2 Weeks in Kerala

We left Hampi and returned to Goa by train for 1 night to catch a flight from Goa to Trivandrum the next morning. We stayed in a nothing-town in Goa called Vasco de Gama, because it was just two blocks from the train station where we arrived and only 3 km from the airport. We ended up at the wrong hotel, but it had the same name as the one where I had made the reservation (Hotel Vasco—how original). Considering that it was too muggy outside to drag our luggage around and try and find the other Hotel Vasco (trying to get directions to anywhere in India will be a whole separate post), and also we were tired from traveling (the train took 9 hours rather than 7), we decided just to stay at the wrong hotel, despite it costing a bit more. (And honestly the promise of a hot shower was enticing enough for me—despite the fact that in the end the water heater didn't work!) The building looked not unlike many we had already seen in Goa—very large, dirty, and quite bombed out. Basically old British colonial homes or barracks that haven't been taken care of since India gained independence some 50 years ago—the walls are all smudged with dirt, wires and rods stick out everywhere, the plumbing is a bit suspect. (In fact at our quaint guesthouse in Hampi, the pipe from the bathroom sink just stuck out the bottom of the sink and emptied out onto the bathroom floor. Nathan didn't notice at first and after he brushed his teeth, his spit just went down the sink through the pipe and right onto his feet!)

We slept well (generally I am woken up in the middle of the night or very early morning by the sounds of either: street dogs violently fighting, roosters crowing, auto-rickshaws honking, or women sweeping) and woke up hungry for breakfast before our flight. I usually prefer a “western breakfast” (toast, eggs, granola, fruit, pineapple juice) which has been pretty easy to find in most towns, but when it's not available I opt for the masala dosa—an Indian breakfast that is like a large crispy crepe filled with a mash of sauteed potatoes, onions and hot peppers, and various dipping sauces. We headed to a divey little cafe right around the corner from our hotel—that looked a bit dingey at first—but we went in and I proceeded to have the best masala dosa in the world. It was not only delicious, but also only 18 Rupees (about 40 cents). Since then I've had several masala dosas but none have compared in taste and usually cost 2 or 3 times as much. Sigh.

Later that day, we flew from Goa to Bangalore to Trivandrum on regional airlines. I won't get into it, but the Goa airport was kind of a joke—you couldn't really tell where we were supposed to go (and again, asking for directions just makes things even more convoluted), which line to wait in (the only clear sign at one point was a separate security line for women), or when your flight is boarding from the gate. (Essentially it's just a madhouse of crowds in different areas of the terminal and by luck and persistence you will end up in the right place at the right time.) Despite the fact that the security line in Bangalore was similarly ridiculous (you're not allowed to bring any liquids at all in your carry-on, yet when they found a ziplock bag of them in Nathan's luggage they showed it to each other and laughed and let him pass through with it; yet my bottle opener that I've dragged through security checks in LA, London, Paris and Mumbai over the past 2 months was confiscated) our layover was really nice and productive—as Bangalore is the tech capital of India, the terminals were spiffy and provided free wifi (so I used the time to book future train trips and guesthouse reservations).

I was excited to get to Trivandrum, as it is the capital of the southern state Kerala—well known as the most beautiful region in India and monikered “God's own country.” Most tourists go directly to Kovalam, an overdeveloped beach town some 12 km south of Trivandrum, but being kind of tired of beach towns and sunburnt Europeans, we decided to stay in the city for a couple of nights before moving on. It ended up being a disappointment though—it was HOT HOT HOT and there was lots of traffic (human and auto), and the sidewalks are completely torn apart so you have to fight for space to walk on the road next to busses and cars which are constantly honking at you to move. Even the sidewalks in front of these brand new buildings—five star hotels and glistening office towers—were completely unwalkable—just made of mounds of rubble and huge potholes. While we had planned to spend only one full day in Trivandrum to see the city's main attraction (for Nathan's birthday!)—the zoo and neighboring art museum— it ended up being closed for the day (Monday was all of a sudden a holiday) so instead we went out for pizza and stayed on an additional half day to go the next morning (and the zoo was slightly disappointing as well, although seeing hippos in real life was fun, and wouldn't you know it the museum was closed until March too.)

