India had been on our radar for a couple of years. Everything about it looked foreign and interesting to us. Throughout our travels, we have met many Indians and they have been such nice people. They have always been very interested in playing with and giving attention to our kids and talking about the United States and our way of life over here. There isn’t too much information about surfing in India, so we figured we would give it a try, and we booked a week in Sri Lanka, which was our surfing back up plan in case we didn’t get anything in India.
India has 4,671 miles of coastline. Most of it has been unexplored for surfing purposes. Most of the lineups I found were completely empty. It seems strange that a country with 1.2 billion people would have so few people surfing. While there is immense poverty in other parts of the country, we focused our efforts on the state of Kerala, on the southwestern tip of the country. Kerala, by Indian standards, is a very rich part of the country. It is very clean and very safe, which were important, as we brought our two young children along. It also has good swell exposure and we went just before monsoon season, which meant there would be a greater likelihood that we would catch swell.
India was nothing like we were expecting and it was exactly like we were expecting. The surf, beaches, coastline and cleanliness were much different than I had envisioned. The water was clean and clear, the beaches were clean and beautiful, they were lined with palm trees. The beaches looked like some of the beaches we frequented when we live in Hawaii. I had a knarly open wound on my knee that I got the week before in Sri Lanka, and I didn’t even get it infected while I was there; something that I considered nothing short of miraculous. The food was good and the restaurants were clean and no one got sick. The culture was just like I expected it, elephants everywhere, sitar music playing everywhere, incredibly beautiful backwaters, friendly people and insanely hot and humid weather.
We had the luck of going during the temple festival in Kerala, which was one of the most unique cultural experiences of my life. There were daily parades where decorated elephants would walk down the streets to the temples, where they would be the focal point of a religious Hindu ceremony. There were not many tourists there, so we stuck out like a sore thumb during the ceremony, but we were all in awe as we witnessed their culture and their religious rites.
The surf was fun. Somedays it was terrible and other days it was good. It wasn’t world class like Hawaii, Bali or Fiji, but at least as good as an average day in Southern California with really warm water and absolutely no one out. The board rentals out there were surprisingly good. I surfed a Lost and a Merrick that were both in good condition all week. Board rentals were $7 a day, so we were pretty stoked on that too. The Kovalam surf club and Drifter’s Board Shop hooked me up with all the info I needed before I got there. They helped me find places to surf based on wind, tide and swell direction. Kovalam Surf Club is a small group of locals that promotes surfing for kids. They only let kids use the boards if they stay in school and don’t do drugs. Their mantra is “No school, no surfing.” It was rad to see them helping out kids and having a positive influence on the community. There are some waves in some small Muslim fishing villages where my wife had to wear board shorts and a t shirt or rash guard to be respectful of the local people. Even though we didn’t even see anyone around while we paddled out, it was something we felt we should do. There was every kind of wave in the 200kms that we explored: peeling points, barreling beach break, river mouths, reefs…etc. In Varkala, we stayed at the Breeze House, which is a bed and breakfast, which costs $30/night. It was clean and spacious and the balcony had a view of a deserted white sand beach that only fisherman would use to take the boats out to fish. In Kovalam, we stayed at Jeevan Resort, which overlooked the beach and had a balcony right in front of the surf break. There are plenty of options in both beach towns, and you don’t need to book in advance.
There is no shortage of things to do see and visit on the days that the surf sucks. Backwater exploration, Alleppey is the town with the famous backwater tours, but we did ours about an hour outside of Varkala, which turned out to be much cheaper and closer than Alleppey. We set that up at the Breeze House, They were great on getting us tux tux drivers and setting up our tours and excursions. We saw temple ceremonies (they had a ceremony at every temple in town in March) and our driver took us to where they kept the elephants in preparation for the temple ceremonies that evening and the owner let the kids pet and sit on the elephants. There is good food everywhere, and there are a few cool hikes…you will never be bored in India. It is a great place to visit if your significant other doesn’t surf or if you just want to surf once a day and explore after your session. If you bring your kids, the locals will line up to take pictures with them. They will play with them, talk to them and many of the store owners would give them little trinkets for free and refuse me when I tried to pay them. When we went to the Taj Mahal, we had dozens of groups line up to take pictures with the kids.
India is a country that can handle surf tourism. There are thousands of miles of coastline and lots of waves that are unridden and most likely not even explored yet. There are waves that are top to bottom and there definitely are barrels. It is a really long flight from San Diego, but the cultural experience we had out there was unparalleled and we had waves all to ourselves all week. It was also really affordable and clean, even by Westerner standards. It was probably the most unique trip that we have been on when taking into account the culture, the unknown elements of going to India: the relatively unknown surf situation, the risk of typhoid and other diseases that don’t exist in our country and the cleanliness standards. We gambled and we ended up winning big time.
