Fort Cochin, India

Our journey from Munnar to Fort Cochin included a long bumpy bus ride down from the mountains, an auto-rickshaw from the bus station in Ernakulum to the boat jetty, a half-hour ferry ride across the bay, and another rickshaw into Fort Cochin.  The trip took about seven hours and the total cost for all of this was only $2.61 per person.  Incredible.

Bus rides and taxi rides in India are an experience.  I really enjoy seeing the houses and businesses speed by, the varied landscape, cars loaded with families, peanut and orange vendors at the crowded bus stations, cows munching on trash on the side of the road…but I have to brace myself to be coated in dust and grime during the ride.  Most buses we’ve traveled in have no windows, and the ambassador taxis keep all four windows rolled down since there‘s never any AC.  We appreciate the breeze since it’s hot and sticky otherwise.  But when the bus or taxi picks up speed, the dust picks up too, and I close my eyes to keep my contact lenses from being pelted by sand.  When we stepped off the bus in Ernakulum, I wiped my forehead and the tissue turned black.  I had stepped onto the bus that morning freshly showered, and now I was wearing a sampling of the dust and diesel exhaust from the broad swath of Kerala that we’d just crossed.

I liked Fort Cochin immediately.  It’s a laid back coastal town (really, a collection of islands) shaded by tall trees and the high walls of its Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial architecture.  Along the water, a line of Chinese-style fishing nets that are weighted with huge stones and lowered and raised by groups of men haul in the daily catch of seafood that disappears into kitchens in all the locals homes and restaurants.

We spent our first morning in town wandering the streets.  We headed across town from the old Fort area where we were staying toward Jew Town by walking down Bazaar Road, which runs parallel to the water.  Most of the way, there were no other tourists, and no tourist shops, which I loved.  The streets were crowded with locals, women in saris carrying umbrellas for shade, out shopping for rice and vegetables.

We had to elbow through the crowd to make our way forward (I’ve learned to be pushy in India, otherwise you don’t get anywhere- my Western inbred politeness is useless here).  We passed doorways where men sat at worn wooden desks arguing over bowls of various grades of rice or dried beans; I assumed they were negotiating prices for the greater stock- big burlap bags piled high in the backs of the rooms.

When the sun got too hot, we popped into the churches to sit on a bench for awhile and appreciate the shade and the calm.  I’ve been surprised by the religious diversity in India- I was expecting mostly Hindu temples but in southern India we’ve seen a majority of Christian churches, with mosques, temples, and even synagogues sprinkled in between.  The church architecture looks European but the insides are Indian-influenced riots of color, and Jesus and Mary often wear fresh jaimalas (flower garlands).

Goats roam all the streets.  Most of them have a bell or a length of rope around their neck, so it looks like they belong to someone somewhere…but they’re left to wander, sleep in shady spots on the sidewalks and munch on the weeds growing up along fences.  I watched one goat stand alone on the sidewalk, blurting out his “blaaaaaa” over and over again with a wide open mouth, toungue stuck out in the air for emphasis.

We visited Mattancherry Palace, built by the Portuguese in the 1500s for the local maharaja in order to secure trading privileges.  There are beautiful Hindu murals that have been preserved on the interior wooden walls depicting scenes from the Ramayana in colorful and gold-embossed detail.  Old sepia-toned photos showed generations of the royal family; the men in heavily embroidered long coats just like Mohit wore for our wedding, and the women bare-chested, with long dark hair, white cloth wrapped around their waists, and wearing heavy gold jewelry.  We stopped afterwards for lunch at a pretty upstairs room painted in blue and white.

We whiled away the afternoon in antique stores selling bits of carved wood and cast bronze salvaged from old homes.  We bargained hard and bought a set of four big iron keys and two carved panels of wood with small windows in them to decorate our walls at home.  We’re feeling comfortable making bulkier purchases in India since we plan to ship a box home from Delhi.

