Not one among the dozens of beach-facing restaurants in Varkala have beer and cocktails in their menus.

But ask a waiter for alcohol and he’ll produce a tattered home-printed sheet from his pocket listing Tom Collins, mojitos, Cosmopolitans, all the classic mixes. Order a beer and an ice-cold Kingfisher bottle will appear in seconds.

The restaurants aren’t allowed to sell alcohol. But like anywhere else, in Varkala, the rules are negotiable if the price is right.

According to multiple sources in the local hospitality industry, restaurants pay the police to leave them alone. This is quite standard and should surprise no one familiar with the ways of the third world.

But it gets interesting when this is used for revenge politics among establishments.

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The strip of cliff-top restaurants and shops in Varkala.

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Varkala, in the southwestern state of Kerala, is a beach resort town relatively new on the tourist map. A simpler, cheaper alternative to overdeveloped Kovalam, it lures hippie types who sport dreadlocks and wear Indian clothes by choice, not just out of respect.

The beach is actually just a small patch of sand, smaller than a soccer field, tucked between two red rocky cliffs. Most of the life is at the top of those cliffs. Five years ago there were barely five hotels; today you can choose from an unbroken necklace of cheap guesthouses, posh bungalows, cafes and restaurants, all offering Ayurvedic therapies.

The town seems to have been built and run by Nepalese and Kashmiris, who, to my surprise, excel in the tourism business. They work as managers, waiters, and souvenir sellers, closing shop and going home for the desolate monsoon season in June.

Local Indians do mostly menial tasks like repairing roofs and patching sidewalks.

I have been spending my evenings at a restaurant called Hill Top Indian Spice, the only place that openly advertises Indian food (the rest cater to homesick Germans and Britons with “continental” menus).

It’s delicious. The chef, a Nepalese man in his fifties, has been cooking at resort towns for 22 years all over India. The red curry sauce he makes on a stuffed tomato dish is so exquisite I demanded cooking lessons.

The restaurant opened in August of this year and was an instant success, the owner tells me. To the surprise of many, people who come to India want to eat Indian food.

For a month, Hill Top was packed while its continental neighbours struggled to fill a few tables. It’s clear Varkala grew faster than demand. There’s an overcapacity of eateries and lodging. So the politics began.

Hill Top hadn’t paid off the cops. Their neighbours tattled. And the restaurant was shut down for two months.

It’s back in business, and slowly filling up again. This time, with their baksheesh installments in good standing.

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Faithful perform ancestor worship at Varkala’s beach. The town is a place of Hindu pilgrimage, thanks to a millennial temple.

Photo by Daniel Grosvenor

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When selling bootleg books didn’t work, the boy turned to begging for food. He looked 12 and was still perfecting his pity pitch.

After four days in Siem Reap (and another week in Sihanoukville), I got used to saying no to child sellers and beggars. I read enough articles to know giving them money does more harm than good:

It encourages them to keep working and begging instead of going to school.

It creates a dependency on tourists for their livelihood.

It undermines the role of parents as caretakers and of NGOs trying to keep them off the street.

It encourages irresponsible parents to stay at home (sometimes drinking) while the child goes out and works.

Worst of all, it robs a child of her childhood.

My girlfriend Bianca, however, let he compassion speak louder than reason. When the boy said he was hungry, she offered to buy him lunch and eat with us on our restaurant table.

It was too late for me to protest. She was already going over menu choices with the boy. All I could do was limit how much we’d spend. No more than $1, I said. Enough for a generous portion of fried rice.

As he ate, Bianca asked him questions about his life. I welcomed this idea. It would be an opportunity for empathy-building, a way to learn more about the people we sadly learn to regard as travel annoyances.

He said he needs money to buy powdered milk for his baby sister. This set off alarms, since I had heard this from other beggars, including a woman carrying her baby.

Traveling in Cambodia, you learn quickly that Cambodians are great imitators but lousy innovators. If something works for one person, you can be sure many more will do the same.

For proof, compare the menus of any three restaurants in Siem Reap. Listen to the sales pitches of souvenir sellers. Notice how every street corner has a “Dr. Fish Massage” tank full of little fish that eat dead skin off your legs. Half of them offer a free beer with the $2 service.

