Since I'm so far behind in blogging as well as in traveling. I'm going to lump some things together. The state of Kerala in Southern India is a small state anyway. The hill town Munnar, with all the tea is also in Kerala so it was only a 5 hour bus ride to the town of Allepey and the famous backwaters - a river system with canals added to it to so people could get around from village to village. I this is where people go on backwather cruises and stay on houseboats that look like rice barges overnight. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to afford an overnight cruise since they are easily a couple hundred dollars. However I stayed in a guesthouse my first night that had its own houseboat and connected groups of people together to go so the cost could be split. Out of nowhere the next morning, I was connected with a couple of retired German school teachers who had the boat the next night but were looking for another person. I've hung out with a lot of retired European school teachers on this trip. To get to the boat we had to go to the guesthouse out in the backwater and spend the night. It was very peaceful. We mostly just took pictures and got acquainted. One was a German and art teacher and the other taught chemistry and biology. They had just retired the week before coming to India. They were both women. We had a really nice canoe trip that evening that evening which was probably the highlight of the whole cruise for all of us. We were really close to the water, birds and villagers. Dusk brought a little bit of mist so it had a very serene atmosphere tinged with the orange from sunset. After was dinner, where retired Danish teacher joined us. She was fun. She was an English teacher and brought some rum with here so we talked about all kinds of things. She was from Elsinore! She offered to let me stay if I ever made it to Elsinore, but I've lost her email address. The cruise started at noon the next day. The owner had spent 2 years making the boat by hand using traditional methods so it looked very authentic. We started out with lunch after only a little cruising. There was lots of food. Once we got going again we noticed we were in a traffic jam of these boats, hundreds of them make their way out of the backwater and into a bay - which is not where we wanted to go. We looked at each other and said, we could have done this part at home in Puget Sound or the Baltic. Finally we got back to the canals for a few hours and parked for the night. We arranged another canoe trip and went into some smaller canals. There were so many birds - lots of kingfishers. Dinner was again a lot of food, and we had the cheap version of the cruise with a 5 course dinner. We talked a lot and watched the last of sunset and the river. We didn't get alcohol with the cheap version. The German/art teacher was also a buddhist so we spent a couple of hours talking about what brought us to that decisions. I really like these two teachers. Morning was somewhat abrupt as we had breakfast and had to be off the boat by 9 am. So I took the 8 hours water taxi from Allepey to Kolom to try and get more water time. I was done at about 6 hours.
The entire reason to go to Kolom was to go to the Munroe Island tour where you go on smaller backwaters on a remote island to see how villagers live. It was actually really good. There was cuir making (coconut fiber product - it was here I discovered that all those really hard beds I'd been sleeping on were stuffed with coconut fiber) and spices and a lot of prawn farming in large ponds. The town of Kolom itself wasn't all that so the next day I went to the beach town Varkkala. It was ok and even the barkers were laid back but it was very much a tourists town overlooking the ocean. Tons of yoga and ayervedic massages. I passed. On those. I came because there was suppose to be a temple festival. The next day there was one. I made friends with an Indian guy who worked for a start up energy company in the US. He still lived in India though. He was and interesting guy who had just started to experience being on his own after a divorce. He had never traveled alone. Everything was new. We talked about economics, politics, social structures. He as a bright guy. The next day we made it to the temple festival with 20 elephants walking around town in procession. They were decked out in red cloth and gold plates. Between them were dancers and characters from mythology and drummers. The drummers had a lot of energy and made everything very festive. We both really enjoyed it and had a nice celebratory dinner of local fish and beer.
The next day I went to Kerala's capitol Trivandrum. Just for a day. I saw the Zoo. Lots of animals I'm not use to seeing but the birds and tigers were in small cages with lots of mesh so it was hard to see. The tigers didn't look happy. They cried and paced or just lay there. I made it to the old palace and the temple even though I wasn't even allowed up the stairs here and Indian men had to take off all western cloths and put on traditional garb to get in. There were army guards at the temple entrance which I later found out was because the amount of treasure in the temple vaults had recently been leaked to the public (the leaker mysteriously died) and it turns out it may be the richest temple in India. Of course it all belongs to the royal family since the temple itself is owned by the royal family - this in a communist state!
