Kerala Trip – Part 2

I am now back in New Delhi.  I have been catching up with work emails and phone calls.  Thought I would write a few more observations from my Kerala trip before I forgot them.

Language was a major issue for me.  I had a hard time understanding the very heavy South Indian accent.  I had to ask people to repeat themselves multiple times.  This was in English.  There are very few people who speak Hindi.  In fact, there are over 50 languages in the state, according to our car rental driver, Nassar.  Curiously, why haven’t they learned Hindi yet?  There was also an effort to speak very softly, almost as if not wanting to be heard.  The problem is for folks like me and my friend – we were getting irritated, my friend more than me, and frustrated that we couldn’t understand each other.

Along with language, it must be noted that Kerala is the most literate of states in India.  Nassar said over 99% could read and write.  For a country with the diversity spectrum on education that India has, that is quite a feat.  Nassar has two boys and he proudly stated that they are both in school.  In fact, he said, they were looking for white collar jobs (as he curiously pointed to his own driver uniform colored white).  They no longer want to work on farms.  This fit in with the information provided by the plantation guide.  Many contract labor from Tamil Nadu come in to work on plantations during the peak season.

We went to an elephant camp near Thekkady (or maybe it was in the town).  We ran into a young couple that was recently married.  As my friend and I were speaking in English, the girl looked up and asked me where we were from.  She could tell from my accent we were not local.  Turns out, she was from Long Island in New York.  She had just gotten married to a young doctor from near the town of Surat.  As I found out later, he was studying medicine in Russia.  They intended to move to the US after that. 

While I found it somewhat interesting that a US-born person would marry someone who barely spoke English, my friend found it even more curious.  She didn’t say anything, but you could tell from the smirk look on her face and her demeanor.  When we introduced each other, I learned from their names that they were Muslim.  I was glad to have met them.  That night we were going on a night walk in the jungle and I wanted to tell them about it.  My friend said they were on their honeymoon and wouldn’t want that.  I think it was more so that she didn’t want that.  When I ran into them the next morning, I asked them what they did the night before and the girl said they had done nothing (Ananya Nivas closes at 6pm and you cannot enter or leave the place after that, except for the night walks apparently).  The girl said I should have told her and was clearly disappointed I didn’t from the look on her face.  I knew they weren’t doing much and I think it would have enhanced their trip a bit.  But oh well.

I had to leave Periyar to be back in New Delhi and so couldn’t do the backwaters.  I was a bit disappointed in that because I had to pay more to change my flight than what it cost initially.  I was perturbed by that.  But on the bright side, it is something I can go back to if and when I get married.

Because I had to leave hurriedly, I took the bus from Alleppey to Kochi.  It was about 80 km and 3 hour ride.  There were no AC buses on the route (they had to be booked in advance) so I took the local.  I sat in the back of the bus on the left side near the window.  This is when I noticed something interesting and saddening about the Keralan culture.  No women were seated in the front rows.  They had seats in the right hand side and back of the bus!  Even when seats were empty in the front, two women sat together in a row on the back.  What’s even worse is when a husband and a wife came on the bus, the man went to the front while the woman sat in the back!  There was a clear hierarchy. 

It reminded me of Rosa Parks in the US and the black movement.  I don’t know how much of this is in the “upper” classes in Kerala.  The folks on this government bus were of the lower class and perhaps tribal folks.  I do know that South Indians tend to be more conservative in many ways and this was an example of that.  I got a few stares from people, especially men, as they entered and left the bus.  What was I doing sitting in the back?  As happens often with things I witness in India, I am both surprised at seeing it and yet not surprised either.

Kerala Trip – Part 1

Kerala is absolutely gorgeous!  It has an abundance of many things that give it visual and simulatory character: greenery, forests, water, spice and tea plantations, lungis/dhotis, churches, ayurvedic medicines, massages, and more!

Kerala ranks high on the greenest of places I have visited.  The middle of Canada, where there is literally nothing, is very similar – green and full of mountains.  Parts of Northern California (at the Nevada border) and the New England states are also similar.  I am here during the peak season.  It is also the non-monsoon time.  Imagine what it would be like when it’s raining all the time!

There is a lot of water in Kerala.  We stayed at Ananya Nivas at the Periyar Tiger Reserve for 3 gorgeous nights.  The entire place is surrounded by water!  There’s also the famed backwaters, which I didn’t even know existed until now.  Unfortunately, I may not get to see them as initially planned.  I may have to rush back to New Delhi.

