Did that just happend?

Varkala. It’s a beautiful beach south of where I live and the destination of my very adventurous weekend. Well, the weekend wasn’t so adventurous, but getting there and back is another story. Jacqi, Allison, and I began our little spontaneous adventure with hesitation at 6am on Friday…I think we all just wanted to crawl back into bed and forget the whole thing, but we figured you only live once. We packed all of our stuff into the bookbags and set off. Getting to the train station was the usually deal: leave our house, cross some train tracks under the bridge (avoiding large puddles), hike up a hill (no stairs), catch a bus, push and shove to get a seat (it’s a 45 minute bus ride), and stare back at anyone who is staring at you because you are clearly not Indian. Typical day. We get off the bus stop and walk the 2 km to the bus stop because there is no way we splitting a .40 rickshaw between the 3 of us. Still a typical day. We buy ‘general seating’ because it’s only 5 hours to Varkala and it seems silly to pay more than a $1 for the train ride. We begin to comment that maybe God will smile on us this weekend for being spontaneous and living in the moment. We were dead wrong…..
Our train comes and we are all of a sudden in the middle of a mad rush with others. Where this huge crowd came from is unknown to me because moments before there were only 3 of us on that platform. We come to the shocking conclusion that we are going to have to stand like sardines the entire way. We are all looking at each other with sadness and despair, but all is still okay. Then ‘it’ happens. I’m standing closest to the ‘doors’ of the train while Jacqi and Allison are with our bags in the train car (note: there are people EVERYWHERE). There is something being yelled in a language that I don’t understand and everyone is murmuring; clearly something is going on that we don’t know about. All of a sudden a man pushes past me from another car. This man is probably the most disheveled man I have ever seen. I won’t go into detail, but what Allison whispers as he pushes past her clearly sums up the description, “Jacqi, I think he’s crazy.” A few seconds later I look over Allison’s shoulder and see a cop coming towards the ‘crazy’ man. The cop is yelling what I can only guess is “Get off the train you crazed lunatic!”, but when the man refuses all hell breaks loose. Allison, Jacqi, and I are trapped beside this crazed man and he is being CANED by the cop. We are about 6 inches from the caning and I think we all had fears of being caught in the caning crossfire so we just tried to protect our heads. Jacqi and I manage to get further away from it as Allison continues to be trapped nearer to the caning. The cops manage to shove/cane the crazed man outside the train and we rush back to our bookbags (they were left when the caning began). Allison began to tear up then hysterically laughing, Jacqi just cried, and I E.S.D. (Emotionally Shut Down). I looked at the floor for a bit and then just got my bookbag to sit in the middle of the train floor. I think if we could have gotten off that train at that moment we would have, but it was impossible with all the people. The rest of the train ride wasn’t much better, but that was the last caning we saw that day. We eventually got seats after some pushing and shoving. Getting off the train was pretty funny; we literally had to leap off the train as it was moving…a little scary.

However, when we arrived at the beach we were amazed. The hotel was perched on a cliff overlooking the Arabian Sea and is one of the most gorgeous things I’ve seen in India. We spent the next 2 days drinking beer out of teapots (many places don’t have license thus serving in teapots), taking pictures, hiking down the cliff to look at the water, watching dolphins, observing the local mongoose, and eating great food. However, most of the weekend we would look at each other and state “Did that just happen?”

(local mongoose)

(teapot beer)