There are tons of herb shops in India, but the trick is to know which ones will sell you the best medicine and how to find them in a country that often relies on landmarks more than physical addresses for location.
Arya Vaidya Pharmacy Herbs, my most precious souvenir from India
After I left Kerala, I didn’t want to carry a bunch of bottles of liquid around with me while traveling around north India, so I decided to buy the herbs once back in Mumbai. I had Googled a couple of places that advertised herbs, but I was disappointed to find the three shops I visited did not offer the ones my doctor had prescribed. “Those are South Indian,” the shop keeps told me.
Frustrated, I decided to try again in Delhi, but this time I had a cheat sheet a friend had given me with a list of Arya Vaidya Sala locations, although many of the places listed were far from my Karol Bagh hotel. I took a chance searching on Google maps, and I ended up finding an Arya Vaidya Sala (AVS) herb shop very close to my hotel that was not on the list but had everything I needed.
Now, you may have read me griping about Arya Vaidya Sala when I traveled to the Pancha Karma center in Kottakal for a treatment, but their herbs are very high quality and trustworthy. Arya Vaidya Sala runs an efficient, highly streamlined business in India, and in the case of getting quality herbs, they are the only outlet I know well enough to trust, although that is not to say there are other high quality herbs out there.
You can find these herb shops in every major city and even in some small villages, especially in Kerala, and since I’ve returned home, I’ve discovered a list of distributors on the Arya Vaidya Sala Kottakal website. This list would have been helpful while I was trudging around north Mumbai neighborhoods, completely lost with my Google maps telling me I was standing on top of a shop that was actually three blocks away, but at least I can share these tips with you now. (Note: don’t be afraid to ask for directions if you get lost—India is still very much a work in progress as far as accurate mapping.)
My list is somewhat different from the list of distributors on the AVS website, and I’m not sure why that is but I can vouch for The Arya Vaidya Pharmacy in Karol Bagh (see shop under New Delhi below). Everything else on this list is an unknown, so be sure to give them a call first for best results.
You cannot ship liquid herbs back from India, but you can fly with them in your checked bags. I packed up about $25 dollars worth of herbs next to about $500 in clothing and fabrics in my big suitcase and hoped for the best, but I took extra precautions to make sure the liquids were double sealed in plastic ziplock bags, then double sealed again in heavy-duty trash bags, and then wrapped up entirely in clear packing tape. While this might sound like a lot of precaution, I was happy I took the time to pack my herbs properly as one of the bottles (these have somewhat flimsy metal tops) leaked on the way home, but it never got out of my sealed bags to ruin my clothes. Indian herbal liquids will ruin your clothing if you get a spill, so be sure to pack carefully.
Buying Indian Herbs outside of India
Once you are back home, there are some options for ordering Ayurvedic herbs online, and Arya Vaidya Pharmacy is leading the way in international distribution as well. A Google search for the formulation will typically yield some good results for me, although I am not able to find the exact formulations (yet) that my doctor in Kerala prescribed. Luckily, she is able to work with me to find good substitutes that are available in the United States, so I recommend following that approach as there are often a variety of formulations available to use as a substitute.
For simple herbs like the Ashwaganda or Triphala I take daily, I love Banyan Botanicals for their powdered herbs (they also sell pills & liquids, but powder is best). However, I have not found an outlet online that delivers the complex Ayurvedic formulations called for by Ayurvedic doctors in India.
In the heavily touristed areas of southern Kerala, the insincere and exaggerated claims put forth by many less scrupulous practitioners can be an exhausting distraction when looking for authentic Ayurvedic care. Everywhere one turns, it seems, there spas and billboards claiming to be able to cure all diseases, extend mortality, and restore youth. As I began again in my search for an authentic practitioner, I was becoming skeptical that I would ever find “real Ayurveda.”
While my sneha paana treatment with Dr. Raj had been authentic in that he didn’t cater to tourists looking for massages rather than medicine, all that time spent suffering the strict diet and ghee drinking failed to pass the simple test of alleviating any of my symptoms. Still, I felt I needed to give a full course of pancha karma a chance before going home, if for no other reason than thoroughness; it was what I set out to do when I started this blog, and I didn’t feel I could make a fair judgment about Ayurveda without the experience.
In my search for a provider, I returned to scour industry-related Facebook groups, AYUSH recognized hospitals, Green Leaf certified clinics, and traveler review websites. I cannot overstate how difficult it is to find a good pancha karma clinic that is both authentic and provides treatments at a reasonable price. Those two criteria immediately eliminated all the fancy spas and resorts from my list, but there were still dozens of choices to sift through. After many emails and phone calls with several top treatment centers, each of which had a price tag averaging in the $100+/day range, I finally found Dr. Bina through her high ratings on a travel website.
While most Ayurvedic centers I corresponded with recommended 21-28 days treatment in order to reach a “cure” (sometimes even before I explained my symptoms), Dr. Bina told me that two and a half weeks should be plenty for my “mild” conditions, and that, while she thought we could see some good effects, she was was not making any false claims she could provide a cure. Her honesty in setting my expectations about results was the main reason I chose her center for treatment, but there was also the price, which was about half of what I was quoted everywhere else: only 70,000 rs ($1087) for the treatments, room, and board for 19 days.
When I arrived at the center around noon on the first day, Dr. Bina was there to greet me and chatted with me as I ate the delicious homemade vegetarian lunch they provided. She then left me to unpack in one of two guestrooms upstairs where there was also a treatment room, cook’s quarters, living room, and dining area. She and her husband, a government Ayurvedic doctor who also consulted on treatments, lived with their young daughter in the lower unit of the spacious residential duplex, so she was never more than an instant message away when I needed anything.
My first treatment, an abhyanga massage, was administered expertly by the only therapist at the center, a woman in her late 50s named Anna. When I remarked later how strong Anna’s hands were, Dr. Bina told me that she had worked hard as a laborer while raising her daughter alone after her husband died tragically during her pregnancy. After years of odd jobs, Anna had come to be a PK therapist after Ayurveda cured her from a serious disease. Dr. Bina spoke of how difficult it was to find a committed therapist who had both “the hands and the heart,” but Anna had both. Unlike many of the massages I had experienced, she seemed completely present and aware during her treatments, and I felt something like love coming from her hands: for me and for the practice.
The chief complaints I presented with were the recurring insomnia, although I’d largely gotten it under control with help from daily meditation; constipation with any change in diet or routine, which was a bothersome issue while traveling; emotional excesses such as anger, impatience, and anxiety; both dryness and inflammation of the skin, which my dermatologists had shrugged off as rosacea; and pain in my fingers and hands, usually after typing, that felt like the beginning of joint issues or maybe carpal tunnel. In short, I was middle aged.
