Indiaaaahhhhhrrrrrgggghhh!

Delhi had been hard!  Rolling out of the city I felt relief in our relatively pampered first class train carriage.  Train travel in India has about a bezillion classes to choose from and the most confusing booking system ever.  Standard India really.  Not an easy place to be a tourist in.  Anyway.  First class is pretty good.  The trains are really old.  I dunno, maybe they are sixties or seventies rolling stock.  Can't be anything more modern than that.  But India is like this.  Old and new juxtaposed.  The postal system is out of the 1940s, people don't have electricity, there is no clean supply of drinking water, but it is the second largest producer of computer software in the world, has nuclear weapons and has sent a satellite into space.  

The Delhi to Mumbai train was 14 hours, and in our cabin, shared with an amiable old Indian couple, the time passed smoothly.  We pulled into Mumbai on time, and discovered we had arrived during a time of mourning for the Hindu Maharashtran nationalist party leader Bal Thakeray.  Chatting to the taxi driver who managed to accost us out of Mumbai station it was hard to see why he was so revered.  An ultra-conservative, he was also an admirer of Hitler and apparently unsympathetic to anyone who did not live in the Indian state of Maharashtra.  Still he was incredibly popular, posters of him were everywhere (I thought he bore a passing resemblance to Muhammer Gadaffi) and the day of mourning meant that the traffic by Mumbai standards was surprisingly quiet.  

Bal Thackeray.  I thought he had a passing resemblance to Colonel Gadaffi but didn't mention this to anyone in Mumbai.

We found Ro a hotel (I was staying with a friend of my brother and sister-in-law's that night) and then did a bit of sightseeing.  We started off in the Horniman Circle and then made our way to the gateway of India.

The Horniman Circle

The Gateway of India, built to commemorate the visit of King George V in 1911.

The electrical wiring in Ro's hotel bathroom.  What could possibly go wrong?

By that time I had to head off to meet my friends so we parted ways.  My friends Rachel and Ashok live in the most beautiful apartment in Mumbai with panoramic views over the city.

The view from Rachel and Ashok's apartment over Mumbai

It was Rachel's birthday so after drinks and nibbles we headed off into town for a gorgeous meal at one of Mumbai's best restaurants.  Mumbai feels a lot more Western than Delhi, or at least more modern.  I think it is mostly the effect of Bollywood.  Most Bollywood films are produced in Mumbai and the industry eclipses Hollywood in the amount of material it produces.  Anyway, it adds a certain celebrity chic to the city which is absent in Delhi, but which makes the city have a slightly more refined feel.  After a delicious dinner I fell gratefully into the comfiest bed I have slept in since leaving the UK!

Next day Ashok had arranged a car and a driver for me and had written down a list of places to visit.  I felt very privileged!  I visited the hanging gardens and had a view of the Towers of Silence, which are raised structures usually placed on top of hills and used by Zoroastrians to dispose of their dead.  The body is laid at the top of the tower and allowed to be picked clean by vultures.  The bones are then interred.  Interestingly, and I digress here a bit, the number of vultures in India has reached a critically low level because of the use of tetracycline antibiotics in cattle, principally sacred cows.  Tetracycline type drugs are extremely toxic to vultures and when they eat meat from cows treated with them they die.  So the number of vultures available has dimished rapidly over recent years.  So the bodies don't get picked clean.  Anyway, I digress.  The hanging gardens were beautiful, with drifts of butterflies flitting in and out of the bushes.

The hanging garden was next to an amusingly signed park for those getting on in years.

After that I was taken to the Jain Temple.  Jainism is one of several religions to emerge from India's ancient Indus valley history.  It is a religion that preaches the doctrines of non-violence and the progression of one's consciousness, through spiritual study and development, to a sort of transcendental liberation.  It is, however, not a very popular religion in India.  About 5% of Indians are Jains.  The most interesting thing for me about the visit was finding out about the use of the Swastika symbol, which I saw people making in grains of rice on a table in the Jain temple.  It turns out that the swastika is meant to represent the primordial cosmic energy that suffuses the universe and has its origins in these Indus valley religions.  But the Nazis gave it a bad name.  So there we are.  I never knew that.  

