Kerala is Red

We're coming to the end of our stay in Kerala and this image, which I took in a small village in the Backwaters yesterday, sums up some of my impressions.  Che is everywhere here along with images of Marx and Lenin on the CPI.M (Communist Party of India [Marxist]) banners and flags.  I've no idea how Marxism co-exists with Hinduism, Islam and Christianity.  For many of the devout maybe Che is just another member of the pantheon of local gods.

After our first three days in the cockroach infested tin box we moved to the delightful Raheem's residency next to Alleppey beach.  I had the pleasure of running barefoot in the sand there most mornings and we would often take a stroll on the seashore.  It's a busy place with people casting nets from the beach, fishing inshore on small rafts and just enjoying the fresh air and the sea.  Often while on my early morning run I'd come across the odd bloke squatting in the sand having a shit while smoking a cigarette and looking reflectively out to sea.  It's a bit difficult to know where to look in these circumstances.

Sue had had enough of local ferries, so one day I took the ferry to Collum on my own, getting off at the first stop where the passengers have lunch and waiting for three hours for the return boat.  I killed the time by strolling to the beach and found a "Toddy" shop, where palm wine is sold.  These kind gents served me a couple of glasses of toddy, accompanied by tapioca root and chilli.  It's a bit like sweet coconut cider and not too strong, 7-8% alcohol I believe.

On the trip back I took this cliched but irresistible shot of the sun sinking through the Kerala palms while chatting with Al, a barrister who airbnb'd his West London flat four months ago and is gradually beginning to realise that with the income from this he could in fact keep travelling forever.  Alleppey was a sociable time for us and we met quite a few interesting travellers, including Andrew and Julie from Australia, Stephanie from the States and Kirsty and Russell of the "Rusty Shears" cafe in Whitby, to which we must pay a visit when we get back to the UK.

The Kerala Backwaters

On 18th January we got a taxi from Fort Kochi to our homestay on the backwaters where our driver was incredibly patient while we tried to find the place, which turned out to be a cute little tin box with a verandah facing one of the main canals into Alleppey.  It was great being able to watch all the boats going in and out of town, just a shame about the cockroaches.

On our first full day we hired a local boatman to paddle us around the nearby canals for a few hours and this really was a great way to see some of the small canals and experience the sights and sounds of daily life here, albeit it feels a bit intrusive to be paddled past someone trying to do their washing or having a quiet shave in the canal outside their house.

Many of the canals are choked with vegetation and I helped our boatman paddle through some of the worst of it, where we encountered this egret who seemed to be trying to chase us off his territory.  The trip ended on a slightly sour note as the boatman deliberately took his time on the return trip to get an extra hour's fee from us.

The next day we continued our exploration by getting the Alleppey to Kottayam ferry, a five hour round trip which cost us the princely sum of 50p return.  Kottayam itself is a busy and prosperous place, but the highlight of the trip for me was discovering a run down church on a backwater canal which looked strangely like an East Anglian wool church incongruously plonked in the tropics.  I'd love to know how it got there.

The Doors of Fort Kochi

After our hectic time visiting some of the major tourist destinations in North India we fled to the South by plane from Varanasi to Kochi via Bangalore.  Our posh hotel, the Xandari Harbour in Fort Kochi was pretty much what we expected with amazing views over the harbour and most days we strolled around the town taking in the ambiance.  After the North it was good to be in a warmer, more relaxed atmosphere with much cleaner air, so that for the first time in ages I felt I could actually breathe in deeply.  It makes me worry that there's an air quality crisis in the North of this country that is going largely unreported and practically everyone we met had a cough.