Despite well-groomed case of hypochondria, Dr. Bina told me I was pretty healthy, but that I had somevata (one of the three main doshas, or energies) imbalances that led to the dryness, insomnia, anxiety, and joint pain. She also noted a healthy dose of pitta in my doshic makeup that tended toward its own set of disorders, such as the inflammation of my skin, the pre-hypertension, the anger, and the impatience.
For these imbalances, she suggested the following plan, with modifications to come as we saw how I progressed.
The Treatment Plan
Abhyanga: whole body massage with oil. Six days.
This massage technique consists of long, vigorous strokes up and down the body in an effort to stimulate the internal organs and improve circulation. There are copious amounts of oil used, which softens the skin and is part of the “sneha” (oleation) process preceding PK. Abhyanga is thought to help with sleep and to aid in longevity.
As someone used to having massages in the US, I was surprised and unabashedly delighted to discover that traditional Indian massage includes massaging the breast area, usually with long strokes that include the arms and go down to the belly or ankles. It’s healthy for the breast and surrounding lymphatic tissue to be massaged regularly, and it’s a good addition for women to include in their daily practice of abhyanga self-massage.
Jambeera Pinda Swedam: application of poultice with medicinal powders, lemon—jambeera—and coconut. Three days.
I thought I was going to miss the abhyanga, but the poultice treatment was a lovely substitute. Each morning, Anna cooked up a batch of herbs in oil with lemons and crushed coconut, which she wrapped in a tight muslin poultice. During the treatment, she dipped the poultice in oil before rubbing it over my body with deep strokes that felt like a cross between a massage and an exfoliation treatment. The smell is heavenly, and the slightly coarse texture of the muslin left my skin feeling silky soft.
Patra Potala Swedam: application of poultice with medicinal leaves—patra—lemon, and coconut. Four days.
This treatment is the same as the one above but incorporates the addition of medicinal leaves as the primary ingredient. These “swedam,” or heat treatments, use hot oil to prepare the body for PK. As Dr. Bina explained, the body must be both lubricated (“sneha”), either internally, externally, or both and steamed with warm oil or water (swedam). When it comes time for the actual treatment, the body will be pliable enough to fully receive the medications.
Nasyam: instilling liquid medication through nostrils. Six days.
Anna gave me this treatment in the morning a couple of hours before the abhyanga. After she massaged my face, chest, and back with a mentholated substance, I would deeply inhale from a steamer to open up the sinuses and bronchial areas. Then she would tilt back my head back to drop up to six drops of medicated ghee into my nose, which she would have me sniff deeply to draw in but not swallow, which was a difficult reflex to suppress. Instead I had to spit it out into a container until my saliva no longer tasted of ghee, which usually lasted only a few minutes.
Sirodhara: pouring warm oil on the forehead continuously for 45 mins. Seven days.
The poster child of Ayurvedic massages for good reason. This technique involves a stream of warmed oil pouring over the forehead for 45 minutes, which is exactly as hypnotic as it sounds. I was not supposed to go to sleep during the session, but a few times I couldn’t help dozing off as my body and mind reached total relaxation.
Vasthi: a combination of five oil enemas and three decoction enemas where a special medicated liquid will be inserted through the anus. Four days.
This treatment and the virechana (below) are the main PK treatments which all others have been leading up to and will begin shortly after this blog post goes live.
Virechana: purgation therapy aimed at eliminating excess pitta dosha from the small intestine, liver, and gall bladder. One day.
Not originally part of the treatment regimen, she added a mild virechana PK treatment after I arrived as I had more pitta imbalance than she originally thought.
The Medications
I started on all three medications immediately, and all were provided free of charge. In addition to the diet and massage, these were used to prepare the body for the PK (Vasthi).
Gandharvahastadi Kashayam: used to treat digestive issues and bring vata dosha under control. After 5 days, we switched to Guloochiaddi Kashayam, which is indicated to clear liver heat in case of high pitta dosha.
Ashwagandharishtam: used to soothe neurological disorders (anxiety).
Gandharvahasta Tailam: a castor-oil based liquid used to treat vata digestive and neurological disorders.
Medicated ghee starting on the 4th day with 20 ml, increasing to 50 ml by day 10, which was the day before virechana. Post virechana treatment, we returned to 20 ml.
A typical lunch
The Diet
I knew the diet was going to be vegetarian as non-veg foods are too heavy for any PK diet, and I also expected it to be a little bland and pretty restricted. I could not have been more wrong. Each meal was a south Indian specialty, and the subtle flavors and complex but mild spices did not leave me missing the spicy, salty, and oily diet I had become accustomed to while eating in restaurants since my last treatment. Dr. Bina even let me have raw fruit, although raw vegetables were not part of the plan. South Indians just don’t do salads, she told me, and besides raw vegetables were hard to digest, which was not allowed during treatment.
She also dealt me the blow of no more coffee—not ever—due to its heating and drying properties and how much it increased stress and blood pressure, which were two things of the issues I was battling. I think she noticed how saddened I was by this news because she relented to giving me a nice thermos of chai early each morning to ease my SBS (shy bowel syndrome). When she first started the clinic, she had her patients follow a stricter diet, but then noticed they were becoming even more stressed out by the deprivation. She now allows for some small joys, such as oil, some spice, some fruit, and a little caffeine as long as the patient’s condition is not too severe.
Typical meals were as follows:
Breakfast: a south Indian specialty like rice noodles (Iddyapam) with coconut milk, puttu (steamed rice and coconut rolls) with curry, or rice pancake rolls stuffed with shredded coconut. Rice and coconut are common and beloved staples in this part of India, and they provide sweetness in a diet that does not include refined sugar. If these dishes sound bland or boring, I can assure you they are not, despite their simplicity.
Lunch: the largest meal of the day, as the digestive strength (or agni, fire) is considered highest at this time in Ayurveda. At first they were serving me white rice until I requested brown, which puzzled them as brown rice is considered inferior and is often fed to animals, and they proudly had been serving me the best white rice available. I explained that I wanted the extra nutrients and fiber with brown rice, so they accommodated my eccentricity with good humor. In addition to the rice, they usually served a soupy coconut-based curry along with a couple of vegetable masalas, and fresh fruit for dessert.
Dinner: whole wheat chapatis with a simple vegetable curry. Whole fruit dessert along with fruit juice, although I cancelled the juice later because I wanted to reduce my calorie intake.
The neighbors
The Results
Each day I have kept a journal, and, looking back, it was on day five that I started to feel really relaxed and at peace. My skin, oiled each day during treatment, has taken on a lustrous quality, and my hands looked younger. It will doubtless return to a drier state once I stop the daily oleation treatments, but for now I’m enjoying it. The inflammation has lessened but still remains.
My sleep, pretty good before I arrived, has deepened to a level I haven’t felt since I was in my 20s. It’s so good, I don’t even want to tell my other friends in their 40s who almost all complain of having lost the ability to sleep through the night.
