“It feels the same… it’s just yours is so funny looking!”

Being an unemployed traveller is not easy as easy as it sounds. It’s Friday afternoon here in Varkala, India, the temperature has just hit 34°, my morning was spent walking along the beach (with actual sand!), followed by 4 hours riding south of the town on my manly Honda Scooter, through some of the most amazing scenery in the Kerala Backwaters, to the most pristine, tourist-free beaches I have come across this trip. To try and ease the stress, I followed my hard morning with fresh caught grilled barracuda with chips and salad, a steady supply of banana smoothies, and I am now sitting in a cane recliner at a cliff top restaurant, looking down over the hundreds of crazy tourists still out in the water in the scorching sun. It is tough for some. Varkala is one of India’s few beach resorts (the budget one of course!), sitting perilously along the top of cliff, looking down on the almost white sands of the beach below. The cliff edge is lined with enough restaurants and shops to have kept me busy for my three days here, and as long as I forget about the fact that only about 100m away, Hindus come to pour the ashes of loved ones into the tourist packed ocean (and often the un-cremated breast-bones of the men, and the hip-bones of the women, which don’t burn all the way through!), the place is almost perfect! Of course, as with anywhere that swimwear is a socially acceptable form of public dress, some people don’t know where to draw the line, and Varkala also appears to be home to the world’s largest population of stretch-marked, fake tanned, elderly women, and men who buy their swimwear from the same place as Tony Abbott, and don’t appear to have heard that greasy mullets have gone out of fashion. Hot stuff.

Along the coast in Varkala

The Kerala Backwaters

I’ve got some catching up to do, so here goes.

Arriving in Chennai, I made my way to meet CouchSurfing hosts Anna and Rasmus. Anna, an amazing, friendly and helpful German born Dane, living in Southern India (as you do!), is working for a Danish pump company just out of Chennai, in research and development of programs and opportunities to provide safe drinking water to developing areas. Rasmus is her hilarious sidekick/housewife/backpacker-entertainer/organiser, and while his visa prevents him working in India, and has managed to occupy his time putting his sustainable environments degree to use in smaller communities, developing an extensive vocabulary of Indian-pump-parts (because this is sure to come in handy back in Denmark!), and mastering the menu at the local café (if he ever offers you Masala Coke – it’s not a winner!). Almost 30km out of the city centre, the apartment was incredibly spacious (I was treated to my own bedroom, plus two half-bathrooms!), and we were soon joined by Nina (a Danish school teacher who got sick of teaching, and quit her job), and Rob, (a Canadian backpacker who seems to share my approach to booking ridiculously inconvenient internet airfares to save money), and the house was full!

After the travel chaos of the day earlier, I decided to avoid the city centre on my first day in Chennai, and instead caught the local bus to Mahabilipuram, a small town about 70km out of the city, and a half hour bus ride from Anna’s house. Set on the ocean, Mahabilipurum is backpacker central, with streets of stores selling crap quality hippy clothing, quirky café’s and seafood restaurants, and a seemingly never-ending supply of creepy shopkeepers, stonemasons and wood-carvers, keen to lead unwilling tourists into their poorly-lit shops for unbeatable prices. However, more interesting than the shops and stalls of the town, are the World Heritage listed stone carvings which line the streets, the amazing Shore Temple on the beach, and the Five Rathas (rock-carved shrines dedicated to Hindu God’s). The largest carving in the city, Arjuna’s Penance, described my Lonely Planet guide as “one of the most convincing and unpretentious works of ancient art in India”. Agreed. Amazing. Carved into the side of a huge boulder, the penance depicts mythical Hindu scenes, complete with a herd of incredibly lifelike, and life-sized elephants, hundreds of carved figures and animals, and a rather inappropriate cat, entertaining a group of mice with his inappropriate actions! Stretching the length of the town, behind the Penance, is a free (unusual in India!) park, filled with a huge array of hand carved structures, shrines and depictions – and my absolute favourite, a round boulder, proudly labelled ‘Krishna’s Butter Ball’. Obviously the eating of Krishna’s toast was an incredibly important part of the day.

