Kerala Part 2

Kerala Part 2

One thing I failed to mention in my last post about Kerala is it's a communist state thats filled with catholic churches, next to Hindu temples, next to mosques. It's the most prosperous state in India with the highest literacy rate of the country. So is communism a good thing? Apparently for Kerala it is.

After a couple of days of feeling nauseous, I finally threw up my entire dinner in the hotel sink and I felt perfectly healthy afterwards. At last we were able to really start enjoying our trip through southern India. We drove from Munnar to Thekkady. The change in climate was dramatic, we went from the chilly, crisp mountain air to steaming, humid jungle. The weather must have known I was coming because it let up raining just long enough for us to take an elephant ride, which was FANTASTIC! Easily my most favorite part of our trip. The rain had left the ground soggy and every time our elephant Lucky took a step you could hear the squishing of mud under his feet. The rain also left a low hanging mist clinging to the surrounding jungle foliage, heightening my "cosmic universe" senses. I actually said to bill "do you think it's called mist because it makes things mystical?". Let's just say strange things happen to your brain when you have an elephant between your legs.

We went to visit a spice plantation, and the remarkable thing about that was I finally met an Indian person I couldn't stand. The most amazing thing about India is the people. No matter how destitute the area or how much trash and rubble is at your feet, there is always a genuinely warm and smiling face waiting for you. The people of India are happy. In fact, in a study done measuring happiness, the people in the slums of Calcutta only ranked slightly lower than fortune 500 CEOs. India is a country where the glass is perpetually half full, and I think that's why so many people fall in love with her despite the obvious drawbacks. This bitch, however, really pissed me off. She showed me a plant, which she said when you grind it into a powder gets rid of dark spots left by some skin diseases. She suggested I should try it. I was confused. Then Bill realized she was talking about my freckles. I laughed at first and told her that these spots were not, as she thought, the result of a horrible skin disease but part of my skin. The same thing that made her skin dark was what the spots on my face and arms were. She didn't get it. Throughout the tour she repeatedly suggested I try the powder and when we were in the shop at the end she shoved a big pot of it towards me and told me I really needed it. I just stared at her and had a quick daydream where I clocked her in the face but I ended up grumbling something under my breath and bought the eucalyptus oil instead. I'm not the first white girl with freckles she's seen, Kerala is a huge tourist area, I think she was doing it on purpose and it really pissed me off.

Moving on, we spent a night on a houseboat which was truly magical. Having your own three person crew, including a chef, on a boat of your very own for 24 hours makes you feel like a king. We sailed the backwaters and at a certain point pulled over to a little shack where the locals were selling crabs and what they called prawns. Prawns to me are shrimp; these were gigantic electric blue lobster looking things and we got 5 of them for 1000 rupees which is 20 bucks. I couldn't believe it. The chef prepared the prawns, along with a chicken dish and numerous sides. I was sooooo happy that I wasn't feeling sick and could eat all of these delicious things prepared for us. We docked for the night along a strip of the river that had electricity and bill and I got out to walk around. The village was a single row of houses sandwiched between the river and the rice patties. As we walked by each little hut children peeked their heads out of their homes yelling "Hello! Hello!" and one little boy blew me kisses.

This houseboat was identical to ours

This is what they call prawns!

A walk along the river



Our next stop was Varkala beach. I imagine this is what Goa is like, only much smaller. It was a little strip of black and tan sand beach and blood red cliffs populated by Australian and British hippies. In between the Tibetan craft shops were Aryuvedic clinics and yoga studios, some even offering "philosophic talks" on the menu. The hotel we had was the nicest place we stayed in, by far, the entire trip. They had spaghetti bolognaise on the menu, which we ordered, and devoured. There were lots of little tiki bars and we took shelter from the rain one afternoon, sipping mojitos as we watched the Arabian Sea rage in the storm. It was the first drink I had since the kingfisher beer at pizza hut in Delhi 3 weeks earlier. It wasn't the best mojito, not nearly as good as the ones i make at home, but at that moment it was divine. To quote the movie Old School (best movie ever after Zoolander of course) "it's so good when it hits your lips"

View from our hotel window

Varkala beach

Do I have a love letter to write to India? Maybe. I want to go back one day and do so many things we didn't get to do this time around. Bill will need some strong convincing though, I think he got his fill on this trip. There were moments that, faced with the fact that we still had so much traveling to do, I screamed that I wanted to go back home for good. But if someone asked me how India was I would say, without hesitation, that I adored it. It's the woman you love unconditionally no matter how many times she hurts you. Because when she does shine, it's so brilliant you can't look away.

