded me again of why I recommend telling teachers to skip the physical adjustments and to rely on verbal instruction instead. A gifted teacher will be able to instruct an adjustment using only her voice, and verbal instructions can be a good way to avoid injury from over-exuberant, ill-trained teachers.

colorful umbrellas shade the sadhu at Papasanam Beach — Sadhu stands at Papasanam Beach

Make Pooja at Papanasum Beach

Abutting Varkala Beach to the south is Papanasum Beach, which is considered a holy site for Hindus to honor theirdead. The waters here are considered sacred and instilled with the power to wash away the sins of anyone who bathes in them. In the service of making pooja, or offerings, are many sadhus (holy men) who set up shop on the beach under colorful umbrellas. They display their various wares on raised beds of sand and will create an offering of flowers, fruit, and ashes they make by burning herbs and sticks while saying prayers. The offerings are wrapped in a banana leaf for the devotee to carry to the sea where the tide will take them out and then usually wash them back up, but it’s mostly biodegradable.

I asked a sadhu if I could take his photo (and you should always ask, especially if the person is in the middle of a religious ritual), which he seemed happy to let me do. After I clicked a couple of photos and showed them to him, he asked me if I wanted to perform a ritual for an ancestor. I thought he said 5 rupees after I asked the price, so I dug out a 10 and told him to keep the change. “Five hundred,” he said a little more loudly. Oooh, well, I love my grandmother, but she was Catholic, and I can usually light a candle in a church for under a buck. I apologized and said I didn’t have enough money with me and offered for him to keep the 10 rs piece, but he declined, smiling at me like I was a little daft. I’m not sure if I would have felt comfortable carrying the offering out to the sea with the true believers, but given the non-discriminatory policy of the sadhus, I’m sure it’s been done.

Massage/Ayurvedic Treatments

Namasthe Ayurvedic Mission
I got the uro basti treatment here as a woman in my yoga class had recommended it for calming the heart and attendant emotions, but it’s more for angina-like pain symptoms in the heart. Regardless, it sounded fun to try but ended up being a little painful as the attendant was not well trained and kept making the oil too hot. I told her repeatedly that the oil, which I could hear spattering in the pan over the stove in our treatment room, was too hot, but she could not seem to correct on a consistent basis. The result was that the treatment was a little stressful, and I emerged with a big red spot on my chest from the oil being overheated.
Note: any professional Ayurvedic center will not let a patient self-diagnose and order treatments, and typically any treatment will require multiple sessions before there is an effect.

Ksetra Ayurveda
There’s a barker who stands out on the street next to the Tibetan Restaurant handing out fliers, and I was lured in by the 500 rs massage offer. Aside from the place being little dirty, the massage was very good and the masseur was well trained. I asked to use the restroom after the massage ended, and I was directed to go through another massage room where a nude woman was in the middle of getting her massage, so I can’t recommend the facilities for anyone who might be shy.

view of varkala beach — The view from a cliff restaurant.

Eat

Tibetan Restaurant and German Bar
Good food but rude treatment by one of the waiters who would not stop aggressively flirting with me both inside the dining room and once when I ran into him outside the restaurant. I felt so uncomfortable on my second visit there that I stopped going, which is a shame because the view of the ocean was one of the best on the cliff.

Coffee Temple
Open at 6:30 am. Great coffee and desserts as well as wood-fired pizza. The veggie burger is ok, but nothing spectacular. Homemade ice cream was a treat that was not overly sweet.

ABBA Restaurant & Everest German Bakery
German bakery items and good food all around. Nice views of the ocean, courteous and professional wait staff.

Cafe Del Mar
Great food at reasonable prices (for the cliff); efficient, unobtrusive service; delicious fresh seafood in the evening.

The Juice Shack
This place had good juice and soup, which I appreciated when I arrived with a cold, but I stopped going after my second visit when my waiter casually picked his nose while taking my order.

See

Janardanaswamy Temple in Varkala — Janardanaswamy Temple

Janardanaswamy Te mple
Just inland from Papanasum Beach, there is a huge scum-covered pond where worshippers bathe and across the street is the long flight of steps to the 2000-year old Janardanaswamy Temple. While approaching the temple, I kept hearing a startlingly loud noise that sounded like a gun firing, but I assumed it was construction work because no one else seemed to be paying attention. On my way up the temple steps, after depositing my shoes at the slipper counter, I learned the source after I paid what I assumed was an entry fee but was actually an offering so that this gentleman would light what looked like a large firework to announce my visit to the gods. At least Vishnu would not be still be wearing his house coat when I made it to the top of those steps.

