Chennai and Bangalore are neighbouring cities in India that are both celebrated as "tech" centres of India and the world. What that means to you is that when you phone your credit card company, or tech help with the internet, you usually are reaching some cubicle in one of those cities. There was an article in some paper about a U.S. tourist in south India who phoned her bank back home in the U.S. about some problem and reached a customer service person in the same Indian city she was phoning from. But the airport for what formerly was Madras is one of the most tumbledown ones in the world. They are building a new one right in the old one, but it is Indian style and a colossal mess. I arrived at night 48 hours after the monsoon had started, and it had just stopped raining oceans just before my flight arrived. The parking lot was a huge mass of Indians standing around waiting for relatives, taxis in no order at all, deep puddles of water surrounded by lots of mud - and cows.
You have never imagined so many cows in an urban setting - especially at the airport as tho a flight of bulls was about to arrive (in India, that may have been the case). I ws trying to figure out what to do when an airport official with a badge around his neck came to me and said many roads to downtown were flooded. I needed to fly out again in the morning only eight hours from the time I was standing there and he suggested that I should go to his little hotel which was humble but really, really (honest, it is, honest, I mean it) clean. I had to take the chance as there was such chaos at the airport I could not figure out any alternative.
Shortly after I entered his vehicle, the monsoon returned with maximum anger. The rain was tremendous pushed along by a gale force wind. We drove a short distance on a divided four lane highway, and there were some cows out in the crossover area beig soaked and looking forlorn as if there were no taxis available. As we drove through a small, poverty stricken commercial area, there were many cows sheltering in the doorways of the stores and offices.
The hotel was uummm, clean if you can ignore heavy yellow DNA stains in white sheets that have been washed, but are uh, well, I slept with my clothes on.
The next day I flew Air India across the southern tip of India to Fort Cochin, aka Kochin aka Kochi etc., Kerala. Kerala is one of the most populous states in India, and it is famous for having a communist government for a decade or more. It is about to be voted out next year, but locals say it is just because people get tired of the same old - as we do. As you know, India is having a seriously bad times with violent maoists. But Kerala locals say they will only gain a foothold in very poor areas with bad governments. Kerala is well governed and they claim Maoists have no chance there at all.
Cochin has such a remarkable history. It is (together with its near neighbour Ceylon) the story of spice islands. Therefore, the Brits, Dutch and French have all taken turns running the place. There is a little church - the original one - there where Vasco da Gama was buried when he died in the 1600's and his body was later removed to Portugal. The catholics arrived (their own publication claims) in 1298 in the guise of the Syrian Orthodox church - which is there today also - although the Roman catholic church is stronger there now in a voodoo way. The Catholic church says that they were in India before both Hindus and Buddhists and should not be called a western invader. Some claim.
Jews arrived around 1500 probably hoping to open some bagel shops down south there. One family who arrived a few hundred years later were the Koders. They dealt in imported goods, and came to control the liquor business, then fuel business, then the power supply for the region, well you get the idea - everything They became big celebrities that every visiting politican and diplomat had to meet. This plus a great deal of other fine info was printed on the back of the menu of the Koder House restaurant. It is in one of their nice houses and is such a great place I dined there twice. It is not very Jewish. The menu says that the only Koder left is "Queenie" who lives over in Jew town (apologies) which has a Jew Street which every cab driver wants every tourist to visit. I took a pass as the name was discomforting enough.
Ft. Cochin proper is an island on a harbour that handles large ocean going vessel, has a large LNG plant, and is really busy with local fishing vessels and ferries in all directions. The trees are immense. You freeze in your tracks for minutes just to stare at a tree that has a circumference of 26'. It is an important source of shade and contains many other vines, parasites, birds and animals. The buildings are mainly two stories or less so the shade trees help a lot.
There are more goats than cows on Kochin. Driving is so terrible in India and nothing can stop or slowdown the idiot drivers of that nation - except cows. I loved the way traffic is just insane, but when the cows lay down on the road, they win. One day I saw four cows and a few goats who had claimed one lane of a busy road and they were so smug and pleased with themselves.
