Paul in India

Jesus Mary and Josephs

Last night I took my Malaria pills without any water, and went straight to sleep. Not surprisingly, they lodged in my oesophagus, and I woke up at three am in a spasm of pain. My stomach was trying to digest something six inches away and it wasn’t working. The pills are still wedged there, and my digestive system seems to have tied itself in a knot around a point in my central chest. I am writing this on the balcony of my hotel at six am. The sun has just come up, and the sounds of the forest are just getting started. I need to drink something to dislodge the tablets, but the only way I can do that before breakfast starts is by washing them down with aftersun.

I have been in Kerala with Pete since Thursday, and it is a world away from the other parts of India I have seen. Kerala means ‘the land of the coconuts’, and it is completely beautiful. The coast line is made up of tropical beaches, unspoilt unlike Goa. Inland, the ‘backwaters’ stretch for miles until you reach the tea and spice plantations in the mountains. On our journey south from Cochin to Allepey, we stopped at a beach and watched the fishwives spread the fish out on the beach and pack them away. Kerala is easily the most beautiful state I have seen, and the easiest to get around. I am glad I saved it to last.

The people in Kerala are more like Europeans than elsewhere I have been here. They are also friendly and funny. Socialist gaffitti adorns the walls of the towns, and hammer and sickle flags fly above the tea plantations. The communist party is the ruling party in the Keralan government, and the state boasts 99% literacy. And that’s out of 100. It is a wealthy state relatively, and the roads are fantastic. The lonely planet says on arriving in Cochin, you can hear a collective sigh of relief from travellers taking a break from the madness of India. Like Goa, Cochin is a little slice of Europe, with a mix of Portuguese, Dutch and British buildings. Kids play football in the street, and the weather is great.

Also like Goa, there is a lot of Christianity here. We visited the first church in India, where Vasco da Gama was buried. There is a very high proportion of Islam too- the state is split almost evenly into three. It’s the first place where I have heard the morning and evening call to prayer. On Friday, we went for a walk in Fort Cochin. We got lost on our way back, and just decided to dander through the Islamic quarter. There were churches, temples and Mosques, all within sight of each other. We were supposed to stay in the house were Vasco da Gama died, but we couldn’t get in- there are only two rooms. Instead we booked into a small place that turned out to be the nicest hotel I had been since coming to India. The staff were fantastic, and their in-house Taxi driver Joseph happily agreed to drive us to Allepey so we wouldn’t have to get the bus. This meant being able to drive the beautiful coastal road, past beaches were the tsunami hit, and stop where we liked. It cost more, but the car was an old white 1950s Cuban looking machine. It was a no brainer.

He took us directly to a hotel, which quickly usurped the hotel in Cochin as the best hotel I had stayed in in India. It felt more like a commune, or, a project, as it was run by a group of guys in jeans and t-shirts not much older than us. It was like a Buddhist complex, spread out around gardens with a large porch and open foyer, and was built next to a temple. Within minutes of arriving, the owners invited us to a party and asked if we wanted them to buy us brandy. I wasn’t sure if maybe their parents were away and had asked them to look after the hotel for a fortnight. We decided to go into town to eat, and them come back to the strange sleepover being arranged in our hotel reception area.

We found three restaurants in Allepey, the first two didn’t have any food. On walking in to the first one, the guy eyed us and said, ‘What do you want, liquer?’ Pete pointed to the restaurant sign and said , ‘No… uh, food?’ The guy just shook his head and went back to what he was doing. The next restaurant had a large menu, but the guy kept recommending three things, that turned out to be the only things available. Finally we walked back to ‘Hot Kitchen’, where we could both drink coke if we wanted, but only one bottle was in the fridge.

