North Kerala: the coast I went back to with the dogs

The first time I came to the north Kerala coast I wrote a one-word caption. The second time I came, everything I wrote was about the dogs, and nothing was about Kerala at all.

Both of those are the correct response to this coast, and the second one is the more useful.

Bekal, and one word

October 2022, near the end of a two-week loop out of Bengaluru. I came down off the Malnad hills, through Coorg, and out onto the coast at Bekal — a huge laterite fort sitting directly on the Arabian Sea, so close to the water that the sea is the view from the walls rather than something you go and find afterwards.

What I wrote that evening was:

Emotions!

That is the whole caption. I have thought about it since and I do not think a longer one would have been more accurate.

The relevant fact about this coast is what is not on it. Kerala's famous places — the Alleppey backwaters, Varkala's cliffs, Fort Kochi — are all south. The north is where the buses do not go, and on a weekday evening in October there was more or less nobody there.

Christmas Eve, and both dogs in the back

I came back on 24 December 2023, and the difference was that I did not come alone.

I will carry you everywhere possibly anyone would dream of going. Cookie 🍪 & Choco 🐶

Everything I posted that day was about the two of them. A bird going up off the sand. Cookie flat-out feisty on the beach. Later, up on the Wayanad plateau at Mananthavady, Cookie making friends with somebody else's dog, which got its own caption and deserved one.

Nothing about the fort. Nothing about the coast. In hindsight that is the honest record of what the day was.

The radius was wrong

I wrote in the Coorg entry that the test of a nearby place is whether the dog can come, and that Coorg wins because it is inside the radius where that is easy.

That is true, and it is also too small a claim. Kannur is not a Coorg-style Thursday decision — it is the better part of a day's drive from Bengaluru, and I did it in late December with both dogs anyway.

So the radius is not really a distance. It is a question of whether the trip is built around them or merely tolerates them. A long drive with a beach at the end of it, in the cool part of the year, on a coast with no crowd to navigate, is a trip built around them. A packed itinerary two hours away is not.

If you have animals and you have been treating that as a limit on range, it is worth testing where the limit actually sits. Mine was further out than I thought.

What the north coast is for

Take the shore road rather than the highway wherever it exists. This is a coast of long empty beaches — Muzhappilangad in Kannur is firm enough to drive on, and is the rare place where that is legal rather than merely possible.

Come between December and March. That matters more here than elsewhere in India: this coast runs on the north-east monsoon and is wet through October and November, exactly when the rest of the country is drying out and everyone else is setting off.

Late December is also deep in Theyyam season across north Malabar — ritual performances in village shrines, running from roughly December to April. They are not a show and they are not staged for visitors, which is the reason to go quietly and stand at the back if you get the chance at one.

And go up. Wayanad is only a couple of hours inland and a different climate entirely — coffee, spice, and plateau air after the humidity of the coast. The two together make more sense than either alone.