Palolem Beach (Goa) and Varkala Beach (Kerala)

"Chai chai coffee chaiiiii" is what you get woken up to dozens of times a night while riding on the sleeper train. At each train station throughout the night, vendors come alongside the train windows with their metal containers of chai (tea) and coffee, trying to sell it. Cyd and I took the sleeper train from Hampi (Hospet) to Palolem Beach (Margao), Goa. Although sleeper trains in India are fun, they are also difficult to sleep in because of the many volumes and octaves of snores you hear from a multitude of other passengers, the loud vendors, and the chug chug chug of the train itself.



Before Goa, I had never before been to a tropical beach where people just basically lay on the beach all day. To be honest, before I'd experienced it, I didn't really get the appeal of it. Laying around on a beach in theory sounded kind of boring to me, until I got to Palolem Beach and experienced the magic of a tropical paradise. On our first day on Palolem Beach, we sat beside two guys on the lounge chairs. When they got up to play Frisbee I asked if I could join in, got chatting with them, and then proceeded to form a friendship with them that lasted the rest our stay on the beach. It turns out they were French, named Bastion and Jim, and they had a friend named Lisa from Sweden who we also became friends with.

I found it amazing how quickly time flies by when your lounging in the sun on the beach! We would get up, have breakfast at our favourite restaurant, then go meet up with Bastion, Jim and Lisa at the lounge chairs in front of Cafe Del Mar. Then we would maybe go for a swim, then play Frisbee for a bit, then hit around a volleyball, go for lunch, then read...and the next thing we knew, it was 5:30 pm and the lounge chairs were being taken away so they could set up for dinner. We would then go get cleaned up, take a shower, and come back to watch the sunset. We'd meet up with a group of friends for a beer at 7, and then hit up a beach restaurant for dinner. It was a routine that left us relaxed, tanned and happy.

One night we went to a "silent noise" dance party. There were noise restrictions on the beach, and so they solved it by giving us headphones to put on to hear the music. We were able to chose the music we wanted to hear through the choice of 3 different channels (although all 3 of the channels were techno music for most of the night). It was quite a funny experience though because with the headphones off, the beach was silent, but all around you there were hundreds of people dancing like crazy to music that you couldn't hear. The range of dancing was incredible! The huge number of different cultures and ages represented at the party resulted in the occurance of every style of dancing imaginable. Dancing ranged from people standing there with their eyes closed, slowly moving their arms in spirals to people moshing in hysterics, jumping on each other in response to the fast, energetic techno music beat. It was an amazing experience that made you feel able to dance however you wanted without feeling out of place, anything goes! Besides, who can't love a dance party where you're sharing the dance floor with cows and dogs?

I made friends with a guy named Ohad, an Israeli who was traveling after his year of mandatory military service. One morning, I had just gotten to the beach when he asked me if I wanted to go for a boat ride to see dolphins. I said sure, and hopped on the boat with him and a bunch of his friends to go search for dolphins. We saw maybe 10 beautiful dolphins before heading to "Paradise Beach", a nearly deserted beach on an island about half an hour away. We spent the day on this beach, swimming in the fresh-water lake there, and playing beach volleyball with a few other tourists we met there. During the spectacular sunset, we took the boat back to Palolem Beach, thrilled after a magical day on the beach.

Cyd and I on Palolem Beach

Paradise Beach

Dead crab

My friends and I at Paradise Beach

After our wonderful stay on Palolem Beach, Goa, we took a 17-hour train ride to Varkala Beach, in Kerala. In Varkala, we stayed in a cute guest house called Mummy Bamboo House, run buy an amazing woman who cooked dinner for dozens of guests at her guest house, while also taking care of many children of her own. In a country where women inequality is very prevalent, it was nice to see a strong, successful women, such as Ronnie.

