Well, it's been two weeks. A fortnight. A long bloody time. And yet, somehow, it passed in a blink. Things tend to happen like that, I guess. Time flies when you're having fun.
Those two weeks have been the highlight of my India expedition. Two weeks of relaxing, traveling, and just enjoying the world instead of working, studying, and dealing with the stresses of life. Living in India is not fun because you have to deal with reality. Tourism in India is fun, because tourists are only supposed to see the good parts... the beauty and wonder that is this country. It's sad that it works that way, but I'm glad I got to see that part for just a while. Within in 20 minutes of being back to Pune, we were back to seeing dead dogs along the streets and being overcharged for rickshaw fare. Welcome home.
But the trip...
We left Pune on Friday, Oct. 29th. We got on a train to Bangalore around 11am, and 22 hours later, we pulled into Bangalore. The train was pretty much just like the one we took to Goa. We slept a lot... read a little... breathed fresh air (sometimes it was fresh... sometimes it smelled like pee... or worse). I'm not sure if I explained the trains when I went to Goa... If you've seen The Mummy Returns, the bathrooms on the trains are comparable to that. Instead of plumbing or anything like that, there's just a hole down onto the tracks. However, instead of a Western-style toilet to sit on like in movie, there's really actually just a hole that you squat over. It's not the most pleasant experience. And the train wiggles a lot, so more often than not, people miss.
Bangalore was... loud. It's basically just another big, overpopulated city in India like Pune; however, it's bigger, louder, and has less character. We got there in the morning, checked into our hotel, ate breakfast (I love Indian food), and spent the day wandering around the city. Laura's host family's children live in Bangalore, so in the afternoon, we put her in a rickshaw to their house and the rest of us went back and slept. The next morning, we packed up, checked out, and headed to the commercialized religious experience of Bangalore: ISKON temple. ISKON is a chain that builds temples for profit, basically. But, it was a quite oasis on the edge of the city, surrounded by nice, grassy areas. We set up camp on the grass, got some snacks, and we took turns (in pairs) going through the temple while the other pair watched our luggage. The temple was built within the last 20 years... one part of it – dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey-god, I think - had a golden roof. It was pretty fancy.
After the temple, we headed to the train station (Yeshwantpur... sometimes, I just don't believe the names) for our 9pm train to Trivandrum, the capital city of India's southwesternmost state, Kerala. We got there early afternoon, and that's when our trip really started.
First of all, I should say that none of the people in our group are really city people. I'm a farm girl... Sarah's a tree climber... Laura spent the last summer working for keep on a farm in Maryland. And Bill... well... he a communist. So, after spending months in Pune and 2 days in Bangalore, we all got to Trivandrum and realized it was just another big, loud city. So, we decided that a city's a city, we've seen those, and we didn't need more of them. We hitched a rickshaw to the beach. All we saw of Trivandrum was the train station, the bus station, and the road away. By 3 o'clock, we were at Kovalam beach... a nice, quiet, touristy place with waves and lighthouses and nice lifeguards.
Everything was literally on the beach. There was water, and then there was sand... and then there was a retaining wall with sidewalks on top of it. And along the sidewalks, there were hundreds of little shops set up by Tibetan and Kashmiri people to sell their wares. When the tide was out, there was beach... and when the tide was in, the ocean came up to the sidewalk. A man met us at our rickshaw and offered to rent us two beach side apartment rooms for $20 a night, so we each ended up paying $5 per night for a place to sleep. It had a rooftop terrace and two balconies, all overlooking the ocean. We got to see the sunrise and sunset on the ocean... we got to watch fishermen pull the nets in in the mornings and launch their boats. And we were lulled to sleep by the sound of the ocean each night.
There was a lizard... lizards are pretty common in India, and they have little preference between outside and inside. So by now, we're all pretty used to having a lizard stroll across our ceiling or walls. However, while I was on the phone with my parents, I heard a rustling and saw the stuff in my suitcase wiggle a little. Out came a lizard. I later met him again, chilling on my swimming suit... and a third time on a stack of my clothes. He liked me for some reason. I half expected to open my suitcase at the next hotel and have a tagalong.
After 2 nights at the Lighthouse beach of Kovalam, we took a bus back to Trivandrum and then another bus to Kanyakumari, the very tip of India. The bus ride was quite a few hours. I'm not really sure how many. The buses aren't air conditioned. They don't have glass in the windows. They don't have bathrooms. And they only stop long enough to pick people up. You fit as many people in a seat as you can, and some people still end up standing in the aisles. But, it got us to Kanyakumari.