Of course, my main issue is stress, and there is none of that here. The house sits back from the main road over a quarter mile and backs up to wetlands framed by palm trees in the far distance, so there is no noise other than bird song, the bleating of goats as a herd wanders by, and children playing in the adjacent field. All my meals are prepared, my room cleaned daily, my clothing washed, and my body manipulated into relaxation every day by someone else’s hands, so I have nothing to do aside from read, write, do yoga, and take gentle walks. The test will come when I return to the real world, and Dr. Bina has warned me that conditions that got better often worsen again after her patients go back to their old environments and perhaps old habits, so it will take discipline to maintain a lifestyle that will allow me maximum benefits from the treatment.
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.
A view of Varkala Beach from the south end of the cliff path
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.
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.
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.
Cafe Del Mar
Great food at reasonable prices (for the cliff); efficient, unobtrusive service; delicious fresh seafood in the evening.
The JuiceShack
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
Janardanaswamy Temple
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.
Rainy train ride to Trivandrum
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After suffering through an Ayurvedic treatment that not only required me to adhere to a limited diet but also to restrict my exercise to gentle walking for several weeks, I was ready to get out and stretch my legs. The mountain country of the Western Ghats a few hours southeast was calling me, so as soon as I was released from my doctor’s care, I hopped a train south to make my way toward the hill station of Wayanad.
To take me from the coastal train station in Calicut (also known but never called by its new non-Imperialist name Kozhikode) to the interior, I had hired a private car for about $30. The mountain pass that led to Wayanad had nine notorious hairpin turns that I had been warned about with no little bit of anxiety from my previous home stay host, and I was glad that I had arranged for a car once I saw the steep windy road that traversed the mountain range. I dared not look down the entire time, but instead rehearsed my mantra, “The driver is a professional, he knows what he’s doing,” over and over. That same mantra came in handy when I departed the area by way of the local bus back to Calicut instead of a private car. I had wanted to save some money, and the bus back to the train station was less than $2, but I spent the entire time questioning if my life was not worth more than $28 as I held onto the metal bar on top of the seat in front of me with whitened knuckles while the driver split lanes on blind curves all the way down the mountain. No one else on the bus seemed to be affected, but I frequently had to remind myself to breathe.
Despite the difficult passage, I’d do it all over again for a chance to glimpse an Asiatic elephant in the wild or to see the mists pooled like lakes in the valleys of the mountain ranges burn off as I ascended one of the most famous peaks in the region, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I had gone for trekking, mainly, which is a relatively expensive solo activity, especially as I was not interested in squandering precious hours of my visit sitting on long bus rides. Also there is the issue of being a lone female in a strange, non-urban area, so I had to hire guides and drivers to accompany me on my adventures. While Wayanad seemed like a big splurge at the time, my costs for activities averaged around $40 a day, and I saw some beautiful sights I will not soon forget.
What I did:
Phantom Rock, so named for its phantom-skull shape
Sunday Through my home stay host, I had arranged for a tuk-tuk driver to pick me up late morning, and for a mere 700 rs ($10.50) he drove me around for the rest of the day, primarily to see the famous pre-historic carvings at the Eddakal Caves.Once there, the admission cost was negligible, but there was a steep hike of about 1 km and then lots of stairs to the entrance to the caves. I saw more than one grandma being pushed up by helpful relatives on the way, but the climb was not that bad and the exquisitely preserved carvings (circa 6000 BC) were a fine reward. The views from the top were also spectacular and made great selfie opportunities, although no photography of the carvings inside the cave was allowed.
On the way to the caves, the driver made a brief stop at the unusual natural formation called Phantom Rock, which is an easy half kilometer walk up a hill. At the top there are lovely views of the two valleys on either side of the ridge as well as of the rock itself.
Plenty to look at if the game gets boring at Krishnagiri Stadium
The locals are very proud of their impressive new Krishnagiri Stadium, which is the highest altitude stadium devoted solely to cricket, and my driver was keen to show it to me on the way home. It a beautiful if not somewhat incongruously located place to watch sports, and it draws teams and fans from all over Kerala. If you are in the neighborhood, it is worth a quick drive up to see the players practicing with the stunning mountain peaks framing the lush green fields. Almost makes me wish I understood cricket.
Monday
My driver arrived around 10 am for a full day that would start with a visit to Soochipara Falls in the morning and then a long drive to Mulanga Wildlife Santuary for the afternoon Jeep safari. We had a lot of ground to cover, so he told me not to take too much time hiking into the falls. Luckily, the path to Soochipara is not nearly as strenuous or as crowded as the one to Eddakal Caves, so it was easy to make it to the pools at the foot of the falls in about 10 minutes. There was a slippery climb into the pools but the water was clean and cold, and luckily my driver had prepared for me to return soaked after jumping in with all of my clothes on (this ain’t California, folks), which is almost required for all except for the fussiest visitors.
Don’t deny yourself a dip in the cool waters at the base of Soochipara Falls
After my brief dip in the “healing waters” of the falls, we had enough time to stop by the Ananthanatha Swamy Jain Temple on the way to the wildlife sanctuary. The stone carvings surrounding the 13th century temple are in excellent condition, and although visitors are not allowed into the inner sanctum of the temple, I was able to walk around the raised platform surrounding the building to get a clear view inside. The entire structure is made of granite, and it’s considered one of the most important Jain temples in Kerala.
My driver had told me not to take too much time at the temple as we were aiming to arrive at Mulanga Wildlife Sanctuary by 2:30 pm, which was half an hour before the safari tickets went on sale. There are only two opportunities per day to go on Jeep safari, and, as it is the only way tourists are allowed to access the sanctuary, the tickets usually sell out right away.
The beautifully preserved carvings of Ananthanatha Swamy Jain Temple
After we arrived, my driver sent me to the ticket office where there were about twenty people already waiting to queue up. Once the ticket window opened, there was a lot of jostling and some fights over line cutting, but I politely held my ground until I reached the window. Being solo, I was put with a two-Jeep group composed of a couple of families traveling together, and they didn’t seem too happy about having me along, but I just smiled a lot and acted oblivious to their obvious disgust as I trespassed on their family affair.
One of the gentlemen in the group spoke English pretty well, and he asked me the usual question of where my husband was. “I’m alone,” I responded, whereupon the women in the group started to giggle and talk among themselves in Malayalam, and while I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I got the gist. I started to make up stories in my head about what I was going to say the next time the dreaded, “Where is your husband?” question popped up, but I didn’t have too much time to ruminate on my answer because we saw our first elephant, six-foot tusks and all, as we rounded the corner.
Maybe if I hide behind this tree the humans won’t see me…
Our guide slowed the Jeep to take a closer look, and suddenly the beautiful beast decided he’d had enough of our staring and, more quickly than you would ever think, started to charge straight toward us. Our driver immediately threw the Jeep into gear to speed us away, but for a thrilling moment it looked like the elephant was going straight for the ladies in the back of the vehicle. After that, there was no more complaining from them about how there “weren’t enough animals,” and the adrenaline rush I felt lasted until well after the tour was over.