At night, we followed the sounds of

classical Indian music into the candlelit courtyard of a fancy hotel with dark wood-beamed ceilings.  Three musicians sat on the edge of a pool backlit by a tree strung with blue twinkling lights.  I really enjoyed listening to the tabla, sitar, and flute while tasting my first glass of Indian wine, a shiraz cabernet (not so bad).  A skinny black cat wandered between the tables mewing loudly.  After he rubbed up against my ankles and sat down purring loudly, I gave in and shared leftover bits of naan and the tails of my masala prawns.

While staying in Fort Cochin, we also took a cooking class with the pleasantly bossy and motherly Leelu, crowded into her tiny kitchen with a dozen other tourists from Holland, Britain, New York City, and Australia.  The chapatis we rolled and cooked ourselves were a bit misshapen but still tasted just as good with the dishes of carrots and cabbage (thoram), eggplant (baigan masala), and tuna (Keralan fish curry) that Leelu demonstrated.

We also bought tickets to see a Kathakali performance.  For the first hour, people filtered in casually and stood at the edge of the stage to watch the three male performers carefully apply thick face paint; one face in bright green (the hero), one in black (the female evil spirit), and one a yellow-red pantomime of a woman (the “beautiful maiden”).  Next, one performer came on stage to demonstrate the careful hand movements and exaggerated facial expressions used to tell stories in wordless Kathakali performances.  Finally, the performance, accompanied by live drummers and a vocalist.  The performers came onto stage in huge costumes and headdresses.

Our next stop is Mumbai…I’m a bit apprehensive about what it’ll be like after these few weeks in relatively calm Kerala.  I just finished reading “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found” by Suketu Mehta.  I loved the book, though its detailed stories of Mumbai’s extremities; the slums, organized crime, gentlemen’s bars, and Bollywood have me wondering what we’re in for…

Kollam Backwaters, India

I think I’m in for some trouble.  Mohit’s really getting used to being spoiled.  We’re on a private houseboat (called a Kettuvellam) for two nights, drifting along the lakes, rivers, and canals around Kollam.  We have a cabin with a king size bed, AC, the biggest bathroom we’ve had yet in India (with a real shower!), and an open-air living & dining room with an ever-changing view.  We are outnumbered by the crew- there’s a pilot, a cook, and the third guy, well we’re not really sure what his job is.

Mohit’s sitting in a rattan armchair, a chilled glass of water in one hand, his feet propped up on a marble-topped table.  He’s wearing a local-style thin woven shirt that he bought in Varkala, and is sporting his aviator sunglasses.  He says “look at me, I’m just like a Bollywood Star”.  Uh Oh.  When we were in Bali, and treating ourselves to $5 hour-long foot massages every night before bed, Mohit said to me “boy, it would be really nice if I had a wife who would do this for me every night before bed.”  Yup, I’m definitely in trouble.

The food has been great on the boat.  For lunch we had five different kinds of vegetables (carrot, green beans, cabbage, potato, beets), each prepared Kerala-style, which seems to mean they are cooked with lots of shredded coconut, whole curry leaves, and cumin seeds.  We were also served fried whole fish and a basket of hot, puffy papadums (light and airy and spiced with the flavor of white pepper, these are different than the papadums we’re used to, that are flat and speckled with black peppercorns).

For breakfast we were served idli (steamed rice cakes) with coconut and tomato chutneys.  My favorite was the tea snack, warm banana fritters with cumin seeds embedded in the crispy coating.  I liked them best sprinkled with the sugar that had been set out for tea.

Most of our two days on the boat has been spent just watching the world float by.  We’ve seen lots of slender-necked white egrets and black cormorants perched on the water‘s edge.  There are schools of tiny silver fish that swim alongside the boat and jump into the air in unison, and a different type of long skinny fish that jumps out of the water and then skips along the surface for a hundred yards or so before diving back under.

