India pt 1, 09 - 22 Dec

State of Kerala on the SW coast

In the Backwaters of Aleppey

Random thoughts on SW India:

For almost 2 weeks we were in Kerala, the state surrounding Ft. Kochi on the SW coast. To the east it takes you to a beautiful mountain range, not really tall, but covered with some of the most beautiful tea plantations we've ever seen. This is where the spice trade started, so there are cardamom, pepper, pineapple, turmeric, banana and everything else you can think of, growing everywhere. And rubber plantations also, which I've never seen.

Even here, where it's supposed to be India-lite, everything is at pace. These are small towns, by India standards, and traffic is still crazy with the constant beeping of horns and passing on blind hairpin corners. To me it seems a bit crazy but I'm sure to them it's just everyday life...gotta go gotta go get out of the way tourist - I have work to do! I guess I need to wait until we find our way to Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata and then revisit my chaos analysis.

We are meeting friends in Delhi later and latching onto their family vacation for a couple of weeks - really looking forward to being with the Metha/Hunt/Naes family and getting to see their heritage with them! And wife is REALLY excited to have someone other than me to talk to for a while! After that we're headed to a yoga retreat near the Himalayas for a week...can't wait to see my out-of-shape un-bendy ass take a yoga boot camp - that's going to be painful!!! I sure hope they don't serve spicy food there.

My first visit to India and I’m surprised at the religion I see. I expected to see much more Hindu but instead I see lots of Christian churches and mosques and lots of Christmas decoration stores but only a few Hindu Temples. Because of the spice and silk trade this area was settled by European traders, so tons of missionaries also settled here. As it turns out, India is such a compilation of ethnicities and languages and religions there seems to be a level of, if not harmony, then maybe acceptance, among the people - everyone seems to respect different religions, or lack thereof, which is refreshing. But at the same time, security is always high, especially at tourist areas and hotels - with Pakistan and Bangladesh as neighbors there are always tensions happening.

One of the cutest things happened in an Uber in Kochi. We got in and, as always, tried to make small talk. Unfortunately, the driver spoke almost no English but enough to ask where we were from. We typically tell people California and Texas, because most don’t know Oklahoma or St. Louis. As soon as I said Texas he told us his daughter was in school in Texas working on a PhD in chemistry in Lubbock. I told him my father went to school in Lubbock and his eyes lit up in the rearview mirror. He immediately picked up his phone and hit the call button and got his daughter on the phone. It was about 5:30 in the afternoon in India, so about 6:00’ish am in Texas, and we had the cutest conversation with the super smart daughter - you could tell how proud this guy was of her.

India (so far) seems like a giant used car lot and every day is the end of the month. Everybody wants you to come into their shop and every tour takes you to their brothers’ spice garden, which leads to an in-house Ayurvedic medicine shop complete with the hard close to get you to buy something to fix the lumbago or psoriasis or high LDL count that you didn’t know that you had. It’s almost comical how they set it up. I’m sure they tailor their sales pitch based on where the “client” says they hail from, which is ALWAYS their first question. I need to change my home country to Germany or Canada and see if they pitch the fat-loss or diabetes medicines so hard then or if they try to sell me on something that only Germans or Canadians get.

I think there must be an Indian drivers test requirement that the driver must complete at least three out of five passes (overtakes for you F1 fans) of a slower vehicle around a blind corner on a mountain road. With no guard rails. Definite bonus points to be given to those that honk the most. The Indian driving and queueing are quite similar - if there is a sharp curve, expect someone to try and cut around you. On a mountain…with a 500 foot drop off on one side…while it’s raining. In the passport line at the airport a cute little multi-color sari’d woman will come stand behind you and just slyly cut in front as the line bends and then look at you like “you shouldn’t have taken the turn so wide, honky”. I’d like to ask a local but I suspect it’s due to the severe population issues - with so many people you’re more focused on finding the quickest way around traffic you’ll take whatever shortcut you’re offered. And then there’s the anonymity factor - the chances of you cutting off someone you know are about zero, so go for it, I guess.

