South India feels very different to North India. In fact every place I visit feels very different to the last. I said before that the rich are super rich and the poor are devastatingly poor but in Delhi (for example) you’d have to get right out of the city to see many rich houses. There are super plush hotels on the right side of a road and tarpaulin shacks on the left, but there aren’t many rich residential homes. I felt very rich in North India, compared to pretty much everybody else.
Mumbai is where the money is. Even just flying into Mumbai’s modern airport you feel like you’ve hit the Bollywood capital. Big buildings flank the sprawling slums like out of place older brothers. Beggar children tap on your windows at the traffic lights and look directly into your bag with practised expressions of pain (making me want to dig my own grave and curl up inside it), right underneath huge billboards advertising million dollar holiday homes.
South India is all together calmer and more relaxed than the North or Mumbai. It’s mellow by comparison. The poverty here is rural, in the form of farmers and agricultural workers rather than street begging. Sellers are a lot less pushy and aggressive. People take less notice of the long white girl with the gold hair.
Both the Ellora and Ajanta caves (out from Mumbai) were impressive, huge caves carved downwards into the rock. The Ajanta caves used techniques such as moving eyes and paint that is completely flat but looks 3D from as far back as second century BC. We got lots of attention there from school children wanting to poke Ryan’s tattooed arm and shake our hands.
Back from the caves to Mumbai we took an over night train. I befriended an Indian boy who had turned seventeen that day. He told me he had been watching me on the platform and his uncle had hit him on the back of the head saying, “You won’t meet her today”. He said it was fate that I was sleeping in the same carriage as him. He reminded me of Dev Patel’s character in Skins, with the same ears and grin (he was an avid Skins fan) and we sat up eating “Holy sweets” while he taught me how to hang off the side of the fast moving train, (extremely dangerous but extremely fun). He was a bit of a wild boy, wanting to know all the “wild things” I did in England. As I passed the night under the stars the sun started to poke up over the outskirts of Mumbai.
We flew to Kochi from Mumbai and met the family my Dad was going to visit. My family had met them two years ago when they came to Kerala. Rasack, Beema and their five boys (all with various names beginning with R) and their friend Rahim who is teaching Rasack English. They have just had a new baby boy, Ravish, who is so adorable. They spent two days showing us the sites of Kochi and cooking us amazing meals in their house. They cooked us a traditional Keralan meal, served on banana leaves while we wore flower wreaths around our necks and ate only with our hands. They also plied us with cakes, tea and this amazing green milk (Beema gave me a pot of the green liquid so I can continue my addition to the green milk at home.) Beema’s sister also did henna on Kate and I. While we were in Kochi we also saw some kathakali dance (a lot of eye brown moving and very strange expressions), which was very interesting. To be invited into the little home in such a warm way, and given so much, was such a lovely and memorable experience.
After leaving Cochin we hired a houseboat to take us on the Kerala backwaters for a day and night, and then took a day ferry up to Kollem. The backwaters are utterly beautiful, with huge wooden fishing nets lining the banks, palm trees and river side houses at every turn. Kate, Ryan and I are now in Varkala, a beach with huge red cliffs and lots of fairy lit places to get cocktails, whilst whiling away a lot of time and money. It’s less a matter of beer-in-teapots here and more a matter of bribing the appropriate people, as none of the bars are officially licensed. We need to be careful we don’t get stuck here (this is also the reason for doing Goa last). I am now writing this in a hammock, surrounded by shady coconut palm trees, feeling very relaxed. It seems impossible that in three weeks time it will all be over and I’ll be back in England after five months away.
Here is a link to a selection of my India photographs so far. It’s so frustrating that this is such a tiny amount of the thousands I have taken and there is so many more I want to show you. However, it takes way too long to sort through and upload them, the computers have failed on me about five times now too. These will have to serve as a little snap shot to my Indian adventures until I get back to the UK… I will upload lots more when I get back to England in three weeks time.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=611986&id=554625160&l=eb58a2bdbf
The plan between now and then is this: Travel from Varkala to Madurai. Spend a couple of days there, see the huge, coloured temples, travel to Thekkady where there is a wild life park, live in a hut on stilts in the trees, ride, wash and feed an elephant, go on safari, go stay in the tea plantations in Munnar, drink a lot of tea. Get a night train to Goa, party in Goa, go out to Hampi, see Old Goa, again party in Goa, cry, get myself back to Cochin for my flight home.
HOWEVER, since I wrote this three hours ago we have hit a massive amount of logistically problems and already revised the route to do Thekkady next. Also, we may fly to Goa or stay in Kerela... We are totally making this up as we go along, which I’m sure you can tell. I will write again…
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