Your guide to a small Kerala hotel
“Hello! I am THE guide here. The writer was just trying to be more smart than what he really is by giving you some big ‘Lonely Plant-like’ impression with the headline. Like he knows everything there is to Kerala – top five, bottom three, middle one, things to do, food to eat, etc. Even god […]
One grand dream
Extreme travel situations have sometimes forced hunger on me. While I don’t know about tasting blood as an outcome of absolute, continued hunger as some say, what I do know is that it makes one angry at first and then desperate. Desperation can be dangerous – it even snaps the will to live in some. […]
Who will save the lifeguard?
When the rest of the country celebrates saving a life with gallantry awards, honours and cash tributes, there is a bunch for whom saving lives is everyday. Other lives are their living; on any given day during peak tourist season they save at least one. That they are paid for doing this doesn’t diminish the […]
Dashing polyglot, brutal rapist / Some seasoned advice
In most tourism hubs the underbelly comes cleverly right beneath the nose. It is rarely that removed from the ordered façade – that ever-smiling and well-groomed veneer which makes the cover of travel brochures and magazine stories and envy-inducing backgrounds to likeable selfies – but tucked safely away from casual glances. I loped through this […]
Lighthouse tourism: Mind the steps
It reminds you of a Grimm tale illustration – red and white striped delectable candy on the outside, lurking peril inside. When a ‘revamped’ Kovalam lighthouse – officially Vizhinjam lighthouse, was opened to the public on December 4 last year, I was among the few enthusiastic ones who flocked to applaud the rise of a […]
Hawa* beach hacks
One of the funniest stories my dad told me from his younger days was about Sosamma who ran a roadside eatery. One day Sosamma made 10 puttu, hoping to sell each for one rupee. For whatever reason, she was particularly hungry that day and began polishing off the puttu one by one. By evening there […]
#KeralaCoastalWalk
As far as office rides go this one takes the cup. The fibre boat crested every wave at somersault angles and landed with emphatic thuds, each a sledgehammer blow from below deck. I sat close to the helm – it is smoother toward the aft, where the rest of the crew were – where I […]
Floats and feuds of the Pala Jubilee
Trading and religion have always gone hand in hand – the unpredictability of one unfailingly appealed to the vagary of the other. Pala, flanking the fertile banks of the Meenachil River, attracted farmer settlers from millennia ago. Recorded history shows they were mostly Christians or Nasrani – as the Syrian Christians of Kerala are known […]
Labuan Bajo – the next Bali?
It was a rare event – Wally was quiet. And Wally was never quiet, as his friends vouched, unless he was sleeping nor still if he wasn’t staring you down enquiring after the ‘angle of the dangle.’ Then at the Tree Top Bar which he runs with his son Mathews close to the Labuan Bajo […]