After a good nights sleep on the train from Chennai, we awoke about 4 hours before arriving in Trivandrum, Kerala. The scenery once again was laden with coconut groves, rivers, farmland and the occasional hillock or rocky outcrop. The soil was now the deep red that we'd first seen in Goa and we looked out the train window and just smiled.
The train tracks in some places were elevated and where this was the case we had sweeping views across the vast coconut and banana plantations.
As usual, bang on time we pulled in to Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram) station. The day was hot and we found a taxi began the hard haggle:
Stacy: How much to Housing Board junction please?
Taxi driver: 200
Janet: No way! It's only 2 Kilometres.
Stacy: Yeah
Janet: 50 rupees
Taxi Driver: 100
Janet: Nope (shakes her head)
Stacy: ...
Taxi driver: 70
Janet: OK but you're getting a good deal
Stacy: Yeah
I'm getting pretty good at this.
We arrived at the hotel and it has a very space age feel to it. Very white and shiny, the aircon set to 'Arctic'.
The room is very modern but what we notice most of all is the there is very little noise from the road, spooooky.
After lunch we went for a walk around the local area, it's 2pm and the heat outside is only just bearable but thankfully the air is less polluted than many of the places we'd been till now. The local area, like most cities is awash with shops, restaurants, temples, churches and mosques. The population seems less dense here and to our joy, the smiles are back.
We wander around for a good few hours an in most shop doorways, the proprietor stands and says hello with a huge smile. We haven't tired of reciprocating the greetings despite doing it 20 or 30 times per walk.
The next day we put all our 'long' clothes (trousers and long sleeves shirts) in to be laundered. This leaves us with only our beachwear. Oh well, it's off to Kovalam beach! The 30 minute auto ride took us through the centre of town and out the other side into the leafy suburbs.
The steep narrow road down to the beach twists often and is punctured with potholes. It is lined with shops, restaurants and bars many of which are not yet open for the season.
At the bottom of the road is a drop off point and we agreed to meet the auto driver here after sunset.
We walked down a few steps onto the yellow and black sand. Kovalam beach became popular with westerners after the hippies arrived in the 1970s. Thankfully, there wasn't too much of the flower power culture on show as to quote Vivian from the Young Ones "I bloody hate hippies".
There are three main beaches, each separated from the next by rocky outcrops. We had arrived at the middle beach and we walked left along the promenade. This took us on to Lighthouse Beach. As the name suggests there is a lighthouse at the far end of the beach, perched on a small hillside. The main attraction however is undoubtably the beach itself. It's neither the longest or widest we've seen in India but there was a buzz of local people and we could get in the sea.
But first things first, we had about 7 hours to kill so we went for a walk around the local area. We walked the length of the beach then ducked up a steep road that took us away from the shoreline. Just a coupe of minutes away from the beach and the cooling sea breeze had vanished. Puffing and panting up the incline our salutations to the shopkeepers must have looked more like grimaces.
At the top of the hill we turned right, we had no idea where we were going but that's part of the adventure. Thankfully the road meandered downward and hugged the coastline. The walk took us through a very different part of Kovalam to what we'd seen in the guide books. The small concrete houses that lined the road were quite run down, many households seemed to own a small herd of goats that grazed or wandered around the property. On the sea-side of the road the rubbish and waste of the community was cast strewn without care or concern across the rocks and ultimately the sea. I just can't get my head round a community being so willingly responsible for their own demise, surely, there must be another way.
The festering smell that the breeze now coated us in was difficult to stomach and we marched on as quickly as we could.
At the bottom of the hill we reached the end of the road, two beautiful mosques sat perched on the small peninsula. One had been painted green and white as was by far the more striking, the other more traditional white. We stopped for some photos, a breather and the opportunity to take on some water. Across the bay we could see the busy harbour. It was heaving with people on dry land and an almost equal number of boats in the water.
We retraced our route back to Lighthouse Beach and collapsed under the shade of a beach umbrella (duly haggled for of course). We sat for at least 90 minutes cooling down and drinking water. The sea here was still rough, the furthest breaking waves, maybe 50 meters from the shore, were 10-15 feet high, the sandbank ensuring the worst of them crashed long before reaching land. As waves smaller waves hit the shore and the water receded, the rebounding waves met the new incoming waves that resulted in spray rocketing up left to right, like a machine-gun strafing the water.