By the time the ride was over, we had seen three elephants, but I heard that we were lucky. There were also some spotted deer and a few jungle bees nests, but the likelihood of seeing a tiger or some other big game animal was almost nil, which was probably for the best. Our guide told us that the best time to go was January through June after the monsoon was long past and the water deep within the jungle had become scarce enough to drive the animals toward watering holes close to the road the Jeeps followed.
Tuesday The highest peak within a reasonable distance of Kalpetta is Chembra Peak, and it was second on my list of places to go after Mulanga despite the hefty price tag of almost $50 for a half day tour. I could have save $15 by not hiring a guide, but I wanted to be on the safe side while climbing in unknown territory.
There are only 20 groups let in per day, and each group can number no more than 10 people, so it never gets too crowded, but weekdays are still best for escaping the crowds. The park opened at 7 am, so we got there shortly afterward to beat the crowds as well as the climbing sun and temperatures. The entrance fee is 1500 rs ($23) per group for foreigners, so I had to pay the entire fee because I saw no other obviously non-Indian tourists at the gate when I approached, and my annoying guide said we should not wait, although I suspected he was hurrying me so he could try to talk me into booking an afternoon tour with him.
View from the top of Mount Chembra
In hindsight, I should have ditched him at the gate. The walk up was strenuous but only a few kilometers each way, and there were park employees posted at regular intervals to make sure visitors kept to the well marked stone paths as well as groups of outdoorsy tourist couples and families, primarily from Europe, the U.S., and Bangalore.
The views on the way up were so lovely that I must have taken fifty photos as the early morning mists burned off to reveal miles of tea plantations in the valleys. There were flying squirrels in the trees, beautiful birds, and butterflies almost in swarms. If it weren’t for the jabbering of my guide, Ramesh,who was as short on knowledge of the flora and fauna as he was long on annoying small talk, the gentle breeze blowing through the tree tops would have been the only sound on the climb up.
“Where is your husband?” he asked, finally getting to my favorite question after “How old are you?” and “How much money do you make in your job?”
“He’s dead,” I responded, hearkening back to the imaginary life I’d created for myself during the socially awkward ride through Muthanga.
“No, no,” he protested, “when this happened?”
“A long time ago, don’t worry about it,” I said, beginning to feel sorry I had lied because now I had to extend the story to respond to his further prying.
“Was it when you were pregnant?” he asked quietly, his voice quavering and his eyes moist.
“No, Ramesh, can we please talk about something else now?” I finally snapped at him, vowing to stick with what amounts to an ugly truth for so many people in this country, at least in the less urbanized areas: I’m divorced.
We managed to get up to the peak and the famous “heart-shaped lake,” but Ramesh warned me not to go into the water because the elephants were just there a couple days before, and the muddy brown color was not due solely to recent rains. We sat on one of the flat granite rocks that formed a perfect seat for viewing the distant mountains and tea plantations, peaceful for a moment until Ramesh decided it was selfie-time. After I sent him a friend request on Facebook, it seemed he had gathered enough evidence of our meeting to head peacefully back down the mountain with me in the lead, and I had to raise my voice to tell him to stop nagging me about one thing or the other only a few more times on the way down.
For next time:
The following were recommended excursions had I stayed longer:
Kuruva Island
Banasura Dam
Karlad Lake
Pookot Lake
Lakkidi view point
Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary
Tip: make the DTPC (District Tourism Promotion Council) your first stop once in Kalpetta. They can give you updated information on tourist places as well as contact information for local guides and tour companies.
Accommodation/Food
Nothing much to recommend here as I was trying to do this pricey area on the cheap. After my short home stay in Kalpetta, I moved up to a decent hotel about 4 km southwest of Kalpetta called Soorya Castle, which had an okay restaurant with hygienically prepared food. The best part was that it was away from the mosques and churches in town, so there was no 5 am wake-up call to prayer or 5:30 am ringing of church bells.
There are tons of restaurants and hotels around Kalpetta for budget travelers, but don’t expect much for your money. The only way to get good food and nice digs is to spend accordingly, and there are plenty of options for luxury resorts with gourmet restaurants out of town, but you will pay handsomely and will also have to spend more on transportation.
During my stay at Amban Guest House in Kannur, Kerala, I had the pleasure of Mrs. Shayana’s tutelage during her preparation of a typical Keralan lunch: fresh fried fish, fish sauce, Sambar dal, and a lovely side vegetable dish of turai. Most of the ingredients, except the fish and some spices, were harvested from the organic garden in front of the heritage home. The fish was freshly caught that morning, and Mrs. S hand selected the nicest ones from the back of the monger’s tuk tuk, much to the delight of the stray cat who wisely knows to haunt the kitchen’s back door late mornings.
Sambar Dal
(All vegetables are medium sized unless otherwise noted, and would tend to be called smallish-medium in the US.)
6 oz toor dal (sometimes known as pigeon pea) 2 potatoes, coarsely chopped 2 tomatoes, coarsely chopped 1 onion, coarsely chopped + ¼ onion, chopped medium-fine
Sambar dal (upper right) and fish sauce (lower left)
5 lady fingers (okra), ¾” slices 1 carrot, ½” slices
1 baby brinjal (eggplant), quartered then cut into ¾” slices 2 kovakka (ivy gourd), ¾” slices 2-4 green chilis, depending on how much heat you want, sliced lengthwise 2 tsp tamarind soaked in warm water for at least five minutes 1 tsp jeera (cumin) seeds 1/2 c fresh shredded coconut 1 pod garlic ½ tsp fenugreek Pinch of hing (asafoetida) 1 tsp salt 1 leaf drumstick (Keralan spice that grows on a Drumstick tree)
For the tadka
3 cloves garlic, crushed
2 kashmiri chilis, whole
½ tsp black mustard seeds
Cook dal in pressure cooker with water to cover for 2 whistles. Add coarse chopped onion, tomato, and potato. Add tumeric and salt. Cook for 2 whistles more.
In a separate pot, cover brinjal, kovakka, and green chilis in water and bring to a simmer for five minutes.
While vegetables simmer, heat a small bit of oil in an kadai or heavy bottomed skillet. Add garlic pod, grated coconut, ¼ onion, jeera, and fenugreek; fry over medium heat, stirring often. After roasted coconut mixture turns deep brown and fragrant, remove from heat and add a pinch of hing. Add to a blender with enough water to make a medium-thick soupy blend.
Add 1 spoon coriander powder, 1 spoon red chili powder to simmering vegetables. Cook ten minutes more. Finish off by adding roasted coconut blend to vegetables; add to dal.
