Marymaking near MALPE

Karnataka tourism’s first island tourism festival was held on St Mary’s Island, eight nautical miles from Malpe beach, Udupi.

The three-day event, organised by the tourism department, was a paradigm shift from the repertoire of the department-organised programmes in the past.

While keeping features like the folk and performing art events intact, the festival made way for some dance forms such as rave too.

Bonfires, DJ nights, open bar, barbeque by the beach, and bands were part of the festival. To pull off the event, special ferry services were pressed into service. Loads of food, raw material for food, liquor, power generators, air-conditioned tents, camping equipment, cooking equipment, DJ consoles, strobes, and other equipment were ferried across the Malpe harbour.

“We had to keep the entry tickets highly priced to maintain the quality of participants, but a few local people did not mind paying it to gain entry,” said an official.

The festival had a telling effect on Goa’s beaches. Tourists who arrived from Europe to take part in the carnival in Goa—scheduled to start from February 18—headed to St Mary’s.

“But we will go back there in time for the carnival,” said Carla Azavedo, an escort of foreign tourists. “I did not know St Mary’s was so beautiful. None of the tourist operators told me about it. However, I will motivate more tourists to visit this place and take the permission of the tourism department to open it for Goan tourists once or twice in a year,” she added.

Deputy commissioner MT Reju said: “It is an international tourism festival and Udupi had never been projected as a tourist paradise to foreign, high-value tourism”.

But the festival has raised quite a few eyebrows. “St Mary’s island has always been attached with our lives as a holy place. Even our Hindu fraternity holds it in reverence as the island has been mentioned in the historic events connected to the 13th-century Udupi Krishna temple,” said Oscar Salins, a local fishermen’s leader. “We don’t (have a) grudge that the foreign tourists and some of the wealthy locals had a good time.

But we want the tourism department to allow lesser mortals like us to enjoy the island too. Many times, we don’t even get ferry connectivity to the island and the tourism department boats are always under a state of constant repair,” said Ravi Karkera and Santhosh Mendon, local youth leaders.

St Mary’s island has been an ecologically sensitive landmass and is one of the four important geological monuments in Karnataka. It is among the 26 monuments declared by the Geological Survey of India in 2001. Environmentalists in Udupi were shocked to hear the stories about the festival and asked how the government could open it to tourism.