We were met at the bus stop by a man offering us rooms (people are desperate for business... no matter how touristy some parts of India are and no matter how many people visit them, there are so many people here that there are still more hotels and hostels and whatnot than there are visitors... and virtually every place is floundering to stay afloat). It makes it easy to travel... We went through the holy temple at the very tip of the continent, and then we spent sunset standing knee-deep in water with hundreds of other people watching the sun hide behind the clouds before it could hit the water. India's all about doing the unexpected.
Then, we got up at 5 am to watch the sunrise from our sunrise view at the balcony... once again, clouds. We went back to bed.
We caught a 10am train North to Kochi, another big city. We stayed in the old part of town, very near to a cute little region called “JewTown.” The white kids were very creative with their names when they moved in to take over parts of India. Anyway, Jewtown is a Jewish settlement... there's a synagogue (on Synagogue Lane, JewTown), a Jewish cemetery, and a bunch of Jewish people... Jewish shops selling Jewish wares. Stars of David in all the windows. It was cute. There was a museum nearby... a palace built by the Dutch (it was conveniently called the Dutch Palace Museum). It contained Indian clothing and portraits of rulers and some gold stuff. Typical museum stuff... For a classics person, I'm rather uninterested in museums. However, there was a nice window overlooking a pond full of turtles. And while I was distractedly watching the turtles, a giant snake slithered out of the roof and stretched out in the sun. So, in the middle of an Indian museum, Sarah, Laura, Bill and I stared transfixedly out the window at the cool snake. It was at least 6 feet long and as big around as my upper arm. It was pretty cool.
We stayed 4 nights in Kochi. We spent one day doing a 7 hour boat cruise in the backwaters. We started out in a big wooden canoe with a guide and two men... paddling? Instead of paddles, they had poles to push against the bottom of the streams. We went down a narrow little channel and saw wildlife and village homes. People were out washing clothes in the stream, abluting, and boating along the canal for whatever reasons. There were birds and snakes and all sorts of flowers.
Then, we got on a houseboat for lunch and a trip through the greater backwaters. We saw chinese fishing nets. We stopped at an island in the middle of the backwaters and visited a spice garden... we saw pepper plants and cinnamon plants and a giant ant hive. And we visited a toddy factory on the island. Toddy is the liquid that comes out of palm trees that turns into a really strong alcohol when left to ferment. Before it ferments, it basically tastes like bread yeast. To get it, men scale coconut palm trees, tap the flowers, and collect the liquid like maple syrup, only thirty feet up in a palm tree. When our tourguide asked the question of “what do you want from this island?” he expected an answer of “We want to try some toddy alcohol!” Instead, three voices in unison responded with “We want to climb a coconut tree!!!!!” And so we did.
One night, we went to a Keralan drama... people danced out in Kathakali style a story from the Mahabharata. It was kind of cool in a painfully loud, obnoxious sort of way. Also, I'm quite certain that it was the largest crowd of white people I've been in since I got to India. No Indians were at the show, so it was really just a tourist thing. That made it less appealing.
After Kochi, we took another bus to Periyar. Periyar is a tiger reserve in the middle of the jungle in the mountains. To get there, you go along a narrow mountain road with no railings, no speed limits, and often dropoffs that you can't see to the bottom of. Sounds like fun, right? Now, I mentioned the buses before. Now, we move on to a second round of buses. There is a state bus system, and a private bus system to Periyar from Kochi. They compete. And it's not about who is safer or who is cheaper or who is more reliable. The competition is based solely on the foundation of who can get you there faster. Imagine riding a roller coaster up a mountain... and imagine having the knowledge that there's no track for the roller coaster, there are other cars on the road, and there are no seatbelts. If you don't hold on, you fall out of the seat (ask Laura... she knows). But it got us there in six hours.
We had a place reserved for the night... we were supposed to be staying in the $10 a night rooms, but the owner accidentally overbooked them and only had $20 rooms available. So we paid for a night and found a cheaper place for the next two nights in the jungle. The first night was basically in a treehouse lodge overlooking a meadow. We saw birds and wild pigs and deer in the meadow from our balcony... it was a pretty epic view. We had hot water and electricity and all the amenities we could ask for... we got complimentary breakfast of fresh honey, bread, and omelets. It was kind of worth our money. Laura and I stayed in the elephant room (it's like these people knew of my unhealthy elephant obsession!).