Dal Tadka: A tadka is made by cooking whole spices and aromatics in oil until the fragrance is released.
Heat oil in kadai or iron skillet. Add 3 cloves crushed garlic, 2 kashmiri chilis, and ½ tsp black mustard seeds. Fry until seeds pop. Add to dal and then turn off heat.
Squeezing fresh coconut milk into turai
Turai
Also known as ridge gourd, this delicious vegetable is good for controlling diabetes and weight loss. It is considered a cooling vegetable in Ayurveda and, as such, is good for balancing Pitta disorders.
3 medium turai 2 green chilis, slit length-wise ⅔ c fresh shredded coconut
½ tsp oil Salt
Cut turai length-wise; scrape seeds. Chop coarsely. Put in an uncovered pot with a small amount of water and green chilis. Simmer 10 minutes.
Take ⅓ c. coconut and blend with a little water until milky liquid. Press through strainer into turai that is simmering. Simmer five minutes more; add salt to taste plus ½ tsp oil.
Fish Gravy
½ c grated fresh coconut 1 tomato, coarsely chopped
¼ tsp tumeric
1 tsp red chili powder
3 green chilis, split lengthwise
Add coconut to blender with a little water. Add tumeric and red chili; grind until smooth. Add a little tamarind water; grind until smooth. Add ½-1 c. water. Grind again until thin sauce. Reserve 1 glass.
Pour coconut, tamarind water into bowl with chilis and tomato. Blend reserved glass of liquid with ¼ tst jeera. Put on to simmer.
Add fish pieces (about 1 cup) that have been marinated in red chili, salt, and tumeric to liquid. Simmer 10 minutes.
Fish frying, turai simmering, mouth watering.
Fried fish
Marinate fish in chili, tumeric, and salt for at least an hour. Lightly coat an iron pan in oil and fry over medium-high heat for 10 minutes each side.
After a week on the prescribed diet, it was time for the main treatment: Sneha Paana, or ingestion of medicated ghee.
Typically, ghee drinking is a form of oleation therapy undertaken in preparation for panchakarma, but at times it is used as the treatment in itself. Philosophically, Dr. Rajah believed in treating his patients with the minimal amount of medicine needed to bring about a cure while incurring minimal cost, which made sense to me from the standpoint of logic and economy: why take two pills when one would do the trick, and why pay for more treatment than you needed. According to him, only about 5% of all patients actually needed panchakarma, and I was not one of them.
His philosophy flies in the face of almost everything I have read about detoxing with panchakarma, which is universally prescribed for practically every medical complaint. I found only one source that spoke of treating with ghee alone, while everything else I read explained that ghee was meant to loosen the toxins from the cells so that the panchakarma treatment could finish the job by flushing them out of the body from one of its exit paths, be that the mouth (vamana), anus (virechana and basti), nose (nasya), or through the skin (rakta mokshana) aided by the use of leeches (yikes!).
When I asked Dr. Raj what happened to the toxins if they were not expelled using panchakarma, he said that toxins cannot be simply pushed out—they must be neutralized. As cow ghee has an affinity for human cells since the time of birth, according to Ayurveda, it neutralizes the toxins and makes the cells receptive once again. He said the 5% of cases where panchakarma was recommended were when people had the sickness lodged deep in their viscera, whether that was the stomach, the small intestine, or the large intestine, and he did not think I had that.
He explained that the lack of receptivity in the cells in my body was what had led to my hypertension. While my systolic (when the valve closes) readings were usually fine, my diastolic (when the valve opened) pressure was high. What happened when my heart tried to circulate fresh, healthy blood into my cells was that it was not fully accepted due to the principal of “like attracts like,” and all the cells in my body were a bunch of Brie-eating, Cabernet-swilling, Nicorette-popping rock stars who stubbornly refused to take in any salubrious substances. Like the naughty teenagers I imagined them to be, they had to be lovingly reconditioned to learn to like the annoyingly clean blood circulating in my body all the time now. According to this rationale, my issues with chronic dryness were due to the same root cause: my bratty, party animal cells were on strike until I consumed something toxic they could relate to.
The Protocol
The saying about how nothing worse will happen to you in the day if you eat a frog first thing in the morning is something I kept remembering as I drank ghee on an empty stomach before sunrise.
As much as the taste disgusted me, I was ready to get the treatment over with so I could get back to a regular diet. At that point, I had been eating my own cooking for a week, and while usually I do not mind that, the struggle of trying to cook Indian food without oil, a full repertoire of spices, or decent cookery was starting to be a drag.
Adding to my eagerness to start the treatment were the promises from Dr. Rajah that it would address all my ailments: the hypertension, my dry skin, and—can we talk?—the constipation that was came with following a diet devoid of insoluble fiber. I had been suffering pretty much the entire week before we started the treatment on October 6, so I happily chugged down the 50 ml of ghee (that’s almost a 1/4 cup) on the first morning.
This ghee was not just ordinary ghee, nutty and golden, like the kind you spoon onto your dal for extra flavor. This was Mahathikthakam Ghrutham, which, if you Google it, is supposed to be good for skin and heart conditions, among other things. In addition to the ghee used a base, there are about twenty different herbs that are infused into the fat, which renders it a greenish color and gives it a terrible smell. And while it was pretty easy to slam the initial 50 ml, Dr. Rajah kept ratcheting up the dosage until by day 4, we were up to 150 ml.
Dr. Rajah had told me that the treatment would probably last five days but could go up to seven. On the fourth day as I stood in front of the sink with the last 50 ml of ghee in my glass, I seriously wondered if I was going to be able to get it down. One of the signs of successful oleation is the inability to think about the ghee without becoming nauseated, and I was there by that morning. I finally was able to finish it by imagining that my daughter had been kidnapped and all I had to do was finish this final shot to get her released. I still almost puked.
As the day wore on, I started to get some of the relief that Dr. Rajah had promised me, and by my fifth bathroom report (it’s flattering in a weird way when your doctor wants to hear about your every “move”), he messaged me back to tell me that the treatment had concluded and that I was to scale back to 25 ml the next morning. Pshaw, 25 ml? Piece of cake.
The Results
For the first few days after the treatment, my skin was absolutely glowing, and much of the dryness has disappeared. My hair also felt moisturized despite not using any conditioner, but there’s also a lot of humidity in the air here, and having recently ingested a pound of butter also may have contributed.
As for my blood pressure, I had my first normal reading (diastolic under 90) in a doctor’s office before we began the medicated ghee therapy, so simply changing my diet was enough to bring it down to acceptable readings. In the days that followed the therapy, my diastolic stayed in the low to mid-80’s, although there was one morning when I woke up with anxiety and got a reading of 120/92. That’s nowhere near the 160/110 I had back in Bombay at the doctor’s, but I’m shooting for optimal blood pressure without the use of drugs that only mask the symptoms. Only time will tell if my diastolic will stay low once I return to enjoying some of my favorite foods in moderation, which was not what I was doing when I arrived in Bombay.
