So, here we are yet again in what some folks back home have heard called Paradise. Well if you like your Paradise filled with polio victims crawling like spiders, strange men in the shadows offering you opium and an enforced police curfew, then you've come to the right place. Yes to some extent the beach is quite nice if you can ignore the piles of litter on the right of the bay towards the small lovely lighthouse. It's got big waves coming in all the time and it is interesting to see what the fishermen bring in with their nets. The beach is about a quarter of a mile long with a bigger lighthouse on the left hand side of the bay and then there's a strip of restaurants, hotels and guest houses. As soon as you walk past them you're subjected to the usual touting and beckons to come dine with us. It becomes tedious after 30 seconds. Sometimes as Grant & myself sat there watching the smiling and laughing European tourists walk by, I wondered if it was just us or were the hoteliers pumping nitrous oxide through their air conditioners in the night.

There's a strange undercurrent going on at Kovalam Beach and I sensed it the first night we arrived and went to get some food and some beers, we deserved it, we'd been through that railway ride and had the shredded nerves to prove it. After we'd sterilised ourselves in boiling showers we had gone down to the beach at about 8.30pm.......we'd been touted and took a walk down before going back to the place with the best prices. Fine but their touts were a right bunch of local wide boys, they greeted you with mock cockney accents and that's never a good thing. We had some food and had 2 beers each and were just about becoming normal although Grant was having the involuntary spasms, I'd had that too and put it down to the adrenalin thing again....the body not coping with relaxation after stress. It was a bit odd, all of a sudden everyone left the restaurant and about 5 well fed chaps came in, I took it they were local businessmen as they were wearing their trouserbands around their portly stomachs, they had the trademark smart sleeveless shirts on, the dyed black hair and the impressive moustaches that are branded about in these parts. They were giving the place the once over and demanded to see the fish platter of the day. One came our way and stood over us, I turned around and said hello, he growled back. They sat in the corner awaiting their feast. The staff quickly put all the chairs away and handed us the bill. It was 10.15pm . As we walked out I noticed every other restaurant was also closed. Welcome to paradise.