Of trains and beaches - The Varkala Travelogue
Part I Varkala beach I write this sitting at a restaurant at the edge of the Varkala cliff, sipping a hot cup of tea. The view from here is scenic, the Varkala hill on one side and the Arabian Sea on the other. I've finally ticked off Varkala from my places-to-visit list. I started off from Mumbai at 0520 PM on Friday, the 24th of March, after leaving office in a hurry and almost missing my train. I was on the Gareebrath express to Kochuvelli. I wanted to make this journey primarily because it had been a long time since I travelled solo on a train, and Varkala was just a break between the to and fro journeys. I associate a lot of nostalgia with train journeys, coz as a kid, whenever I used to travel to my native; it was on the train, with mom and dad, sitting at the door, with a Kodak camera. The memory just stayed. Since then, I used to think of a long-distance train journey as a travel in itself rather than just a means of getting somewhere. Shooting from the t...