I also had issues with constipation again, and that didn’t clear up until I was back to eating insoluble fiber, mostly from raw apples as they were one of the few sources of high insoluble fiber I could find readily in the small north Keralan town where I was doing the treatment.
Nor has my insomnia abated. Although I typically feel rested when I arise at 3 am as long as I am in bed by 9 pm the night before, it’s sub-optimal to keep that schedule. I have the sort of insomnia that will wake me at 3 am regardless of whether I’ve gone to bed at 9 or 10:30 pm, so I conform to its schedule rather than trying to make it go away by staying up later.
I really wanted for this treatment to work. Dr. Rajah and his wife are committed to giving the best care they can for a minimal price, and they focus on treating people first before asking for their nominal fee. Committed to the cause of updating Ayurveda with modern understanding of metabolic processes, they are warriors against solutions proposed by so many healers, either here in India or abroad, that include over medicating and charging outrageous prices.
The only problem was that the treatment did not have the results I was promised. The doctor has asked me to return for a second treatment in December to instill the benefits, which he assured me would build with time. But I need a better response before I do this again—my no-oil cooking is just not good enough to sustain me for another round.
With my blood work panel showing everything as normal, Dr. Rajah explained that there were three phases to his treatment. Phase 1 was the preparatory diet in which the digestive fire, or agni, would be stoked so that I would be able to digest the medicated ghee efficiently during phase 2. The ingestion of ghee (Sneha-paana) during phase 2 was the primary treatment, and its purpose was to lubricate the cells in the body in order to dislodge toxins, which are known to have a sticky quality in Ayurveda. It could last from 5-7 days, and having experienced choking down ghee first thing in the morning in preparation for panchakarma, I prayed for the shorter duration.
Following the ghee treatment, the final phase would be a period of recuperation during which I would follow the same diet protocol as in the first phase while gradually re-introducing prohibited foods. He promised me that my high blood pressure and other complaints would be alleviated if I followed his instructions strictly, and that I would be rejuvenated down to the level of every cell in my body. It helped to keep his words in mind to encourage me as I struggled with the diet in the days that followed.
It was a pretty simple regimen in that I had only to remove anything that takes the act of eating from the mundane to the sublime:
no oil or butter, not even for cooking
no dairy
no fruit, raw or cooked
no raw anything as it’s understood to be hard on digestion in Ayurveda
no meat
no honey or sugar in any form
no bread or bakery products
no beans because of the digestive difficulties they presented, although pulses were fine
nothing metabolized in the liver, like alcohol, nicotine, or drugs, including OTC substances like Ibuprofen. Luckily, I had let go of my last bad habit, nicotine gum, a few weeks before.
He did allow me small amounts of salt and also a little black tea or coffee, the latter of which I had also managed to give up but then started to drink in modest amounts if for no other reason than it seemed a little naughty. And my menu was in serious need of naughty.
At a loss for how to make my usual Indian vegetarian foods, like palak paneer or any subzi (veg dish) cooked in oil, I began to research no-oil recipes online. The best advice I found was to brown the vegetables in a pan while using small amounts of water to keep them from sticking. The broth with the browned veggies would form the base of the curry or soup I was making, and it would be a little more flavorful than simply boiling the vegetables in water. The most helpful websites that I could find invariably catered to people on Candida diets or to those with horrible, incurable diseases.
To complicate matters further, I was in a small village with a limited selection of vegetables, many of which were unfamiliar and sold by vendors with whom I did not share a common language. I took some chances and bought some of the stranger looking ones, like bitter gourd (Karela), which I later determined I could not make palatable without oil, but mostly I stuck to what I knew: beets, okra, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, ginger, onions, garlic, pulses, and basmati rice.
After much experimenting, I was able to cook a decent curry, but I still missed oil. The food was good in a simple, humble way, but lacked the depth and flavor that oil imparts.
There were also restrictions on the water I drank as it had to be boiled with herbs. It was very important that I drank only boiled water, and it could not be chilled afterward. I had heard that drinking cold drinks is bad for digestion as it cools the digestive fire, but I had not heard of drinking water that had been boiled for several minutes. After some online research, I learned that Ayurveda teaches that boiling water raises its energetic qualities to a level of sharpness that helps to dissolve toxins in the body and also stimulates the agni toward better digestion.
Do you remember in school learning about “suspension of disbelief,” that strategy of the mind that allows us to watch a play without having the enjoyment of it ruined by constantly thinking about how the actors on stage were just people and that they weren’t really falling in love or stabbing each other? I am employing that technique every time I boil water for drinking. I am not sure if I buy the theory, but I want to follow the instructions strictly so that if the cleanse/reset doesn’t work, then I won’t be left wondering if the results would have been different if I would had drank the boiled water.
After about a week on this diet, I got my first normal blood pressure reading at the doctor’s office even before starting the main ghee treatment. I also lost a little weight, which I didn’t really want because I was already where I wanted to be, but I know how to fix that later. I did find the diet to be constipating at times (my vata dryness issue), but the good doctor promised that issue would be addressed as well. One thing I know is that I will appreciate the day I can eat some heavenly paneer again, but I think I will also try to make these simple oil-free dishes more of a mainstay in my diet. They might not thrill my palate, but my heart seems to like them.
Arya Vaida Sala might have been a bust, but I was optimistic about my plan to meet with a doctor I will call Dr. Rajah (Malalayam for “king”), a well known and highly regarded doctor of Ayurveda in northern Kerala. I had recently become acquainted with his wife, also a physician, who recommended his treatment protocol for hypertension after I turned to her for guidance when Arya Vaida Sala didn’t work out. Dr. Rajah held a PhD in Ayurvedic medicine, was on the faculty at a medical college of Ayurveda, and had just published a book on evidence-based approaches to curing diseases using modern medical practices coupled with Ayurvedic treatments.
That interweaving between modern medical science and the centuries-old science of Ayurveda composes the curriculum in Ayurvedic colleges in India, which is not something I fully understood before coming here. Unlike the schools of Ayurveda that have been established in the United States, Europe, and other countries that are catching on to (or cashing in on) the rising trend of Ayurveda worldwide, schools in India require a much more in-depth understanding of what is taught in Western medical schools.
Just to be admitted to the BAMS (Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine & Surgery) undergraduate program, high school students must complete standard pre-med classes such as chemistry, physics, and biology, before leaving grade 12. Once admitted to a BAMS program, the course of study spans 4-½ years and is followed by a 1-year internship. During the academic years, students study anatomy, physiology, and the history of Ayurveda, but also toxicology, pharmacology, surgery, ENT, skin, obstetrics and gynecology.
