Mountains, the Kerala Backwaters and Kochi

Friday, October 30th was yet another travel day, all in the state of Kerala, over the Western Ghats and down to the Malabar Coast. The mountain scenery was spectacular: only about 3,000 feet up, but very precipitous, though lush and green. We stopped for coffee and restrooms at a roadside restaurant hanging over a deep valley.

At first, tea plantations ran down every hillside, but when the altitude got below 1,000, we started seeing rubber trees.

We stopped at a rubber plantation, where a rubber worker showed how the tree was tapped and showed us a seed and a tiny sapling. The tree grows for seven years among pineapples or manioc or yams, then is tapped for thirty years, when it's cut down and the wood is used for plywood or light furniture. Then new saplings are planted and the process starts over again. Most of the first-quality rubber goes to the tire companies.

Once we were down from the mountains, the population density rose dramatically. One municipality followed immediately upon another, like pearls on a string or like suburbs in the U.S.

Finally, we arrived at the famous backwaters, where we boarded a beautiful 85-foot, two-bedroom houseboat.

Tables were set in the bow area and we had a nice lunch. Then we settled in for a delightful, leisurely cruise of the canals and lake. We wafted along, past other houseboats, mansions, huts, people fishing with homemade rod, women washing clothes by slapping them on a rock, people paddling canoes to get from one place to another, people paddling large, very full canoes to carry other people from one side to the other (like a Venetian traghetto), a kingfisher, a kite (the bird, not the toy), goats, dogs, ducks and geese, Catholic chuches and schools, Syrian Orthodox churches and schools, Hindu temples, shops, political posters for Hindu nationalists who want to ban beef eating (elections in Kerala are on November 2nd, next Monday), political posters for Communists (in the 1950s, Kerala became the first democracy to vote a Communist party into power), a poster of Che Guevara, rice paddies wet, rice paddies dry and burning, newlyweds in rented boats, American or European tourists, Indian tourists, working boats full of filled burlap sacks, sunken or wrecked boats--in other words, everything that you might expect of a place known as the Venice of India, in a state where Sudha said the population is evenly divided among Hindus, Muslims and Christians (Kerala is home to 60% of India's Christians--the reason we are here on this trip is because for many years now, Mary Joy has worked with Catholic priests from Kerala).

After about three hours, the boat docked in Alappuzha (formerly Alleppey), where there were huge numbers of houseboats and big new hotels. We boarded the bus and headed up the coast to Kochi (formerly Cochin), and our hotel in the old town, Fort Cochin, which has a history more than five hundred years of European trade and military involvement, first with the Portuguese, then the Dutch, finally the British.

As a free-time activity, Sudha took us on a long (100 minutes) walk, down the Spice Road (where the rice, tea and spice merchants would do their business, right next to where the docks used to be), past an old, old Catholic church that was filled to overflowing with a special Friday evening service, and past a mosque where a burial was taking place. I knew we were in a Muslim neighborhood when all the campaign posters for all the parties showed women who had their heads covered. Then I knew we were in a Hindu neighborhood when there were vegetarian restaurants named Sri Krishna and Sri Ganesh. In the latter neighborhood, outside a temple, we saw a Hindu priest blessing a new car.

Elephants, a Massage and Tea-Pluckers

On Thursday, October 29th, we got a 5:30 wake up call, for 6 a.m. breakfast. By 6:45 we were on the bus, heading into what the signs proclaimed to be the Periyar Tiger Preserve. There are only 45 tigers in the whole, huge park, and no one ever sees them. There are, however, a thousand elephants, and, according to the chalkboard outside reception at our resort, one had been seen yesterday, as well as deer and a Nilgiri tahr (they have those at the Minnesota Zoo, but I forget what they are). We got off the bus and walked further into the park. Near where the boat tours leave, we went to a sort of ranger station, where we met our two uniformed guides, Raj and Nayan, formerly poachers, now helping to protect the animals. We sat on a bench, took off our shoes and put on "leech socks," big, tightly woven (almost canvas) socks going nearly to the knee. We put them on over our socks or bare feet, put on our shoes, folded over the top of each sock and pulled tight and tied the pull string, just under the knee. We then divided into groups: five with Stalin and Raj, the remaining four, including Mary Joy and me, with Sudha and Nayan.