I was then taken to the dhobi ghats, where much of Mumbai's washing is brought to be pummelled and thrashed in the concrete vats, before being hung out to dry.  It doesn't look terribly impressive in the photos but this was a slick, well-oiled machine to watch.  

The Mumbai dhobi ghats

Hundreds of shirts hung out to dry

Finally, after lunch I visited the Prince of Wales museum of Western India, which is full of curiosities, amongst them old sculpture of various Hindu gods.  Having the head of elephant, Ganesh is probably the coolest!

Ganesh

After a quick supper back at the apartment and kisses and thanks to Rachel and Ashok I was off to the station to meet Ro for our train down to Goa.  It was time to leave the hustle and bustle of Indian cities behind and try and find a beach paradise again.

The train to Goa was pretty easy.  Again we had AC1 tickets, which whilst the train was even older than the last one, meant we had a reasonable flat surface to sleep on as the train bumped and rattled its way down south.  It's not a particularly comfortable way to sleep, but by Indian standards this is probably the best you're going to get unless you fly, and then you miss the experience of the trains and the view of the countryside rolling by.

12 hours later we alighted at Thivim, and got a taxi to our first beach in Goa, Arambol, in the far north of this, by Indian standards, tiny state.  Goa was a Portuguese colony until the 1960s, and did not fall under British colonial rule.  It was only after the Indian army re-occupied the state in 1961 that it was incorporated into the rest of India.  Perhaps partly because of this, although I think mostly because of the influx of hippy culture in the sixties and seventies and the resulting party scene of the 80s and 90s, Goa is India's richest state, with a per capita income twice that of the rest of India.  It shows, not least because it's the cheapest state to buy beer in, but generally with the state of its infrastructure.  It's easy to be a tourist here.

When we arrived at Arambol it was easy to find a place to stay.  The hardest decision when you get to a beach in Goa is whether to turn left or right to look for a hut to stay in! We stayed a couple of days in a little hut above a restaurant, before moving to the yoga village.  This place was very chilled out and friendly.  Life consisted of getting up for yoga at 8am with the resident swami ("focus on your eye-brow centarrrrr"), having a healthy breakfast then lounging in the sun and playing in the sea until it was lunch time/dinner time, then whiling away the rest of the evening with music or cards before swaying gently into a soporific haze under the mosquito net, the waves lulling us to sleep.

The yoga village where we stayed in Arambol

Arambol beach

Tai chi on the beach at sunset

Tough, tough life ;)  Before we knew it, 10 days had passed and our friends Harry and Elliot had flown out from the UK to join us.  It was exceptionally good to see friends after so much time away :)

Beers with buddies on beaches.  Doesn't get much sweeter.  Simple pleasures :))

We came across one of the more unusual scams in Arambol.  Walking down the beach, a man suddenly rushed up to me saying he could see ear wax coming out of my ear.  He then produced a small metal implement, stuck it in my ear and appeared to remove a big glob of yellowish material.  He then showed me a card announcing that he was an ear cleaner, and a very good one at that, endorsed by some local doctor.  He didn't seem aggressive and I was a bit intrigued, although I knew he was trying to scam me.  The stuff he was claiming to pull out of my ear was definitely not ear wax, and by some sleight of hand he was managing to get it from somewhere else.  Anyway, by the end of his charade he was demanding 2,000 rupees (20ish quid) from me for his services.  I told him I hadn't asked to have my ear cleaned, nor had he told me he was charging for the service and at any rate I didn't have any money on me (this was true).  He was not pleased.  His friend came over to try and back up his claim.  They wanted me to pay them later.  We walked off.  Bizarre experience.  Being scammed is something of an everyday event in India.  I want to stress however that it isn't done in any sort of malign or unpleasant way.  It just seems to be the way it works to a certain extent.  You get out of the station; 20 people try to get you into their taxi.  They charge you an exorbitant price because they know you don't know the local price.  They take you to a hotel that pays them commission to bring you there.  They tell you the place you want to go to has closed down, or burnt down, or that it just isn't a good place to stay.  They take you to their friend's emporium on the way.  You have to negotiate the price on everything, and frankly they are much, much better at haggling than we were!  It gets kind of wearing after a while, until you learn to just go with it because they you know they don't mean you any harm.  And even after all the price hikes given your foreigner status, India is a pretty cheap place to be.  A decent meal is a couple of quid.  A night in a hut 4 quid.  A hotel maybe a tenner.  Our train ticket from Gokarna to Kochi (700km) was about 6 pounds, between us!  So you can't really complain.  Cheap as chips!  Lovely jubblys!  As the locals will say to you as they try and sell you a sarong.  Lots of smiles all round.

