On the Road to Hassan

Not much to report today.

We flew from Kochi to Bangalore early this morning, got some cappuccino at the airport there, boarded our bus and drove (with a stop for a thali lunch - a circle of small metal bowls surrounding a couple rounds of roti flatbread) and drove (with a second coffee break) and drove (with a couple of bathroom stops) and drove until we reached the Hoysala Resort here in Hassan around 5:30 PM this evening.

We'll see if the whole trip was worth it when we visit a couple of World Heritage Site temples tomorrow!

At Leisure in Kochi

Under Lee's expert direction – or so the picture makes it appear – five of our group strained to raise the nets out of the Arabian Sea. The fishermen who do this for a living raise and lower these immense nets – called “Chinese Nets” locally because of their origin in that far off land centuries ago – some 450 times a day!

We performed the joint operation involved only once and netted only a single fish, not much to show for the amount o human effort involved.

Our stop here along the shore of the harbor in Kochi (also known as “Cochin”) was the first of four for the day, a relatively relaxing one compared to our usual schedule.

The others were at an Anglican church, St. Francis, the original burial site of Vasco De Gama; a Catholic basilica, Santa Cruz Cathedral; the Jewish Paradesi Synagogue; and Mattancherry Palace, also known as the “Dutch Palace”, a gift to the local maharaja originally by the Portuguese and later (following an extensive renovation) by the Dutch. All this is indicative of the multiplicity of cultures contributing to local life in Kerala.

There followed some actual free time, devoted to lunch and to some rewarding shopping in the local Jewtown shops (not a politically correct appellation but historically correct and preferred by the fourteen remaining Jewish residents of the area).

Lee was especially pleased to find a copy of Manu Joseph's Serious Men in a local bookstore; the author had just today been announced as the recipient of The Hindu (“India's National Newspaper Since 1878”) Best Fiction Award for 2010 for this, his first novel. That find took some doing since he didn't remember either the author's name nor that of the book's title and had to look through lots of possibilities before hitting on the correct one, all with the help of the bookstore clerk anxious to make a sale!

This evening Heidi's off to see a Kathakali performance. Lee's staying behind, totally caught up in Joseph's novel – and, of course, in keeping this blog up to date.

Off to the Kerala "Backwaters"

We drove two hours south of Kochi this morning to visit a milk co-op serving some forty families by supplying them with a readily accessible terminal at which to “deposit” their excess milk for purchase, pasteurization and distribution by milk collection agencies.

A little further down the red clay road we spent an hour or so at a public elementary school, one with which Overseas Adventure Travel's charity wing established a helping relationship earlier this year. The school currently is little more than a shell with very little in the way of supplies beyond the basics: shared desks, textbooks, slates for the kids to write on, a raggedy blackboard. The kids, however, ranging from five to ten years old, were ecstatic to see us and kept us going – playing games, reading books, singing songs – until exhaustion set in!

Our last stop was to spend some time with a women's self-help group which has met twice a week for the past six years to fry banana chips or sew blouses for sale to local merchants to earn “pin money” shared among the group of fourteen, an example of micro-financing that has worked remarkably well throughout Kerala.

Then we got to relax for a couple of hours, eating lunch while floating along on the “backwaters” and watching daily life as it played itself out along the banks of the canals crisscrossing this entire coastal area. Heidi and Lee remember our prior experience here in 2008 with great fondness and found this much more brief sojourn equally relaxing.

Later the group broke up into two smaller contingents to have dinner with local host families. Our group of seven enjoyed a particularly lively evening with a family of four, including twenty-one and fifteen year old daughters, a stay-at-home mom and a retired professional travel planner (one who helped OAT pull together its Soul of India itinerary). The opportunity to quiz the daughters about life among the young in India was especially appreciated.

Tomorrow we head off to explore Kochi itself, like its population, one of the most cosmopolitan and diverse entities in all of India (and largely a review of our earlier visit two years ago).

Sunday, Blessed Sunday

Three highlights of the day:

• LUNCH at the wonderfully comfortable home of a Kerala family, owners of a rubber plantation - one with a commanding tree top view of the Western Ghats and surrounded by fruit trees, pineapple fields and groves of towering rubber trees.
  
