Monday 26 April 2010

Varkala, Kerala. That’s a lot of vowels.

A number of factors convince us that we should pop down to Kerala for a week, namely that I am starting work on 1st May, and the evil monsoon rains are approaching and will beat the living daylights out of Kerala first.

We flirt with a number of possibilities. Should we hire a cab and get him to drive us to Kannur in northern Kerala? Or should we fly to Kochi (formerly Cochin) or fly to the catchily named Thiruvananthapuram (formerly Trivandrum). We umm and ahhh over each option. We rule out driving to Kannur quite quickly. Although it looks close enough it will apparently take 8 hours in the car. I suspect this will not fill the children with rays of joy.

So then we get into one of those comparisons that lovers of Easyjet and Ryanair are all too familiar with: what if I fly into that airport with that airline, and then fly out of that airport x days later? What about if we do the whole thing one day later, or three days later? If I leave my booking one day, will it get more expensive or less? And how far is Kochi airport from Kochi  (quite far, it turns out)? But all done on slow internet connections. Click. Wait. Click. Wait. Did I leave the gas on?

In the end we plump for a return flight to Trivandrum with Indian Airlines, now part of Air India. We commit to this plan on the Friday night, looking to fly out from Bangalore airport on the Monday morning. I happily type all our details into their website – names, passport numbers. We get to that bit with the credit card. I type it all in. The machine haughtily remarks “Foreign cards can not be accepted less than 72 hours before departure”. I cry.

The next day we go to some Indian Airlines booking office in a 60s decorated small room in the basement of a hotel. Needless to say the 10% online booking discount goes out of the window, but hurrah hurrah they can book it, and they can take our card. Hannah sticks her debit card (which has been quite happily been pumping money out of cashpoints) into their gadget, and it is rudely rejected. We try again. No, says the machine. I shall reject you for some random reason I shall keep veiled.

So I use a credit card I have with me (oh god there’s another 2%) and we defeat all the Indian administrative restrictions they have attempted to throw at us and woo hoo, we’re off to the beach.

I speak to my favourite taxi man and he says that to get to Bangalore airport for 9am, we need to leave Mysore at, wait for it, 4.30am. That’s Banaglore traffic for you. Kind of reduces the non-planned sheer ‘whoosh’ of flying, but hey.

4.30am on Monday arrives and Salim waits silently and patiently outside our front door. We fit the kids’ car seat into the Indicar, and Hannah wedges herself between the car seats in the back, and I sit in the question zone passenger seat. Everyone is wearing some form of crash protection except Salim (his choice), and Hannah. Doesn’t quite seem fair, but there is not much to be done about it. The kids sing ‘Happy Birthday’ (they have been doing this a lot recently) and the utter tedium of driving to Bangalore airport begins. I resolve to watch the sun come up, but I think I must have been asleep when that finally happens. Salim yawns largely and often which is a little scary, but suddenly we are at the airport. We’ve arranged for Salim to keep the car seats for the week, so off he drives with our car seats still nailed into the back of his car. We hope he doesn’t sell them. Or go joyriding in them.

We check in. The Air India computer, in its mighty wisdom, has preallocated us seats: 13c, 18D and 27F. Thanks for that. There is much rapid talking on telephones and the word ‘baby’ is bandied around a lot. The man pulls out his pen and crosses out the assigned seats and writes three new ones on them. I could have done that.

We have to split up for the X ray thing into queues of men and women. The women are scanned inside some curtained structure to preserve their modesty. We decide to have some breakfast. Isla decides to redecorate the airport by throwing her unadorned-by-milk strawberry cornflakes all over the floor. People walk past us and I pretend I cannot hear them as they crunch, crunch, crunch past us. Isla, not yet finished, pours a cup of water all over my crotch.

Hannah wisely suggests we get something more substantial as we don’t know when next we shall find food. The airport has one of those ‘pay-at-some-till before you can get the food in case you STEAL, STEAL all our food’ systems, so I look down the list and plump for the only one I think I can safely pronounce (it’s name escapes me right now). Everyone in front of me is getting what I now know to be idli – spongy fermented rice cakes. I assume I will be gifted something in this vein. Mmm. Not quite.

My offering has a white vomit like consistency, peppered with something like sweetcorn. I think it based on rice. This is a fair guess – everything is based on rice. I return sheepishly to where Hannah and the kids are sitting. Hannah laughs derisively. Standing on a carpet of cornflakes, huge wet patch on my shorts, holding a plate of vomit. It is not my best moment.

But we eat it and it isn’t as bad as it looks. I would, however, avoid ordering it again (if only I could remember what is was called). The Japanese man next to me has idli too (how come he can order correctly), and as soon as he leaves I lean across and steal his receipt so that I can work out what it is called.

After usual airport meanderings we board the plane. None of that ‘those with children board first’ PC behaviour. Just rush for the gate, rush at the gate. Our plane looks like a hasn’t had a refit since the 70s. And there are none of those infant lap seat belts. “Hold her tightly”, they say, and smile. Babies are curiously absent from the flight safety card.

A worried looking flight attendant says to us “Does the baby not have a seat?”. And we say no, she is an infant, a lap held creature. And they say “There are not enough oxygen masks for you all”. Which is a fair consideration. So they encourage me to move the row behind, leaving Beth, Isla and Hannah in three seats, and therefore three oxygen masks. This would all be very sensible if the row they move me to does not already hold a man, his wife, and their infant stretched out across their laps. I try not to think to hard about how many oxygen masks there might be for us all, should we need them, and hope that this must be a special infant row. Maybe.

Isla scours the Planet for somewhere to stay. Arriving at Trivandrum, we take a taxi to the train station. We get tickets for the 2.30pm train to Varkala and wait. And wait (It’s only 1pm). I walk up and down the station to try and find food, and find, instead, a bat, dead, lying in the middle of the platform, wings out, half its thorax missing. I neglect to tell the girls. Our train leaves bang on time and off we poddle to Varkala.

 

Kerala 019 Varkala is increasingly developed. In the high season people pour out of Trivandrum airport into Kovalam and now also Varkala. We take a bamboo hut at Pink Aana at Odiyam Beach, a little way off the main ‘strip’, for 650Rs a night (about £10). And all is good. The sea makes appropriate sea like noises. There are coconut palms. It is the SEA SIDE. We waltz along the beach and stop at a bar and have a beer. It’s all a bit quiet. A bit too quiet. Like the City at the weekend. Or Cleethorpes in November. We have dinner and go to bed.

Kerala 024Isla humours us for about 20 minutes in her travel cot, and then begins to wail. We all end up on our double bed, mosquito net in place. Some sleep is achieved. Mainly by the small people.

1 comment:

  1. Four under one mosquito net must have been a tad clammy to say the least.

    ReplyDelete