The streets of Fort Kochi reminded me a little of Galle in Sri Lanka with its old colonial vibe, which I have to admit I rather enjoy.  But Fort Kochi is actually more run down and while some buildings are being salvaged there are a lot more that are approaching the point of no return.  Near the hotel there is a transhipment area for tea, rice and spices whose smell and atmosphere reminded me strangely of the Wapping of my youth.  The warehouses, which face the waterfront, where I guess they break down shipping cargoes and load them onto the trucks that create a permanent traffic jam in the narrow streets outside, are called "godowns" a name which also rings a bell in my memory, maybe of reading Conrad.

Anyway, a week passed here photographing the flaking old doors and crumbling walls and trying to take in the spirit of this old place occupied successively by the Portugese, the Dutch and the British before the locals took proper possession.

One thing that came as a surprise was that Kerala is governed by the CPI.M, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and there are red flags with the hammer and sickle all over the place, along with pictures of Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara.  I hope those old British Imperialists are turning in their graves.

Varanasi

We had an uneventful trip to Varanasi via Delhi, although it was strange to have a taxi driver point out the India Gate yet again on our ride from the railway station to the airport.  The journey from Varanasi Airport to our hotel however took ninety gruelling minutes, much of it inching through the insane traffic in the City centre.  Sue needed to rest, but that evening I had a stroll along the Gats and took this photo.

On our first full day in the City we took a long walk through the centre and along the major Gats before returning exhausted to our hotel, a pleasant and more or less tranquil spot in the heart of the mayhem.  On day two we visited the run-down but fascinating Hindu University museum before again walking the Gats back to the hotel.  Both trips were broken by lunch at the Dolphin rooftop restaurant.

What can you say about Varanasi that hasn't already been said?  Actually, it was all the stuff that has been said that was the problem.  I came here with so many pre-conceptions that I expected to be overwhelmed and perhaps gain some new insight into life and death.  Well it is kind of overwhelming to the senses with so much life and colour exploding around one, so that almost everything you look at is a separate rich tableaux of burning pyres, temple entrances, sari and sweet shops, con men, monks and gurus.  And yet at the same time its effect on my brain was really quite relaxing and wandering the Gats by the banks of the Ganges was more like strolling along the prom at Eastbourne on acid, rather than living out scenes from Dante's "Inferno".  Death, which I expected to be ever present, took much more of a back seat than I expected.  I saw no burning bodies and heard no communal keening, just big stacks of wood being weighed and the odd fire, with the occasional body whipped through the backstreets by the special caste of pall bearers.

If I've taken any moral lesson from this fascinating and ancient city it's that here there is a place for everything from birth to death and all the stuff in between, including worshipping, posing, swimming, doing your washing, ripping off tourists, grazing your water buffaloes, flying your kite, playing cricket or just having a laugh with your mates and that all those things are completely normal things for humans to do and it's entirely appropriate that they should all be going on at the same time.

I must say I'm very glad to have been and unsure whether I will ever want to come back.

Agra and the Taj Mahal

The fog we hit at Bharatpur and its effect on the trains worried me, so I checked out our later bookings only to find that our Agra to Varanasi overnight train had been rescheduled to not stop at Agra.  After some furious checking on the internet I managed to get a refund and book new trains and flights.  After the Birder's Inn we then took a taxi to our hotel in Agra, arriving in the still fog bound city before lunch on 4th January.

Our approach to the Taj Mahal was eliptical.  That afternoon we attempted to walk from our hotel in search of a view, but ended up getting hot, bothered and tired as we tramped the dusty traffic choked streets, before getting an auto rickshaw back.  On our walk through the dirty back streets of Agra we saw the most incredible squalor, including at one point a small herd of pigs wallowing in the waters of an open drain in a crowded slum. 


On the 5th we visited Agra Fort which should have a fine view of the Taj, but the fog stubbornly refused to clear.  Then we got an auto rickshaw to the Mehtab Bagh, the gardens on the other side of the Yamuna river from the Taj, where it finally revealed itself to us.  Finally, on the 6th we entered the Taj itself via the East Gate and actually got to see it close up, the thousands of tourists with us reduced to ants by its sheer scale.  I guess the thing that surprised me most, apart from its size, is the colour, which close up is more grey and marbled than I expected, well it is made of marble after all.  Conscious that we would probably see it this one time in our lives we lingered and looked and looked.