On arriving back to the hotel, the party was just getting started, and we were ushered into a tiny room packed with eight Indians, a set of bongos and two Belgian girls. I was a little unsure at first that there wasn’t something up- surely this was too good to be true. I kept expecting the police to burst in and find the real owners locked up in the attic. A guitar was produced, and Sabu, a man with a lovely voice, knocked out a few classics, before Pete blasted out ‘Joxter goes to Stuttgart’ accompanied by two powerful Keralan men on the bongos. As the night wore on, the guys proceeded to get hammered, and a few times I had to remind myself that these men were running a hotel. Towards the end of the night, Suba played some traditional stuff, and the guys sang a few songs in the local language. Suba then played a lovely tune, with a chord progression I didn’t recognise, and some words I couldn’t understand. ‘Wow’, I said afterwards with great reverence. ‘That was beautiful. Is it Malayalam music?’ ‘No’, he said, ‘ It’s Judas Priest.’

The next morning, it was weird to be served breakfast by our buddies from the night before. There had been the necessary hugging and swapping of email addresses, and now I was asking them for more sugar for my coffee and a newspaper. They had helped us arrange a house boat, which is the big draw to Allepey, and dropped us off at the jetty. True to form with these guys, the boat was amazing. We had rented it for 24 hours, with three meals and two staff, a cook and a captain. Joseph and Joseph welcomed us aboard with fresh coconuts, and we headed into the backwaters in blazing sunshine.

The scenery was great, pretty much paradise. We sailed gently among other houseboats through a network of canals, until the water opened up into larger expanses separated by tiny reclaimed strips of land that people somehow lived on. A few hours out, Pete went down the back of the boat to chat to Joseph the cook, and we proceeded to have identical conversations with both Joes.  I was used to being asked if I was married, but Joseph was more persistent than usual. ‘No, not, married. No, no girlfriend. 29. Yes, very old. When? I don’t know. Maybe next year, yes.’ In the back, when Joseph found out Pete had a girlfriend, he paused and said: ‘Nice?’. Later, when we were both back in the front, Joseph tried again, unsure of out heterodentials. ‘Married?’ he said to Pete. ‘No, girlfriend’. ‘Married soon? Next year?’ ‘Um…. yeah, maybe’ said Pete, aware of my earlier planned engagement. ‘Friends?’ He said, pointing at us. We nodded. ‘Neighbours?’. ‘Well, we know each other from school, but we live about ten minutes walk from each other. ‘Four kilometers?’.

We docked for the night on a strip of land beside a rice paddy, at a small village that consisted of about twelve shacks in single file at the edge of the water. We went for a walk along the narrow path along the waters edge, that basically went through the front porch of most of the houses. A man was out fishing until well after dark, and an old woman bathed fully clothed in the water. The people just lived to fish and to tend the rice, and apart from the sound of a radio, it could have been a scene from a thousand years ago.

On Sunday, after waking up on a boat in the middle of India, we took a bus to Periyar wildlife reserve in the Western Ghat mountains. We have been here for two days now, in the small town of Kumily, staying in my second favourite hotel in India ever. The scenery from the bus was great, much better than Karnataka. Although the driver was still fond of driving on the wrong side of the road that was hung on the side of a mountain, the bus was comfortable, and the good roads made it much less scary. The night we arrived we took an Elephant ride, and went for a wildlife cruise the following afternoon. For a Tiger reserve, I was hoping to see more than none tigers, and less elephants, but it was still a nice cruise. We saw some Kelari, an ancient Keralan martial art, and some Kathikilli, an ancient dance. One was awesome with swords, and the other was just men dressed as women and making faces at each other.

Yesterday morning we went on a spice tour around the spice gardens and tea plantations. Our guide around the spice garden was Krishna, on the surface, a seemingly harmless old man with a good sense of humour. Pete found his accent hard, but I was able to decipher most of his anectdotes, and his extreme racism. We visited a tea factory, which was amazing, and then went to a flower garden. The guide Mary, was slow and smiley, and rather than explain anything, just pointed to the flowers and said their names with a graceful bow of her head. As we got round a corner from the house, she turned quickly with a crazed look in her eye and whispered sternly to me: ‘Give me some money’. ‘Ok’, I whispered, taken aback, ‘How much Mary. Would you like it now’ ‘Yes, yes, before they see. Quick’. I handed over the ‘tip’, and she once more became the beaming flower lady. She proceeded to stuff exotic clandestine bulbs into my pockets as she bade me to smuggle half the flora of south India back to Derry. I didn’t know how to break it to her that a banana tree won’t grow in Foyle Springs.