-Claire

Vomiting, massages and hospitals... Oh my! Our week in Kerala part 1.

We left our home stay in Delhi on Saturday afternoon and weren't catching our flight until Monday morning so we booked a cheap (think $30 bucks) hotel by the train station. It was dirty. Don't stay at the chanchal deluxe hotel in Delhi, it sucks. There were dead fruit flys all over the floor and bed and the bathroom was scary. I kind of threw a fit and proclaimed I would not eat food from the hotel because of how dirty it was but there weren't many options outside. I guess thats the thing about staying in india for an extended period of time, at some point you just accept that its fucking filthy. What was i going to do? Go downstairs and throw a fit that my 30 dollar a night hotel in the shithole neighborhood that is the delhi train station was dirty? It was all food carts surrounding the numerous religious icon stores where people were hand carving statues of Shiva. So we ordered room service, specifically the chicken biryani which was delicious as we were eating it. Fast forward to Sunday afternoon and Bill is vomiting and has diarrhea all at once. I can only deduce he had a really high fever from the way he felt to my hands because we didn't have a thermometer. Who travels around the world with a first aid kit?! Pshaw.... On top of all this his recurring bad back had given out so he was immobile. I wasn't feeling so great myself but I managed to keep it in on both ends so I was fine. As Sunday afternoon grew into Sunday evening I started getting worried and I did what anyone would do... I called my mother. I figured that if I looked up his symptoms on the Internet it would tell me he was dying (it did, it said he had malaria) so I opted for moms advice instead. She assured me he prob just ate something bad but he should go to the hospital. The one thing I always told bill was if I got sick to never EVER take me to a hospital in Asia. The last thing I want is a needle for an IV going into my body and I get some terrible disease and die far from Brooklyn. He did start taking the malaria pills we had brought from home as a precaution.

I don't know how either of us withstood the flight the next day, or the two hour drive to fort kochi from the airport but we did. Well, i dont know how i did it, bill ate a painkiller and passed out. He was burning up the whole time and I just kept giving him aspirin and malaria medicine. I knew something was up with me because the smell of any sort of food was making me turn green. Our hotel there wasn't great either but it didn't really matter because we both went to bed immediately. The next morning the lady running the place made us eggs for breakfast and sat with us while we ate. I really felt at the time I would never be able to eat another egg as long as I lived. Bill looked like he got beat down with the vomit stick and pushed the food around on his plate. He was also limping around because of his back. After living with a family for 3 weeks with very little privacy, Kerala was supposed to be the romantic part of our India trip. We were not getting off on a good foot.

Our driver for the week picked us up and was a very nice and funny guy. He made bill sit in the front so he could recline back and relax. We drove almost 5 hours to the mountains in Munnar. It was miles and miles of tea plantations rolling over the hilly landscape. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Everything in Kerala was on steroids. The greens were so deep an lush, the flowers were extraordinarily large, the houses were painted in neon purples, teal and lime. The sky was BLUE! There are no blue skies in Delhi, it's just a continual overcast of hazy pollution. These skies were blue! There were elephants on the side of the road! We drove past countless waterfalls that appeared magically out of solid rock. There was barely any trash on the side of the road. This place was amazing. We finally pulled into the Arunyaka resort. There were a small cluster of cottages overlooking a hill of tea plants and a waterfall. The air was silent except for the sound of the crashing water and the rustling of the wind. We ordered some lunch which we both regretted eating and then drove down to an Ayurvedic place to make massage appointments for the next day, then caught a kathakali show, which is a traditional form of dance and storytelling.

