BACKWATER & BACK

We get up at dawn and catch a ferry out of town and into the backwater. The filth and noise of Alleppey are behind. The ferry is basically a local bus but on the water. We are the only tourists on it. Everything becomes surreal. The ferry stop frequently at wooden piers, on islands, on narrow jetties, alongside fields, picking up and dropping off passengers. We pass lakes, forking rivers, shaded canals with draw-footbridges. Colorful houses in the middle of nowhere drift past. A pink church on an island floats by. I wonder who goes there and how they arrive. The backwater is shallow and we see men standing chest deep beside their boats. The duck below the water and come up holding fish which they toss in their boats. On every lily pad there is a different bird. An unforgettable few hours. A way of life I never could have imagined.

Then we arrived at Kottayam, a bustling city. After staying inside all afternoon to dodge the heat, we hired a rickshaw driver for the afternoon and went to a bird sanctuary. We didn't see many birds, but we saw dozens of enormous fruit bats flying through the trees and creepers. Their wingspans must have been 4-6 feet. Then we took another trip to a Shiva temple in another town. It had a rivival atmosphere, with loudspeakers placed across the parking lot and down the roads to broadcast the chanting Auuuums, and large mobs of Hindus flooding in to worship. The inner temple was surrounded with candles, and men (probably two dozen?) were rolling slowly on the ground around it ("to deal with their problems" Jiji, our Christian rickshaw driver, tried to explain). We couldn't go inside the inner sanctum.

The guidebook spoke glowingly of two murals in the courtyard of a wrathful Shiva dancing on the corpses of demons and cobras. I was excited to see it. But when we finally found it, it was so faded we could barely make it out, AND it was surrounded by stacks of old chairs, unused signs, and dust. We found that odd. A beautiful and intricate mural just neglected by the obviously prosperous Shiva temple.

Anyhow, the ferryboats going back to Alleppey were done so we tried to take a bus. That turned into the usual Indian chaos. We've learned to be very pushy, because directions and advice is sketchy and often wrong. (For example, the number of times people have said left and pointed right is getting a bit ridiculous.) The guy at "enquiries" told us 7:30 and after 7:30 came and went with no bus he refused to talk to us. Another bus official seemed very helpful, but finally didn't seem to know what he was talking about either. Finally some teenager came up and told us that there were no more direct buses and we had to transfer to the local bus at a nearby town. No one's English is that hot, and we've been given incorrect advice so many times, that we were flustered. But the teenager had decent English and wrote down the bus names (when someone's talking to you in broken English, it's hard to understand that "Mugamsandacherry" is a place...).

So we're off again. It's night by now. We're not really sure where we're going. The buses drive like maniacs through the trash fires in the ditches, the endless horns, blinding headlights. We get to the local bus station and are directed to the bus to Alleppey. We sit down, but then the bus just starts filling and filling and filling with people, and by the time it leaves the conductor has to kind of swim through the people to get everyone's money.

But then this last bus ride is quite magical, like the ferry boat ride, we're driving on a road surrounded by water, with the flickering porch candlelights of homes on islands, each reflected pristine in their watery front "yards." Everyone seems to know each other and everyone's talking to each other--probably all just on their commute home. Stop by stop people get off and head off across bridges to their floating glowing home. And then we made it home ourselves. Such small accomplishments often feel like minor miracles.