A Change Of Plans

The blog has slipped a bit. It’s seems that despite having no particular plans just being in a busy city like Singapore absorbs more time. After my last post we had just left the backwaters of Kerala and were making away to Varkala. Our primary reason for visiting was to enjoy a little break from backpacking and guest houses by helping out one of Maren’s recent acquaintances Tony who she’d met (like many other girls it seems) after her stay at the nearby Sivananda Ashram. Tony having retired several years ago is a long term resident of Varkala spending his winters in India and his summers in his native Greece. With his son visiting, he was leaving town to spend a couple of weeks in the Andaman Islands and was looking for house sitters whilst he was away to look after his villa and feed the pets. We happily offered as this would allow us to regroup for the next part of our trip. We were especially looking forward to giving all our clothes a well overdue wash in a decent washing machine instead of being beaten on rock in a dirty river.

However, on arriving in Varkala our plans began to change rapidly. Over the last couple of weeks we’d heard stories that they’d been some changes to the rules on people travelling in India on a tourist visa. We’d initially heard rumours that travellers we not permitted to re-enter India after two months once they’d left the country, even if they still had a valid “multiple entry” tourist visa. However, it wasn’t until we’d heard a story from someone who had experienced this first hand with his friend not being able to enter the country at the airport in Mumbai that we took it seriously.

With access to Internet at a local cafe, I tried to make sense of what was going on. After reading official notices on various Indian embassy websites and wading though pages and pages of discussions on traveller forums it did indeed seem that new restrictions had been placed on tourist visas. There was now a rule that travellers could not re-enter the country for at least two months once they had left and it also appeared that in some cases travellers had not been able to apply for a new visa until their previous visa had expired for at least one month. Frustratingly, these restrictions were not clear or being consistently enforced. Even the information provided by the US, UK and Australian Indian embassies websites differed and the experiences of travellers was mixed. A compounding factor was that the ministry in charge of making the rules (The Foreign Office) was not the ministry in charge of enforcing them (The Home Office).

Our long term plan at this point had been to spend the majority of our time in India, being in the south till around April, with a brief interlude in Bali and with a trip somewhere where we could learn to dive, returning to India shortly after my visa expired in May so we could travel to the far north of India. With this new information we needed to leave no later than March so we could try and re-enter the country in May. It looked like the main casualty to our original itinerary would be a visit to the Andaman Islands and after consideration there were just two places we felt strongly about visiting before we left the south of the country. First to Bangalore, to visit our new friend Manoj and second to visit the ashram of the Sai Baba, just a few hours drive from Bangalore. With Bangalore’s international airport so close we decided that we may as well leave sooner rather than later and take the opportunity to travel more extensively around South East Asia. Since Tony now had other offers for a house sitter, we decided to book a train to Bangalore and a flight out of the country as soon as we could. In the meantime we got to enjoy a very pleasant few days in Varkala.

Varkala has by far the most developed and westernised of the beach fronts we have visited in India, catering more for middle class westerners than budget backpackers. That said, it’s still pretty good value. Our room was 300 rupees a night (just over 4 pounds) and was up there with the best we’ve stayed in, with marble floors, a nice bathroom and a large comfortable bed. Eating out was a little more expensive, but still good value and the displays of fresh seafood at the restaurants along the north cliff were impressive. It seemed to be something of a competition between the restaurants as to who had the most impressive display, with metre long barracuda and swordfish being the main attractions, along with huge red snapper, grouper and tiger prawns enticing visitors in. All this fresh fish is provided by a huge fleet of fishing boats whose lights can be seen on the sea horizon as you enjoy your meal. It is said to be the largest small fishing boat fleet in the world, forming a floating town at night with all manner of trade (some no doubt illegal) being conducted on the waves. Maren took the opportunity to introduce me to her favourite fish, Barracuda, having failed to find any along the shores of Goa and Gokana and we ate very well during our stay. We also thoroughly enjoyed swimming in the crystal clear waters along the beach, however being well into February it was simply too hot for any prolonged sunbathing with temperatures well in excess of 35 degrees by lunch time. Instead, we passed time by playing many fiercely contested games of Cribbage (we both hate to lose) and formulated the rest of our travel plans.

Thailand was our first choice, but just as I was about to book our flights I had the presence of mind to check we met the visa requirements. We both qualified for visa on entry (you just pay and get one when you land) but we could be asked to show that we already have a flight booked out of the country. Again, after checking forums it seems that this isn’t consistently enforced but since we weren’t booking a flight out as we planned to cross over the border into one of Thailand’s neighbours we didn’t want to take a chance.

Recent changes introduced to Thali and Indian tourist visas aim to make “visa runs” more inconvenient and prevent people staying in the country long term. There are people who are for all intents and purposes living as permanent residents by abusing the tourist visas of various countries. This basically involves leaving the country as your current tourist visa expires, applying for a new visa in a neighbouring country and then re-entering the country almost immediately. In most cases this is probably a pretty benign problem, with people on just on extended holidays (like Maren and I) or retirees. But it seems there has increasingly been a problem with people who have left their country and have begun to take local jobs and start businesses. Whether such people have a negative impact on the country is no clearer to me than the immigration issues we have at home but clearly the governments of these countries have a problem with it which unfortunately makes it harder for genuine tourists.

After looking at other options Malaysia looked like a good choice since there were no visa requirements and it was easy to fly to from Bangalore. However, the flight that we’d taking would require a transfer in Singapore and it turned out that Maren had an open invite to stay with another new friend, someone who she’d met in the Sivananda ashram just before Christmas. After an exchange of emails along with booking our flights we were all set to spend a few days in Singapore before we crossed over the border to begin our new adventures in South East Asia. First however it was a 16 hour train ride to Bangalore.

Pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/kris.lander/Varkala