The 5th was our one month anniversary in India, a feat only slightly less impressive than our six year anniversary in matrimony, on the 4th. But this is Armshaws on Tour, not Armshaws in Love, so I'll spare you the sappy details. We spent the day leaving Mysore and Karnataka state behind as we headed to Wayanad National park, on the border of Kerala, India's southernmost and successful-most state. Kerala famously elected the world's first democratically chosen communist government in the 1950s, and the two electoral coalitions governing the joint since then are the Congress-led UDF and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led LDF; so center-left versus far left. Since then, land reform, infrastructure spending and a focus on education have meant Kerala now has life expectancy 10 years higher than average, infant mortality one-fifth the average, and near-universal literacy. Even the rare stray dogs are pleasant and well fed.
The road to Wayanad was long - like 12 hours long - and we were famished when it was time to stop for lunch. Fortunately for us, we were in Kerala, and we stopped at a fantastic bakery where we ate our fill of samosas, veggie puffs and sandwiches, with more stashed away for the road. The prices were crazy low, making the astoundingly beautiful new-build houses all along the road even more inexplicable. Seriously, communism has been good to Kerala: there was little poverty to be seen, and a ton of middle class living to be found on the road to Wayanad.
When we got to the park, our first order of business was a 3km hike up a mountain to see the Edekkal cave drawings: these are 6000 year old pieces of art in a cool ravine on top of a mountain. I've literally never seen anything approaching that old. Stonehenge is a parvenu by comparison. The pictures show stylized people, including what appears to be a shaman or headman, animals and geometric patterns, and it is incredible to think of how long ago it was in human terms, and how short in geological terms. The ravine is ceilinged by a massive boulder that got sandwiched in between the two walls; this happened recently, only 1,000,000 years ago or so. Also, the shade and breeze were a welcome break from what were otherwise boiling temperatures. That last bit is gonna be a leitmotiv in the next several posts, I'm guessing.
On the way back down the mountain, we stopped for Emma to realise a dream - no, a need - of which she has long dreamed; for years she has looked on in silent longing, but been prevented from taking part by fate, chance and outrageous London-level prices. But here, in the Western That mountains of Kerala, at a kiosk on the edge of a huge cliff, Emma's dream was to finally come true.
FISH PEDI!!!
After she finished squealing (with joy and squickiness), she said that the fish did quite a good job. Admittedly, the doctor fish missed a bit of her heel, but her feet were left smooth and silky, and ever so slightly clammy. Score one for symbiotes.
After collapsing back in the truck, we were taken to our home stays for the night. Having done one in Peru (Raqchi) during our last Drago adventure, I was expecting a room in someone's traditional shack. Instead, we got a room in someone's gorgeous newly built middle-class two-story house. A family in the area has basically been pooling its resources to build nice houses for themselves and rent them out to companies such as Dragoman. The money comes from the fact that the members have good jobs (one was an ear, nose and throat doctor) and the matriarch's cooking would not be out of place in a surprisingly refined home-style restaurant. They fed us beautifully, and the relatively cool weather (high 80s rather than low 90s) in the mountains made the lack of aircon bearable. I hope they make a killing.
One thing missing was a shower - so we finally had to come to grips with bathing the Indian way. Basically, the whole shebang revolves around two buckets, one very large and another very small. You fill the large bucket (in my case) with cold water, then use the smaller handled bucket to pour water over yourself. Get yourself wet and cool, then scrub up, then pour water over yourself to wash off the suds. On a hot night after a lot of hiking, it's just about ideal. So much so that, at our next hotel, we skipped the shower entirely to get busy with the buckets.
One thing the home stay was definitely not missing was kittens. There were about 8, including three that were only 2 weeks old. Emma was in heaven, of course, and I admit that there were certain sounds, almost like childish squeals of joy and adorableness, that emanated from somewhere around me. I do not care to speculate on their origin. We spent most of our time with three juveniles that we named Slinky, Spiglet and GI-GAAAAAN-TOR (not their real names), who vacillated between nibbling our fingertips and ignoring us utterly. Such is the way of kittens. I blame the internet.
That night, after a wonderful meal, we sat around the table in the, well, not cool but at any rate less hot, of the evening playing the Monopoly card game with Laura (our fearless leader), Julia, Emily and Vincent. Luck was with us both - after days of failure and loss, I won the first game and then Emma skillfully won the second. Flush with victory, we did the only possible thing; we hit the buckets and went to bed.
The next day was given over to a tour of the area given by our guide, Bibim. We got to walk around a local village and see rubber and coffee trees, a local shrine to Kali (the terrifying incarnation of Devi who demands blood sacrifice and wears a necklace of demon skulls), tiny carnivorous plants, and a local family building a goat shack. After that, we saw a school for working with bamboo (we bought a cool mask for the wall) and a waterfall that, while still impressive, is possibly more impressive still during the monsoon when there is a lot more water about. We saw a Syrian Orthodox shrine (which was also curiously home to the village's tug-of-war trophies) and tried our hands at a tug-of-war against the forces of gravity.
We walked through a tea plantation on the mountainside, ate fresh grapefruit just off the tree, and finished things off with an exceedingly uncomfortable 'tour' of a local tribal village that mostly consisted of us standing around staring at, and being stared at by, a bunch of people who are effectively being paid to act as an exhibit. The tribe is being integrated into the Kerala economy, education is given free, and houses have been built, but the tradeoff is to have a busload of tourists being brought in every other day to stand about gawping. Neither of us like to gawp.