We went down to a riverbank, where was beached a raft made of bamboo logs, each about six inches in diameter and twenty feet long, while the raft was about six feet wide. Toward the far end was a little wooden seat, sitting right on the bamboo, wide enough for two. The first group got onto the raft and Raj pulled in the rope at that end, tied to a stake on the far shore, about fifty yards away. Once they were across, Nayan pulled in the rope that ran from the near end of the raft to another stake, on the near shore, the raft came back to us and we boarded and crossed. Almost immediately Nayan saw leeches in the wet grass. They are tiny things, less than half an inch long and narrow as a bit of brown thread--until they gorge themselves on some creature's blood. They don't jump, but they can inch along very quickly, once they smell prey. However, like the Surgeon General, they are strongly opposed to tobacco, so the evening before, we had been given little foil packets of snuff, which Nayan now opened and sprinkled over our shoes and leech socks.

We now turned into the woods, and very soon Nayan saw something through the underbrush: an elephant!

Nayan waved us back and off the trail, up a muddy, leech-infested hill, where we used sticks to scrape leeches off our shoes, while Nayan followed the elephant. When he came back, he said that the elephant had gone on, faster than we could follow. That didn't stop us from trying. We walked fast in the direction it had gone, with Nayan stopping to point out birds, animals and plants along the way. We came out of the woods and walked along the river, eventually meeting up with Raj's group, who were watching something in the distance, between the woods and the river--our elephant!

Nayan brought his group much closer, but, in the end, he kept us at a distance where the elephant (an elderly female) could barely be seen through the underbrush. He worked closer with my camera, for a better shot, but what he came back with wasn't much better than what I could get from the longer range. However, once we got back to where Raj's group was standing, the elephant came out of the brush, and I was able to get some better pictures.

We went on along the riverbank, meeting a group of fishermen, who had been exercising their indigenous tribal right to fish in the park. They had done pretty well, but were moving on to avoid the elephant.

We got to the raft landing, pulled the raft to our side, got on, and Nayan pulled us over to the other side. We were told to quickly take off our shoes, then the leech sock, which we were told to throw away from us, to avoid any leeches that might have been on them. We inspected our shoes carefully, scraping off any leeches we found.

We said goodbye to Nayan,

then, as we were about to head back to the bus, someone said that thee were elephants across the lake from the boat dock. Sure enough, there was a group of five just across the water.

After some rest, then lunch, then more rest, then Mary Joy and I both had Ayurvedic massages:

MARMA THERAPY
(RELAXATION FULL BODY MASSAGE)
(PURPOSE) If you are looking for a full body relaxation, marma therapy would be an
Ideal choice. It focuses on vital points called Marmas.
(BENEFIT) Gives complete relaxation of the body and mind, enhances sleep, improves
general vigor and rejuvenates the body.

Mary Joy had a ninety-minute massage, including a steam bath, while my massage lasted an hour. After I took of my clothes and the masseur gave me a paper loincloth, the massage started with a large amount of scented oil being poured on my head, while I was sitting on a stool. The masseur rubbed my scalp deeply, over and over, then went to the back of my head, then to my face. Then he had me lie on the table, face down. He poured hot oil on my back and rubbed it into what felt like every single muscle, repeatedly, in long sweeps from top to bottom. It hurt a little when he pressed the back of my toes, then he made the toe joints crack! Next, he had me turn over and did the same intensive, oily massage on the front, at one point making my finger joints crack.

Finally, it was done, and I showered off all the oil.

It was pleasant, but not as relaxing an experience as the Roman-Irish Bath at the Friedrichsbad in Baden-Baden. Mary Joy said that her massage was wonderful.

Later, we when to a tea plantation, arriving at the end of the tea pluckers' workday. They were trimming the tea bushes. Sudha handed out 8x10 prints of photos taken when the last tour group had gone through. Then we visited their homes, in housing provided by their employer. Simple but clean. They were paid three to five dollars a day, but received free housing, daycare, medical care and schooling.

After such a long day, I felt tired, so I stayed in the room, while Mary Joy went by tuk-tuk with most of the others to take a cooking class. The consensus was that the class was a lot of fun, but that Indian cooking was too labor-intensive: there were seven people from our tour and five people from another tour, all chopping various ingredients for nearly two hours. The proprietor had made the various masalas (spice mixtures) in advance--lndian cooking seems to require at least five different spices for each masala, and there was a different masala for each dish.

Madurai to Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary

Wednesday, October 28th was a travel day. We set out at 8:30, stopping along the way at a a rice paddy, where women were replanting rice plants, to thin them out, while a man in a yellow turban was plowing with oxen.

Then we visited a brick-making facility, where we talked to the women who were making four dollars a day, turning 4500 bricks a day, so that they would dry evenly.