You will need to pay a fee to use your camera, and it may be worth it to be able to take a photo of the collection of baby dolls suspended from ribbons from a huge banyan tree. As always, don’t take photos of worshippers. Non-Hindus are not allowed inside the temple.

Beaches
Aside from Varkala and Papasanum, there are miles of beaches to the south to explore. I never went further south than Papasanum as I wasn’t sure how safe it was, but it seemed much less crowded. As for entry and exit points, I am not sure; the beach is impassable at high tide from Papasanum.

Trivandrum

Since India achieved independence in 1947, the governments of more than 100 cities have changed the names from the colonial to the native versions. Now officially known as Trivananthapurum, Trivandrum is what most people still call the capital of Kerala. Despite having the largest population of any city in Kerala, Trivandrum is known as the most relaxed capital in all of India. However, the downside of it not being overwhelming is that it’s a little underwhelming, so don’t feel bad if all you have is two and a half days—that’s all the time you need to see the main sights and to eat some delicious, authentic south Indian thalis.

Getting there

Trivandrum has a major airport, and flights from Cochin barely have time to get off the ground before they have to land. I opted for the train, which takes about an hour from Varkala Beach and passes pleasantly through typical Keralan countryside of green fields and banana tree farms. It rained the entire way down, which made the passing countryside even more beautiful.

Once off the train, be sure to ignore the rickshaw drivers who meet you in the lobby—they will try to scam a high fare. Instead, proceed directly to the pre-paid cab counter outside. A 200 rs fare offered in the lobby dropped sharply to 30 rs at the pre-paid counter.

Do

Spa

My hotel offered Ayurvedic treatments, but after the heartburn of my last experience, I decided instead to get a Swedish massage at the Naturals spa near the Carmel Hill Monastery Church. My massage was thorough and relaxed me for the upcoming train ride that evening, and it was a nice change to smell like almond oil instead of medicated oil used in Ayurvedic massage. The lip and bikini wax were expertly done (she warned me they had no cold European wax, but she was fast), and the pedicure de-nastified my feet after a week walking the beach at Varkala. Total price: 2100 rs, including the hour massage.

Eat/Coffee

Ariya Nivas Hotel
Manorama Rd, Opp to Railway Station, Thampanoor

This is the place all the tour books and online guides recommend, and it didn’t disappoint. I went for dinner on my night in town, and as there’s no thali at night, I ordered the masala dosa. I was presented with a dosa as long as my arm, and it was perfect. Right up the street from the central railway station, it’s a great place to stop for breakfast if you’ve just hopped off a long train ride with nothing but crappy railway food the night before.

Hotel Arulakum
Railway Station Rd, Pulimoodu, Overbridge, Santhi Nagar, Pulimoodu

This place came recommended by a native son of Trivandrum, and while spoken English was scarce, there wasn’t much need for it as the thali was the only thing anyone was ordering. I skipped the buttermilk that came with it but everything on my plate was superb.

Indian Coffee House Maveli Cafe in Trivandrum — Maveli Cafe

Indian Coffee House Maveli Cafe
Near K.S.R.T.C. Stand, Overbridge, Thampanoor

Probably the oddest cafe I have ever visited, this place just across from the central railway station. The building is several stories tall but with a spiraling ramp inside that winds up past ascending cafe tables until it reaches a main kitchen several “floors” up. The waiters must have calves like racing cyclists because it was not an easy climb to the top, which is how far as I had to go to find a table in this busy cafe. Aside from coffees and teas, there are curries, sandwiches, and desserts, all for very reasonable prices.

See

Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple
West Nada, Fort, East Fort, Pazhavangadi

While you won’t be able to enter unless you profess to be Hindu, it’s worth a visit just to walk around this stately temple built in Keralan and Dravidian style. Primarily devoted to Vishnu, there are treasures stored in its vaults estimated to be worth over $15 billion, which makes it the richest temple in the world.