One of the best experiences we had in Trivandrum was surprisingly at...the post office! Because we had some time to kill on Monday we decided to lighten our load by shipping some things back to the US. We arrived at the post office and asked where we could get a box, or large envelope only to be shooed away (this happens all the time) toward an alley on the other side of the building, with the simple directive, “stitching, stitching.” Because asking to elaborate usually ends up getting you even more lost or confused, we just decided to go for it and headed into this trashed alley adjacent to the post office to a doorway with a sign that says....stitching! We looked in and there was a shirtless man, half asleep at a table in a room no larger than a walk-in closet. We approached him with our packages and a quizzical look and he motioned us in and asked us to sit down. Without saying a word, he measured our packages and then some canvas material and proceeded to make pillowcase-like covers on an antique manual sewing machine for our stuff. He then wrapped our our goods in newspaper and stuffed them into the cases, sewed up the last open edges and sealed it with red wax, and handed them to us to bring to the post office. The whole thing was pretty awesome and Nathan got some great pictures. Can you imagine if you had to go to a tailor to have a custom envelope made every single time you wanted to send a package? Insanity!

We left Trivandrum and began to head back north towards Goa, working our way throughout Kerala. The train tide up to our next town, Varkala was a sweet 45 minutes. Varkala is a quiet cliff-side town right on the beach. While the views were amazing (beach, sky, cliffs—a total postcard paradise), there are only so many sunburnt Europeans and yoga snobs one wants to see, and Varkala was full of them. To cater to them (and I guess, us) the only path along the cliff was so packed with same restaurant after same restaurant after tourist shop after tourist shop with the occasional German bakery thrown in to break up the monotony. We went for a long walk down the path, out of the tourist zone to the “black sand beach” that wasn't as pristine, but where we could get away for a bit and see some of the real Indian beach life (ramshackle fishing huts, tired men huddled out front).

Varkala is relatively expensive, and since we were'nt really feeling it anyway we left the next morning for a town just an hour north by train, Kollam. We had planned to go just for a day, to take a boat tour of the backwaters and spend the night in a crumbling old mansion-turned-guesthouse 3km north of the city. These old British colonial government houses are legendary amongst travelers—giant, beautiful, aging and inexpensive. The only downside is that usually you cannot book them in advance—just show up in the morning to see if there's availability. I was surprised when I called the day before, to see what protocol was, when they offered to reserve a room for us. We were disappointed to see that when we got there though, the mansion was undergoing total renovation, and a much smaller and more modern house next door was serving as its substitute. We decided to leave Kollam, and luckily our rickshaw driver was still around. He dropped us off at the bus station where we had our first holy-shit-bus experience.

At the prospect of staying in the government mansion, we had cancelled our train tickets that would have let us bypass Kollam straight for Aleppey (which by train would have been only another 45 minutes north). Not wanting to chance that we'd have to wait around too long for another train, or whether we'd even be able to get on it (trains sell out days in advance, making it difficult to have more fly-by-night plans), we decided to take the “Super Fast Express” bus—a 2 hour limited stop journey. The busses are like retro-fitted old school busses—painted insane colors and designs on the outside, with very limited comforts inside. It's hard to describe the bus ride as anything other than madness, and Nathan captured some of it on video. Basically the roads are very narrow, and since this was the main north-south drag, it was croweded with busses (tour and public), taxis, private cars, autorickshaws, work vehicles (like dumptrucks or other grumbling along heavy loads) and of course...cows. There are no road signs, no traffic lights, and in this particular situation, no lines on the road. It's seemingly a free-for-all, yet after watching the traffic patterns for a while you learn there are certain ingrained rules of who gets to pass whom (the bigger and faster are usually at the top of the pecking order). Busses honk and swerve completely into the other lane, driving smaller and slower vehicles off the road. No one seems to mind, and in fact if you are one of those bottom feeder vehicles, you better get out of the way, otherwise you've violated the unwritten rules and you get the snide “head turn” from other drivers. As terriffic as this all was, I was glad we hadn't taken our rickshaw driver up on his offer to take us all the way to Alleppey.