I loved the spice plantation that we visited.  Indian tourist sites don’t always depict correct facts.  Many times, the history documented on blocks of stone is incorrect.  They also oversell or dramtically undersell.  The plantation we went to is the largest in Thekkady.  Officially, there are only 12 spices that come out of the place.  Untrue.  There’s probably more than 100.  I saw plants that are used for fixing joint pain, to growing hair, to improve memory, to helping cure diabetes.  Many plants give medicines for more than one ailment.  Also, many ailments can be cured by more than one plant residue.  I only scratched the surface in the one hour trek, but it was very eye opening.  Interestingly, the plantation workers get paid only Rs. 200 per day.  The hourly rate for similar labor in New Delhi is Rs. 150!

I humored to ask our guide if they grew ganja!  Of course, they wouldn’t and didn’t.  This wasn’t a state-regulated place that was operating in a slack way.  Or, I should say, it wasn’t blatantly flaunting its lack of following laws if it was in fact doing that.  The guide laughingly provided a tid bit of information: you can get ganja in the tribal areas in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.  People are not supposed to know it’s grown there but it is!  Off to TN I go!

Then there’s the lungi or dhoti in Kerala.  Men are showing more leg than women in this year-round-warm state.  There are different ways that the lungi or dhoti is worn.  Hindus tie the knot to the right (or was it the left) and Muslims in the opposite direction.  Different colors also signify different things.  I didn’t get a chance to ask about the meaning of colors.

Kerala is one of the most peaceful states in India.  There is limited crime and high religious tolerance.  This is clearly due to it’s history.  Hindus are the majority with 60% but the minorities are very large as well.  Christians and Muslims are about 20% each.  These are statistics according to our car rental driver, Nassar.  It is quite amazing how people have lived together so harmoniously.

While I didn’t see many mosques in and around Thekkady or on the way from Kochi to Periyar and from Periyar to Alleppey, there were tons of churches!  You could see small brick enclaves with a cross on top on the top of the mountains as we did on the Cloud Walk, which by the way is 800 meters of a straight uphill climb.  You could also see many smaller ones throughout the streets of main towns and villages.  There is also a very large church, the largest in Kerala (or perhaps it was overselling again) about a 30 minute drive from Thekkady.  By the way, I don’t know what happened to my hands on the Cloud Walk but they swelled up.  I don’t think it was the height nor the quick pace of our walk (I had to rest a lot, I must admit).  I wonder if it had to do with something else.  I’ll have to ask a doctor about that when I return to Delhi.

Ayurvedic medicine is big in Kerala.  This is likely a result of the many plantations growing the hundreds of herbs and spices.  Listening to the plantation guide made me wonder why Western medicine exists on the one hand (which I quickly answered for myself) to why it hasn’t incorporated herbal medicines as mainstream.  I also wondered how accurate the claims of ayurvedic cure actually were!  I’m sure the scientists have studied and documented this extensively (or have they?)!  If they are as good as the guide claimed and I have heard elsewhere, why isn’t it used more?

I have gotten maybe one massage in my life.  I think I paid $30 or so for it 10 years ago, which I did after convincing myself it was a very low rate.  I saw a few more parlors after that and was even tempted to go but they would range from $60 to $100.  I didn’t get another massage.  Couldn’t justify spending that kind of cash.  Interestingly, I have treated myself to things here in India that I wouldn’t have in the US (golf is an example and a massage is another).  My 45 minute basic massage was Rs. 500.  That’s not bad at all.  I didn’t really feel much better after it.  I was initially going to take the one that hit the pressure points but when my friend took the basic one, I changed my mind too.

More coming next.

A Trip Down South

A friend is visiting from the US.  She’s doing her MBA at Duke and participating in an exchange program at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad.  She’s fully immersing herself into the travel too!  Every weekend for the past four, she’s been out and about.  Her term ends fairly soon and then she has a break before heading back to the US.  This is when she emailed me wanting to know if I’d be interested in doing a trip to Kerala, Kochi (aka Cochin), and Lakshadweep.

Having done travels in the North and even some of the West, I have been waiting for an opportunity to head down South.  I had heard about Kerala and the lakes, waters and general tropical environment.  This was perfect!  Well, not quite!  Things have picked up at work!  We are heading into a very busy next few months.  But, if there was any time in the next 3-4 months where I could feasibly get out of town for so long, the 10 days coming up is the small cracked window!  And so I am going to go!  I might be able to pull a weekend trip here and there (if that), but 10 days is not going to be possible later.

We know we are going to the Periyar Tiger Reserve.  We are also doing the houseboat on the Kerala backwaters.  We had planned for Lakshadweep but with hotel bookings costing Rs. 11,000 per night, we decided to skip that.  I haven’t had much time to review where we will go and neither has my friend, so we’re going to be winging it.  I’m hoping we’ll make it to Ooty, it’s about 275 km from Kochi.  I’m pretty much going with the flow on this trip.  I do have places I’d like to go but given that I haven’t seen anything in the South, there’s plenty to see.