After our time in Agonda we moved down to Vagator, partly for a bit of variety, and partly because we were planning to go and see The Zen Mechanics, a favourite psytrance producer of our's, who happened to be playing in a club called Hilltop in Vagator.

The Zen Mechanics, aka Wouter Thomassen.  Probably my favourite musical artist of all time, playing in Goa :)

The Hilltop is set up with quite a big outdoor bar and dance area, speckled with palm trees, which are all painted different fluorescent colours.  All very psychedelic!  Everyone had a good time and we met another friend at the party who had flown out from the UK too.

Vagator is  a bit more commercial than Arambol.  Indeed a lot of Goa these days is becoming a more commercialised holiday destination, with cheap charter flights from the UK.  We skipped out the towns of Calangute and Candolim, as we hadn't heard promising stories about them from the travellers that we exchaged stories with.  And we were keen to head down further south to Palolem, which we were told had a more relaxed, less commercial feel.  When we'd recovered ourselves we set off for Panjim, the capital of Goa, although it is pretty sedate by Indian city standards.  Lots of quiet, Portuguese feeling streets.  Not a whole lot to do, and no beach here.  We had some good food, slept in a decent bed and the next day were wending our way down the coast towards Palolem, which is in the deep south of Goa.

Beautiful though Palolem beach is (see pictures), I was surprised at how busy and commercial even this place was.  You can tell when you get there because of the intensity of locals trying to sell you stuff.  We found a decent hut to stay in and spent our time eating, drinking, sea-frolicking and messing about in kayaks.  We even saw dolphins, who were breaching the sea around us as we kayaked out from Palolem.  Oh yes, and awesome, awesome fish curries.  Nom, nom, nom, nom, nom :)

We spent three days in Palolem before heading up to our final beach in Goa, called Agonda.  This was by far the best place we went to in Goa, and if you are reading this, and planning a trip to Goa, and want a decent, paradise beach, then go here.

Baywatch, Indian style!

Really beautiful, peaceful, no sellers harassing you and lovely places to stay with good food and cheap rates.  I am sure it won't be long before this place is overtaken by the commercial influx too, but for the time being, this place is a little slice of paradise.  Our friends Harry and Elliot had to leave after a few days here.  Poor Harry was ill with food poisoning at this point so I dosed him up with some meds and we waved goodbye to them.  Ro and I then spent another week or so in a sort of stuporous torpor, again sliding effortlessly from sea, to sun lounger to delicious meal, to evening drinks and games.  And repeat.  Ad infinitum.

We found this fellow sitting on the shower tap one evening.  No idea how he could have got there.  It was way too high to jump up for him and there was nowhere near he could have jumped from.  A mystery.

But even paradise wears thin after a while…a long while though :)  We had to move on at some point.  And we did.

So in retrospect, Goa was awesome!  A beautiful place, but it is slowly being commercialised and we saw the signs of mass tourism taking over.  If you want to go then go soon.  There are still some unspoilt, beautiful regions, the sea is warm, the food is delicious and the people are laid-back, friendly and grateful for the business you bring the local economy.  I'll never forget Eric, the guy from Bhutan, who looked after us at the Green Valley in Agonda.  He was attentive, friendly, humble, grateful and interesting to talk to.  A lovely, lovely guy.  I wish him all the best in his aspirations to start up his own business.