Once graduated, the doctors can use the title Vaidyar (abbreviated Vr.), the classic term for physician, before their names and are able to do many of the things we see Western doctors do, like write prescriptions for allopathic medications and even perform minor surgery. Following the BAMS degrees, doctors can go on to earn a PhD, such as Dr. Rajah held, which certified specialization in one of many subject areas such as general medicine or pharmacology. Understanding Dr. Rajah’s qualifications, I knew I was going to an expert in the field whose personal philosophy to target diseases with the minimal amount of medicine was one I respected.
In the interim before I arrived in the small (by Indian standards, at least) coastal town a couple hours northwest of Kottakal where Dr. Rajah practiced, I had tapered off all my blood pressure medication, so I was anxious to be under a doctor’s care. When I arrived at my appointment the evening of my first day, Dr. Rajah was with another patient in the modest treatment room built on the porch of his rambling Keralan home on the outskirts of town, so I sat on the porch to wait and passed the time watching birds swooping down through palm trees to catch twilight dinner in the idyllic yard surrounding the house.
After his patient left, he greeted me warmly and showed me in to his office. He took my blood pressure, which showed a diastolic in the mid 90’s, asked me some preliminary questions, and then sent me to a nearby medical lab to get some standard blood work and liver function tests performed. I was happy that he had ordered tests before even talking about treatment; it showed me that he wanted to gain a full understanding of my physical condition before throwing a bunch of herbs at me and talking about panchakarma, which I’d come to understand he recommended for only a very small number of his patients. He also never asked me about any of my eating habits, looked at my tongue, or performed any of the standard intake questions I’d come to associate with an Ayurvedic intake.
Nor did he perform any of those examinations the next morning when I went back for my follow-up appointment. I came to understand during the course of our next few appointments that my disorder was indicative of the underlying imbalance, and it didn’t matter what my dosha makeup was or its role in predisposing me to having the blood pressure issue. It was enough that I had it, and the treatment was standard regardless of what my tongue looked like or how my body was structured.
But what gave me the most confidence that I was with a true healer instead of a salesman was that when I asked what I owed him the next morning, he seemed almost puzzled for a moment, but then answered, “Oh, nothing, this is just consultation. For the main treatment, it will be the standard cost of 5000 rs.” That’s about $75, or what a couple of days in a panchakarma center would have cost me. I skipped out of his office feeling like I was on the right path, or at least one that wouldn’t cost me thousands to travel down.
One of the most well known and highly regarded Ayurvedic institutions in all of Kerala and throughout India, Arya Vaidya Sala Ayurvedic Hospital & Research Centre was my first choice in seeking treatment. In addition to the many online reviews and articles praising their treatments, I was referred by Ayurvedic practitioners for the quality of their medicines. The main drawback was that the center is in the middle of a busy city unlike most of the peaceful, secluded resorts, but still the positives seemed to outweigh the shortcomings. In addition to their sterling reputation, the prices I found online were much lower than the thousands of dollars charged by resorts catering to Westerners. Or so I thought.
While the website states there are additional costs for treatment and medicine, I could find no information on these tariffs, which turned out to be almost as much as the room per day. Thus, a three-week stay would cost just over $2000, which puts this place on par with some of the resorts I researched.
Their site also offers a free “online consultation,” but it’s not what I would call a real online consultation. Instead, potential patients fill out a simple form that sends an automated reply directing them to come to the hospital in Kottakal for an in-person consultation. There’s no way to book this place without going in person for evaluation, so you don’t know if you will even be admitted. I thought that made sense as a doctor would need to assess a potential patient in the flesh in order to conduct a thorough examination, and I knew from their website that they treated hypertension in addition to other disorders.
After filling out the evaluation form online, I called to speak to someone in their office because I wanted some reassurance that making the trip to otherwise undesirable Kottakal would not be in vain. She told me that I would need to be seen by a doctor, and while there were no vacancies at the time, there were frequently cancellations for bookings, so the best I could do was to show up and try to grab a spot. Undaunted, I made the long train overnight train journey from lovely Canacona station, which is about 1.5 km from Palolem Beach center, to less-than-lovely Tirur station in northern Kerala. From there I caught a rickshaw, which was incredibly cheap after Goan prices (only 250 rs for about 15 km) to make the final part of the journey to my hotel in Kottakal, where the main Arya Vaida Sala hospital is located.
My hotel was just over half a kilometer away from the in-patient panchakarma center, but I had been told when I called the week before to report to the out-patient center, which is closer to 2 km away. There are several hospital buildings, including a cancer ward, the outpatient building, a medicine manufacturing facility, and the PK center. The entire area, which I began to think of as the Ayurveda Industrial Complex, is encircled by four main roads and includes an area of about 8 km. There are also research centers, a huge and beautiful outdoor herb garden, and even a trash disposal site for the hospitals. Surrounding the hospitals are hotels (none that I would call a good value), restaurants, pharmacies, and drug compounding shops that thrive on the business the hospital brings.
The morning after my arrival, I walked to the out-patient treatment center to get in line for my free consultation. I had a photograph of my passport on my phone, which they let slide, but ideally I would have had the actual book in my hand. (Note: always carry your passport when you will need to prove your identity.) After about twenty minutes sitting in a crowded waiting room, I was shown to the doctor’s office. She asked me a few preliminary questions, but nothing as in-depth as I’d been asked by Ayurvedic doctors before. She took my blood pressure, which was 140/100, the highest it had been since Bombay, but I had also been cutting my dose of blood pressure medicine as the side effects, which included dizziness, edema, and nausea, were becoming too much to bear. I asked her if she could prescribe me a new blood pressure medication that didn’t have side effects, but she said she wanted me to go to the PK treatment center first so the doctor there could determine the course of treatment. She assured me that if the doctor at the PK center was not available, she would help me with getting new medication that afternoon, so, with her referral slip in hand, I made my way to the center close to my hotel.
Upon arriving at the center, I was given a sheet of paper with the room types listed along with prices. I had to get out my calculator when I first saw the prices to make sure that the hot walk hadn’t given me any temporary brain damage when I was doing the conversion from rupees to USD, but I my initial calculations were correct: the price including treatment and medication was much higher than I’d expected, even for the more basic rooms with A/C.
After studying the list of rooms, I told the young man behind the desk that I wanted the most basic room with A/C, and he seemed taken aback. He told me there were other options that were much more “deluxe” and included amenities like attached kitchenettes, cable television, and so on. He got on the phone and spoke to someone in what I assume was Malayalam and then hung up to tell me that my choice was not available and that the only room left was due to a cancellation, and that was the more expensive room that included what I considered a bunch of unnecessary luxuries.
