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Kovalam
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The coastal village of
KOVALAM
may lie just 10km south from Thiruvananthapuram, but as Kerala's most developed
beach resort
it's becoming ever more distanced from the rest of the state. Each year greater numbers of Western visitors - budget travellers and jet-setters alike - arrive in search of sun, sea and palm-fringed beaches. For many travellers it has become, with Goa and Mamallapuram, the third essential stop on a triangular tour of tropical south Indian "paradises" - or indeed just another leg of the trail along the coasts of South Asia.
Europeans have been visiting Kovalam since the 1930s, but not until hippies started to colonize the place some thirty years later were any hotels built. As the resort's popularity began to grow, more and more paddy fields were filled and the first luxury holiday complexes sprang up. These soon caught the eye of European charter companies scouting for "undiscovered" beach hideaways to supplement their Goa brochures, and by the mid-1990s plane-loads of package tourists were flown here direct from the UK. This latest influx has had a dramatic impact on Kovalam. Prices have rocketed, rubbish lies in unsightly piles at the roadsides, and in high season the beach - recently enlarged to make way for even more cafAŠs, souvenir stalls and fish restaurants - is packed nose-to-tail. Add to this a backdrop of rapidly deteriorating concrete hotels, and you can see why Kovalam's detractors call it "the Costa del Kerala" Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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India,
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