  We learned how the family got into the rubber production business more than forty years ago as a means to retain ownership of their land (threatened with government confiscation until converted to rubber trees, an exempt land use category championed by the current owner's grandfather in the Kerala assembly).
  
  We watched a demonstration of how tree tapping is done – each of their eight employees taps 300 trees a day once every three days, in essence taking care of 900 trees as their contribution to the plantation's production.
  
  We also met and talked with members of the family, including a visiting son working towards his CPA certification and a daughter's first child, the owner's first grandchild.
  
  

• THE DRIVE BETWEEN PERIYAR AND KOCHI through the Western Ghats which took us through some fantastic, lush mountain scenery on a bright, sunny day with just enough short stops along the way to keep us from going stir crazy on our tour bus. The wild flowers and water falls along the way were particularly memorable.
  
  The enormous tea plantations were also fascinating! Shaded by Silver Maples from Australia (with pepper vines growing on each tree trunk) and each bush sheltering cardemon plants, the whole operation made excellent use of agricultural space.
  
  

• A CHANCE ENCOUNTER with an Orthodox Christian procession in the midst of a four day walking pilgrimage across Kerala to the grave site of the group's founder and first saint who died in 1902, a trek undertaken each year to honor his memory on the anniversary of his death.
  
  Hundreds of devotees walked along the side of the road or rested briefly nearby; several talked with us to explain what was going on – as did their spiritual leader (who blessed us all, one by one, with a touch to the head before we re-boarded our bus to continue our own pilgrimage here to the capital of the province in Kochi).
  

A Blessed Sunday, indeed!

A Day in the Mountains

Three of us left at six o'clock in the morning with our guide to line up for tickets to take a seven thirty boat ride around a lake in the Periyar National Wildlife Preserve to view the local wildlife. The mountain scenery was an added bonus to sightings of wild dogs, two kinds of deer, lots of birds, warthogs but no elephants or tigers (oh,my)! The ride proved a relaxing beginning to another busy day, one dampened by intermittent showers but still chock full of activities.

Next on the agenda was a visit to an organic spice garden where Taj, our young host, showed us some of the many, many varieties of spices grown locally, including pepper, cardamon, allspice, turmeric, mace, curry and cocoa. We were surprised by how some were grown, the kinds of plants involved and the parts thereof going into the spice itself.

For lunch we crowded into an apartment kitchen and, under the tutelage of our hostess, her sister and a neighbor, prepared lunch together. Actually our three hostesses had done most of the preparation but left the making of a couple of dishes to us. We gamely plunged right in and in the end had a delicious meal!

A brief elephant ride in the rain followed. It felt somewhat like a pony ride for grownups...

Back at our bungalow in the late afternoon we were visited by a curious pack of local monkeys who swung in to take a look and then vanished just as quickly.

After dinner this evening we attended a splendid performance of two traditional dance pieces performed by a graceful and extremely well trained young fifteen year old dancer whose every movement of eye and hand and head helped tell the stories she presented for our entertainment. What an accomplished artist!

A full dance card indeed, don't you think?

Searching for Periyar (not Perrier)

Yesterday (Friday) evening, at the end of a perilous vertical climb winding up from the plains surrounding Madurai after dark into the Western Ghats, our bus crossed over from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu into Kerala and entered the resort area of Periyar.

We're here to enjoy the cool mountain air, visit a National Wildlife Refuge and tour an organic spice garden. Kerala, as we know from our earlier visit in 2008, is particularly known for its spices. We'll even have a chance later today to mix some for ourselves since we're also scheduled to cook our own lunch meal today (under supervision, of course)! And we have been promised an elephant ride into the bargain...

Friday morning we awoke to learn that our guide's father had died suddenly during the early morning hours and that he would be leaving us in order to take up responsibilities connected with the funeral arrangements. A local guide joined us for our morning activities, then Manika Ashoka flew in from Chennai to assume Srini's leadership role. She had just finished with another OAT group the evening before but didn't hesitate when asked to jump in to help in this emergency situation. We'll all miss Srini's expertise and his meticulous planning but appear to be in equally capable hands under Manika.

