I’m in a car being driven by the Hindu version of Michael Schumacher. After one month’s sojourn back in a world where a stop sign actually means stop and traffic lights are obeyed, it’s good to get back to a bit of street-mayhem.
Staring out the window, the roads are a never-ending carnival of chaos and diesel. Trucks with colourful hand-painted sides, spluttering buses that are fixed together with little more than rubber-bands and hope, hand-pulled carts and the auto-rickshaws of course careening through the traffic like fly’s hoping not to be swatted.
I’m on my way to Cheruthuruthy, to begin a 10 day journey into the Nila river region; an area of Kerala that is near untouched by the state’s tourist boom. The last time I was here I took the typical backpacker route. Cochin followed by the backwaters and then onto the hippy-ville southern beach of Varkala. This time I head north.
The Nila is practically impossible to find on a map and now here I find out why. It turns out that the river also goes by another, official, name: the Bharatpuza, but is known simply as Nila to all who live along its banks.
The name doesn’t give anything away. Nila simply means blue in the local language Malayalam. So what’s so important about this river I wonder? I watch palm trees, paddy fields and rows of tapioca fold into a blur of green outside my window and look forward to finding out.