A short hop down south on the train and we were in Gokarna, which is the neighbouring state of Karnataka.  Amusing sign on the train.  I never thought I'd see the word 'urchin' used in real-life, as it were.

Gokarna roughly translates as "cow's ear" both because the geography of the region and because it is said that Shiva, one of the three divine entities in Hindu mythology, emerged through the ear of a cow, which itself represents the mother earth.  Anyway, because of this it is a Hindu pilgrimage site and a pretty town with dusty streets, temples and quaint slate roofed houses.  A man kept trying to persuade me to let him have my sandals which, as my only footwear, I am quite endeared to.  He was standing by a large pile of other footwear that he had presumably wrested off other people.  We moved on the end of the town and took a rickshaw towards the beach, which wound its way through little side alleys barely wide enough for the rickshaw to fit through.  People pressed themselves to the wall as we skittered passed.

We ended up walking down to Kudle beach, which in many ways was similar to the beaches in Goa, except that the feel here is a bit different.  Much less commercialised, more of a hippy feel.  Lots of pretty people meditating and doing yoga and generally being a bit spiritual.  Same routine.  Find a hut to stay in, eat, drink, swim, read, think, sleep.  Repeat.  I found myself thinking about stuff too much.  Thinking about thinking about stuff too much, and thinking about thinking about thinking, and so on.  These twists and turns of our mind never end it seems, and lead essentially nowhere.  I found the meditation practices of returning to the feel of the breath and the body, and to the present moment, helpful in keeping everything balanced.

We found an ingenious solution to the problem of the squat loo, which you come across a lot in India.  Worked very nicely!

We stayed a few days in Kudle, but I think our beach lust was waning and, delicious fish curries notwithstanding, I was keen for a bit more culture.  It was time to move on 700km down the coast to Kochi, or Cochin, in the state of Kerala.

It was here that we fell victim to the Indian train system.  You have to be careful to book your tickets ahead, on this complicated and obscure system.  Because many people are heading south for holidays on the trains about the time we were travelling, the trains were all full.  In this case you are 'waitlisted' for a ticket, but you can't actually know whether or not you will get your reservation until you arrive. We were waitlisted until a few hours before we had to leave for the station but, because previously we had still managed to get our waitlisted tickets right up until the last minute, we decided to chance it and turn up at the station, which was about 40km down the road.  Taxi driver was banging out PSY's Gangnam Style as we hurtled down the road.

At the station we discovered to our dismay that we were still waitlisted.  The only ticket to buy in this case was 2nd class unreserved.  This is basically the sardine carriages at either ends of the train where anyone and everyone just crams themselves into the carriage and occupies any available sitting, lying or standing space available.  We levered ourselves in with our bags and the only space we could find was right by the loo.  It was not pretty.  I will spare you the details.  We were faced with 16 hours of standing in this absolutely disgusting carriage.  It was something neither of us could face.  We got off at the next station and tried to get into the guard's carriage, but couldn't get the door to open, and then sprinted down the platform, finally pushing our way into one of the sleeper carriages, which is one step up from second class unreserved.  There was no space and we eventually had to sit in the corridor by the door.  It was 2am, we were knackered and the cockroaches were crawling around and about our feet.  I put my head between my knees and must have, somehow, slept for a brief while.  At about 5:30 it started getting light and by about 9am enough people had got off the train that we were able to fall at the mercy of a kind Indian family who let us lie on the bunks above the compartment where they were sitting now it was daytime.  I fell into a hazy, grateful doze on the hard thin bunk and the hot, humid, sultry hours drifted slowly past as we wended our way into the deep south of India.  My good friend Katie had once described the horrors of her similar train journey in India to me, and I had wondered if we would meet a similar fate at some point.  We did.  It was chalked up to experience.  And in a funny way I am glad I experienced it.  It makes you appreciate the times when the journey is easier!

Day time train trips in India.  The doors are left open as the train lumbers along.  

