Stuck in Kerala

(Varkala, India, 5-13th of Nov 2016)

We now have spent more than a week in a small village, Varkala, which is situated along one of the beaches in Kerala. As usual India delivers and this has, as you will find out, certainly been a very eventful stay.

We initially booked two nights at a budget hotel, Basuri Resort. A very spartan place but as always in India it had a wonderful host. The hotel only had cold water in the taps and it was situated in a little “off” location in the middle of a steep hill.

We wanted to stay a few extra nights in Varkala and relocated to another hotel, Hill View Resort, which was an upgrade from the budget hotel, it even had some hot water in the taps (now and then).

When we had stayed in the new hotel for two nights we woke up in the morning to the shocking news that all Indian 500- and 1000-rupee notes were taken out of circulation right away so we actually only had a total amount of 500 rupees in cash that we could use. (Read more about this here.) On top of that all ATMs in India were taken out of service for three days so there was no way to get your hands on new valid notes.

When you have a lot of notes in your wallet that you cannot use and all ATMs are closed and shops and restaurants do not accept paying by card, then you feel it like someone is saying, “time to go home to Sweden”, but we decided to wait it out to see what would happen.

As we could not pay for transports or at restaurants we had to stay at Hill View Resort for almost a week. Luckily for us there was a restaurant at the hotel that we could use, breakfast, lunch, afternoon coffee, and dinner, all we had at the same restaurant. The food at the restaurant was delicious, staff pleasant and they had plenty to choose from on the menu so it could have been much worse.

To unwillingly spend a week in Varkala is really nothing that is either boring or awkward in any way. The view from our hotel was amazing, the sand on the beach was white, the shopping was endless (but a bit boring when you have limited cash supply ..) and the food was good. The village has no fancy resorts, instead it’s crowded with small hotels, yoga centers and homestays. This was also the first place since we started our journey in August that we met someone from Sweden, all of a sudden there was Swedes everywhere and we feel like we were in a Blue Wing resort in Greece or Spain.

We took the prolonged stay in Varkala as an opportunity to get on with our exercising again. Most days we ran 4 kilometers in the morning, we also did a lot of walking, once or twice every day back and forth to Varkala town situated 3 kilometers away (to check if there were any cash in the ATMs, which there was not for several days) and together with some walks to the beach we several days come up in a distance as long as 20 kilometers.

We could not take up swimming again, because in Varkala the currents at the beach are extremely strong and the waves are large and unpredictable, thus no good water to swim in.

A few days after our cash had vaporised into thin air some restaurant owners and shopkeepers offered creative solutions to get customers and we were able to get rid of all the old 500-rupee notes we had on food and shopping. Four days after the notes were banned we managed to get some cash out of an ATM ( after queing for an hour) and we felt that we could start making plans for where to go next.

As we were in Kerala, known for what is called “The Backwaters”, an area with interconnected channels and lakes, we decided to get us a houseboat for a day. We found a hotel nearby where we were staying that arranged the kind of backwater trip we wanted so we decided to move there for one night. Here we met Babu, owner of both the hotel and the houseboat, and we got us a bungalow with sea view.  It was very nice to sit on the porch to your own bungalow and look out over the huge and wild waves. In the evening we had a candle light dinner on the beach and we ate delicious fish curry and prawn masala.

Life was as good as it could be again….