Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Benaulim - Agonda - Hampi - Mysore - Ooty - Madurai - Kumily - Alappuzha
Someone has turned the heat up. I am sitting under a fan in a little computer cubicle, still hot and sticky, but it's a relief after the beating sun and humidity outdoors here in Alappuzha, town on the backwaters in Kerala. We arrived yesterday afternoon after a three and a half hours on a bus and three and a half hours on a little ferry from Kumily, high in the Western Ghats. It was another death-defying downhill run - Indian buses seem to spend more time on the right hand side of the road than the left and more time hooting than not. I have learnt that it's better not to look. The signs on Keralan roads may give you an insight into the problem: 'Impatient on Road - Patient in Hospital' and 'Speed may thrill but it can kill' are the only two I can remember. Same goes for the auto-rickshaws, although with a maximum speed of about 20kpm, you don't feel quite as endangered.
This morning we booked ourselves on to a 24-hour trip on a houseboat into the backwaters tomorrow morning. We had a look at one today - these houseboats are amazing, little bamboo and reed homes equipped with everything, including the kitchen sink.
Kumily sits perched on the eastern edge of the Western Ghats, a mountain range that runs down the eastern edge of southern India, on the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The air there is thick with the smell of cardamon, which grows wild in the jungle along with cinnamon and pepper. These spices are now cultivated across the hills of eastern Kerala, along with tea and coffee. Kumily is also famous for its wildlife - the town sits a few kilometers from the edge of the Periyar Tiger Reserve - and this was the reason we came. We knew we had little chance of seeing a tiger - the reserve is about 1000km2 and there are believed to be around 50 tigers remaining. Poaching is still a problem - there was a story in the Hindustan Times the other day that listed around 9 found dead this year - mostly from poaching. However, there are still lots of elephants and we went on a day-long trek, starting with a jeep ride deep into the reserve at 5.30am, with high hopes. We saw Malabar Giant Squirrels, which are huge, lots of black monkeys and lots of birds - including a mynah bird, possibly a hornbill. We saw lots of evidence of elephants - giant turds (like huge horse poo) half-crunched bamboo, bark stripped from tree trunks and even toppled trees. We even heard big elephant feet shlop through streams and crackle through thickets. But despite a second even more gruelling trek into the jungle, we saw no elephants. Never mind. The jungle was beautiful, full of the noises of birds and monkeys (and elephants..), rolling for miles over the peaks of the Western Ghats. What we did see was lots of French people - Kerala seems to be a top holiday spot for Les Francais.
Before Kumily, we were in Madurai in Tamil Nadu, a hot busy city full of the noise of worship at the Sri Meenakshi Temple complex, which lies at its heart. We arrived at 4am on a hot sweaty (and delayed) night train, in which we'd been dodging the cockroaches between naps.
The temples are amazing, steep towering buildings covered in multi-colourled carvings of mythological figures. The courtyards and paths resonate with the sound of tannoyed chanting and there is a temple elephant who is led in and out each day. Unlike a visit to the Parthenon or the Mayan temples of Central America, this is still a working temple. It might date back more than 2000 years - though the current buildings are newer - but around 15,000 people visit the temple every day, climbing to 25,000 on Fridays. You do feel you are going back in time. That is true for India as a whole. At different moments you feel you could be in completely different centuries - one minute the 21st, then the 15th then, as in Madurai, where people daubed there foreheads with brightly coloured dyes and prostrated themselves on the ground and the priests are bare-chested, with shaven heads, anytime in the last three millennia.
Hot Madurai with its age-old Hindu traditions could not have been more different from where we came from - Udhagamandalam in the NilgiriMountains, or Ooty as the British who made it their summer retreat, complete with racecourse and sweetshops, fondly called it. Snooty Ooty is seedy Ooty these days and has the feel of a faded English seaside resort, the racecourse dilapidated (though still used apparently, in the summer months), the man-made lake is slightly stinky and a few fairground rides for honeymooning Indians. Still, it was fascinating to see the place and was a cool break from sweaty cities. We went on a trek through the famous Nilgiri tea plantations and took in the breathtaking views of the plains below.
Mysore in Karnataka, where we were before Ooty, lies a few miles from Srirangapatnam, an island between two rivers that was the site of the victory of the future Duke of Wellington over Haidar Ali in 1799. Chris studied this during his degree, so without Lucy and Fred, who were already on their way to Ooty by bus, we spent the best part of a day exploring the place - from the palace and the prison where some other time in the 1700s, British soldiers were chained up. Back in town, the market is famous for the brightly coloured powders it sells for Hindus to use to mark their foreheads and other acts of worship, and rows of flower sellers make up strings of jasmine and marigolds to adorn statues of the gods and for women to pin in their hair - which most do, leaving the heady scent of jasmine in the streets - much nice than the usual urine/cow poo combo. Indeed, the streets of southern India are full of smells far more alluring than those of the north.
I had arrived in Mysore on a bus (well actually two buses) from Hampi via Bangalore, nursing the last stages of an upset stomach - the first proper one of the trip. It must have been something I ate (or perhaps some water on a glass or a fly on a fork - who knows) in Hampi. We had arrived in Hampi, in north east Karnataka, after a journey on what was the night bus from hell from Agonda in southern Goa, the idyllic and far less Saga-fied village we went to after Benaulim, (which was where - I know, it was a long time ago - I last deigned to write this blog. We have actually been quite busy, honestly, this traveling malarky is actually quite time consuming, and then there's breakfast and lunch and supper to plan).