The feel of the country changes quite a lot as you move through.  I daresay there are many such changes as you move west to east, or whatever in India or any country, but going from north to south I felt a definite change in the ambience of our surroundings.  Kochi was the only place where I saw anyone clearing up some of the rubbish that lies strewn about everywhere.  Generally, whilst the north had felt quite frenetic, hectic and competitive, in the south the people were much more laid back, and the pace of life more relaxed and friendly.  It might be the heat I suppose.  Here I found it particularly stultifying, and started developing an annoying heat rash.  The mosquitoes were also absolutely relentless.  I'd by this point more or less given up on trying to prevent bites and was just taking an antihistamine every day to stop the itching.  Little buggers.  I try to find love for all creatures, and often take fascination in little creepy crawlies when our paths cross with, carefully relocating them rather than swatting them.  But mosquitoes are culled with a passionate, ruthless, unhesitating zeal.  My attitude was further confirmed by the yoga swami at the Yoga village we stayed at in Goa, who, whilst we were sitting quietly meditating and breathing at the start of the session, leapt out of his half lotus position to bring his hand down mercilessly on a passing blood-sucker.  Kablammo!  It was reassuring to see that even the apparently spiritually fulfilled are pragmatically minded when it comes to disease spreading parasites!

Kochi is a coastal town in Kerala, about 200kms north of the capital of the state.  In fact the older part of the town lies roughly on an island and a peninsula although the major modern part of the town, now called Ernakulum, is on the mainland. It's more recent history lies primarily around its importance as a spice trading post, and it was variously controlled by the Portuguese, Dutch and Brits between the 1500s and 1947.

So, anyway, we dehisced ourselves from the train, glad to be free of that interminable bumpy rattling carriage and the endless calls of the chai-wallah.  The city was in its full morning swing, with the constant blaring of horns and swarms of people going about their daily business in the pressing heat.  We shared a taxi into Ernakulum, before getting a ferry over to Fort Kochi, which is the older part of the city.  The ferry cost 6p.  Between us!  Most things in India are cheap, some ridiculously so.

After finding some accommodation and having a well-deserved shower, we did a bit of sight-seeing.  The first thing you notice in the city is the writing, which is in Malayalam.  It has this aesthetically pleasing cursive script, derived from its ancient Dravidian origins.  I don't know why I found it so good to look at, but it seemed almost like calligraphy, even in the street signs and graffiti.

Speaking of graffiti, there was some pretty weird stuff written in Kochi.  An example...

Why indeed?

The second thing you notice is the architecture, which has a particularly European feel about it.  It felt a little like a Portuguese town to me, but busier.

We walked up to the north shore of Fort Kochi, where they have the huge Chinese fishing nets, which are static, levered structures that dip and raise out again enormous fishing nets into the water.  It takes at least four men to haul the nets up and down.  They are quite spectacular in their grandeur and simplicity.



Scarcely had we arrived there though than a 'friendly' tuk tuk driver (he must have been because he had a sign) approached and persuaded us to take a tour of Fort Kochi in his tuk tuk for the measly sum of 50 rupees (60p or so).



India being what it is though he makes plenty more than that in commission from the various places, including shops, that he took us to.  But really we were all happy I think.  He took us to the Santa Cruz Basilica, the Dutch Palace, the Jain Temple and the spice markets, as well as into a warehouse where he showed us the mounds and mounds of spices being processed for export.  We bought some spices to send home to family and friends.

The Santa Cruz Basilica

On the main fishing port building.  I don't get it.  English is sometimes used very creatively here.

Spices!  We bought lots.

 

The Jain temple in Kochi.

More interesting than the Jain temple itself was the elaborate ceremony they did with the pigeons there.  I couldn't get anyone to explain what was going on, but it involved swarms of pigeons being fed and then induced to fly round and round the building (below).

 A few other random shots we took on that tour.

Buying Tapioca crisps from a stall by the side of the road.

The rickshaw driver's fare meter.  Never used needless to say.  All fares are bargained for.

One of the Indian worker elephants from the Hindu temple in Kochi.

Random sign that caught my eye.  I don't know, but it just summed the place up really, in some sort of way, for me.