He then said that I needed to choose the length of my course of treatment, which went anywhere from 7-28 days. “How do I know how long the treatment needs to be without seeing a doctor?” I asked. He seemed annoyed by the question, and assured me I would see a doctor, but then also told me that he would need full payment the next morning before I was admitted, and that was when I would see the doctor. “Ma’am, the boy will take you to see the room so you can tell us if it’s acceptable.” Okay, whatever, I wasn’t in the mood for his circular logic, and I planned to go back to the outpatient doctor to see if I could get my blood pressure medicine changed, which was at that point my primary concern, especially after the high reading from that morning.
I’d named the pushy sales guy behind the desk “Rick” because it rhymed with a word that I thought described him well. Rick then called over a man to take me to see the room, but before I had gathered my things, he was outside, and by the time I reached the courtyard outside, he had disappeared. I waited for a couple of minutes while the guards, who spoke no English, tried to fathom what I wanted when I asked them where I was supposed to go to see the room. Finally my guide stuck his head back around the courtyard gate and motioned impatiently for me to follow him.
It was a typical hot day in India, and my heart was beating a little too fast for my comfort as I walked up the inclined sidewalk behind my guide who was not slowing down or even checking to see if he’d lost me again. I was trying to focus on my breathing instead of my thoughts so that I would stay calm, but I was getting pissed by that time. We made it to the building where a couple other people were waiting, but the elevator was broken so we had to walk up three flights of stairs to the room. The young man who’d taken over as our tour guide in the lobby opened a door to show us the $35/night room, and right away I muttered, “you have got to be kidding,” as he kept asking us “room ok? Room good, yes?”
No, room not good, room kind of shitty, dirty, and dark, I thought to myself. There was a short, narrow bed with dingy sheets, and the floor didn’t seem clean. The place smelled of Ayurvedic medicines, and the attached kitchenette was nothing more than a sink with a counter. The bathroom was tiled but beyond that nothing nicer than your typical Indian bathroom with a Western toilet and a shower head coming out of the wall. There was a partial view of some greenery in the back yard, but it was nothing like the photographs I had seen of the lovely manicured gardens with pools of water reflecting the surrounding plants.
He seemed to need immediate validation that the room was acceptable, so I finally said, a little sharply, “No, the room really isn’t okay, and I need to see a doctor before I can make a decision.” He didn’t seem to understand what I was saying, so I repeated more loudly, “I want to see a DOCTOR NOW!” At last, he got the message, and he showed me out of the room and downstairs to the doctor’s office.
To the credit of the hospital, both the doctors I saw were very nice, but even this doctor didn’t seem interested in asking me any questions, looking at my tongue, feeling my pulse, or performing any of the standard intake procedures you think of when you see a vaidya, or Ayurvedic physician. She did take my blood pressure again, which was back to normal, even after I’d thrown my little hissy fit a few minutes before.
I explained to her that I needed to understand what length of time I would need the treatment before I could secure the room and pay the hefty price tag for that length of treatment time. She nodded, said she understood, and after hearing my basic complaints (hypertension, recurring insomnia, dry skin, rosacea), she told me that 21 days would be ideal but that 14 would suffice, depending on time and financial constraints on my side. I said that time was not the issue, but that the price for the room and the medicines daily was pretty high considering what I’d been shown a couple of minutes before. She conceded that the pricing was expensive, but she told me I could do the first part of the treatment as an out-patient and then complete the next two weeks in the facility. She also kindly recommended that I keep checking back every morning to see if one of the room types had had a cancellation.
I thanked her and made my way back to the administration office to see my friend, Rick.
Once back, I let him know that I’d seen the doctor and she had recommended 21 days of treatment, so that was the length of time I needed. I told him that as I didn’t need A/C (and having it during PK is not recommended by some practitioners as it cools the body too much), I would be happy to take one of the smaller, more affordable rooms without A/C. He immediately told me that there were no other rooms available, even the basic hospital rooms that had “NON-RESERVABLE” printed next to their description on the sheet of paper. I asked when the next availability was for a room, as I could come back in a month if necessary, to which he impatiently responded that “all rooms were booked one year in advance,” which I found hard to believe. I asked if I could check back daily for to see if there had been a cancellation for a cheaper A/C room, and, after thinking about it for a second, he assured me that was an option but only after I had been admitted and paid in full for the expensive room for 21 days. I would be willing to bet that, had I checked in, there would never have been a cancellation.
“Okay,” I finally said, “I will take the room, but I want to check in tomorrow morning because I already have my hotel room for the night.” Suddenly, Rick was my new best friend. Smiling, he told me that I could come at 8 a.m. for immediate check-in. “And how much is the food?” I asked, as their kitchen supplied all the detox meals during treatment. He had no idea. Really? Was it his first day or something? That seemed like a pretty basic piece of information.
Putting on a smile, I told him I’d see him first thing in the morning, and then I made my way back to my hotel, ready to move onto Plan B even thought I didn’t know what that was yet.
Once back, I messaged a doctor of Ayurveda in nearby Thalassery with whom I’d become acquainted through an Ayurveda Facebook group to see if her clinic offered PK treatment. She responded to tell me that only about 5% of patients even needed the somewhat drastic PK treatment, but that the industry was making so much money here in India (and abroad) that no one was telling the truth. When I told her about my experience that morning at the hospital, she said, “No, they will not treat you, they will cheat you.” For the first time that day, I felt like someone was being straight with me.
She said all that I probably needed was dietary modification, herbs, and a simple treatment to get my blood pressure under control, so I asked if her partner, whose specialty included hypertension treatment, could see me. While I’m agnostic on the idea of fate or divine intervention, I do believe that we see opportunities clearly at the right time, so after she confirmed an appointment for a couple of days later, I set out to buy my train ticket.
I cannot call this post a review of the esteemed hospital, and for all I know, they may have had very good treatments and medicines. However, the feeling I got while I was there was that I was being hustled and misled. Ayurveda is big business here in India and abroad, and it’s difficult if not impossible to find providers who will be honest with you or who know what they are doing. My experience with the sales and intake department at AYS in Kottakal, unfortunately, did not leave me with a good feeling about what they could offer as far as healing. Ayurveda is supposed to be a spiritual practice, but what I encountered felt like I was dealing with an insurance company in the states: they didn’t care so much about my health as they did about getting my money.
But let the journey continue.
Note: during my wanderings I carry a blood pressure cuff so that I can monitor my status a couple of times a day. I also keep my blood pressure pills in my purse, and I always make sure I am near a hospital in case I need emergency treatment.
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 
During my stay at Amban Guest House in Kannur, Kerala, I had the pleasure of Mrs. Shayana’s tutelage during her preparation of a typical Keralan lunch: fresh fried fish, fish sauce, Sambar dal, and a lovely side vegetable dish of turai. Most of the ingredients, except the fish and some spices, were harvested from the organic garden in front of the heritage home. The fish was freshly caught that morning, and Mrs. S hand selected the nicest ones from the back of the monger’s tuk tuk, much to the delight of the stray cat who wisely knows to haunt the kitchen’s back door late mornings.
