Holi Temple Festival in Varkala

Travel Day 967 – Varkala, Kerala, INDIA

Wow, today was Holi again, the festival of colors and I couldn’t help but reminisce about my last Holi festival in Kathmandu, Nepal…

Costumes at Varkala Temple Parade during Holi Festival in India

Two years ago when I happened to be in Kathmandu, the city went crazy during Holi with every single person, especially the kids chasing down the foreign faces in town to dump some colored powder over them and splash them with water. The local guys next to my hotel room even dumped entire buckets of water down to the street, instantly soaking their foreign targets and making them jump and scream due to the shock of the cold water. Well, this was obviously not going to happen here in this tourist beach town of Varkala and in fact only some foreigners organized to meet at a parking lot to throw some colors at each other…

This was obviously not quite my cup of chai and so I rather waited out the heat of the day and then walked over to the local temple, where supposedly a temple festival was going to happen. As it turned out, the temple festival was an all night event with costumes, fireworks, music and all, but when I arrived, it stated off with a big parade. To my great surprise the whole festival was a completely local event and it had seemingly nothing to do with the actual Holi Festival and the throwing of colors or water, but instead it had to do with ceremonies, offerings and elephants…

Village Street Decorations during Holi Festival in Varkala, India

From the temple on, some fellow travelers followed the parade with me, along the main street towards Varkala city for quite a while. We made sure to see all the costumes, listen to all types of different music and see all the little floats they had prepared. But once we had seen everything, even the guys with the long sticks lifting up all the electrical wires for the floats to pass, we were wondering about something else. Where were the promised elephants?

We had heard so much about some elephants being part of this temple festival and the parade, so we really wanted to see them. Obviously we started asking around, but naturally we received different answers from every single person we asked. As we found about soon, there were about 2 to 4 elephants and they had either been at the parade or they would possible meet up with it in a few minutes, or maybe later in a few hours. The information here was not quite solid, but at least most people agreed that the elephants were most likely at the present moment by the beach…

Elephants during Holi Temple Festival in Varkala, India

Well, since there was beach everywhere in Varkala and all this good information was somewhat unclear, we nevertheless started to walk though little side streets that were nicely decorated. The rational was that eventually we should reach the beach somewhere, and we actually did. After lots of walking, having conversations with local people and enjoying all the decorations including candles and offerings they had set up in front of their houses, we finally reached a beach…

Luckily it was the correct beach and we actually had found the promised 4 big elephants. While it was obviously amazing to see them, I once more felt sorry for them not being able to move around freely. But still, the elephant walk through the village roads was a great sight and a pretty unique thing to do during Holi Festival. But it was very enjoyable, even it meant walking for a very long time as seemingly every single house owner along the way had to give an offering of bananas to the already slow-moving elephants… : )

Find all Varkala photos here.