Touring South India in many ways lacks the constant “wow factor” present when traveling through the North of India – from Delhi to Jaipur and Khajuraho, then on to Agra and the Taj Mahal. That's a hard act to follow. In our travels through Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, however, we do have the opportunity to experience India at a more personal level. And that seems to be what OAT is aiming for in planning our itinerary.

Yesterday morning's visit in Madurai to Meenakshi, a Hindu temple devoted to Parvati (also called “Meenakshi”), the consort of Shiva (who also merits his own sanctum sanctorum within the temple complex and is escorted each evening to spend the night with Meenakshi), was this tour's exception to that “experience the soul of India” motif.

Meenakshi is one “wow” of a place, believe me!

From the seven huge gopura guarding the various entrances and central worship spaces to the brightly painted ceilings and the corridor after corridor lined with brilliantly executed sculpture, this is one pretty amazing place.

Photos don't do it justice. They isolate items from one another which in reality abut each other and taken together add up to much more than the sum of the individual parts.

Furthermore this is an active temple, one visited by 10,000 Hindu worshipers daily. That means the space is filled with life and sound and rituals and offerings and elephants and shops selling all manner of objects, sacred and profane. It was an experience well worth removing our shoes and socks to undertake; and, in our minds at least, ranks right up there with the best India has to offer.

Usually Lee takes about one hundred digital images on any given day. At Meenakshi he snapped nearly 150 in just that one location!

It's hard after an experience like that not to want to take something of it home with you. The central image in Meenakshi's Hall of A Thousand Pillars is a bronze image of a Dancing Shiva. Lee hoped to find a similar image to add to his “god shelf” at home and managed to locate a small bronze at the National Folk Art store across from the temple itself. It will evoke a very special memory of a very special place forever after.

Following our temple visit and brief shopping excursion, we set out in individual bicycle rickshaws for a drive-by view of the older part of Madurai, a city among the oldest in India – and full of crowded, narrow, bustling streets and alleys impossible to see any other way. On our earlier visits to Old Delhi and Varanasi, this kind of wild ride was one of Lee's favorite experiences – and this one was no exception, helping in this case to boost his photography count well up into the two hundred and fifty range!

On our afternoon bus ride we stopped along the highway and persuaded a local brick maker to demonstrate his manufacturing technique. Actually, as seems true in many of these instances, the brick-making operation is shared among several families, in this case three sisters and their respective spouses and children. Theirs was only one of dozens of similar cottage industry enterprises scattered along the road outside Madurai, all doing well in the building boom atmosphere that dominates the current Indian economy. Everyone's building and they all need bricks!

Once again, as has become the usual case, we had a busy, busy, busy – and extremely exciting and rewarding – day. And along the way, as well, we came to appreciate just a bit more of the true “soul” of India.

On the Road to Chettinad

Chettinad is a long bus ride from Madurai but worth the trip to see some of the remnants of a brilliant era in the town's history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it was home to a group of wealthy international merchants who built large mansions throughout the township on profits from their trading operations in Asia, Europe and elsewhere.

Today these homes have fallen on hard times but they still retain hints of their former grandeur and seem especially intriguing given their EXTREMELY remote location. Evidently prices in the middle of nowhere on land not considered at all productive is precisely why these mansions are located where they are – these merchants didn't amass their fortunes by being lavish but parsimonious instead!

And they still managed to eat very, very well: our lunch at a local small hotel showed the Chettinad cuisine, famous throughout India, very much worthy of its outstanding reputation.

The bus trip gave us ample opportunity to observe life in rural Tamil Nadu.

We stopped on our way to Chettinad in a small village to visit a batik cooperative giving shelter and training to orphan girls …

… and later at a pre-Hindu temple, the walkway to which is lined with terracotta figures of horses, elephants and cows given by local farmers in thanksgiving for good harvests, a practice dating back thousands of years.

Returning to Madurai we took in a visit to another rural coop, this one making beautiful handcrafted ceramic tiles. Two of our group even got to try making free form tiles themselves, and both turned out quite credible efforts.

It's all these little extras along the way that make Overseas Adventure Travel tours so very special, however long the bus ride might take to bring us to them.