first stop: Vedic Heritage Hotel, Kovalam

Most of you have already heard about Aravindam, the hotel manager at the wonderful Vedic Heritage Hotel in Kovalam.  It wasn’t until he started to fill out our registration form that he told us he’s actually 90% blind. He was warm hearted, round bellied and couldn’t do enough to help us, including getting up at 2am to power up the generator so we could have the ceiling fan on at night. As they say in India, guest(tripadvisor) is god… Most nights when we got back after dinner he’d be sitting extremely close to the tv watching some bonkers indian comedy show and giggling like a schoolboy, often springing to attention to regale us with his latest saga involving ‘all the peoples’ (aka guests) who had wanted to come and stay, but that he had had to cancel due to ‘crazy temple peoples’ making too much noise at the shrine up the road. Once we came home to find him napping on the marble floor (a practise we have since adopted ourselves to keep cool), later he confided to us ‘he’d had a little ‘viskey’ and decided to take a snooze.