An Impromptu Excursion

It’s important to be impulsive in life. A conversation last week went something like this:

Julia: My homestay sister and a few of her friends are going to some beach this weekend and we’re invited. It will be cheap and they will organize everything. Want to go?

Brenda and Katie: Uh… Sure, why not?

And so began our strange weekend. My friend Julia is staying the semester with the Ramanans, a family whose generous hospitality we have taken advantage of several times. Their daughter Sowmya recently received her MA from the University of Chicago and is now working in Hyderabad. She, along with her fiancé, and her two friends, Ajay and Prashanth, decided to visit Chirala, a tiny town on the coast of Andhra Pradesh this weekend. Julia, Brenda, and I joined them on Friday evening for an overnight bus ride. The bus was surprisingly comfortable and I actually arrived Saturday morning quite well rested.

After de-bussing, we took a rickshaw (with a weird picture of a baby in a Santa hat inside) to the beach-side hotel where we wanted to stay only to find that it was completely booked. The problem here was that this is the only actual hotel in the area. Chirala is really tiny and isolated. It is one of those rare places in the world yet untouched by McDonald’s, Starbucks, or tourism. Indians and Westerners alike prefer to visit beaches in Goa or Tamil Nadu, so the Andhra Coast is left purely at the hands of its locals and has no need to cater to tourists. All of the street signs are only in the Andhra language, Telugu (no English, no Hindi) and the only suggestion of Western influence is in the presence of the occasional Coca-Cola product...or the occasional pictures of naked white babies decorating rickshaws...

The driver took us back into the town where we were able to get rooms. It was not a hotel, per se, just a building with rooms that you could rent. And they weren’t rooms, per se, just cubicles with bunk beds. But the beds were clean and there were working showers and it cost us less than $2 per person so no one complained.

We went to breakfast in a very tiny, very local, very delicious establishment down the street before heading out to the beach. The restaurant patrons and other locals were more than a little surprised to see the three American girls in town. Our four Indian friends were highly amused by how much attention we were attracting, but it was just the typical celebrity treatement of staring, pointing, cameras flashing, and shouts of "Which country?" that we Americans have become used to in India. Luckily, the beach we went to was completely secluded so we had the day to ourselves without causing too much commotion. The beach itself was really ideal with perfect warm water and swaying palm trees and empty wooden fishing boats sitting on the sand. Of course, in spite of the heavenly conditions, I developed a hellish sunburn.

On the second day our little brunch consisted of traditional Easter favorites like Iddly and Bajji with coconut chutney. As we were eating breakfast, Julia stood up to go wash her hands and in the time she was gone, an old woman in a bright green sari approached our table and sat down in Julia’s chair with no explanation. She looked around at us all and smiled then spoke some slurred, colloquial Telugu that even our Indian friends couldn’t make sense of. Julia returned, had a confused, comical exchange with the woman, and eventually won her chair back.

For our second day of beaching, we decided to try out a different, more popular spot. The beach was very crowded and the demographic was an interesting mix of teenage boys swimming and a small village community sacrificing a goat (not kidding). It was actually much harder to ignore the teenage boys than the goat slaughter, because as soon as the boys spotted us they started swarming. We actually had to approach a security guard and ask if we could swim in the “restricted area” of the beach so that the crowd couldn’t bother us. Here are my soggy friends with the curious boys sneaking up in the background. Though we felt a little like animals in a zoo, the crowded beach was just as beautiful as the secluded one from the previous day and we even spotted dolphins splashing around in the water.

After enjoying a leisurely lunch we returned to our secluded beach from the first day to find it COVERED with little red crabs at low tide. As it turns out, crabs are very scared of people and they dive back into their crab holes when you approach instead of viciously attacking you with their pinchers as I imagined they would.

When time came for us to leave our lovely beach, the sun had begun to set and all forms of transportation had disappeared, as had everyone’s phone signals. This left us essentially stranded, but we began walking toward the road. The town we were staying in was still several kilometers away so the road led us into a tiny, beachside grass-hut village. No one was really around when we walked in, but word spread and soon enough the whole community was gathering to look at the sweaty, sunburned, foreign strangers. Ajay thought it would be a good idea to take a group photo, which seemed like a popular idea among the locals as well. In the end we discovered that one of the men from the village happened to own a rickshaw and he kindly agreed to return us to the town.

After showering and dining we made our way to the bus station for our return to Hyderabad. We hadn’t been able to get tickets with the same bus company that we took the first time, but procured tickets on something called the “Special Bus” which we assumed must be even more luxurious than the first one. What we got instead, was the same caliber of vehicle as the dilapidated Hyderabad city buses with three-person, not plush, not reclining, not arm-restable, bench seats. Sowmya, who had developed a bad flu by this point, looked around once and said “Oh my god. Can’t we take a taxi to Hyderabad??!” The answer, sadly, was no. The uncomfortable seats coupled with the sounds of the rumbling motor, incessant horn, and screaming babies, did not create a very relaxing environment for sleep. Instead, Julia, Brenda and I, crammed into one seat, remained awake for most of the night. We passed the time by eating unhealthy amounts of candy at 2 AM, gossiping about everyone we know, and deliriously discussing works of American literature.

We arrived, fatigued, sunburned, and badly in need of food and showers at 5 AM, but in my book, these circumstances are the signs of a weekend well-spent.