At a hotel in the hills outside Munnar I find one of the things I’ve been hoping for…an Indian yoga teacher. Mr. Anil, complete with a ponytail and a bushy beard, has this amazing demeanor and voice and it’s fun to try and figure out what he’s saying. He speaks decent English but with such an accent it typically takes me two times to understand what he’s instructing. But I feel like I generally get the moves close to correct, which isn’t too bad for being 11 months out of practice. His instructions were beautiful and I learned a few new moves, although I’m way too tight to try and push anything. The best part was when we did pranayama breathing…his progressively softer and elongating “Relax…reeeelaaax..reeeeeellllaaaaxxx” just made me feel calmer. And then he sang a short song for peace (Shanti) that follows many of the yoga classes here. I’ve been told that the yoga here focuses more on the inward rather than the outward, like in the west and if I keep hearing this gentle song for relaxation and peace I might actually be able to focus inwardly rather than how high my foot can go over my head.

Driving through the Kerala mountain range, covered in beautiful tea fields, wife and I both agree that these are some of the most beautiful crop fields we’ve ever seen. The crazy switchback mountain roads go from tea and coffee plantations to rubber, cardamom, pineapple, coconut and every spice you can think of. Along the way there are busses and cars decorated with colorful sheets and banners  and flowers, all holding Hindu pilgrims making their way to the next shrine. I need to understand more about the pilgrimage they undertake - we see a lot of pilgrims on the side of the road, walking shoeless and shirtless, with just their diaper like shorts on. I’m more of a pub-crawl type of pilgrim but it might be interesting to walk with them for a while some day and see what they go through on their walks.

For some reason (wife?!?) we ended up shadowing our friends parents through Kerala, the same ones we plan to meet in New Delhi later in the trip. Theckla and Raju were here early for a family wedding and just happened to be in the area. We got really lucky and met them for dinner for three nights. It was wonderful to be able to sit across the table from friends again - these are the things we miss the most about being gone for so long! More on these two in India Part II, when we get to tag along with them for two whole weeks!

In the town of Thekkady for two days and one day is spent taking a boat tour of the lake and then an afternoon jeep tour of the surrounding mountains. At the lake I got chased by a monkey that felt my peanut butter energy bar was supposed to be shared. Actually scared me a little - those farts have big teeth! On the jeep tour through mountain dirt roads that looked and felt like they had been bombed (an Indian massage!) and I almost got a concussion on the rollbar we saw an elephant trundling up across the valley from us on top of a mountain at about 7000 feet. It amazes me that they can walk over steep terrain so easily.

I over-dosa’d this morning. Don’t feel all that good right now but I mistakenly ordered two instead of one and I didn’t want to waste them…so here we are, looking like Buffet Buddha after Thanksgiving dinner. They are basically crepes filled with all sorts of fun stuff and some not-so-fun but fiery stuff and almost two feet long, in case you haven’t seen one before. Ugh. But they are so good! And I'm learning that there is a point when the burning on your lips stops, the numbness then kicks in and then you can keep eating the fiery goodness that is a part of every meal served here. Actually, that's a lie...I'm such a weenie with spice we have to tell them to make it "old white guy non-spicy" and then they wobble their head a little and walk away. And then my lips still burn...but damn the food here is amazing!

We spent the night on a houseboat, after traveling the canals and "Backwaters" around Fort Kochi, on the SE coast of India. In the background, a bit louder than the ceiling fan above us, there has been a steady stream of songs and prayers from the local Hindu temple across the rice paddy. They must be a km away but we can hear them like it's just outside the door. The water really carries their voices, especially when you are away from the cities and the constant sounds of traffic they bring.