We headed up into the mountains, the Western Ghats, eventually driving up a twisty mountain road, with buses and trucks going both ways. When we got to the state line, between Tamil Nadu and Kerala, there were many buses parked there, because they hadn't gotten a permit to operate in Kerala. Our hotel was a very nice mountain jungle resort, run by Americans who also run eco-resorts in Costa Rica.

It is on the edge of a large national park, Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. We were warned not to leave anything out on our porch, or the macaque monkeys would grab it.

After rest, we visited a spice plantation, where the energetic young owner showed us various spice plants: pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, turmeric, ginger, coffee, cacao, etc. Then, of course, we ended in the shop, where damage was done to the U.S. balance of trade.

A Temple, a Palace, a Rickshaw Ride, a Cremation

On Tuesday, October 27th, waking with the calls of peacocks, which apparently think they own the hotel and its beautiful grounds, we went to the spectacular Meenakshi Amman Temple, a huge complex, with tall gate towers that are covered with thousands and thousands of brightly-colored statues.

Then we visited the Tirumalai Nayak Palace, an odd sort of place designed by an Italian architect in the early seventeenth century. There were huge Doric columns, Mughal arches, Hindu details.

After lunch and some down time, we took the bus back into town, where we were met by a bunch of pedal rickshaws (tricycles with buggy seats), one for each of us. We rode through a middle-class neighborhood (Indian middle-class, not American middle-class), people smiling and waving at us, kids in their maroon school uniforms shouting "Hi! Hi!" We stopped to watch a man milk a cow in the street in front of the shop where it would be sold. We stopped on a street where there were textile factories. We were going to visit one building where women were sewing towels, but the owner wasn't there and the staff wouldn't let us in without his permission.

Then we rode to a crematory. As we arrived, a funeral carriage had just left a body off. Smoke poured out from several open concrete pavilions, with corrugated metal roofs. Each pavilion had three cremation pits. Some of them were not in use, but others had pyres in various stages. One had not yet been set on fire. One of the untouchables who operated the crematory (they wore khaki shirts as a sort of uniform), mixed dirt with water to make a thick mud paste, which was spread over the body. Unlike funeral pyres in the movies, these wouldn't flame up, but instead there would be a sort of oven or kiln effect, which would burn the body more slowly and efficiently. The body was held up about two feet above the ground, I assume on piles of wood, the whole thing looking like a mound of mud, with large ventilation holes running across below. The deceased was a 70-year-old man. His seven sons, all bare-chested and barefoot wearing white dhotis (wraparound skirts), with a white cord from their left shoulder to their right waist, were in the process of having their heads and underarms shaved. When they were done, the deceased's face was uncovered and the sons, then the grandsons, then relatives and friends, sprinkled a handful of uncooked rice down the body, starting at the face. There were no women, except for one eight-or-nine-year-old girl, who was excited by the presence of us foreigners and bounced around from one to the other of us. When there was no one else to sprinkle rice, the deceased's face was covered, the oldest son took up onto his shoulder a large clay pot that had three parallel holes near the bottom rear. One of the attendants filled the pot with water and the oldest son led a procession clockwise around his father, three streams of water spouting out behind him, indicating the passage of life. When he came to the end of the third circuit, he stopped and smashed the pot on the ground, and the attendant lit the pyre, from below. Everyone left immediately, not looking back. The next day, they and their women would return to gather the ashes.

Out of respect, we didn't take any photographs.

We returned to our rickshaws, which took us to our bus. Coincidentally, as we drove back to our hotel, we met a funeral procession. Sudha said that it looked like a woman on the bier under flowers in the special open car. At the head was a bare-chested, forefoot man in a white dhoti, carrying a small clay pot with the fire from home, to use for the cremation. There was a group of men walking behind him, sometimes dancing wildly to the beat of a drum. Sudha said that they had been drinking, that one of the reasons why only men went to cremations was that there was always a lot of alcohol available. There would always be loud drumming and sometimes firecrackers as a procession proceeded to the crematory.

Thanjavur to Madurai

Monday, October 26th was another travel day. We got on the road at 8:30. Sudha pointed out to us all the children in their school uniforms, heading off to school on foot or by various forms of transportation. We stopped at one point to look at a cashew tree. Shortly afterwards, we came to a town and stopped at a hotel, where Sudha had temporarily booked some rooms for us to use the toilets. The tour company had warned us that while our hotels would have bathrooms up to American standards, we might have to make toilet stops out in the country in places where there might be no American-style toilets. Mary Joy is not fond of "Turkish" or squat toilets. They are apparently not designed for women wearing slacks. So far, however, Sudha has always managed to get us toilet stops where there are American-style toilets.