But, when we went to look for other accommodations, we met Shamir. Shamir was probably a 25-30 year old Muslim man. He pretty much became our tourguide for Periyar, and I'm not sure who benefited more from the relationship. Probably him, in all honesty, because if he hadn't found us, someone else would have. He saw four confused white kids wandering around looking for rooms, and he showed us to a place, got us rooms for $12 a night, and welcomed us into his spice shop. Periyar is all about spice shops. There are spice plantations everywhere, and everyone is selling the goods. So, his helping us decided where we'd do all our spice shopping. Then, he offered to arrange for us things like elephant rides, treks, visits to the tea plantation, visits to the spice plantations, etc. The first day, he rickshawed with us to the elephant grounds, got us a discount on elephant rides, and took pictures of us riding an elephant. Riding an elephant was kind of my main goal for India (set few goals, and you're never disappointed). It was awesome. We spent 30 minutes on the back of the giant wandering through the jungle. I brought a special SD card for my camera specifically for the elephant ride... it got filled. And after the elephant ride, we got to have a photo shoot with him. He was kind of a stubborn elephant, and I appreciated that. He'd just stop randomly, wander off... and we were pretty regularly given a nice snot shower from his trunk (you're supposed to have to pay an extra $2 for that). But now, I can say I've ridden an elephant. And I can say I've gotten a snot shower from an elephant (you know in the movie Shrek... Donkey makes the comment of “my mouth was open and everything!!!” I know what he means.)
After that, we went to a tea plantation and walked through the assembly lines of the factory. We saw all the equipment that makes the tea and learned how they pick and dry it. It was kind of impressive how much work is still done by manpower instead of by machines. It's good, I think.
Then, we went to a spice plantation and Shamir acted as our tourguide. He picked a cocoa pod for us so we could taste cocoa fruit... apparently, the beans that become chocolate are originally a really bright purple before they're ground into powder. It's cool. And they're coated by a slimy white goo that tastes good. He showed us nutmeg trees and allspice trees... peppercorn vines... banana trees... turmeric and ginger roots... we tasted cinnamon leaves (they made my tongue go numb just like big red gum)... we also tasted the hottest pepper in the world. It's about the size of my pinky nail and it wasn't at all hot until after my tongue was done being numb from the cinnamon. At that point, I decided maybe eating an entire hottest-in-the-world pepper while my tongue is numb was not the best choice I have made in India. We also tried fresh cardamom... it grows in clusters of balls at the base of giant tree-plants. And everything just grows together in one spice plantation... mixed together in no real order. It's kind of a cool arrangement. There were bee hives and wild tomatoes and eggplants growing everywhere, and all the plants were intermingled.
The second full day in Periyar, we went into the Jungle. Or at least the tourist-friendly part. Mostly, there were monkeys and wild horses and squirrels. And leeches. Has anyone ever been bitten by a leech? It feels about like a mosquito bite... however, unlike a mosquito, it doesn't stop. It injects some sort of gross poison into you that makes your blood not clot, so even once you get it off, you keep bleeding. Assuming you can get it off. It's also designed so that if you try to pull it off, it will break in half before its teeth will let go of your skin. It's like a worm in that it can live with half a body. I'm not a fan. Laura has nice long nails, though, and they came in handy.
Anyway, we walked around the jungle. We saw an Indian Giant Squirrel... it was super exciting. I like squirrels. And then we found a beautiful, giant tree. And we climbed it (are you detecting a pattern here?). Laura, Sarah, and I climbed up into the branches, and sat comfortably while Bill was a dumb boy who wandered in the unsanctioned part of the jungle alone. There were signs everywhere saying stick to the path! Wandering is illegal! Tigers will eat you, and if they don't, we'll prosecute you. And yet, he decided he wanted to explore, so he did. We followed only so far as to tell him it was a bad idea, and then we went back to climb up into the wonderful tree in the tourist-friendly grounds. And, while we were sitting there, up in that wonderful tree, the monkeys got curious. They had spent most of the morning frolicking in the grass and climbing the smaller trees around the tourists... showing off and playing. They're used to people... it's a tourist area. There are people everywhere. Always. The monkeys are even used to white people... there were some of them there even while we were. However, they were baffled at the idea of people in the trees. Apparently, that's unusual everywhere. Normal people don't go around thinking “gee... that tree would be good for climbing.” It's very convenient that Sarah and Laura and I all have similar strangeties. Anyway, we in the tree, waiting patiently for Bill to return from his suicidal wanderings (and halfway expecting to hear a distant scream and roar of him being eaten), did not notice the level of curiosity we piqued in the monkeys until I had a one-armed (I blame the tigers) monkey tickling me with his tail. Literally. He was staring at us from the branch I was using as a backrest and his tail was draped nicely onto my shoulder. I don't think I've ever gotten out of a tree that fast, and Laura and Sarah were both below me and out before me. I felt kind of bad, though, because the monkey seemed like he had really just wanted to hang out with us. He wasn't at all aggressive, and I get the feeling that he'd been sitting there for a little while before I noticed him... And frankly, if he'd had bad intentions, he sneaked up on us so quietly and quickly that he could have monkey-pounced us before we even noticed he was there. It's not like he needed to get our attention for that.