We bummed around for a few hours, a couple of times, locals tried to take our photo and they were shooed away by the guys we'd rented the sun beds from. Not sure why they were so protective of us but we were grateful nonetheless.
Just after 5pm, the sun's journey across the sky seems to speed up, we made our way to the beach where we had been dropped off earlier, which gave us an unobscured view of the sunset. The smaller, busier beach is where the majority of the locals come to watch the spectacle. There was a palpable feeling of expectation from the onlookers. Every few seconds we were glancing to the horizon, seeing what had changed since the last time we looked. We bumped into a couple (from Brighton of all places) who were on a similar trip to ours, only they were squeezing it into 3 months, we chatted with them until the colours started to change and then by mutual agreement went our separate ways to capture the show.
As the gap between the sun and the sea reduces, the sky turns from blue through deep yellow to orange. The sun goes lower still an the orange turns to pink. The minutes go by, the orange intensifies to amber and pink becomes red. All this is doubled by the reflection in the surf.
Finally, the sun sinks low enough to view it without squinting and the fire is briefly sandwiched between two banks of cloud, and as the bottom of the sun breaches the horizon the lower cloud has the appearance of fast boiling water. Within a minute or two of the edge of the sun hitting the horizon it is gone for another day. The light show continues for another 15 minutes as the hues go through oranges and reds and purples until finally, the blackness of night rules above and the stars begin to appear.
This was the first time either of us had seen the sun sink into the ocean and I'm not sure we'll forget it in a hurry.
We met our driver and we got back exhausted and sunburnt. Very sunburnt.
Our second day in Trivandrum and as we got our laundered clothes back we thought we'd best see some of the historical sites in town. On MG road a protest was being organised. From what we were being told,
and something may have got lost in translation,the Communist party in Kerala was campaigning to shut down the Women's Eduction Facility and the protest and march was against the closure.
I was filmed by the local tv crew while Jan was rallying the crowd by punching the air in rhythm to the music. This went down very well indeed. All this on a hunt for biscuits and samosas.
We wandered past the growing crowd and the good natured protest was accompanied by a drum procession that marched jubilantly through the centre of the road. At no point was the traffic stopped to accommodate them, autos, buses, cars and bikes weaved in and out between the thickening numbers of protesters.
We saw a couple of churches and then went on to the Padmanabhaswamy temple. This temple is set some way back from the main road behind a large fort-like wall and gate. For some reason the road to the temple was closed so photos had to be taken at long distance. The temple dominates the local skyline and even from a distance we could tell that the building was something a bit special.
The multi tiered temple had thousands of carvings of human like forms, it was difficult to determine at that distance exactly what the figures were, although they appeared to be vastly varying in size and in various poses, supporting the next tier up.
At the front of the temple there is a pool which at some point would have been for bathing, however the gates now remain locked and the water is green with algae. There are numerous modern temples in the area too, all of which are so colourful and vibrant that we couldn't pass a single one by without stopping and taking a couple of snaps. There was however one exception to these colourful temples. One the corner before the Padmanabhaswamy temple there is an open sided temple that is dedicated to Ganesh, this temple, with the exception of the deities was painted matt black. The effect it had was striking and the Hindus knew it as it was also the only temple we have come across where no photos were aloud at close quarters. As we write this, we do not know the name of this temple.
We wandered around the bustling backstreets for a couple of hours, Jan got her umbrella repaired for the princely sum of 35p and then the sunburn from the previous day caught up with us. Our heads ached and the red skin on our faces and necks glowed like they were fresh out the fire. We had had enough and returned to the cool sanctuary of the hotel.
In the evening we wandered back to town and found a restaurant for dinner. The downstairs was open fronted and was full with locals although there were a couple of free tables. We were ushered upstairs to the air conditioned room. We were the only ones up there and it initially felt like they had moved us out of sight. But within a couple of minutes the room had filled, friends and families also deciding that the cooler room was a better option. We had a light dinner of masala dosas followed by a chai, simple but delicious.
The next day we were making our way to Varkala about 45kms away for our anniversary treat.