Kerala, Part I

**pics/vids added as of 6/1; post complete**

The train to Alleppey, Kerala seems long, and it is.  When I wake up, the train has fallen even farther behind, about 4 hours.  Somehow, we make up a bit at the end, and in Alleppey, I “get down” about 6:30p, which is about 3 and a half hours late.

I get off and a man approaches me.  He has a rickshaw parked on the back side of the station.  We haggle.  I think he can do better.  He says he can’t.  They all say they can’t.  We part ways.

On my way out, I try to locate the Cloak Room for future use (which I do, but it looks unattended), and see if the station has a pre-paid taxi stand out front.  They do.  I tell the man the name of my hotel, and they don’t know it.  I have a number which they call and get direction and determine the fare.  The fare ends up being more expensive than the first guy I negotiated with, but it always seems a bit safer when it’s coming from a pre-paid government stand.  I turned around to put my stuff in the rickshaw and the first guy was standing there smiling at me, not mean, but kind of like, “should’ve come with me…”  I lament a bit that I did not give the first guy my business, as apparently he was being honest, and I want to reward that type of behavior here because the deception in the haggle is huge.  But who knows if he’d have changed his mind when I got there, bumping it up a bit or what-have-you as has happened to me previously.

Regardless, it’s now dark, and we’re heading inland toward Pulinkunnu (pullin’ canoe), but it is said (like almost everything in the Malayalam language), really, really quickly.  I love the way this language sounds, it’s sing-songy and smooth, and it sounds like it would be fun to speak.  I could listen to it all day long, it sounds as much like music as it does language.

We arrive (after a few additional calls to the hotel) along a small dirt and sand lane, and pull up at a house.  I guess I should’ve read the descriptions a bit better because I was expecting a hotel.

There are several people standing there, and one of them waves the tuk-tuk driver in past the gate with a flashlight beam pointed on the ground.  I pay the driver and get out, a lady greets me and I walk in, but I must drop my shoes outside first.

This is a homestay, which means I’m staying in someone’s house, kind of like I did in Khuri with Badalji, but also completely unlike in Khuri with Badalji.  I feel completely out of place.  The house is very ornate and quiet with old wood carvings and chandeliers, and generally feels like you walked into your rich grandmothers house in Old England somewhere.

The manager lady asks me for my passport and tells me she will return it in the morning.  I object and she says she needs to make a copy of it, but that the copier is not available now.  There are pictures of Jesus and the Pope on the walls, and the place seems very staid, like the act of someone stealing a passport would be met with the penalty of death.  For some reason, I let her keep the passport, and I receive it back in the morning, though curled quite a bit from the astronomical relative humidity.

I ask if I’m too late for some dinner, and she outlines the meal pricing.  $2 for breakfast, $7 for lunch, and $6 for dinner which (except for the my splurges in Goa) is some of the highest prices I’ve paid.  I mean, in Haridwar, Nishant version 1 and I both ate dinner for a combined $1.20.  I’m kind of between a rock and hard place, though, because I’m somewhat isolated; it’s not like I can just walk out of my hotel into a busy street area and find 5 restaurants I can hit with a rock.  She wants to know if I’ll take my meals here, and what my “program” is, meaning what do I intend to do while I’m here in Kerala.

I tell her I’ll take dinner tonight and breakfast in the morning, but politely put her off on the future meals and itinerary by telling her that I will be relaxing first and decide later if I’d like to do something else.  She doesn’t have a problem with it.

Dinner that night was dal and chapatti and vegetables, and breakfast in the morning was uppam (fermented rice crepes) with green-pea curry and butter jam toast.  I ended up signing on for lunch and dinner and the following breakfast also.  Lunch was several dishes with boiled Keralan rice (which is a really fat short grain), and included Indian spiced beet greens and boiled cucumber in curds (I think) and some finely sliced long beans among some mango “pickle.”  Pickle here is not the same as a pickle in the United States.  A pickle here is a chunky sauce which is a very sour; you add it to a bite of entree for an extra punch in the mouth.  I have not yet had dinner for tonight, but am told it will be chapatti and dal and some vegetables again.  Granted it is all homemade by the male cook here, but it is expensive.  Every meal is served with a red beverage which is water boiled with Ayurvedic herbs.

In the daylight, the morning after I arrive, I get a much better sense of where I am.

There is a river right out the front of the homestay, and behind it are rice paddy fields, though there is no rice in them, having been harvested about a month before.  They lease out the rice paddy fields to a neighbor who farms fish in them for the other 6 months.  Fish waste (and any dead fish) create nutrients for the rice when it is planted again.  This is like crop rotation, but with water instead of dirt, and, well, with fish.