Overhead, there are majestic rust-colored birds with white heads and a broad wingspan.  They look like American bald eagles, but we learned that they are called Brahminy Kites, and that the local Hindus consider them holy.  We glide by rubber trees, mango trees, and the climbing vines of pepper berries growing on the banks of the river.

We pass men mining sand from the bottom of the river, filling their wooden boats until they nearly sink, and then paddling to shore where dump trucks wait to be filled.  We also pass by small village houses, women are hanging laundry or squatting by the water‘s edge to scrub out metal cooking pots.  We float past a school just letting out for the day, and over a low wall I can just glimpse the tops of a hundred boys’ heads.  Suddenly one of them detects us, he yells out an alert, and now fifty boys all in matching blue uniforms have rushed to the opening in the wall and they’re all jumping up and down and waving their arms and yelling “Hello!  Hello!”.  This only feeds Mohit’s delusions of celebrity status.

Our first evening on the boat, we tied off to a few palm trees at a sleepy Auyervedic Resort.  We hopped off and went walking through the small village beyond the resort, in search of a spot to watch the sunset.  We ended up at a clearing, with a small Hindu temple at one end and a public ferry boat dock at the other.

As we sat on the edge of the dock dangling our feet in the water, a gaggle of kids came up to us, shy at first but then excited to try out their English.  “How are you?  What is your name?  Where are you from?  What is your weight?”  This last question made me laugh.  The kids asked us to take their picture, and we happily obliged.

The next afternoon, we explored the small canals running through a tiny backwater village on a wooden canoe punted along slowly with a bamboo pole by our guide, Vijeesh.  Vijeesh is in his early twenties (though he’s slight and looks hardly over sixteen) and he’s a joker.  He was very disappointed that Mohit didn’t want to try the local toddy (bootleg liquor, which Mohit declined since he’s now fighting the cold I just recovered from), and while I was in the front of the boat, he was whispering to Mohit, desperately wanting to know if he’s got any other girlfriends on the side (or just this one wife….)?

Vijeesh pointed out one house in the village that’s much bigger than the rest, multi-story with ornamental balconies, it’s painted bubble-gum pink and looks like a birthday cake.  It stands out dramatically since most other homes we’ve passed are only one or two rooms.  Vijeesh tells us that this family had eight kids, and they’ve all gone off to America for work, they’ve been sending money back to their mother, who still lives here in this big house all alone (with servants, I suspect).  He’s heard that one of the sons even married an American woman.  Imagine that!

At night we smother ourselves in bug repellant and sit out on the deck to read.  There’s a chorus of music off in the distance, it seems like there’s a party in every direction.  We hear the bang of far-off fireworks and see flashes reflecting off the fog.  It’s a festival night at all of the Hindu temples  in the area.  It sounds like we’re missing out on some big fun in this tiny backwater village!

Varkala, India

Varkala has the raw beauty of Kerala’s coast and an international culture artificially isolated from the rest of India.

We're sitting at an outdoor café on the edge of a cliff.  I’m enjoying a slice of toasted homemade bread spread with Nutella and a pot of strong milky cardamom tea in which spoonfuls of sugar disappear without sweetening. The café has an Italian name (Trattoria’s), and the sign advertises “Oriental Food Court and German Bakery.”  There’s a glass case displaying French pastries- croissants and baguettes.  There are silk Chinese lanterns strung under the overhanging porch.

We're eaves- dropping on the couple sitting next to us.  He’s a Punjabi from Delhi and she is Israeli with an enviable mane of curly hair.  His English is much better than hers, but they are flirting shamelessly.   A barefoot man wanders by in a white turban and a green lunghi playing a small instrument that sounds like a cross between a flute and bag pipes.  I feel comfortable here in shorts and a T-shirt and girls on the beach are wearing bikinis.  In Pondicherry, I’d felt exposed in my knee-length sun dress with bare legs.

