Varkala
I now know in depth the meaning of the phrase “tourist trap” – Varkala is the definitive tourist trap. The geography of this place makes it the perfect cage for tourists that can be beaten and berrated into submission until they “buy in my store” or “eat in my restaurant”.
Picture a cliff – steep and deadly with a shear drop to rocks below – then picture a path about a foot or two from the top of this cliff made out of either big rocks or smaller rocks or sometimes just dirt and sand. Then on the other side of this path is a mile long strip of shops and restaurants and hotels. That is the essence of Varkala. There is no way to escape this gauntlett. When you leave your hotel, you must walk out onto this cliff top path and proceed along in front of the haukers and beggars and people selling drums and cards and whatever and the people in front of their shops and restaurants. And all the while you have to walk slowly and carefully cause you are aware of the cliff.
This video will show the cliffs, ocean and a bit of the ‘strip’ . Which is about a mile long and sells all things tourist.
They get to know every person like every person gets to know and recognize them. It matters not what tactic you try: to be friendly, to ignore them, to walk with your head down or to even go into their shop. If you dont go in or buy every time they would never be happy, In fact they actually get more aggressive. If you walk buy they yell “Come into my shop when you come back.” They know you have to come back. They when you come back its, “You promised you would come into my shop.”
The picture on the right shows the post office in the town of Varkala itself.
The restaurants it seems are all staffed by people who have come down from the north from Nepal or Tibet or northern provinces because they need money to support their families. When you do go into a restaurant then you have committed for life. They become your friend. You look deeply into their beautiful eyes and learn about their individual stories: two sons that need to go to school, a grannie that lives in a village with the bridge washed out that has to be moved. All of them have large families and these families are depending solely on them to send money home. And you tip as large a tip as you can. I often left as much of a tip as i paid for the food.
But if i came home and sold my condo and liquidated every asset i had and brought all of this money back to varkala and gave it to all of these people it would not have been enough. I should have given more. “You promised me.”
I had to leave Varkala – i would rather have gone hungry than walk down that strip one more time. I had go ‘get out of jail.” Having said that – the food was cheap and wonderful and the beaches beautiful and the fishermen on the beach absolutely ‘the real deal’.
The images below show the strip, a mile long bit of cliff that has many shops and restaurants. Most of the people are from the north and some have more than one shop. The town of Varkala is set back from the ocean a bit.