For me, one part of my discomfort with things like slum tours and the like is the suspicion I get that most of us tourists react in one of two ways: either dismissive superiority, marked by asking questions such as 'well why don't they get better jobs', or wistful regret at the passing of a more authentic culture. The first is bigoted, but the second is more insidious: when you get down to it, its wishing people remain poor, sick and uneducated in order to have space to express discontentment with modern life. We can make a better world without throwing out all that we've learned as a species, and the poor are not more authentic than the middle class, they're the middle class without enough money.
Anyway, enough haranguing the audience. Our next stop is Kochi (Cochin), capital city of Kerala, a mélange of Malaya, Portuguese, Dutch, British and even Jewish influences all centered around a millennia-old spice trade. How cool and breezy it will be beside the seaside! How wonderful our hotel is sure to be! How heavily can I slather on the foreshadowing! Let's find out!
The road to Wayanad was long - like 12 hours long - and we were famished when it was time to stop for lunch. Fortunately for us, we were in Kerala, and we stopped at a fantastic bakery where we ate our fill of samosas, veggie puffs and sandwiches, with more stashed away for the road. The prices were crazy low, making the astoundingly beautiful new-build houses all along the road even more inexplicable. Seriously, communism has been good to Kerala: there was little poverty to be seen, and a ton of middle class living to be found on the road to Wayanad.
When we got to the park, our first order of business was a 3km hike up a mountain to see the Edekkal cave drawings: these are 6000 year old pieces of art in a cool ravine on top of a mountain. I've literally never seen anything approaching that old. Stonehenge is a parvenu by comparison. The pictures show stylized people, including what appears to be a shaman or headman, animals and geometric patterns, and it is incredible to think of how long ago it was in human terms, and how short in geological terms. The ravine is ceilinged by a massive boulder that got sandwiched in between the two walls; this happened recently, only 1,000,000 years ago or so. Also, the shade and breeze were a welcome break from what were otherwise boiling temperatures. That last bit is gonna be a leitmotiv in the next several posts, I'm guessing.
On the way back down the mountain, we stopped for Emma to realise a dream - no, a need - of which she has long dreamed; for years she has looked on in silent longing, but been prevented from taking part by fate, chance and outrageous London-level prices. But here, in the Western That mountains of Kerala, at a kiosk on the edge of a huge cliff, Emma's dream was to finally come true.
FISH PEDI!!!After she finished squealing (with joy and squickiness), she said that the fish did quite a good job. Admittedly, the doctor fish missed a bit of her heel, but her feet were left smooth and silky, and ever so slightly clammy. Score one for symbiotes.
One thing missing was a shower - so we finally had to come to grips with bathing the Indian way. Basically, the whole shebang revolves around two buckets, one very large and another very small. You fill the large bucket (in my case) with cold water, then use the smaller handled bucket to pour water over yourself. Get yourself wet and cool, then scrub up, then pour water over yourself to wash off the suds. On a hot night after a lot of hiking, it's just about ideal. So much so that, at our next hotel, we skipped the shower entirely to get busy with the buckets.
One thing the home stay was definitely not missing was kittens. There were about 8, including three that were only 2 weeks old. Emma was in heaven, of course, and I admit that there were certain sounds, almost like childish squeals of joy and adorableness, that emanated from somewhere around me. I do not care to speculate on their origin. We spent most of our time with three juveniles that we named Slinky, Spiglet and GI-GAAAAAN-TOR (not their real names), who vacillated between nibbling our fingertips and ignoring us utterly. Such is the way of kittens. I blame the internet.
That night, after a wonderful meal, we sat around the table in the, well, not cool but at any rate less hot, of the evening playing the Monopoly card game with Laura (our fearless leader), Julia, Emily and Vincent. Luck was with us both - after days of failure and loss, I won the first game and then Emma skillfully won the second. Flush with victory, we did the only possible thing; we hit the buckets and went to bed.
The next day was given over to a tour of the area given by our guide, Bibim. We got to walk around a local village and see rubber and coffee trees, a local shrine to Kali (the terrifying incarnation of Devi who demands blood sacrifice and wears a necklace of demon skulls), tiny carnivorous plants, and a local family building a goat shack. After that, we saw a school for working with bamboo (we bought a cool mask for the wall) and a waterfall that, while still impressive, is possibly more impressive still during the monsoon when there is a lot more water about. We saw a Syrian Orthodox shrine (which was also curiously home to the village's tug-of-war trophies) and tried our hands at a tug-of-war against the forces of gravity.
We walked through a tea plantation on the mountainside, ate fresh grapefruit just off the tree, and finished things off with an exceedingly uncomfortable 'tour' of a local tribal village that mostly consisted of us standing around staring at, and being stared at by, a bunch of people who are effectively being paid to act as an exhibit. The tribe is being integrated into the Kerala economy, education is given free, and houses have been built, but the tradeoff is to have a busload of tourists being brought in every other day to stand about gawping. Neither of us like to gawp.For me, one part of my discomfort with things like slum tours and the like is the suspicion I get that most of us tourists react in one of two ways: either dismissive superiority, marked by asking questions such as 'well why don't they get better jobs', or wistful regret at the passing of a more authentic culture. The first is bigoted, but the second is more insidious: when you get down to it, its wishing people remain poor, sick and uneducated in order to have space to express discontentment with modern life. We can make a better world without throwing out all that we've learned as a species, and the poor are not more authentic than the middle class, they're the middle class without enough money.
Anyway, enough haranguing the audience. Our next stop is Kochi (Cochin), capital city of Kerala, a mélange of Malaya, Portuguese, Dutch, British and even Jewish influences all centered around a millennia-old spice trade. How cool and breezy it will be beside the seaside! How wonderful our hotel is sure to be! How heavily can I slather on the foreshadowing! Let's find out!
 |
| TEA!!!! |
No comments:
Post a Comment