The Butter Ball

After strolling through the streets, parks and the cow-paddock, polluted sand of the beach, I passed the lines of western tourists waiting to pay 250 Rupees for a tourist bus to the city, and jumped on a local bus (9 Rupees, or 18c for those in Australia!), and began one of the most unforgettable journeys of my trip so far. Traveling through the Indian countryside, stopping in small towns on the way back to the city, the bus began to fill with school students quite fast. Now, by this stage of my trip, I am fairly used to being stared at in public situations, for if it is not strange enough that I have white skin, I am also blessed with height, making my white skin all the more obvious to anyone within view. So it came as no surprise to me when a group of seven school students started giggling amongst themselves while they discussed the strange creature on their bus home. The closer we got to the suburbs, the bus began to empty, and my friends continued to giggle and whisper amongst themselves, glancing every few seconds to see if I had grown a second head, turned green, or any other story they had no doubt been told about us strange, white folk. With the aisle of the bus now almost completely empty, one of the boys in the group finally worked up the courage to walk up to me, and in the most polite, perfectly spoken English, said to me,

“Excuse me Sir, my friends want to know if they can touch your skin, to find out what white skin feels like?”

Of course, not wanting to disappoint, I agreed, and one by one the seven kids slowly walked over to me, touching my arm, accompanied by looks of amazement, a selection of ooh’s and aah’s, and even more giggling and whispering when they got back to the group. Eager to find out the verdict of their test, I asked one of the girls who looked particularly mesmerized by my unusual pigment if my skin felt any different to hers, to which she looked at me wide-eyed, and excitedly replied,

“It feels the same… it’s just yours is so funny looking!” 

Thanks! Funny looking! And I thought my tan was doing wonders for me!!! Of course, not really offended by her comments, it was an incredibly unfamiliar, surreal and unforgettable experience I had managed to get myself into. As an Australian, where multicultural friends, family and co-commuters are the norm, where the colour of a person’s skin no longer defines who they are, or what they can do with their life, it was amazing to know I was the first ‘white person’ these children had ever come into close contact with. There was nothing negative or malicious in their interest in me, and their curiosity of my skin colour came purely out of fascination, not out of judgement, hatred or fear. I was so very relieved when the young girl expressed her surprise that my skin felt the same as hers – for as I continue to learn on this trip around the world, and as I was once taught by a creepy, confused, yet incredibly successful man, ‘it don’t matter if you’re black or white’.

My second day in Chennai, I decided to brave the public transport ‘situation’, and head into the city centre for the day. Having heard only horror stories about the traffic and public transport of Chennai, I grabbed a decent length book and left Anna’s place early for the 28km trip into the city. 2½ hours later, I finally arrived at Marina Beach, exhausted from the crush of people on the bus, the lack of air-conditioning, and the fact such a short distance had taken so long to cover! Now battling the blazing sun, 36° humid weather, the absolute stench of the streets of Chennai, and an ever-increasing hunger, things for the day were not looking good. I walked along Marina Beach, hassled by stall-owners, photographers and beggars, before making my way toward the only street the Lonely Planet seemed to half-encourage tourists to visit, to find myself surrounded by gridlocked traffic, unusable footpaths, stray farm animals sleeping in, and sifting through gutters piled with litter and pollution, and the stench of all of the above, in a hot, humid city with no obvious waste management system, and a higher population density than New York City. You may be able to tell by now, I didn’t have the best day in Chennai! Walking the streets (literally the streets, as the footpaths were an absolute disaster), using ‘labour-breaths’ to avoid having to inhale too much of the stench of the streets, I finally stumble upon a semi-clean café, where a Masala Dosai and a coke set me back a whopping 42 rupee (84c!), and then, deciding the afternoon traffic was likely to be worse than the morning, set off on my almost 4 hour journey back to the peace, quiet and clean of Anna’s place. I didn’t make it back into the city centre in Chennai… not all that disappointed!

I always like to share my
bus stop with a cow...