While in Agra we stayed in the Grand Imperial Hotel, nearer the centre of the City rather than the tourist places by the Taj.  It was as we had hoped a faded bit of colonial grandeur a bit down on its luck.  Lovely chandeliers, old furniture and decent food and overly attentive service.  At breakfast one morning Sue observed one of the waiters picking something off his shoe and then flicking it absent-mindedly at the buffet.

On the 7th, our last day, we had time to kill before our evening train to Delhi and so went to the Ram Bagh, the oldest Mughal garden in India and in a very dodgy part of town.  Later we took an auto rickshaw to Palliwal Park, where Sue fulfilled a lifetime's ambition by seeing a Bittern, which I managed to photograph.

Keoladeo National Park Bharatpur

The third train of our trip was a luxurious Exec Chair car from Jaipur to Bharatpur.  Comfy seats, tea, newspapers and breakfast with mainly foreign fellow travellers as dawn broke over Rajasthan.  Everything was going well and then we hit the fog and the train slowed to a crawl.

We arrived in the small town of Bharatpur to find it shockingly cold and damp, but our hotel, "the Birder's Inn" recommended by our friend Subash was very welcoming and next morning we touched base with Vishnu and Jitender, the two rickshaw driver/guides he recommended, who gave us two excellent days birdwatching while transporting us along the the paths in the National Park.  Highlight of day one was a pair of Sarus Cranes.

Over the two days we saw an incredible variety of birds and other wildlife including deer and water buffalo paddling through the wetlands.  The Kingfishers were one of my favourites and the park is home to three different species.  In the evening the hotel did a substantial buffet to the keep the large numbers of hungry birdwatchers happy.

The guests were mainly Indian, but with a few foreigners on the longer tours of the so-called "Golden Triangle".  On a couple of evenings many of the Indian guests sat round the big log fire in the garden singing songs, which was delightful.

Jaipur

We had six days in Jaipur arriving tired and confused after our train from Jodhpur was three and half hours late.  At the station we were bombarded with touts looking for our business but eventually found a prepaid taxi stand where our charming old driver took us to our airbnb via a few 'phone calls to Payal the owner.

I'd been expecting Jaipur to be more urban and sophisticated than the cities to which we'd recently been and in some ways it is, but the noise and dirt were still overwhelming.  We visited the City Palace on our first full day, where I pictured this pigeon happily perched in a chandelier and as ever we had to force our way through the crowds.  Payal and Anurag our hosts were charming and Anurag took me out to the Central Park jogging path on a couple of mornings and we also took Payal's cooking class one afternoon, which was a really good introduction to Indian cooking techniques.

Payal is a very knowledgeable guide to Indian cookery and culture and gave us some really good tips about the basics of Indian cookery in which I finally understood why ground coriander is sold in such large quantities in India delis, as most basic sauces start with a mixture of chilli powder, turmeric and ground coriander which act to provide heat, spice and a thickening agent.  Unfortunately during the lesson I began to feel sick and for several days since then I've had first diarrhea and then a bad cold.

On our last full day we booked a car and driver and took in the sights we hadn't managed to get round to, including the Amber Fort, a vast palace complex outside the City which was abandoned after Jaipur was founded and the temples at Galta also known as the "Monkey Temples" for obvious reasons.

Galta kind of sums up some of my feelings about our trip to date.  I was expecting something beautiful and what I found was something dirty, confusing and in some ways ugly.  The ponds at the site are green and fetid and the whole area smells of decay.  Gradually you lose some of the smell and the rubbish as you climb to the Sun Temple at the top of the narrow valley in which the temples sit, but still it all feels a bit tawdry and played out, or perhaps that's me projecting my feelings after three exhausting and bewildering weeks in India.