Puthenmalika Palace Museum
Padmanabhaswamy Temple Road, Near East Fort, Pazhavangadi, Fort, East Fort, Pazhavangadi

Worth a visit just to see the building itself, this palace is filled with beautiful photos of historic figures as well as important artifacts. A good guided tour is part of the entry fee (50 rs), but photography and wandering off alone is not allowed.

Matsya Kanyaka in Trivandrum — Matsya Kanyaka

Matsya Kanyaka next to Shangumugham Beach
About 8 km west of city center next to the airport

Whenever I would ask someone what the best beach in Trivandrum was, they would tell me to go to Kovalam Beach, which is about 20 km south of the center and not actually in Trivandrum. I didn’t feel like venturing that far out of town, so I took an auto rickshaw to Shangumugham to catch the sunset and check out Matsya (from Sanskrit for “fish”) Kanyaka. This 30-meter-long mermaid sculpture was created by the famous artist Kanayi Kunhiraman, the Raja Shilpi (royal sculptor) of Kerala, out of a single piece of stone.

Many families gather here to let the kids ride on ponies or frolic in the nearby children’s park, and vendors have small stalls set up to sell snacks, drinks, and plastic toys. It’s a nice, safe place to relax and watch the invariably spectacular sunset over the India Ocean while mingling with locals. Adjacent to the mermaid statue is a coffee house selling all kinds of south Indian snacks and drinks, and rickshaws are easy to come by in the parking lot outside when it’s time to go home.

If I had to do it over again, I would have stayed in Varkala Beach only four nights, hung in Trivandrum for a couple days, and then headed down to Kovalam for four nights before leaving the area. The beaches south are supposed to be stunning, and then as long as you’re down that far why not keep going to the tip of India in Tamil Nadu where three oceans converge at Kanyakumari. Sometimes I wonder if Indians believe in reincarnation because one lifetime in this beautiful country is not enough.

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Varkala Beach and adjoining Papanasam Beach are places that inspire the faithful. Each morning while the fishing boats are still beyond the break, worshipers gather to offer puja, or worship, at the edge of the sea. Holy men set up ephemeral kiosks atop coffin-sized beds of packed sand and sit shaded by colorful umbrellas to burn offerings in memory of loved ones—for a fee, of course. Their customers include some women but mostly men clad only in dhotis who make their way to the ocean’s side with garlands of flowers or offerings wrapped in banana leaves. Here they briefly immerse themselves in waters reputed to have healing powers and scatter their prayers in the lapping waves.

Perhaps it is this atmosphere of healing and cleansing that has inspired the clustering of Ayurvedic treatment centers, resorts, and spas, which are concentrated along Varkala cliff. Visitors cannot walk more than fifty feet without encountering some business venture offering treatment, and barkers stand on the sidewalk handing out flyers promoting relief from every kind of malady: piles, insomnia, sexual dysfunction, hair loss, skin conditions, and even paralysis.

In the face of this rampant commercialism where cures for disease are aggressively peddled alongside tee shirts and statues of gods, it’s hard for me not to want to walk away from it all in disgust, including my scheduled two and a half weeks of panchakarma treatment later this month. But I don’t want to give up just yet; I came for the specific purpose of receiving this treatment, and I am too stubborn not to see it through.

Understanding that I can be stubborn, I have been questioning my beliefs about natural healing and how many of my long-held assumptions came into being. My grandmother used to ask her dinner guests to refrain from discussing sex, politics, or religion at her dinner table as these topics were likely to invite controversy and ruin digestion. To that short list I would add health beliefs, as what we eat and how we heal ourselves can be very emotional topics. There is nothing more personal than how we take care of our bodies, and in this age of diminishing religious faith, health and dietary practices seem almost to have taken the place of theism.

My fascination and sometimes blind acceptance of natural medicine can be traced to my mother and her siblings’ beliefs in alternative healing, which ran counter to the conventional beliefs held by the older generations in my family where many of the men were doctors. The relatives of mine who rejected, to a greater or lesser extent, conventional medicine, were also children of the sixties, when the counter culture embraced natural remedies over the conventional medicine of their parents. One sibling became a chiropractor, one became a psychologist (which was on par with becoming a snake handler in my family), one studied herbology and Mayan uterine massage, and my mother turned vegetarian in her teens and advocated natural foods, vitamins, and alternative healing remedies all her life. I was raised drinking goat’s milk and remember arguing with a science teacher when I was fifth grade that non-organic vegetables had been robbed of their nutrient value and thus we needed to use vitamins as supplements (both my mother and the teacher have later been vindicated; studies have shown organic vegetables to have higher nutrient values but also that vitamin supplements are not necessary unless the diet is extremely poor).