The next day we had a few bits and pieces to sort out.  I had smashed my iPhone screen, but in India such things are not a problem if you find the right person.  800 rupees (10ish quid).  30 minutes.  Sorted.  Bargain.  Except that barely 24 hours after getting it repaired I broke it again.  Arrrgh!  It's only a phone I suppose.  Anyway, errands completed, we headed over to the Kerala Folklore museum, which I have to say is one of the most interesting, beautiful, well set up places of interest I saw in India.  A kindly, slightly obsequious, but immensely knowledgable man showed us and 1 other German girl around the museum as the only visitors.  Aside from the occasional mosquito annoyance, the place was quite entrancing!  Filled with beautiful Keralan and Dravidian artefacts and curios divided into three floors of a building specially built to show off the styles of architecture and decoration from the north, mid and south of Kerala.  Beautiful, beautiful place and I highly recommend going if you ever find yourself in Kochi.

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Other notable activities included a trip to see Kathakali, which is a stylised Keralan dance with dramatic make up and costumes.  We could see the artistes being made up beforehand

And then the wonderful, if slightly bizarre, show afterwards.

And, of course, to complete the tourist experience, pictures with one of the protagonists afterwards!

We made two trips out of Kochi in the 6 or so days we were there.  The first was to the backwaters, which are described as "the Venice of India" because of the intricate network of smaller and smaller inland waterways and tropical islands that make up the unusual geography of an area which stretches for a couple of hundred kilometres south of Kochi.  The area is essentially a vast river delta, where sea water meets fresh water over a large area of land at sea level, cut into a myriad of islands by the snaking rivers and waterways.  Many people live here and use punted boats to get around, and traditional fishing methods to make a living. 

The exotic, unusual nature of the place has resulted in a dramatic increase in tourism in recent years, which, as many things in India seem to be, has not been handled with much sensitivity.  So the natural beauty of the place is threatened quite clearly, both by the influx of tourists and the expanding population.  And so we added our own names to the litany of those who have visited.  A half day was taken on something that resembled a reed roofed hut on a boat, whilst the rest was spent being punted along the mirror smooth narrow inlets that the larger boats could not pass down. 

We had some local alcoholic drink made from fermented palm tree sap and spicy locally caught mussels (yum) for lunch. 

The entire place has a magical charm about it.  It feels a little like an enchanted tropical forest only with waterways rather than paths.  Children peep out at you behind the lush foliage.  Life goes on in huts and houses set back from the waterways.  It seems as though life has not changed much here although, by all accounts, change is coming. 

I struggled, in the face of so many different cultures, practices, religions and people, to see how India will emerge from its apparently increasingly rapid Westernisation.  There is a rampant materialism here, but an entrenched spirituality too.  They feel like uneasy partners to me, and I don't really see how they can go together fundamentally, except to say that if anyone can make it work the Indians can.  This country is so rich, so lush, so vibrant, so colourful, so diverse, so complex, so difficult, so easy.  Everyone says it about India, but you don't really appreciate it until you've spent some time there.  It is such a fundamentally enormous place, but also has SO many people in it.  To place it in perspective this is a country six times the size of France, but with thirty times the population.  And its history is richer and more diverse and influenced than any I have been to.  It seems to me that India is in a state of extreme flux at the moment.  No one can know where it will go.  We just hope it is good.

Anyway, I digressed.  We were only there for a day and before we knew it we were back in Kochi and ready to go on our next tour, to the tea country of Munnar, in the hills of Kerala.  I will have to have a rant at this point and say that travel in India, especially road travel, is shit.  The roads are appalling, the safety record lamentable and the vehicles usually badly maintained and uncomfortable.  It took six hours to drive the couple of hundred kilometres to Munnar, and by the end we were regretting coming.  The bumps, the blaring horns, the swerves, ridiculous over-taking practices and general near misses seemed never to end.  I am monumentally surprised that we were not in a vehicle that crashed in India.  We saw plenty by the side of the road, where the wrecks are seemingly just dumped.  A sort of sombre reminder that this country has the worst road traffic safety record of any on the planet, by a long margin.  Except that no one takes any notice, and the vehicular bedlam continues.  The roads sort of reflect the ethos though.  It is everyone for themselves, but in a very friendly way.  I never saw the road rage you see in the UK in India.  Everyone smiles as they hoot impertinently at each other.  In the UK we'd be at each others throats!

