Kerala, Part II

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

Well, I found out that the “Elephant Camp” was seeing the elephants and going on a short ride about 2 and a half hours from here, so I wasn’t very interested having done that already in a different part of India.  The village tour was actually a guided walk through the main drag of a small town like many others in India, and not an actual rural village like I had hoped (and would have been interested in), so that got scrapped as well.

What didn’t get ruled out was a non-motorized canoe ride through the canals of the “Venice of the East.”  I told Jimmy that I wanted to do the small canals and not the larger ones or the lakes.  I want to see regular Keralan people living normally, or at least the portions of their normal lives that are lived around the water.

What I saw on the 2 hours boat trip was exactly that.  Women were kneeling at the canal-side, scrubbing their morning dishes with a tuft of coconut husk as a scrubber.  Ladies with baskets of clothes and bars of soap, getting the family’s clothes clean.  Boys jumping around naked in the water, their mother telling them to get washed up and get out.

I saw “blue-collar” men in slacks and t-shirts, hanging plumb lines and making short walls with stones and mortar.  I saw 16 ladies, all laughs and smiles, using hoes and rakes to cut the vegetation away from the canal sections that bordered their homes.  I saw boys and girls, all dressed up, walking hand in hand on their way to church.

I saw people watching television and saris hanging on clotheslines.  I saw old men talking and people on bikes.  I saw kids that were smiling and waving at me, and one that reached out to touch my hand.  It was strange touching the boys hand.  Like two distant worlds colliding.  Why did he reach out, and why did I follow suit?  He followed along for the 50 feet of frontage that he belonged to.

Nearly every person I “met” along the way smiled at me.  They usually said “Hi” or “Hello” and not in the I-don’t-speak-any-English-but-I-know-hah-low kind of pronunciation.  It sounded pretty much like a regular American “hello.”  And it shouldn’t surprise me.  Kerala has the highest literacy rate of any state in India (91%).  It’s infant mortality rate is one-fifth of the national average, and the life expectancy here is 10 years longer than the rest of the country.  They also happen to have the first democratically elected communist government in the world.  The Keralan people freely elected the communist party in 1957 and it has gone on to hold power regularly (though apparently not constantly) since.  Something seems to be working here for these people.

From my venturing, Keralans seem to be the happiest Indians I’ve run into yet, and the friendliest.  All Indians seem to be highly social, but when I was on the canoe, the boat-wallah had brief conversations with about a dozen different people along the shore.  Granted it’s a small town where I am, but even in small town America, you don’t talk to people just because you know them or recognize them.

The canoe ride was an excellent experience.  I have some videos of the trip and I hope that some are good enough to post when I get to a place where I can.  Even the wildlife (though it didn’t seem very wild) was abundant.  Anything that has an excuse to grow, probably can here in Kerala.  Ferns and palm trees and stands of bamboo.  Huge white-and-green-leaved beasts that looked like prehistoric philodendrons.  Water hyacinth, lilies, and the occasional lotus.  Water lettuce, and duck weed, and red-root floaters were everywhere; in some places choking the little waterways nearly completely.

Birds of various shapes and sizes and colors and calls to match.  Small fish, big fish, gliding silver-surface feeders, and all the bugs that the bigger guys could eat.  I saw grasshoppers and butterflies and every conceivable species of dragonfly.  If there’s someone out there that studies dragonflies, you should come to Kerala because you will have enough to study for a few lifetimes.  Fat black ones and cherry-red ones and iridescent blue ones.  Powder blues too, with oranges and pinks.  Thin straight yellow ones riding two-up, and hulking red bombers perched on a log.  Dragonflies were everywhere, you could not help but be mesmerized by their colors and their aerial acrobatics.

I was originally scheduled to go on the canoe ride at 7a this morning, but a storm kept coming and going for a couple of hours until I gave up waiting and had some breakfast.  Shortly thereafter, the boat-man arrived and we were off on our cruise.  The homestay gave me an umbrella which I was thankful for, as I had my camera and my phone, and not 3 minutes into it, it started to rain.  That brief bit was the last of the morning storm, but boy was it heavy when it started.

The sky seemed to tear open, heavy, belly-shaking thunder and an absolute torrent of rain.  The winds seems light for the amount of noise and water the storm was producing, but maybe that’s how it is here.  There seems to be very little excuse for a Keralan to not have a clean source of water during this monsoon period.  It simply pours from the heavens, and in such quantity that you don’t even have to have a sophisticated collection device.  A simple bucket will do.

I had iddlis (fermented rice cakes) this morning with a coconut chutney that was my least favorite breakfast dish so far.  They also provided me with 4 pieces of toast (well, toasted on one side), and butter and jam.  Seems that everywhere in India they serve the same jam, and it tastes similar to strawberry crossed with something else foreign.  In America, if you go to a sit down restaurant that does breakfast, you will likely be given a little carrier filled with a true variety of jellies and jams: grape, strawberry, mixed fruit, maybe a blackberry if you’re lucky or an orange marmalade.  Here you can pick any kind you’d like too, as long as it’s the one flavor everybody has.  I buttered and jammed the bread-toast and ate all four pieces.

I asked for a very late lunch (or early dinner) as three meals here were just too many.  I ended up with gigantic prawns in a dry curry rub that were every bit of 6 inches long.  There were three of them on the plate, and I’m glad they didn’t put any more on there.  Three were more than plenty.   They were served along with “dirty fingers” which is a disgusting vernacular description of okra, which was sautéed with onions and butter and some Indian spices.  I also had dal and chapattis with tomatoes.  I ate my fill, which was quite a bit, and had some more pink Ayurvedic water.

I was kind of hoping for a sweet at the end, but I couldn’t remember if this was considered dinner or lunch, and either way, nothing appeared, so I went back to my room a few minutes after the table was cleared.

Not five minutes later, Jimmy knocks at the door and has a tray in front of him, carrying a small dish of homemade vanilla ice cream with a gulab jamun in the middle (gulab jamun is an Indian desert which is like a ball of fried sweetened flour and soaked in honey and clarified butter and flavored with cardamom and some rose water).  This little concoction was delicious.  The ice cream alone was fantastic, rich and creamy and sweet, and only partially frozen.  And fresh-tasting; the responsible cow was probably not a few hundred yards away.

Other than eating and canoeing, I read some DH Lawrence short stories from a book they had in the common area.  I got another shower because I could and besides, it’s already been two days.  I also came to realize that my initial apprehension of this place was based on my state of mind.  Coming from Goa, I was in a consumption kind of mindset.  I was feeling kind of driven to have this, have that.  And this place is not driven; it’s taken a couple of days to downshift again, and the resultant gear change has allowed me to get comfortable here.

I might spring for an Ayurvedic massage tomorrow for an hour for 1000rs ($20) since nothing else (itinerary-wise is tempting me).  I will probably walk around a bit along the banks of the river and see about some food or maybe an ATM.  I may just sit someplace and listen to people speaking Malayalam!

I’m not at all sad now that I chose Alleppey as my destination in Kerala, as I first thought to myself upon getting here.  A future visit to Kerala would start in Cochin, however, and branch out from there, now that I’ve seen the backwaters.

If there’s nothing else worthy of reporting in the next day and half, this will be my last Kerala post and I’ll check back in as time and connection permit in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu.  Otherwise, you’ll hear it here.