The boy said his father lost his legs to landmines. He kept going, and it all started to sound a little too tragic. Instead of sympathy, I felt suspicion. This kid was combining several pity ingredients in a clumsy way. As a result, I wasn’t believing a word of it.

Then what I feared happened. Two other boys, who evidently witnessed our charity, entered the restaurant. One of them asked for a plate of fried rice while the other looked on. These kids usually move on after three “no, thanks” but this one would not budge.

And this is what I hated the most: I had to be a hard ass with the kid. I had to look at him sternly in the eye and say, “I said no. That’s final.”

As we got us and left our table, the boy’s eyes followed me with a load of rage I had never seen in this country of meek and deferential people.

“You stingy,” he spat.

It’s a lousy thing to hear, especially after buying one of his comrades lunch. And it exposed the third world beggar’s logic, which is so often kept veiled behind so many Have a nice day’s and Thank you sir’s.

And that logic is this: if you have the money to travel this far from home, you have the money to buy me food. You have the money to buy all of us food. So why don’t you?

Never mind that I worked hard for three years to save money for this trip. Never mind that I chose this country precisely because it’s cheap and I’m not rich. Never mind that I’m helping his countrymen by just being here, injecting money into their economy and creating jobs in tourism.

The boy was simply saying what most beggars think all the time, whether it’s true or not.

And that’s a hard but necessary truth to swallow no matter what comforts our faith in tourism dollars may provide.

Years of robbery and kidnapping by paramilitary thugs made travelling within Colombia a fool’s venture, but improved security over the past few years has sparked a tourism renaissance. In many parts of the country (Cartagena excluded), there is no formal structure to receive visitors; rudimentary services are improvised by local entrepreneurs.

This makes travelling to Colombia off-limits to those without a functional level of Spanish, but the perfect destination for anyone seeking an uncontaminated experience in a fascinating country: most of the coast is blissfully free of all-inclusive monstrosities and sunburned gringos with ridiculous hats, over-sized cameras and Hawaiian shirts are nonexistent.

Plus, it’s cheap. Really cheap. And that’s partly because Colombians still haven’t learned how to haggle.

Observe Exhibit A:

Paipa is a town famous for its thermal baths and rustic scenery. Several hotel-spas line a lake, most of them predictably expensive. The first we looked at charged 320,000 Colombian pesos (about $160 USD). A second one we saw, the Casona Salitre, was majestic: Spanish colonial architecture, a stone thermal bath fed by four gargoyles, lots of potted plants and flowers. Plus, the liberator Simón Bolivar spent a few days there, which in this part of the world, turns any location into a national monument.

We expected to find the highest price. Said the concierge:

“Our rooms start at 250,000 pesos.”

We thought about this in silence for about two seconds, after which the concierge said:

“But we can give it to you for 190,000.”

Again, we said nothing for a bew beats and then declared, “We’re going to take a look around the hotel, all right?”

“Fine, 152,000,” he shot back.

And Exhibit B:

East of Santa Marta is a fishing village called Taganga, where several diving schools have been set up. The town is quickly primping itself for tourism; all day long workers slowly build a boardwalk where a scraggly dirt road met the sand. A 15-minute walk over a rock gets you to Playa Grande, a pleasant, secluded cove that is nowhere near grande but filled with ramshackle estaderos, essentially fish eateries under straw roofs.

Stroll near one and a lady eagerly ushers you to a table and brings out three freshly caught fish of different sizes on a tray: “This one is 15,000, this one 18,000, and this one 22,000,” she says.

I repeated the information, pointing to the smallest one. “This one is 15,000?”

Immediately she responded, “It’s ok, we’ll make it 12,000.”

This happened a few other times, which led to the inevitable conclusion: Colombians haggle for you.

Contrast this with Guatemala, a country with a long-established backpacker trail and multiple tourist destinations. Whether by mastery in haggling or unshakable pride in the work, Guatemalan merchants rarely ever lower their prices. Rather, they often look at you like you’re some kind of bathroom tile buildup. “This is the price,” they calmly respond, and hardly care if you walk away.

One could assume that Colombians are suckers or simply naive, but I ascribe this to their tender nature, where the fear of offending a friendly stranger takes precedence over profits. It’s as if they know that their original asking price is a rip-off and can’t bring themselves to actually charge it.

It’s too bad this won’t last.