So Munnar, aside from being a mission, was actually both beautiful and refreshingly temperate.  A welcome relief from the heat and insect armageddon of Kochi.  On the way we were taken to see some elephants in training for work being given a bath by their trainers.  I was actually appalled at the way the elephants were beaten and shouted at by the men.  The elephants were forced to lie down on their sides in the river and then scrubbed.  They seemed so accepting of their fate, so at one with their suffering.  I found it very upsetting to see such noble animals treated, in my eyes, so cruelly and I think so did every tourist who was there.  The Indians seemed unaware of our distaste, and the driver explained matter-of-factly that this is the way elephants are trained.  Personally I found it utterly inhumane, but in this country where the harsh facts of life are obvious, it is perhaps not so surprising.

Up in Munnar we spent our time seeing the tea plantations, the tea museum and taking a brief hike up to Top Station, I think about 5,000ft up by this point.  Invigoratingly cool, but disappointingly cloudy when we got up to the top, so no great pictures unfortunately.  As was becoming standard though, there were clutches of young Indians who were keen to have their photo taken with us.  It's strange at first, when a complete stranger wants a photo with you.  I wasn't sure whether to be flattered or embarrassed.  They usually then are anxious to know,  "Who is your favourite celebrity?", "Which football team do you support?", "Where did you get your <insert western-branded item>?", or, even more brazenly "How much do you earn?".  It seemed to me that this was the younger generation, exposed to Western society via media and the internet, and being sucked in just as we were when we were kids.  Only I came to India to get away from it.  They couldn't understand why I would want to divest myself of Western culture but at the same time come to India, where they apparently aspire to it.  The irony was tangible.  As were the metaphors. The grass is always greener.  You always want what you don't have.  Etc. etc.  I sort of wished I could warn them that what they were aspiring to wasn't anything but a media-fuelled fantasy of life as it will never be.  But you can't tell people things they don't want to hear.  And they didn't.

 It was explained!  It's true.  The sign did not lie.

The next day was bright and sunny though so we stopped for pictures as we made our way back to Kochi.  It's stunning scenery.  The tea plantations make this sort of craquelure effect of bright green all over the hills which makes it look like a distressed wall paper covering, or something.  Very beautiful.  The bus journey back to Kochi was only remarkable for the fact that it took even longer than the journey the day before.  At a conservative estimate we spent about 18 hours in that damn minibus on those damn roads.  Hellish.  But I am still glad I went!

Next day we were back on the train (prebooked tickets this time, phew!) down to Varkala, about 300kms down the coast and nearing our final destination in Kerala where we would fly out to Bangkok.  Varkala is remarkable for the fact that it is another major site of Hindu pilgrimage, and where specifically relatives of the deceased will come to throw their ashes into the sea.  There is a 2,000 year old Hindu temple here (which we weren't allowed to visit) and the waters of the sea are said to have the power to wash away sins.  However this does not seem to have stopped the place from being haphazardly developed into a beach holiday resort of sorts, and the religiosities we witnessed were pretty minimal.  Hindus certainly more likely to be hurling themselves into the sea here than the ashes of their relatives.  Or maybe we were at the wrong beach.  Anyway, we stayed in a cute hut, ate nice fish curries and cavorted about with the gay abandon of two young men.  The surf here is quite epic, and we spent a significant amount of time getting hurled about by the waves, and body surfing into the beach. 

Varkala beach...

...And the view from the cliff

Just about to be ramshanked by a wave!