The next morning bill still had a fever so we decided he should go to the hospital after breakfast. Thank god they had cornflakes, we lived off of cornflakes for days. I really need to write the manufacturer of corn flakes telling them they saved my life and see if they give me a free box. We rolled up to the Tata general hospital in Munnar. Tata is an all encompassing brand in India, they make the ever popular $3000 car, a plethora of crap, and they have a beverage company which includes tea. Our resort was down the road from the Tata tea packaging plant, so it made sense that the local hospital was also of the Tata variety. I don't know if any of you ever watched that stupid hospital show set in costa rica on ABC ( for awhile ABC was the only channel we got that's why I know this) but the hospital kind of looked like that. A one story building in the middle of nowhere, the emergency room was 8 beds, all empty. The nurse told us to wait and the doctor saw us after 5 minutes. He told bill it was prob a mixture of altitude sickness and food poisoning and gave him a bunch of medicine. The cost of the visit and the medicine was $3.50 USD. I couldn't believe it, we could still make our massage! I thought we would be in there all day!

Bill opted out of his massage and that was a wise decision considering what I ended up going through. Aryuvedic medicine is everywhere in southern India and to get the true healing experience it's a treatment given over time. For example, if Bill really wanted to use the treatment to fix his slipped disc he would consult with an Ayurvedic doctor and participate in various treatments for 3-4 hours a day over the course of a couple weeks. We just wanted a one off massage so our driver took us to one of the many clinics that pepper the landscape of Munnar. It was a tiny little building that wasn't very pretty inside. It was dark and damp and dingy. This is the case with a lot of places in India and then you actually go in and it's fine, so I didn't really think of it when I was booking my 90 minute relaxation body rub. A girl who looked kind of young led me into a dark room. The floor was dirty, the walls were covered in mold as a result of the steam box in the room. There was an enormous wooden table in the center of the room with an oil dispenser hovering over the head of the table. On the side there was a counter with a gas burner and various jars of oils and creams. She told me to take my clothes off so I took my pants and shirt off. She then motioned for me to take my underwear off. The thought that literally went through my mind was "it's India time" I figured that I was in for a penny in for a pound. How many diseases could I possibly get from that wooden table? I already probably had food poisoning and there wasn't any rash a good cream can't cure, right? I took off my underwear and stood in the cold room shivering, stark naked, with a young Indian girl. She unfolded a paper loin cloth thing that she tied around my waist and in between my legs and motioned for me to get onto the table. I was shivering as I lay face down and watched her put oils and spices into a big pot on the burner and then mix some oil into a bowl. She started by pouring oil all over my head and massaging it into my scalp. She worked her way over every part of my body, every crevice, every muscle, down to the tips of my fingers and toes. As the spices in the pot began to boil they let off a very calming aromatic perfume and at one point the electricity went out so for 5 blissful minutes I actually forgot that I was in a set from the movie Saw getting oil rubbed by a minor. After the massage was done she helped me off the table and slid me over, oil dripping off my skin, to the wooden steam cabinet. I sat down, she closed the door and then put the top on so just my head was sticking out and I steamed for 20 minutes. When I wasn't thinking of all the horrible things that might happen to my cooch as a result of it sitting exposed in this environment, it was actually very relaxing. After the steaming was over she came back with a stack of gauze cloths and then proceeded to wipe me down. I would have rather wiped myself down but I guess that was part of the $22 deal I got right? I got dressed and tipped her and ran out of there. Meanwhile, bill and the driver had been chillin in the car and when they saw me, oil dripping from my head, he looked a little scared and asked me if I wanted to shower, which I did. After I got out of the shower though, I looked at myself in the mirror and I was literally glowing from top to bottom. My skin had never looked so brilliant. Bill commented that my face "felt like a baby's ass" and it did. It felt smooth and creamy and had a healthy flush to it. I did not end up getting a weird rash in my nether regions so all in all it really was the best 22 bucks I ever spent on a beauty product. Not to mention they weren't kidding when they said it was a "deep relaxation" massage. I could barely keep my eyes open as we went sightseeing and I fell sleep at 8pm and had the deepest, most restful sleep in weeks.

-Claire