After a few months inland we are finally back on the coast! We'd been planning to spend Christmas in Goa, somewhere on the beach enjoying some down time after a pretty busy couple of months travelling. And that we did! We managed to find an amazing spot to set up on a quiet, clean beach. A beach so nice we stayed all the way through until the new year.
There's a lot of exploring to be done in Goa, which we intend to do a little later on.
Our next stop is Varkala, a small beachside village in the beautiful state of Kerala. Kerala is known for its palm-lined beaches and backwaters, a network of canals, and mountains whose slopes support tea, coffee and spice plantations as well as wildlife.
The two day drive down the coast, following India's 'Route 66', was extremely scenic, quiet and a little interesting. On day two we left our camp spot at about 7:30 and the roads were eerily quiet. At first we didn't think much of it because it was kind of early still though when the hours passed by and there was still no one on the road except for us, police, and ambulance we became very curious as to what was going on.
It soon became very clear what was going on as we drove through the main street of a town and came up behind a big protest of men chanting, and waving their sticks and flags down the main street followed by the riot police. At first we were a bit apprehensive driving up to them though once they saw that we were foreigners they were all happy to see us and waved us through.
This same scenario continued in every town centre that we drove through for the next few hundred kilometres. We later found out that it was a statewide strike due to a government and religious conflict regarding a sacred men's Hindu temple.
Arriving in Varkala we had a look around at the possible camp spots which we'd spotted on google satellite though due to the strike everywhere we'd found was busy with the locals enjoying their day off. This being the case we done a quick google search of nearby hostels and made our way over to the Short Giraffe, where Dwaruk, the owner, was happy to see us and let us set up in their yard.
Varkala is known for its cliff-lined beach with restaurants atop, yoga retreats and if you're lucky a little bit of surf. In the next episode we'll be getting a very local insight into this beautiful part of India.
That's a wrap for this episode! Thanks for watching!
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/ thewayoverland
26 авг 2024