I felt bad for him because he was kind of ostracized from the other monkeys and their games because he was missing an arm. When we got out of the tree, he stared at us for a few minutes and then sadly climbed away.
Don't pet the monkeys.
Either way, after the park, we loaded up on spices. And thus, we became Shamir's best decision ever. One of the shop keepers in Periyar showed us his books the first night we were in the town. Everyone is desperate for business in India. Everyone. Even the people who work hard... who own land... who have shops that seem stable... even they are desperate because there are so many of them and so few people who can pay for their merchandise. One shopkeeper showed us his books. He averaged one customer a week. And usually, when a foreigner comes in and decides to buy something, a lot gets bought. $20 worth or so. $20 is a lot of money in India. But that only happens once a week, even in the peak of tourist season. How do you make a living when your income is $20 a week on a good week? How do you pay for a life? A family? And what happens when that one person per week doesn't come in? Shamir was lucky. He got a small cut of the fees we paid to go to the spice village because he was our guide, and he got a small cut of what we paid to ride an elephant because he brought our business. Maybe a few dollars. His real luck was in finding four kids who wanted to buy spices and who decided that he was the man to buy them from. I spent $15 in his store, and I was the cheapest of our group. In a world where $20 a week is the norm, he landed the jackpot of spiceworld... probably $150 between the four of us... over 7 times what is normal. I wonder if he even hoped for that kind of luck when he spotted us wandering on the street the first night there? Everyone benefited in the situation. We got the jungle experience we wanted, and he made enough money to be comfortable for a while. We got discounts and got worked into schedules because of him. And he made more money in two days than he would have made in a month.
After a day or so there, he said we'd brought him good luck. Other travelers saw that his store was the spice store that the four white kids were coming in and out of every day, and they got curious. Our business lent his store some form of legitimacy to other tourists, so they bought from him as well. Before we left, he gave us each a garland of spice packets as gifts, and he started giving us discounts on his spices because of how much business we were bringing him.
But what about the other spice vendors? There were hundreds of spice shops in that little town in Periyar. Only one of them benefited from us. The others may have even been hurt by us because we attracted business away from them. And that's how this entire country works... how this entire world works. One man's triumph is another man's downfall. And there, in a little town called Kumily in the middle of the Indian jungle, four 20 year old foreigners from America were the ones who decided the triumphant and the fallen. What world is this that I live in?
There was a French restaurant in Periyar. It's listed in the Lonely Planet guidebook. They served sandwiches and pizzas and things like that. The lady that ran it is amazing. She was a sweet Indian woman who catered to the bewildered Americans that wandered into her restaurant. She served avocado sandwiches. And, when we asked to buy avocados, she sent her husband to the market to get us extras. They were huge. They could have been mistaken for dragon eggs... I named mine Israfel, the avocado dragon, and I waited patiently for him to hatch. And when he didn't hatch, Laura, Sarah, and I ate him. Maybe we were too hasty... the ents would have disapproved. Then we ate Morgana on the train back to Pune.
Our second hotel in Periyar had free HBO. Laura and I may or may not have stayed up until 1 o'clock in the morning watching Twilight. However, I will vehemently deny to anyone who asks that we watched it a second time the next day. It. Did. Not. Happen. However, if it did happen, I can only say that the movie showed us a little piece of our American home while we were so far away in the land of tigers. I will also say that it's still fun to poke fun at the dumb characters, even in India.