Recently read an interview from CN Traveller with Rick Steves, my travel hero. For the past 25 years, since Lyd and I first got our passports, we have used Rick’s books for all of our European travels. It’s like that local restaurant that you love and want to patronize, that you want to see succeed - you go back to them again and again in the hopes that you’re going to be that little bit of additional income to help this place survive. That’s the way we have been with Rick - always bought his books and if public television or NPR had him in StL, we went and had him autograph whatever books we bought. In addition to his writing I love his sensibilities/sensitivities and worldview. Some of our fondest Rick Steves/Travel memories were from our honeymoon, before cell phones and the internet, when we had to rely on the printed page. We’d travel on a ferry or a bus in Spain or Morocco and notice another couple clutching the same RS book we had and then strike up a conversation with them. Often it ended up, “Hey, let’s have dinner tonight. Meet us on #12, page 47 for dinner…Rick says it’s wonderful” and we’d have dinner with fellow travelers. That’s sort of how we met our dream couple, a retired teacher and a retired cop from LA, that didn’t have kids and retired young. They sold everything and spent a month at a time in a new city, but always off-season so the cost wasn’t so crazy.  We don’t do that as much these days, take printed books, with his digital books and ChatGPT so much lighter to carry. I bought his new book ‘Tales fromThe Hippie Trail’ the day it went on sale. Anyway, Rick mentioned something that rang out about our misconceptions about “civilized” groups. He mentioned a lunch with an Afghani professor who said that “1/3 of the people in the world eat with forks and knives, 1/3 eat with chopsticks and 1/3 eat with their hands, but all are as civilized as the next.” It was timely as I’ve seen people eating with their hands for months now and, in the back of my mind, I felt a bit of discomfort and in some cases, a tiny bit of revulsion/pity. But why??? They are eating the same way they have for eons and following their cultural norms. Why do I think I’m any better because I eat with a fork versus with my fingers??? Hell, my wife and I can’t even agree on the proper fork techniques - she baffles me and does that little eating with the fork upside down thing, thinking she’s all Bridgerton and shit. We don’t eat with a spoon upside down so why would we eat with a fork that way??? I wondered why eating French Fries with your fingers is any different than a bowl of rice? I guess anyway I do it I’m still going to make a mess, such are my skills with forks and chopsticks, but I have decided to never judge those eating with different utensils than me.

It’s interesting, I get picked out a lot by younger Indians who want selfies. At first my conspiratorial mind picked up on it and thought they were going to go back and use facial recognition software to hack into the system and rob me - haha!  Then we learned that for many kids, especially in the less touristed areas, they see European/American/Asian travelers as a curiosity and we might be the closest they’ll ever get to getting out of their country. So now we go with it and ham it up in the pics!

Today in the hotel breakfast there was a ghostbuster kid walking around with one of those little bug zapper tennis rackets in search of mosquitos. It was cute, he had that focused Elmer Fudd zeal and stare as he searched for his prey. I wish every hotel had this guy working for them, but as soon as he left, every little breeze on my legs made me jump thinking it was a little monster attacking me.

I’m interested in different cultural relationships and interactions wherever we go. All over Africa and the middle East, and here in India, I’ve seen men show a lot of affection toward each other. I constantly see men walking with their arms around others’ shoulders, old men walking arm-in-arm as they help each other over uneven sidewalks while discussing something intently all the while. I see boys walking and playing, clasping in a friendly embrace. Most beautifully, I see lots of dads holding hands, fingers clasped, with their sons as they walk and talk. There was a table of fit, weightlifter type guys at breakfast and they were each serving each other and had their arms around the others as they talked - it was just a wonderful bit of tenderness and caring. This isn’t to say anything about the relationship with girls and dads, it’s just something I don’t remember seeing that much of in a lot of places with men, outside my friends and their kids. It’s definitely a different “personal space” rule than I am used to. I’m curious if it comes with growing up with a greater density of people and limited space…or if it’s just me never noticing it before???

Maybe I’m digging too deep in search of differences, but it seems people are gentler and more loving than we like to give them credit. For instance, the traffic is crazy here yet I’ve only seen one person lose their temper…if these types of driving maneuvers were pulled in the states there would be guns drawn in no time. People just seem to shrug stuff off easier.

Overall we really loved Kerala and it was a great first look at India and a good way to ease into the chaos! We started in Ft. Kochi for a few days and then got a driver and car to take us into Eastern Kerala, starting in Munnar/Idukki. Then to Kumily, Thekkady, Kumarakom and finally Aleppey before heading back to Ft. Kochi.