Go(to hell)karna

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  Gokarna, Karnātaka, India
Friday, January 15, 2010

After a great visit to Hampi, our next stop was to the costal town of Gokarna.

With our trip to the Wayanad national park being curtailed by dullness we had a couple of days free so we thought we would spend them at the beach at Gokarna. The trip from Hampi was an interesting one and worthy of a blog in itself. A supposed 3 hour bus ride took 8 hours whilst we got caught in a traffic jam full of trucks, inexplicably spent an hour parked in a field and then watched as police dispersed the traffic by hitting lorry drivers as hard as they could with big sticks. India could never be described as dull but this trip was truly bizarre. After spending 7 hours to navigate 50KM or so, the traffic suddenly disappeared & the next 50KM took only an hour! After such a marathon journey we were ready to relax and spend a couple of days on the beach.

Gokarna is famous for its empty and deserted beaches and this sounded like the ideal place to enjoy with our year long adventure rapidly coming to and end. Deserted however was not a word we could ever use to describe Gokarna and our stay here was our most unpleasant experience in India. It all started well as we found a hostel right on Om beach and spent the afternoon swimming in the ocean by the long sandy bay – our next 2 days couldn't have been more different.

We woke up on the second day to find that the beach was packed. We later found out that it was a public holiday in India and the beach was full of Indians, or more specifically Indian men, or more specifically still, Indian men who had come solely to look, stare and gape at Western women in bikinis. In a country where there is such segregation of the sexes and Indian women are always seen fully covered, there is a booming industry in what the local newspapers call 'the sex trade’ – days trips for Indian men to ogle women. It is such a big issue that Goa has stopped using bikini clad women in local adverts as it is affecting lucrative foreign tourist trade.

As we sat on the beach we watched as Indian men walked up and down the beach with cameras taking photos of women whether they wanted their photos taking or not. They then sat down in groups of a dozen and sat no more than 10 feet away from the women and gaped – some groups of women had 12 men in front of them, another dozen to the left, another to the right and a dozen behind, all laying face down and staring, leering and taking photos. If women dared to venture in to the sea, the men would swarm around them, jumping at them and trying to touch them. If the women got out of the water, the men would shriek and scream like a pack of animals, the men were all lecherous perverts who had no idea how to behave. I left the beach after 15 minutes and watched from a café as the men chased scores of women of the beach - the ones who stayed reverted to hurling out verbal abuse but to no avail. It was a horrible, horrible experience and one that I would never want to go through ever again – it didn’t matter if you were with your partner or not, in a big group or just a single woman, the men would just photograph you and look at you as if you were a piece of meat. We have experienced a lot of sexism in India but this was disgraceful and we wished we had never come and stayed here.

The next day was a little better with perhaps only 100 or so ‘sex tourists’ and I was able to swim in the sea escorted by Paul. The men still walked up and down and took photos despite politely asking, very impolitely asking or hurling abuse at them telling them not to. It was a little better but not exactly a fun trip to the sea side.

Gokarna and its deserted beaches? What a joke.

Here are the photos.

Next stop, our final stop, Mumbai.

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