I think we spent three days here, and our only notable activity was negotiating the Indian postal system to send a load of spices back to family and friends.  It was a quintessentially Indian experience and probably one of those I will remember with most affection, even if it was a pretty frustrating experience.  Some things in India have not changed since the 1940s.  The post office is clearly one of them.  Honestly it's like stepping back in time.  The first thing to think about when sending a parcel home to the UK from India is how you are going to pack it.  We couldn't find Jiffy bags, and we searched extensively.  No one seemed to know how one might parcel a small quantity of items for post back to the UK.  Until, that is, we were walking past a tailor's shop (yes a tailor's) and the man within, spying our armfuls of items, rushed out and started to entreat us to let him pack them for us.  I was deeply dubious, but reassuring and cheerful, as most Indian's are, this man created, before our eyes, a dozen or so tailor-made fabric pouches into which we obediently tipped our spices and other unguents into, before he stitched them neatly up and dripped sealing wax on the stitching.  It was just so wonderfully Indian.  Entrancing!  And then we wrote our addresses on the fabric and tottered off to the post office, where the next saga began.  Notwithstanding the fact that we had to come back twice because they don't accept parcels after 3pm, I can give you only a small window into the bureaucratic mire of the Indian post office by telling you that the young Israeli girl in front of me was reduced to tears just by asking how much it would cost in principle to send a 1kg package back to Israel.  She left dejected and defeated, and without an answer to her question, after an hour of increasingly desperate conversation with two incredibly friendly but ultimately unhelpful staff.  Lots of head wagging.  It was bewildering, yet funny, to watch the antics going on in the post room behind, where the most modern accoutrement was a dot matrix printer out of the 1980s and most of the equipment looked museum quality.  Piles of dog eared bits of paper teetered on antique looking teak desks, behind which clerks with pots of paste and small brushes were laboriously applying stamps to letters and other mail.  A seething hive of pre-war activity, right here in 2012. 

The tailor stitching up our parcels on his antique foot driven sewing machine.

I half expected to see neatly dressed ladies in the room next door talking in nasal voices down telephones whilst they connected calls on their manual exchanges.  Actually, in Munnar, now I remember it, one of said manual telephone exchanges was still in use up until 1990.  But, for all my faintly derogatory descriptions, I can say that they accepted our parcels (after we had filled in the same form three times for each parcel), charged us a very reasonable rate, and the parcels all arrived in the UK within 10 days!  So, a little descriptive window into the post office, and a window into the larger view I had of India itself.  Chaotic yet organised, bureaucratic yet efficient, bewildering yet understandable, friendly yet mercenary, beautiful yet filthy.  All of these paradoxes make India what it is.  I loved it and hated it, usually in quick succession, as it buffeted me and badgered me, bludgeoned me and bullied me, and finally forced me to accept what it is, even love what it is.  It was a lesson in life, certainly.

So then, finally, down to the capital of Kerala, which has the almost unpronounceable name of Thiruvananthapuram (go on, try it), which is handily shortened to Trivandrum from the oratorially challenged.  We stayed a couple of nights in Kovalam, and I am not going to go into any detail on this place because it was pretty awful.  I think now that there are such cheap flights out to India a lot of it is being ruined with charter tourism.  It felt like being in the crappier parts of the Algarve in Portugal.  We were waiting for our flight out to Bangkok via Colombo, and given we had a nice swanky hotel booked with comfortable beds, clean sheets, AC and a guaranteed mosquito-free existence, even if only for 48 hours, I couldn't get out of that steaming, seething, sweltering city fast enough.

I heard a saying about India shortly after I left and it went like this.  "Sometimes, in India, you have to surrender before you win".  It's a perfect way to describe the process of liking the place.  Surrender to it, it's assault on you, and it will let you reap some rewards.  Fight it, and you will hate it.  I think in some ways that is also a lesson for life but it was absolutely my experience of it.  I fought it, and it punished me ruthlessly.  I surrendered to it, and it poured upon me riches.  This process was unpredictable, even capricious, but that is the nature of India.  The ride was sensational.  Unforgettable.  And the Indians- as friendly as any people I have met, even when they're fleecing you.  They do it so well!  It's impossible not to love them for it.

Next stop Bangkok.  Thank you for reading!  Love and Rupees.  DrJ xxx