After breakfast, the manager has Jimmy give me a tour of the gardens which are beautiful.  I see two types of coconut (tender and curry), two types of banana, Jack fruit trees, and coffee trees.  There are tons of flowers and ornamental grasses and shrubs.  I imagine you could grow just about anything here, being that it’s sunny and hot and gets plenty of rain.  The monsoon season has begun here in Kerala, but it is not in full swing.  The dew point is nearly 80* Fahrenheit for those of you that understand that type of thing.  For those of you that don’t, it means that you take the humidity needle and swing it past stuffy, uncomfortable, and difficult, right past oppressive, and into downright miserable.  I might not have been lying to the nice lady about not having an itinerary.  It’s simply not fun to be outside.

Thank goodness my room has AC.  It has a fan too, and a four-poster bed, and both drapes and curtains.  It has French doors that lead to my own veranda with it’s own fan.  I have a 32” flat screen LCD television, which I might actually watch if I decide to stay indoors and a plug-in mosquito fogger.  The bedroom has a separate dressing room off of it, and a separate bathroom, but the bathroom is open to the outside via screened slots in the roof.  It feels sauna like in there, but it is neat to have the light and the sounds of the birds and insects coming in.  The hot water is solar she says, but when I showered last night, it went from blazing hot to cool and back again, about every 2 minutes (or about as long as it takes to get soapy and/or shampoo-y).  I’m not sure if that’s a “feature” of the solar hot water heating or not, but it was a bit annoying, and I ended up using mainly cold water to just avoid the fluctuations.

So, Jimmy shows me around the property and it’s nice.  The house is apparently owned by someone wealthy, and from what I understand, the owners don’t live here, but it in the United Arab Emirates, or maybe they are just in UAE right now on vacation or something and will be back - chalk it up to language barrier, but I’m not clear.  There are 10 staff here, and I’m the only guest.  I sit at a 10 person dining table and eat solo.  Well, until I ask Jimmy how to eat the uppam and grean-pea curry like an Keralan.  Then he sits down and makes himself one and shows me how to use my fingers to mash it together and soak up the juices.  He laughs when I tell him we scold our children in America for eating like this.  I find it interesting that with the majority of the population eating solely with their hands, that I always have to ask for a napkin.  I’m not sure what they are doing with their hands.  I will have to watch.

I ask Jimmy about his name, and he tells me it’s his Christian name.  I assume he means it comes from James in the Bible, as I don’t remember there being a Jimmy in there, but I’ve been wrong before.  He tells me he has a “given” name also which when he says it, sounds something like “a luke.”  Because he’s a Christian, everyone calls him by his Christian name, except for people inside his close family and they call him by his other name.

I’m pretty sure, however, that this is not how you get a “Bobby” or a “Tommy” from an Indian customer support call center.

I take some pictures of the gardens and of the architecture, which I like better here than in Goa.  I didn’t like the Portuguese influence at all, which I never knew til I got to Goa.  I liked the pastel colors and so forth, but the architecture over all didn’t do it for me.  In Mumbai, I thought it was amazing.  From the brief look I’ve had here in Kerala, its somewhere between ok and slightly interesting, but to each his own.

Jimmy shows me some small water features they have on the property.  The one in the front entry, over which I trod in the dark last night, has koi in it.  I see something big and silver in there.  He says “piranha,” but I’m pretty sure they don’t get that big.  He called the koi “goldfish” anyway, so I’m doubting his piscine species identification skills.

There are several options for itinerary that are provided/arranged by the staff, should I decide to go somewhere.  The interesting ones seem to end up around $75 to $100, which is about $74 to $99 more than I’d like to pay.  This place is a steal at $20/night, and I think the excursions and (definitely) the food, help subsidize the actual cost I should be paying.  The staff are not rude, but the manager and Jimmy have asked me several times and made some suggestions on itinerary that I have so far refused.

I could go out and find some things to do, even possibly some of the same things, and do it more cheaply, however, I feel the least able to arrange this on my own here, with my semi-isolated location and the ridiculous humidity combined with high temperatures.  And transportation costs remain high here as well, though not quite as bad as in Goa.  I will feel like a slug for laying around and watching TV, but I very well may end up doing that for a day or two anyway, slug or not.

I know that I will pull my rear-end out of the AC (for brief periods) to go on a canoe ride in the canals around here.  And probably also for a small village tour.  Those two things I will likely do, because they are of significant interest, don’t take too long (for the heat concern - I have plenty of time), and only about $30 combined.  The main draw for Alleppey is the absolute maze of little canals which until roads were built, served the population as the only transportation lanes.  Now, they are still heavily used but there is plenty of road traffic as well.

There are enormous houseboats with nightly price tags to match, but they don’t interest me because they can’t get into the smaller waterways, where you can see the native Keralan people doing their work and their play.  There are beaches here too, but beaches would fall into the been-there-done-that category for me at this point.  There is an “elephant camp” on the list of options also, but I’m not sure what it entails.  I love pachyderms, so I’m tempted.  But I’ll need more info in order to plunk down the cash and I’m honestly leaning away from it at this point.

So, I know that I will likely do those two things I mentioned, but further than that, I will have to see.  When I know more, so will you - in Part II.