An odd thing about the place is the crows. There are tens of thousands of crows in the area. They are so vocal that I thought many times ' You are never alone here . A couple or few crows are always very loud and nearby, and then there are the hundreds in the distance which cause a din over the town during daylight hours. Indians honk their vehicle horns constantly because they do not know how to drive. The noise during the day is unspeakable, but at night the traffic diminishes a great deal, and the crows go right to bed at sunset and shut up. They are awakened conveniently (for them) daily at 0500 by the Moslem prayer moaning from speakers all over the city. I asked a guy if any of the moaning aka singing, was real and he said "Are you kidding. They used to have to get up and press a button for a recording to begin, but now it is all on timers, so they just stay in bed and ignore it all."
The locals say the crows come in such numbers becasue people will not handle their garbage correctly. There are also fishermen throwing out fish parts all day too which the crows depend upon. The crows were pretty and amusing to watch, but I think there can be no songbirds at all in the city as the crows would eat their eggs and young.
One of the best things I did on the entire trip was to rent a houseboat for a couple of days. The usual method is to arrange for a boat in Alleppy - a backwater area south of Cochin about 90 minutes drive. I met a guy who said he had houseboats there for 20 years. There used to be 250 when started, and now there are several thousand. In the erstwhile, "rich Indians from up north" only want two storey boats with complete air conditioning. " This means costs have gone way up and at night instead of peace and quiet all you can hear is generators running the AC.
So Mr. Willson found a backwater village and bought two, one storey, two person houseboats and he is the only houseboat guy in the whole area.
I guess my boat was abut $100 for two nights including taxi down and back and all food. It was really attractive and lounge chairs in the front and a little table where the cook served me with tea (or beer) and banana chips all the time. There ws a small table for meals with the required Jesus Christ picture above it. Behind that wall was a nice double bed with excellent mosquito netting and a nice window to view the sunrise over the backwater. There was a pretty bathroom all nicely done in blue/white tiles with a shower and western facilities. Behind that was a galley where the cook worked to prepare meals for my two punters, himself and me.
There was no motorized boat of any kind on all the lakes and canals around me. You really cannot imagine the silence - except for a few birds, cows mooing, and some crows, of course. I think the water was 4-6 feet deep, so the punters poled along with one in bow and another in the stern.
At one point, we entered a long wide canal lined by coconut palms, rice paddies and shrimp farms. It was the very definition of natural beauty. It was what we all travel hoping to find at the end of the rainbow. My bow punter left his post and went aft and I guess they both worked from there just steering and let the current and light breeze propel us ahead in the most serene and perfect hour of my life. Eventually we arrived at a medium sized lake where a canoe - sized local boat (they are all small dugouts or equivalent of same) passed occasionally. My cook prepared lunch for himself and the punters first, then brought lunch for me. While I ate the huge amount of food he prepared, they all slept on the coconut-sisal floor mats in the back.
Later they toured me around some connecting lakes and then headed back - right into a monsoon blast so powerful they had to tie up to a tree and left down the plastic sheets to keep all dry. I loved it. It was so beautiful and natural to the area.
That night they served dinner for me and left me alone. After another trip the next day, I went back to Kochin. From there I went to some tea estates and waterfalls about three hours drive away. Because part of the trip was by motorcycle, I left camera and everything behind except a rain jacket. It ws all very pretty, altho the constant jerking and hard braking of idiot Indian drivers was exhausting.
Photos: I stayed in a 225 yr old heritage hotel which had the oddest bed and chairs. The entire floors, stairs, actually every item of wood was old planks of mahogany or teak. The bed is actually two double beds bolted together. Each bed had two revolving mirrors, pictures, ceramic tiles (12 total) and no end of spindles and decoration. The bed was about 38" off the floor (good for keeping down cobra snakes). In the photo the bed is oddly up against the window. They had some muslim guests who insisted they sleep facing east, so had to move the beds. But one day when I came in the beds had been shifted back to where they belonged and looked better. The chair with the long arms is to allow one to put up his legs and read his paper, and it works just fine. It was a really nice hotel - only about 10 rooms - and I think $50 night. I will put more Kerala photos on the next section.
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