Oh, wait, hold on. We've just woken up in normal sleeper class after a long train ride south from Goa. Right. Those birds are food vendors, and it's dark and windy because it is dark, and the mechanical fans are going strong. Normal sleeper has no AC or sheets or pillows. Whatever. We're hard core, and have places to be.
We have traveled to God's Own Country. That's what Kerala, the name of India's south-west most state, means. It is nice. Pretty nice. Pretty really realy nice.
This is a socialist wonderland! People here are more educated and wealthier, judging by the advertisements around. Look at this poster! It makes me happy in many many ways. Marx, Lenin, the hammer and sickle -- they are all common icons here. I am most pleased knowing that somewhere in the world this graphic design style is still employed without irony. Awesome. Kerala is in fact officially a democratic socialist state. Later we meet a Keralan family. The dad tells us that they have the highest literacy of any Indian state. When he was 15 (20 years ago), through a government organized program, he taught older people how to read and write, which was very hard.
We stop first in Fort Cochin, an ancient trading port. Finding a place to stay was easy. If the neighbor is a nice German lady with cute puppies -- it's a done deal.
You can see here some ancient Kochi Chinese fishing net contraptions. One day, we were minding our own business, and admiring these nets alongside a field trip of young Keralan school children, when all of a sudden the fisherman beckoned to us. Who us? Yes, indeed. They needed our strength!
Not wanting to let these young children down, or our working comrades, for that matter, we naturally joined in and lent our muscle. We of course contributed what we could to the work, and were paid what we needed, which turned out to be a negative quantity of Rupees.
Cochin still has the same problems with trash that all of India seems to have. It is hard to explain the enormity of Trash here, so big, it is capitalized. It is everywhere. Cochin has these open gutters that don't contain sewage as much as this Grey Goo filled with trash. To touch it means certain death preceded by extreme pain and excommunication. Amputation is an option. Also, Cochin has so many mosquitoes. I was almost eaten alive while using the internet one night, leading to a shorter, less sophisticated, Phases Crossed of two issues ago... Luckily we have survived to tell the tale.
Cochin has a picturesque Synagogue that's a few hundred years old. The Cochin Jews, thank you very much. We smuggled out some photographs, although photography is forbidden. Inside, a series of paintings explains the history of the synagogue in comic book form, telling how Jews arrived after being expelled from ancient Israel by the Romans. We're not sure if this is exactly true, but you can read the Wikipedia article linked to above for yourself and find out the truth. This synagogue doesn't seem to be used anymore, but is closed for the holidays. It's lovely, no? The floor tiles are all hand painted pieces from China. You must cover your legs, and dress modestly to enter. Curiously, head covering is not required, but shoes must come off, like all holy Indian places, Hindu or Muslim.
We hear about 13 Jews live here now, but it was clearly once a thriving Jewish community. They have a Jewish cemetery, and the place is named Jew Town. The shops here are clearly catering to a more moneyed kind of traveler than simple backpackers, and they have many nice things from all over India in them, but few topical Jewish items.
We see a Kathakali performance. And some fighting. And other stuff. Wild wild wild. This form of dance performance / story telling goes on for 8 hours at a stretch. Luckily they do it for only 20 minutes or so for tourists, which is certainly long enough for us. It's really interesting -- like Chinese brush painting, there's an entire iconic language of eye and body movement and sound effects that communicate specific emotions and actions.
We take the Lonely Planet recommended cooking class, Cook & Eat. We have a great time. You want to be my friend, no? I make you Kerala food. Show you tasty time.
See this pan? It's derived from the Chinese Wok many years ago, and has been adopted into Keralan culture on its own terms. The class is 500 instead of the book's quoted 400 Rupees. While we aren't promised hands on cooking, after re-reading the print, we were expecting it, especially after having such a good time at Ban Thai in Chiang-Mai, Thailand, which felt like you were on a well oiled cooking show. Sushi chefs apparently watch master chefs make Sushi for years before touching any materials, and then they are magically experts. So primates learn, apparently. True for me and cooking, I know. I love to watch people who are better cooks than me work. I learn so much. Apparently, though, our guest house would have gladly let us watch them make dinner, for much cheaper, presumably, so perhaps this was not optimal, but it was fun. We also met some nice Brits.
It's not uncommon to find yourself in the thick of friendly Indian mobs. These things happen if you are a foreigner quite often. If you have a camera, and are willing to use it, you can achieve near rockstar status in under twenty seconds.
Kerala is famous for its backwaters, a huge network of freshwater waterways, populated with entire villages, fisherman, churches, temples, schools, etc... A tourist highlight is hiring a converted rice barge / houseboat for a day and night.