We saw a band of macaque monkeys and stopped.

We visited a village (called Ilangudi) where there was a four-way feud, now in court, between various caste groups as to access to the central temple. We wandered through the lowest-caste area, talking to people, then walked through the woods to an outdoor place for worshipping Ayyanar, one of what Sudha had called the "fierce gods." As we approached the clearing at the foot of a centuries-old tamarind tree, we had to take our shoes off. The path was lined by hundreds of terra cotta horses, each about four or five feet high, in various states of (dis)repair. Sudha said that the 380 families who worshipped there would periodically add a new horse, but this had stopped with the court case. The oldest horses there were 280 years old

We stopped for a wonderful lunch, served not on plates but on banana leaves, at a former British club called the Bangala.

Then we went on to the temple city of Madurai. Our hotel was one of the nicest yet: a mansion built by an American textile magnate on a hill outside the town. Peacocks wander the grounds.

After a two-hour rest period, we joined Sudha and Stalin in climbing into a group of tuk-tuks and heading for the old town. The ride was very interesting, especially when we discovered, later, that our tuk-tuk didn't have headlights. We got out at a sixteenth-century market building, where cloth-sellers and tailors were soliciting business from the passersby. Mary Joy bought a pair of small, zippered bags, then got herself measured for an Indian-style shirt and pants, which would be ready the next day.

Then we climbed back into the tuk-tuks and rode to a sort of milk bar, where the proprietor was famous not so much for his milk masala drink (though it has a very nice almond taste and is only barely sweet (unlike most Indian drinks, which are loaded with sugar), as for the spectacular show he puts on in pouring it from one pitcher to another, without spilling a drop.

Next, we drove to a small neighborhood restaurant, where the cooks put on another sort of show, of making bread and chopping together the ingredients (bread, egg, onion, tomato and curry) of a dish while it is frying. We ate some of it (very good) with some bread.

Then back to our hotel.

A Temple, Two Workshops and an Orphanage

On Sunday, October 25th, we went to the thousand-year-old Brihadishwara temple. I forgot to bring my "temple socks" from the bus, so, like Sudha and the trip-leader-in-training, Stalin (he says that he wasn't aware of his namesake's reputation until he was grown), I went barefoot. You are not allowed to wear shoes in temples, so most tourists wear an old pair of socks that they don't mind getting dirty. Going barefoot was actually pleasant--the floors and grounds here were relatively clean. Although the temple was dedicated to Shiva, Sudha told us that the king who had had the temple built in the early eleventh century was himself devoted to another god, so there was a small shrine on the lawn, holding a statue of a boar dressed in women's clothes--one of the incarnations of Vishnu. Sudha brought us over and introduced us to the Brahmin priest, who had just spent a year in Boston, serving a Hindu community there. He was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing a topknot and the traditional kilt, the dhoti. We lined up around the enclosure and he gave each of us a blessing and the ubiquitous red dot, the bindi, in the middle of the forehead. Meanwhile, a man in yellow was blowing a conch shell on the temple steps. He then went to the Vishnu shrine and blew it there.

In front of the temple is a huge black statue of Shiva's main transport, the bull Nandi, and in a niche to the left of the door was a statue of Shiva's son, Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who someone that day told us is the most-worshipped god in India. Unlike in the temple in Kanchipuram, where we could take pictures if we paid a fee, signs everywhere proclaimed that no photography was allowed in the temple. But, as usual, once we got inside there were people flashing away at the huge, black linga stone representing Shiva. The bindi, Ganesha and the linga will be explained better in a future digression.

We got into a long, slow, single-file line, and worked our way to the front, where there were three priests, one of whom took our offering (I didn't see what it was), burned it in front of the god and brought back the ashes, which an older priest dotted on our foreheads. Behind us, a group of women was singing a hymn to Shiva, in Sanskrit, very beautifully.