Alleppey isn't much to write home about. It calls itself “the Venice of the East” because the city is divided up by a couple of canals, but it's really just a filthy little town with two trashy, dirty waterways running through it, with the appeal that you can take a nice backwater tour through the waterways to some nicer islands close by. Which is exactly what we did! It was serene yet odd—quite and beautiful but then we would come across these little neighborhoods on these scrawny peninsulas that were far from any real town. People would jump on and off our ferry, we assumed they were going to work in the rice fields, or out to catch fish for the day. We passed people openly bathing, and men would would dive down like birds into the shallow rivers catching fish with their hands. Nathan took some pictures and video footage along our 3 hour journey so hopefully that can be posted soon. Once we got to the town (Kotyam), we took a tour of a nearby bird sanctuary (in nearby Kumarakom, where we heard many, but only say one...and some fruit bats) and then up to “the angry Shiva temple” at dusk in Ettumanur where we heard a chant bellowed to the tune of “OM AHHH YAAA SHIVAAYAAA” loudly over and over again as tons of devotees flocked inside (where, as non-Hindus, we were not allowed), and men “who have problems they need help with” rolled around one next to another, around the temple, like a human conveyor belt of prayer. I felt a little overwhelmed—it was the first time I really felt religion in my face (and ears, and rolling around me) since we've been to India.

(A funny sidestory about Alleppey was that there was an older Canadian couple who stayed in the only other room next to ours. This happened to be the same couple that stayed in the palm hut next to us at the Blue Corner in Goa—who heard me (as you could hear EVERYTHING in those huts) not only suffer from my initiating case of Kerala Belly in the hut, but also describe the gross details to my mom one morning as I related all of them to her on the phone (for commisseration). When the husband realized who I was (his wife who I had encountered alone at first didn't), he brought up the Blue Corner, and a knowing and squeamish face came over her. )

Underwhelmed with Alleppey though (and tired of the sweltering heat), we were excited to head further north up to Kochi—a quaint little port city, where we stayed in the Fort area (far from loud Ernkalum, it's major loud city). Kochi was a nice change of pace and scene from what we'd seen so far in Kerala. It was more cosmopolitan that the beaches we'd visited, yet not nearly as noisy as any of the cities. We compared it a bit to Hampi—not too touristy, not too rustic—just the right mix of people and things to do and a place to relax but not get too comfortable. On the night of the day that the bomb went off in the German bakery in Pune, we were having dinner outside near the street when an Islamic group came by, blaring through it's megaphone...something...about something. I know it's nothing to worry about, especially because later we saw some posters for an Islamic community engagement that weekend, but we couldn't help but feel a little tense afterward. Some parts of India feel like Florida or Caribbean resorts, but then sometimes things like Pune happen and you have to remember where you are. But, still, Kochi was nice--there's a beach and market area, 2 blocks of shops and restaurants, a beautiful basilica (that we stayed right next to), another old palace, and shopping area called Jew Town, where one day we saw a head-to-toe Hasidic Jew riding a bike (and suddenly I was really homesick for Brooklyn). We spent most of our nights there cooling off in a spartan beer hall (one of the few to serve beer, as again alcohol is banned in many places or liquor licenses are tough to obtain) where we became familiar with a strange brew called Hayward 5000 STRONG. (Prompting the phrases that would later come: “Hayward strong, Banta weak” and “Heeyyy waaard you like another beer?”)

We spent a long day traveling from Kochi to Ernkalum to Calicut to Mananthavady and finally to Tholpetty where we would spend the next few days far removed from civilization in the Jungle. The 3 hour bus ride to Mananthavady was pretty intense, we went far up into the hills, where our driver had to nimbly make 9 hairpin turns on a narrow road with a cliff on one side. We saw people surrounding one of the cliff areas on our way up, and later learned that a bus had not been so nimble, and had gone off the side of the road, down the cliff. We stayed in a nice guesthouse just across the street from the entrance to the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary. We took jungle tours twice—once at dawn, and once at dusk—where we saw elephants (one even charged after us), bison, rattlesnakes, monkeys, crazy squirrels and all kinds of birds (including an eagle), visited some beautiful waterfalls, and ate some incredible meals—all cooked by the caretaker of our guesthouse.

We left Kerala to go back to Goa, on an overnight train where we had a bit of a logistical problem. I had moved from the waiting list to an actual seat, but Nathan hadn't. We weren't sure what to do, so we were instructed to just both get on the train. We ended up sharing one of the berths (a metal cot/seat) for the whole 10 hour trip, and neither of us got much sleep. In Goa, this time we stayed in the north region—one night in Arambol, which we found too overrun with Eurotrash, so then down to quiet Candolim Beach for a few nights, where we stayed in an amazing older house, in a room with high ceilings and lots of space.  We explored the old fort, which is right on the cliffs overlooking the sea.  Quite pretty.

We left Goa yesterday and flew up to Lucknow—the capital of Uttar Pradesh. We're done with our month in the South and will spend the next 4 weeks traveling the north of India. More to come soon...