Realizing the foundation for my beliefs has made it easier for me to let go of them, or at least to evaluate them non-sentimentally. But there are lots of reasons that people have for believing in alternative healing modalities aside from growing up in a family of conservative Republican doctors. Here are a few that I have culled from a book I read recently called Trick or Treatment (Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst, M.D), which seeks to examine the scientific evidence behind many modalities of natural healing, including widely accepted therapies like acupuncture and chiropracty.

Doctors
Motivated either out of ignorance of the lack of scientific evidence, laziness in wanting to give patients “something” to hold them over until nature heals the problem, or in hopes that the placebo effect will help the patients, doctors are one reason the authors give for people believing in unproven therapies. I have had doctors recommend homeopathic remedies to me on several occasions, and I’m not just talking about some shady quack at an emergency medical clinic (a “doc in a box”), I am talking about doctors from respected healthcare networks in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Similarly, in the UK, either from the reasons cited above or for its fondness for alternative therapies encouraged by Prince Charles, roughly half of all practicing doctors had arranged for acupuncture sessions for their patients according to a 2002 British Medical Association report.

The Media
The book brought up a particularly painful example of how the media is quick to cover sensationalist alternative medical “cures” with lack of proper investigative reporting into the scientific studies underlying them. In 1993, 60 Minutes ran a program called “Sharks Don’t Get Cancer” which reported on the promising possibility of shark cartilage as a miracle cure for cancer. This program aired at the time just after my grandmother had been diagnosed with cervical cancer, and my uncle encouraged her to buy and drink the expensive supplement as part of her daily routine. She hated it, but she was dying, so someone got rich off her desperation. Luckily she did not eschew conventional cancer treatments, so she got a few more years after a grim diagnosis.

The World Health Organization
The widely respected WHO has published two studies over the years upholding the efficacy of acupuncture despite there being no definitive scientific trials: Acupuncture: the WHO view (1979); and Acupuncture: Review and analysis of reports on controlled clinical trials (2003).

For the second report, the WHO took into consideration almost every trial ever conducted, which seems like a good thing on first impression, but the quality of those trials varied widely. The organization also took into consideration many sub-par Chinese trials which were almost always positive as the validation of acupuncture in China is politically motivated and negative studies are often unpublished. Further, the WHO panel evaluating the paper did not include a single critic of acupuncture.

It is these papers and their frequent citation that have led me, as one of many, to believe in the validity of a treatment despite the fact that it has not been backed up by trustworthy clinical trials. Throw in the fact that major insurance companies cover these treatments, and it is natural to assume this modality is valid.

The argument from practitioners of natural healing is that research into conventional medicines is influenced by money from pharmaceutical companies who strive only to increase their stock price at the risk of the health of those they profess to serve. We have all seen the drug commercials with the happy narrator’s voice reading through a list of side effects which are often more serious than the disease, and then later the commercials that advertise for prior users to join class action suits after the “miracle drugs” are pulled from the market.

Similarly, there are plenty of examples from academia where egos got in the way of new theories that undermined long held beliefs. Read Sapolsky’s excellent book Behave for a short history of the struggle in neuroscience circles for acceptance that the brain can change after birth, which is now the commonly held understanding.

Even if our professional reputations are not tied to our beliefs, it’s still hard to let go of them. They make us who we are, in many ways, and it takes a healthy ego let go of what no longer makes sense. It’s also very difficult to know what exactly is the “truth” when scientific findings are either supported or undermined by new evidence on a regular basis because, well, it’s science. I just read in the New York Times that fish oils are no longer believed to help with heart conditions despite prior studies showing the reverse and millions of dollars being spent on this supplement (which still may help with depression and other ailments, but that will take further study). Sometimes it makes me want to pull out my hair in frustration, but I will have to resist the urge—I don’t think the Ayurvedic clinic down the street can help me grow it back.

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Month

November 2017