Varkala runs as two separate towns on the same ridge. On the cliff edge there is a near-continuous strip of open-fronted cafés, guesthouses, yoga schools and craft stalls facing west over the sea. A couple of kilometres inland there is a pilgrim town around a temple that has been drawing devotees for centuries, and a hill with a mutt on it. They share a postcode and very little else, and most visitors only ever see the first.
The four Varkalas, and how long each takes
What is here
| Which | What | How long |
|---|---|---|
| The cliff | North Cliff strip, cafés, sunset, the steps down to the sand | As many evenings as you have |
| Papanasam | The sacred bathing beach at the foot of the cliff, and the springs | A morning |
| The pilgrim town | Janardanaswamy temple, Sivagiri mutt and the Guru’s samadhi | Half a day |
| The back of the ridge | The Victorian canal tunnel portals, and the ordinary town | An hour |
That is comfortably two days. One is not enough, and a week is what a lot of people end up doing, because the cliff is the sort of place that absorbs time without asking.
Papanasam is a working sacred beach, not just a beach
The sand at the foot of the cliff is where families come to perform funeral and ancestral rites, in the water, in the morning. It is also where people swim and sunbathe. Both things are true at once and the town manages the overlap gracefully, but the courtesy runs one way: keep your distance and your camera away from rites in progress, and use the parts of the beach that are not in use.
On swimming — this is open Arabian Sea with a real undertow, not a lagoon. There are lifeguards on the main stretch and flags that mean what they say. The monsoon months are not swimming months here.
Getting here, which is unusually easy
Varkala Sivagiri station is on the main line and most trains between Thiruvananthapuram and Ernakulam stop. Thiruvananthapuram and its international airport are about an hour south, Kollam under an hour north. This is one of the very few beach destinations in India you can reach comfortably without a car, which is a large part of why the traveller strip grew here rather than somewhere prettier.
From the station it is two or three kilometres to the cliff, so plan on an auto at each end unless you are travelling light.
What Varkala does not have
No backwater — the canal is behind the ridge and closed, and the houseboat country starts at Kollam. No old quarter, no fort, no museum. Very little that is open late outside the strip, and Kerala’s alcohol rules apply here as everywhere. Almost no shade on the cliff top in the middle of the day. And it is emphatically seasonal: the strip largely shuts through the monsoon, roughly June to August, when the sea is rough and much of the cliff-top business closes.
It is also busier and more expensive than its reputation suggests, in December and January in particular, when the peak beach season and the Sivagiri pilgrimage land in the same fortnight.
The two days that work
Day one: down the steps to Papanasam early while it is cool and the rites are on, back up for breakfast, out of the sun in the middle of the day, then the cliff for the sunset — which is genuinely one of the best on this coast because you are looking due west off a height. Day two: Janardanaswamy and Sivagiri in the morning, the tunnel portal on the way back, and the afternoon on the sand. If you have a third day, go north to Anchuthengu and Kappil, or south to the capital.