I bought the Lonely Planet South India guidebook.  This is one of the better books for travel and I’ve used it before.  Now, I just need to go through it and identify a few places for us to check out!  Should be a fun trip!

North India Trip – Day One – Part 2

The drive on the Chand-Zikarpur bypass was slow.  This is Highway 22.  It was early evening so that probably didn’t help.  There were not only personal cars but also lorries and trucks.  The road up to Kalka is mostly double lane, one lane per direction.  So you have to drive the way people used to drive before roads got better in India.  You had to pass one car at a time by overtaking from the right and going into the opposite lane, which isn’t demarcated as such.  It could have just as easily been one lane.

There are lots of potholes.  You can’t really go faster than 30 to 40 km/hr in a Honda.  I guess when people tell you the road is “good”, that is all relative, although the roads have improved from 20 years ago.  To me, they weren’t all that great.  I was doing between 25 and 30 km/hr.  I didn’t want to mess up my car.  After all, I wasn’t in an SUV, I had my trusty Honda City!

As I drove to Kalka, the narrow road jogged old, mostly fond, memories.  This was the same road my Dad used to take my brother and myself on on our way to being dropped off at Bishop Cotton School in Shimla.  There was one specific junction that I remember quite well.  Once I get the pictures and videos off my camera (the transfer to my computer isn’t working), I’ll put them up.

McDonald’s conquers the world!  That’s right, there is a McDonald’s on the way to Shimla.  It’s in Jabli in Kausali district to be exact.  As much as I wanted to experience the local food and the local way-of-life, I had to stop!  I have been to a Mikey D’s throughout the United States and had to stop at this one also!  Here’s another example of the world becoming smaller and smaller.  The place was air-conditioned and very clean.  I really like the veggie burgers I can get here, good stuff (yes, I know I’m easily pleased).  Too bad the U.S. chain doesn’t carry them.

As it turned out, my next adventure was right around the corner, I didn’t have to wait very long.  Exiting the restaurant meant to go upstairs.  Lo and behold, it was raining!  I hadn’t noticed any clouds in the sky so the down pouring caught me off guard.  “Do I stop at a hotel now or do I continue to Shimla?”, I asked myself.  I decided to push on.  I drove another 20 km.  It was around 9:30 pm and I couldn’t see at all.  Not only was it pitch dark, it had started raining again. 

The darkness and the rain, going uphill, not being able to see all that well – all of it could have been manageable if I really wanted to push through it.  The thing though was that my wipers stopped working.  Well, they were working except that the driver’s side ones kept coming off.  This is something that has been happening since I got the original wipers changed a few months ago and I never got it properly fixed.  Now I was in a bad situation.  I was coming through small towns and tried to find an auto-parts store.  I soon learnt that while a few shops were open, only Maruti parts were available.  I wasn’t going to find anything for a Honda City.  There aren’t many of these cars up there so the demand doesn’t exist.

After asking a few people in two towns for auto shops and getting the same answers (shops closing or Maruti-only supplies), I decided to swap the wipers.  It was still drizzling so I had to get my light jacket out of the trunk (I was truly not expecting rain!).  I took the passenger side wipers off and put them on the driver’s side.  I left the passenger side empty and lifted the wiper rod so it wasn’t on the windshield and wouldn’t keep scratching it.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to see from that side.  That made me nervous because I had already found out I needed to be able to see from there or chance having my car falling into the left side curb, which in many parts were one foot below the rest of the road (i.e., the curb could be a ditch).  The whole ensemble looked really funny.  I was a bit embarrassed but not enough to not have it be that way.  Screw the people looking at me, I needed to be able to drive and drive (somewhat) safely.

After swapping the wipers, I got back on the road.  I was driving very slowly (10 to 15 km/hr), it was very dark, and now I had a small wiper on the driver’s side that didn’t clean the whole windshield and I couldn’t see from the passenger’s side.  All signs pointed to finding a hotel and stopping for the night.  Luckily, I wasn’t too far from Solan, about 45 to 50 kms from Shimla, and came across a hotel.  After very little negotiating, I decided to crash right there!

The rest of the night was relaxing.  I chatted with a friend on GChat and uploaded my camera pictures to my laptop.  I took a look at where I had reached and planned my day for tomorrow.  It became clear I should stay in Shimla one night.  And why not?!  I could go and visit good ol’ BCS!  I hadn’t planned to stop in my old stomping ground, but here I was!  Spontaneity (and adjustment to reality) was the mantra!

North India Trip – Day One – Part 1

I left for my Delhi-Shimla-Manali-Leh (and hopefully Srinagar-Jammu) trip on August 29.  I was very excited to finally get to see some of the amazing cities of north India.