Also, I will fully own up to the fact that we watched Armageddon. I love that movie. I cannot say that it is a profound or moving story; however, I cannot help but like virtually every character in the movie, and it's one of my favorites. Laura and Sarah had never seen it, and there was a thunderstorm, so there was nothing else to do... so we stayed up and watched it. Halfway through, the thunderstorm knocked the signal out. So, I prayed to the TV gods. I made a little sacrificial dish, filled it with white chocolate and malaria-prophylactics (it was all I had to offer), and I put it on the TV. For it to have been official, I should have lighted a candle/lamp, but for some reason, the hotel owners don't provide those in India. It's like they think the tourist kids would burn down the jungle or something. Anyway, after only missing a 20 minute chunk of the movie, the TV gods pulled through and we got to finish the show. Those TV gods must really like white chocolate, because 20 minutes is pretty impressively short amount of time in India. I thought we'd be lucky to see the Bruce Willis blow up the asteroid, but we made it in in time to see the Russian space station before it exploded.
And, realizing that I'm starting to sound like I spent my entire tour of India watching TV, I'd like to emphasize that it was 16 days of traveling, and I haven't watched TV since I left America. Disclaimer being finished, we also watched The Taking of Pelham 123. It has Denzel Washington and John Travolta in it. I didn't actually mean to watch it, but I was flipping through channels waiting to be ready to go to lunch, and it was on. I was immediately sucked in. And Laura and Sarah came to get me so we could go to lunch, and they were drawn in, too. It was a really good movie. John Travolta is an ex con who takes a train car hostage claiming to be a terrorist to profit from the stock market. He almost gets away with it, too. I missed the first part of it, so I'm going to have to watch it when I get back to America. That's all the movie-ing I did. Really.
On the way back to Kochi from Periyar (where we would catch a train), we took the bus again. 6 hours up a mountain... 5 hours down it. Does that sound sketchy to anyone else? I mean, yes, it is physically easier to go faster on the downward trip. But that doesn't mean it should actually happen. I got the ear-pain of plane descension on the way down. Once we were on level ground, we drove past a giant torch of fire. A building outside Kochi caught on fire and blazed in a fire that could be seen for miles and miles. We were across probably a mile of water, and the air was still a little overheated from it. And, thirty kilometers away in Kochi, we could still see the lighted-up sky from the blaze. I have no idea what it was. I checked the paper for the next few days, and it didn't show up. Hopefully the internet will answer some questions for me once I get it. However, it got American Pie stuck in my head on repeat for a few days. “And when the flames climbed high into the night to light the sacrificial rite I saw Satan laughing with delight the day the music died...”
Last night of vacation: found a room. Ate street food. Drank fermented pineapple juice (there is a fine line between polite and dumb...I'm not sure where that falls). Found out that Sarah and Bill get passive aggressive when they're stressed. Found out Laura gets paranoid when she's on malaria medication. Slept a few hours. Went to the train station.
Apparently, there are two train stations in Ernakulum. Ernakulum is a small offshoot of Kochi proper. However, despite its diminutive size, it has both an “Ernakulum Junction” and an “Ernakulum Station.” We went to the wrong one. Twenty minutes before our train was to leave, we realized this error. Ten minutes after our train was to leave, we got to the right station. For once, brown time came in handy. Thirty minutes later, we left on the correct train. While in a taxi on the way to the second train station, Sarah and I prayed to the traffic gods and the train gods that we would not miss the train. As such, I now am obliged to build a temple of river clay to the traffic gods when I return to Missouri. India has a god for everything, and they're always willing to put things off when you want them to.
On the train, (remember, I said we ate Morgana here), we sat next to a couple going to Mumbai. After we ate Morgana, the couple asked about it – they had never seen an avocado before!!! So we gave them the seed and told them how to plant it n'stuff to grow an avocado-dragon tree.
Laura is from Maryland. She has some strange obsession with southern accents. As I am the only Southerner on this trip (the first thing I learned when I went to Illinois is that Missouri is “the South”), she finds my accent fascinating. Things like “djy'eat yet?” and “y'all” give her no end of amusement. So, at regular intervals, she'd prompt me to say something hick-like. As a result, more and more of an accent came out over the two weeks of travel. Considering the fact that the four of us were around each other non-stop for 2 weeks, we all picked up some of each other's phrases. The linguistic high-light of the trip was on our last day in Kochi when Yankee Bill from New York City accidentally used the phrase “I'ma go get me a newspaper.” He didn't notice. We all did.
Laura was my roommate the entire trip. Sometimes we split in pairs – Laura and me, Sarah and Bill. Sometimes we did three girls in a room and Bill got his own room. Sometimes we got a suite and all four of us stayed together. However, Laura and I were always in a room together. And I have to say, she's a firecracker of a roommate. The first night, she had a nightmare and started hitting me in her sleep. That kind of set the tone for the trip. She was horrified. I was just kind of amused.
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