As we came out of the temple, Sudha saw a group of people sitting under an arcade across the grounds, by the wall that surrounded the temple quarter. He thought that it was a couple of families arranging a marriage, and that's what it was. He introduced us to them and them to us: the prospective groom's family, the prospective bride's family, the mediator or marriage broker, and maybe the astrologer. Sudha was surprised that the couple themselves were there. The families were from separate places, twenty miles apart, and were now meeting each other for the first time. Since the family backgrounds were suitably matched and the astrological charts were harmonious, now the families were here to get a feel for each other, face to face. When our group asked them about how husbands and wives in arranged marriages managed to get along, the groom's mother (a banker) made a long (and, Mary Joy said, very eloquent--I wasn't positioned to hear) statement about the importance of family and one's place in one's society and how one needed to put love of others before one's own preferences, in order to arrive eventually at God. Later we saw the two young people, in western clothes (he had a smartphone) standing away from the others, talking, getting acquainted for the first time. Sudha said that based on their impressions of each other, either one could at this point put a stop to the whole thing. So their whole future lives could depend on this one, short conversation.

After leaving the temple, we took the bus into a wealthy neighborhood and got off. We saw a man ironing clothes by the side of a side street., using a very heavy iron with coals inside. Further down that street was a workshop where we were shown the lost-wax process of bronze-making. A wax model was made, covered with clay (the mold), the wax was melted out of a hole in the bottom of the mold, a mixture of copper, zinc and tin was melted and poured into the mold, the mold and figurine now inside were cooled for 24 hours, the mold was broken and the statue was filed and polished.

Afterwards, of course, we visited the shop. Mary Joy got a tiny Ganesha, made of metal with an enamel coating.

Later, we visited another workshop, where they were making vinas, a string instrument like a very large mandolin, but played on the floor, with a bulbous support under the neck, to keep it level. The vina is associated in Hindu iconography with Saraswati, the goddess of music. Mary Joy was in her element, learning the instrument's tuning, which she discussed with another musician on the tour, in terms above everyone else's heads. Although it is an ancient instrument, it was played every night in the musical ensemble at our hotel's restaurant.

The workshop was in back of the owner's house, and he invited us into his front parlor, where his wife played scales for us on their own vina.

At 4:30 we took a 45-minute drive out to an orphanage which is supported in part by funds from our tour company. We met the house mothers, and then we went to the assembly hall, where all the children, ages 6 to 17, were gathered, seated on the floor, girls to our left and boys to our right. Behind them were seated, in chairs, about fifty elderly persons (the orphanage has an attached home for seniors). The children were very excited to see us. After various introductions, etc., we all sang "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands." Then we went back and greeted the seniors. The oldest man there was 94. No one knew exactly how old the oldest woman was, because in those days no one kept track of such things.

As soon as we finished with the old people, it was time to go out and play with the kids. I was immediately kidnapped by some boys, nine, ten, eleven years old. It was frenetic chaos. I was dragged here and there, shown their schoolroom, shown a series of tiny puppies, played some sort of game involving trying to cover the other person's thumb with your own, taught them paper-scissors-rock, did my coin-disappearing trick (in this case, stone-disappearing), took pictures of them playing "monkey" (climbing a coconut palm tree), while they were trying to pronounce the name "Mike" on my big, lanyarded yellow name tag, and were saying (shouting) such English words as "photo," "belt," "monkey" and "bad boys" (some other boys who tried to horn in on their ownership of me). Meanwhile, Mary Joy was trying to do music with some girls, but they, while more focused and less awhirl with tornadic energy than the boys, had their own agenda, too. After 45 minutes, Sudha and the house mothers rescued us all, a girl and a boy named each of us, from memory, and we said a cordial goodbye and got on the bus to return to Thanjavur.

From Pondicherry to Thanjavur

On Saturday, October 24th, we took another of Sudha's 6 a.m. "golden hour" walks, through Pondicherry's "Black Town": in colonial times, the French lived between the canal and the seaside Promenade, while the natives lived west of the canal. The main interest was the food market and the surrounding streets, where women from the villages would come to buy fish and vegetables to take back and resell.

We ended up at a coffee stand, where we had very good coffee and samosas.

This would be largely a travel day, so luggage had to be in the hall at 7:30 and the bus would leave at 8.

Next to a Shiva temple, we visited a collection of statues of what Sudha called the "fierce gods": fanged, beweaponed beings, surrounded by severed heads, set to protect the lower castes against their various oppressors, but now somewhat domesticated and residing next to the brahminical temple.

Then, out in the country, we visited a village of Untouchables, living in thatch-roofed huts. It was named Allkondanatam. The children, who were home from school because it was a holiday, were very excited to see us. Just before we left, Mary Joy had them singing "I love to sing!" At the very end, they asked her for her autograph!

After we got to our hotel in Thanjavur (formerly known as Tanjore), before dinner, we were treated to a performance by two teenage girls of three classical Tamil dances. They were fully costumed and accompanied by two male singers (one of them their teacher) and a drummer. They danced very well.