We travel down to Allepy, pictured above, to enter the Venice of India. A houseboat is expensive -- 4500-6500 Rupees and up, if you want multiple rooms, decks, bar, etc... That's a boat load of money for India, so everybody is involved in this business. Every man, rickshaw driver, hotel operator, dog, child, and cow in Allepy has a boat they want to book you on. The problem here is getting what you want. The Lonely Planet has some advice that is basically useless, if not harmful, in value. They tell you to see the boat beforehand, since they vary in quality. Where? How? They are all gone for 22 hours, cruising around... All booking seems to happen downtown, where there are no boats. Get an eco friendly boat. Get a manually punted boat. They don't exist, as far as we can tell. And nobody comes to Allepy, the center of houseboat action, to do anything else, so all tourists split as soon as they finish their cruise. So there's no good gossip or tips anywhere. The majority of the tourists, by the way, are Indians from India. Everybody will tell you what you want to hear in order to get the commission, too, from the first moment you discuss a boat, to the final moment you board. Basically, the tourists have no leverage here.
Perhaps we can share what little information we had. What we can tell you, is that we had a good time, and booked a one room boat through the DTPC downtown, paid 500 in advance, 2000 on boarding, and 2000 when finishing, and got it in writing. Forget about getting an eco boat, or a punted boat. We don't know how to do it, and went crazy trying. There is a main jetty downtown with about 60 boats in it between 9:30 and 11 am, so perhaps if you get into town early enough, you can shop the boats, and book for the next day. We heard about the Jetty, but never found it ourselves. We did definitely see a ton of boats from behind when boating from Allepy to Kottayam, so it does exist. Also, it is possible to split your payment like we did with the DTPC, but you need to get it in writing.
So, we board our boat, and the scene that we see before us is unreal. We feel as if we've stepped into a Miyazaki film, or a Star Wars movie. If a giant land walking octopus, piloted by a man in a loincloth with a spear, pursuing a Wumpus, crashed through the scene in front of us, nobody would have blinked. After reorienting ourselves to this alternate reality we had booked ourself into, this friendly but curt gangster boss feeling dude gets in the boat, and asks us to complete payment. We insist we agreed to pay half up front. He says no. We show him the receipt from the DTPC and he agrees. He promises us Appam, which we love, for breakfast, as do the DTPC, but the cook, who we love, along with the crew, explain they aren't equipped for it. No matter.
Our crew is lovely. We have our own cook (above, caught during a break), pilot/captain, and motor operator/cook's assistant (also above, at right).
We have a great time. This whole world appears to be cobbled together from a collection of 2d spaces, like a platform game -- long strips of land separating waterways and rice fields. An entire alternate dimension within the parallel universe of India, filled with waterways, goats, villages, churches, people, canoes, fisherman, draw bridges...
This is a magic. Who thought such a place could exist.
The barge boats are fascinating in design. Here is a quick sketch from Alex Rosmarin. The shapes remind me of soap bubble like shapes -- materials searching for their optimal physical form under the pressure of outside forces.
It'd be fun to push and pull, interactively, on these materials and see what kinds of shape you'd get with optimizing bamboo forms.
At lunch, Yotam and I get in a smaller boat for a manually powered spin, muscled by a local man.
We dock for the night, and see a man tapping a palm tree for a liquid that he will later turn in Toddy -- palm beer -- a Keralan speciality. We are still trying to acquire some.
More magic.
Despite the aggravation of arranging the boat, we had a super time, and highly recommend the trip. Above you can see just how happy Alex is with his breakfast. Perhaps it will be easier to book from Qullum, which is farther south, and less busy. The backwaters are huge, and there are many entry points.
Finally, we take the water bus, or ferry, from Aleppy to Kotayyam, to head into the mountains, where things are guaranteed to be a bit less sticky, more cool, and certainly more tea-ful & mountainous. Stay tuned for an even more other wordly adventures.
We wish to alert our visually curious readers to Yotam's photos, which are now all online. This is a slight temporal irresponsibility on our part, since at this point in our adventure, as narrated, he is still with us. In real-time NYC, though, he dropped his and my pix onto the internets. Our readers must, by this point, be skilled in untangling the various temporal threads of our blog, so no matter. He has, in careful consideration of everyone's time, thoughtfully put his favorite ones here. For the idle or retired, every single one of his 900 some photos can be viewed here, at your leirure. Perhaps our next issue will be illustrated, in part, with Yotam's pictures. For some reason flickr, even when I'm logged in, won't let me grab the embedding URL's for his pix. So maybe who knows who is doing what wrong maybe. Or something like an English sentence.
2 comments:
wow
unbelievable.
Those are some fantastic pictures.
Oddly enough, I've been learning a bit of Indian cooking again (I took a class last year, then promptly forgot half of it...)
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