Agonda stretches out along a couple of kilometers of sandy beach, sweeping a soft bay between two tree-covered rocky points. The sea is never calm and there's an afternoon breeze that blows through the bamboo and reed huts that mostly line the beach, but these give the place a wildness that I loved. We spent our days swimming (or, when the wind was really strong, as it was on the first couple of days, just sort of standing thigh-high and letting the waves crash over you, for fear of being swept away) and reading and generally shifting from one lazy slumped position to another. Unfortunately, Chris spent some of his time - sadly his birthday - getting over his own bout of Delhi belly (or the Goan version), with hideous trips down the hut's step ladder and over to the toilet block, past the pigs and dogs, every time nature called.
There was also - there is a God - a SOUVLAKI place in Agonda, run by a typically nonchalant hairy biker Greek, where for the first time since we arrived we ate meat - chicken - wrapped in pitta with tsatsiki. Now, Indian food has far exceeded my expectations: we have lunched on delicious thalis, with little pots of curries and rice, and snacked on samosas and parathas. By the sea, the kingfish was delicious and the Portuguese-influenced Goan dishes were a delight, but, to get to munch on one of my all-time favourite foods was heaven.
The train from Goa to Hampi covered a very scenic route that takes you over the some of the northern stretches of the Western Ghats. Unfortunately it was all booked up and we settled on taking the night bus with Paolo Travels. But the sign said the 'luxury' bus had 'super suspension', so we weren't too perturbed. Now, our last night bus, from Jaiselmer to Ahmedebad, on our journey from Rajasthan to Mumbai, had been somewhat better then expected - Chris could almost stretch out and there was room for us to sleep side by side without the risk of suffocation - so if our hopes were not high they were not rock-bottom either.
Paulo Travels, however, has plumbed new depths in the field of bus travel. With an argument underway between the bus conductor and some people who had been double-booked and were having to share a sleeper compartment, we clambered into our own berths - a sweaty, dirt-encrusted (and that is saying something in the sphere of Indian travel, as some of you will know) 5'6" by 3'6" box right at the back of the bus, with open panels to the compartment in front where, just as we got on, the window fell out. This left us in the peculiar predicament of being hot and cold at the same time - as the bus picked up speed, the wind blustered past us, and we sweated/shivered under the scarves we bought in Jodhpur.
And then there were the roads. Indian roads are littered with speed humps - or speed breakers, as they are known here, and these are so steep that even if the vehicle is new and almost stationary there is a severe ricocheting effect. On the top berth on the back of a very ancient bus, apparently lacking in any form of suspension, this effect is multiplied and means very little sleep. Thus we arrived in Hampi the following morning crumpled and grizzly, but determined to book the train to Mysore well enough in advance to avoid the night bus. But the train was full, so we booked another night bus. We were reassured, with a welcome Indian side-to-side head roll, that it was never be as bad as Paulo Travels, and it wasn't. But first Hampi.
Hampi is a small town consisting of a main bazaar (like a high street) and a few narrow streets tucked beside a wide river. There are lots of guesthouses and for our weary selves lots of nice places to eat and rooftop terraces (a very Indian delight) to lounge about on. However, the reason people come to Hampi is not Hampi but what lies around it: for miles the countryside is strewn with enormous boulders, on to and around which are dozens of Hindu temples, some dating back to the 1400s. It's an amazing sight and, on the day after we arrived, we hired bikes to explore properly. I was already feeling slightly off as we set off on our squeaking charges up the hill to the first set of temples where e were inundated by schoolchildren.By lunchtime - and the realisation we had not brought enough water/any lunch with us, and that despite the thousands of Indians and Westerners who visit every day there was not anywhere to buy water/lunch, I was definitely feeling iffy. We cycled on, visited palace elephant stables, royal baths and women's enclosures, and , when faced with cycling all the way we'd come on roads (maybe 15km) or a two km 'walkable' route we opted for the latter, and ended up clambering over rocks with our bikes. I arrived back at our room and collapsed into bed, where I remained for the next 24 hours, feeling very sick - food poisoning combined with dehydration and heat stroke, a fine achievement.
We did get the night bus we'd booked to Bangalore - not really a wise move, granted, given I was not 100%, but faced with a days-long wait for the train or a seat on the night bus (no berths available) I decided to move on. The night bus was actually the best so far - clean(ish) large berths, closing windows, lots of loo stops. And I only felt slightly sick. It took me a few days to get back to full rations, but I did, and have been fine since. Chris and I are the weaklings amongst us: Fred and Lucy's stomachs have held strong so far. We are being more adventurous now, enjoying delicious fruit juices - pineapple and mandarin and grapes but are still holding out on the salads.
So, tomorrow, the Keralan backwaters, then on to Kochin then back up to Karnataka and southern Goa before we fly to Bangkok on March 10th. Can't believe how quickly time has gone, but it's been fantastic so far - everything I dreamed of and more.
- comments