We’d arrived here after a long 20 hours of auto rickshaw, bus, train, and taxi travel.  Since we purchased last-minute, our tickets for the overnight train from Villupuram (outside of Pondicherry) were for a  “3AC” sleeper car, which means we were fortunate enough to have air conditioning, but our bunks were in tiers of 3 along the sides of a large public train car (no separate compartment or locking door).  Our neighbors for the 15 hour journey included a constantly crying baby.  I’ve thought more than once that the best thing I packed is ear plugs!!  .

We disembarked at Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala state, around noon.  We needed to take another short (one hour) train ride to get to Varkala.  While we waited, I parked myself on an aluminum chair on the train platform with our luggage while Mohit went off in search of lunch.  Two cute little girls, maybe three and five, sat with their mother in the chairs in front of me.  Both wore pastel dresses and silver anklets with bells.  I was doing nothing, just sitting still and sweating.  But the girls were transfixed- they stared at me for at least half an hour.  I smiled at them but they didn’t smile back.  They didn’t even blink.  They were studying me.

After a messy, spicy, delicious take-out lunch (Hyderabad Masala and chapattis) we crowded onto our next train.   The only spot available was on a top bunk- Mohit threw our luggage up and I folded myself in.  Disembarking onto a dusty platform in Varkala, we hailed a taxi. (Actually, he hailed us.  We were too exhausted to argue).  The taxis here are all old-fashioned looking white Ambassador cars.

When we finally dragged our bags down a lane sandwiched between concrete buildings, we emerged into the sunlight and beheld a blinding stretch of turquoise ocean.   Stunning! Varkala is a small enclave of two-story bamboo-built cafes and thatched beach huts perched on the edge of a cliff of crumbling brick-red dirt and black rocks with a wide stretch of beach and pounding surf below.  Tall coconut palms shade the narrow footpath that is the main boulevard.  We found a room with a fan and cold water at a complex of cottages nestled in lush green landscaping.

We rented an umbrella at the beach and spread my Indonesian shawls on the sand.  A woman in a peach-colored sari walked by swinging a steel carafe calling “Chai, chai, cha-eeeeee!” She served the tea by pouring it into a white paper cup, spooning in a heap of sugar, and then pouring the liquid back and forth between the cup and a small metal bowl until it was cooled and the sugar dissolved.  We both went swimming- the water was warm but refreshing.  We came back to the beach gasping for air because the waves were huge and the undertow ferocious.

An impossibly lean muscular couple grabbed the slice of sand next to us and proceeded through a sequence of coordinated yoga poses.  Two Indian couples ran toward the water holding hands, then plunged into the waves fully clothed.  The men were wearing slacks and button-down shirts.  One woman wore a cotton kurta outfit and the other wore jeans.  They bounced along in the waves whooping and laughing.

On the advice of an Australian girl we’d met on the crowded train and then bumped into again in town, we walked to the northern edge of town where the tourist shops end.  The paved path turns into a narrow footpath of packed red earth that meanders under palm trees leaning into the ocean.

We passed a deserted yellow and pink mosque, then crossed a creek and hopped onto the sand of a sheltered cove where a few fishing boats were beached.  The boats were made out of planks of wood stitched together with string that had been waterproofed with what looked like white sap.  Each boat was sheltered with a thatched palm roof.

There was laundry hanging out to dry on the edge of some of the boats; I assumed the fishermen were inside napping the afternoon away before their nighttime work.  Each night at dinner we’ve watched a city of blinking lights bob up and down on the water.  The restaurants here all feature broad planks spread nightly with piles of local squid, calamari, prawns, and even a huge swordfish with a tomato skewered on his sword.

Our walk out of town also brought us past a few simple stone huts scattered under the palms.  A man was sprawled in the shade next to one of the huts, sleeping on a pillow of bunched-up fishing nets, with the sparkling blue water just beyond.  He’s got a sublime piece of real estate that would fetch millions at home.  The Kerala tourist literature advertises this region as “God’s Own Country.”  I can see why- it’s absolutely beautiful here.