I left about 12:45 PM after making final preparations of getting the spare tire (stepani) checked out.  This was one of the more important tasks as I was about to drive for miles.  It was good that I decided to do this, though I had just gotten it fixed a few weeks back, because the tire was indeed flat.  Apparently when I had a new tube put in, the guys didn’t do a good job of removing the debris from the tire and thus a new puncture happened.

I had gotten to Chandigarh without too much hassle.  It was a clear and now-familiar drive and I hit the usual speeds over 80 km/hr.  I hit 90 as much as I could.  The route to Chandigarh now has an exit off the left side of the highway.  In my previous trips up north, that wasn’t there.  You had to drive straight through and then hit a patch of bad roads until the Chandigarh/Amritsar/Panchkula bypass.  The immediate bypass area is still the same with construction going on but the route to it is much cleaner now.

Upon reaching this bypass point I had my first adventure of the trip.  There are two different roads to take from here.  I could go up to Chandigarh and go through Rupnagar and Bilaspur up to Sundernagar and further north.  This is Highway 21 and the road most people take on their way to Manali.  The second option was to take the Chand-Zikarpur bypass through Panchkula, Pinjore, Kalka, and Shimla before merging into Highway 21.

I had stopped and asked a couple of people the condition of the roads.  Apparently both roads were just fine.  Most people suggested to go through Chandigarh since that was the traditional route to Manali.  I had distant family living in Panchukla, a place I had never visited and didn’t know anything about, so I decided to drive through that and at least get a periphery idea of the town.  It was a small and superficial method of feeling connected to them, having “driven through” their town.  Now I know Panchkula has an army cantonment near it.  The first few kilometers on the Chand-Zikarpur bypass has banquet halls developing, some are already there and others are being constructed.  There is a lot of construction everywhere.  Roads, buildings, and hotels are being built.  I could see the big green road signs to the undoubtedly new sectors.  One hotel right at the beginning of the bypass, Hotel Sun Park, a 3-star venue, goes for Rs. 1795 double occupancy regular rate.  I could have gotten it for Rs. 1300 for single occupancy for that night.

But, to go back to my adventure at the bypass – I had stopped and pulled over at a point in the highway where going straight would take me to Chandigarh or a U-turn would put me on towards Panchkula.  I was off the road looking at the maps and considering which route to take.  It was clear the preferred route was through Chandigarh but I could just as easily go through Kalka and Shimla.  This is when a police officer decided to come up to me.  Apparently, I had stopped at a main point in the artery.  “Why are you stopped here?  Where are you coming from?”, he asked me after looking at my Delhi license plate.  I answered his questions.  He wasn’t satisfied.  He asked me to pull up to the police booth where 3-4 other cops were stationed. 

I was a bit perturbed and for a moment thought, “Hey, this guy is on foot.  I could easily just take off and he’d never catch me.  He could note my license plate and track me down or he could not bother.  I could chance it.”  Of course, I didn’t, too damn law-abiding I guess.  I took my car to the police booth, which meant I had to do the U-turn and be on the Panchkula route, and the guy drilled me again.  He said the fine for stopping on the highway like that was Rs. 2000.  I had no intention to argue with him but I asked him wasn’t it better that I pulled over to look at the map rather than driving and looking at it?  He was a bit taken back.  I guess that was too logical an answer to his soon to come bribe request.  I told him I was sorry, I was off the road, and just trying to figure out my route.  He then said I should give him Rs. 1000.  I almost gave him a couple hundred bucks but Rs. 1000 wasn’t going to happen.

We kept talking for a minute or two when one of his seniors came up to me and said, “Just give him whatever you’re going to give him and be on your way.”  This was a direct request for a bribe, more direct than I had expected.  I guess it was their turn to surprise me.  By now I was getting a bit pissed off.  If he was going to ticket me, then fine (yes, police officers on highways in India do ticket you!).  I wasn’t about to give him money for pulling over and being a safe driver, at least not yet and not as much as he wanted.  The cop was now being called back to the booth by the other police officers and was clearly also getting frustrated at me for not giving him some buksheesh.  Eventually, he said with part pissed-offness and part incredulous surprise (at my desire to not pay him) that I could go on my way.  Aha, finally!  Off I went to Panchkula!

Would my reaction to the police officer have been very different if I was a local desi?  Would I have been treated with less harshness or more (he didn’t know I was not local)?  Would I have given into him and paid him?  My way of handling the situation had to do with my stubborness to not pay this guy a bribe (especially for what I considered a good and safe driving practice of pulling over to read a map).  It probably also had to do with the fact that I have experienced North American life where bribes don’t happen (well, not in this manner anyway.  One can argue being a pretty girl smiling and apologizing to the cops who then let you off the hook was bribery/manipulation at some level).  If I broke the law and I was in California, I got a ticket, there wasn’t much to discuss.  If I broke the law and I was in Boston, I may have gotten off with a warning unless it was a major violation (which this wasn’t).