I backtracked up Kerala to Kochi to stay with the family of a friend from work. They were incredibly kind and welcoming and fed me lots of home cooked food. They helped me get around town and took me to dinner and showed me how they cooked. If was very comforting. I spent one day in the old town of Fort Kochi where the Portuguese and Dutch had forts to control the spice trade. I went to Jew Town were a 500 year old synagogue was still standing. There are only 70 jews left though - most have gone to Israel. There were Chinese fishing nets brought by Chinese merchants several centuries ago. There seems to have been a lot of far east Asia influence here as the architecture has curved pointed roofs that I think of seeing in China and Thailand. There was an interesting arts show called the bienalle, that occurs every two years. It shows Indian artists and brings in some international ones. It was interesting to see the mix. There was even a piece by Yoko Ono (it was a pile of postcards siting on a pedestal for people to take and use; first done back in the 60s). The best part of the day was seeing the traditional Kathakali dance used to tell mythology in temples. It has outrageous costumes, big makeup, over the top facial expression and music. Usually the dances go all night in temples but this was just an hour. After that I stayed for a sitar music. I've always loved sitar since I first heard it in Beatle's songs and enjoy ragas. I had to listen to sitar if I came to India. The next day I scored big with some duct tape. It took 2 weeks of looking and searching the internet. Once I found an address in Kochi it still took me an entire morning of asking for it because google maps was a little off and the company had changed it's name but neglected to change their online info - typical! I tried doing a little shopping other than that but I really just hate shopping. So I went home and took a nap until people got home from work. We had dinner and then I was told all kinds of tales of what it was like as Indian doctors working in Saudi Arabia.
After a couple of days I headed north to the Wyanad Wildlife Reserve to see elephants in the wild. I stayed in small town called Kalpetta. You can only get a 1 hour jeep safari because they don't take people too far into the reserve anymore. Apparently the elephants have killed a couple of people and something about a tiger killing a couple of people last year - whatever! The earliest I could get to the reserve was 9 am so things had already started to warm up and I worried about seeing any animals. There were a few white tailed and samber deer and a peacock over the first 20 minutes or so. I was starting to get disappointed. That was only reinforced when the jeep driver started pointing out termite mounds - admittedly they were 6 foot tall mounds but still. Finally around a corner we saw elephants off in the brush about 100 feet away. The guide said there was 7 including a baby. I only saw 3 and maybe something that could have been a baby. Trip made. The only thing we saw after that were some tracks the guide said was a tiger and its cub and had been made maybe 30 minutes prior. I was sceptical but took a picture of the smaller track near me so I could compare later. Once we got back to the paved road I thought all was over, but then they spotted something lying in the middle of the road. It was this huge red and black squirrel with blood coming out of its mouth. It was a Malabar squirrel and they had to stop and call it in. Its body was almost 2 feet and the tail added another 1.5 to 2 feet. We had to wait until someone came and got it. So I got to play ranger.
After the wildlife sanctuary I went to a town called Sultan Batheri because a Sultan used to keep a battery of artillery there. I really liked this little town. I went shopping at the local Hyper Market which was a small department store and had all kinds of stuff from spices and hair products to dishes and cookware and a grocery store. It was kind of cool. After shopping I finally found a bus that would take me to some nearby caves with 3000 year old petroglyphs. The ride into the country was beautiful with banana and coffee plantations. The bus driver told me the last entry was at 4 pm. I ran up the hill to the gate about 1 km and made it by 4 to be told that I couldn't enter because the last entry was at 4 and the ticket office was another 25 minute walk up the hill so I couldn't go past the gate. I almost lost it because I'd just taken the bus and fun up the hill to get to the entrance by the stated time to be told that the stated time is not actually the stated time. Again, sometimes Indian logic makes no sense. The guy was turning away Indians as well, so it was not just me. He just didn't seem to see the problem with the rules as stated. I started being really annoyed and aggressive asking about how to take a damn bus back to the town. Apparently I mispronounced it so he tried to correct me. I just turn around and yelled who cares and walked off. A rickshaw driver suggested I go to a museum nearby instead. Why not? Finally a museum that understood how to light object so you can actually see them instead of no light or everything covered in glare. Still no real context for the items being presented but baby steps, baby steps.
I was leaving the next day for Mysore, but that morning I wanted to see more plantations after my trip through the countryside to the caves. The desk clerk told me to just go walking out this road. It was one big coffee plantation. I tasted my first coffee fruit - general fruit flavor but nice. Lots of pictures. After I wanted more so I went to the tourist office and they said take a bus out this other road and go to Swami's Estate. They put me on a bus and had the conductor let me off where in needed to go. There was a sign at the toad saying Swami's Estate. No other information and no arrows. I wondered around for a couple of hours down the road and through some coffee trees until one of the people i ask could do more than just point. This was at the house of a retired deputy police director for the town, K Jonny. All that was listed on the gate outside. They invited me in and gave me something to drink and a fruit I'd never heard of (it was the only thing the monkeys wouldn't eat in the garden). They showed me pictures of their kids. One was a neurosurgeon so they loved that I was a neuroscientist. He was also a writer and was just having a book publish about how is family's coffee estate was mostly submerged when a nearby damn was built. His wife kept taking lots of picture of me - a little unnerving. They were very nice and sincere people. After a couple of hours they gave me a ride back to town to catch my bus. Just before leaving he wrote his email in my notebook but insisted he use his pen, a fountain pen he used to write his first published short story 23 years ago.