In Kerala, we went to a trippy dance performance called Kathakali (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathakali). This performance originated in Kerala in the 17th century, and has been virtually unchanged since then, except for minor improvements in the make-up, singing and drumming. A traditional kathakali performance goes for a whole night (dusk until dawn), but for us tourists they have a more concise, 2-hour long version. The performance we saw had 3 scenes:

1: There is a demoness who comes across a prince and falls in love with him. She then tries to make herself beautiful, so that she'll be more appealing to him, by fixing her hair and make-up.

2: The demoness, now looking like a princess, approaches the prince and tries to woo him.

3: The prince does not want her, so they fight and he cuts off her left breast and her ear.

Throughout the entire performance, the eyes of the actors are bloodshot and bulging out of their sockets, twitching back and forth. Their faces also twitch for the duration of the performance, as they scream, shriek, and jump around the stage in large movements. It was almost surreal to witness the performance, with its quick jerky movements and colourful performers.

The next day we went for a ride on an elephant. We rode through a farm on a female elephant named Beagup. Although I felt like I was stretching my morals by riding an elephant in captivity, she looked healthy and happy, was being fed bananas for snacks and was getting a long bath with a water hose. The ride was about 15 minutes long, and Beagup's steps were steady and rhythmic, quite relaxing. After Varkala, we took a train to Madurai, spent the day there, and then took a cab up the ghat to reunite with Vera and George in Kodaikanal.

Rice paddies - taken from the train between Goa and Kerala

Varkala Cliffs

Kathakali performance, the prince and the demoness. The drummer looked so bored during the entire performance.

We went for a boat tour of the Backwaters. The net is a traditional Chinese fishing net. They lower into the water once a day during the tide to catch fish.

Tons of fishing boats all lined up.

Hanging out at Mummy Bamboo House in Varkala.



Masala Dosai, my favourite Indian food! Inside the bread is a pile of delicious masala (potato curry). The sauces are curds, sambar, and chutney. We were instructed to never eat chutney at restaurants because if it gets dried out, they add a bit of tap water to moisten the chutney, which can make you sick. Tap water is never drinkable in India, as it can carry many diseases.



We went back to Madurai to see the Meenakshi Temple. It was spectacular! The first time I was there, it felt like I was being surrounded and followed by a huge crowd of street vendors and beggars. But the second time around, it felt like the crowd of people talking to me and following me had significantly shrunk. It must have been a mixture of me being more used to being followed, such that it didn't bother me the second time around, and being better at dealing with them. The first time I was in Madurai, I'd look and smile at everyone. But by the time I was there the second time, I had learned to look down whenever I walked by a vendor, because they take being looked at as a sign of someone being interested in what they were selling.



I love the cobra in this one.

People riding on a peacock. We saw a wild peacock run across the road on the way to the airport, in my final few hours in India. Thank god it didn't get hit as it sped across the road.

A giant ganesh squishing a wolf by sitting on it.

It is not uncommon to see up to 5 or 6 people sitting on the same motorcycle, most often entire families. There'd be a mother, father, 2 or 3 kids all sitting in a row behind them, with the mother holding the youngest one in her arms. The father would sometimes be holding a kid in one arm, while driving the motorcycle one-handed. There are so many things that happen in India one would never see in Canada.



I think that something got lost in the translation here. Everything in India had poorly worded and poorly spelled English. It actually made it a lot of fun to read signs and menus with the oddly-translated English. We had many menus that were offereing "crud" and "crap"...where they were trying to say curd (yogourt) and carp. There is a desert there called curd and treacle, a kind of honey-yogourt treat. One menu was offering "crud and trickle", obviously a mis-spelling. Reading these mispelled signs and menus provided us with endless amusement while waiting for our meals, which would regularly take up to an hour to be served.



Vera and I in front of a gigantic tree in the shola.

We thought that this was a slightly conceited message to display on your car.

View of Kodaikanal from Observatory Road, a five minute walk from Vera and George's house.

I have now been back in Canada for about 3 weeks. I miss so many things from India, and I hope to be able to go back some day!

For example, I miss:

-the vibrancy of the streets of India. They are colourful, alive, loud and interesting. They have such a sense of community and commerce, which is nothing like the quiet, empty-street car-culture of Canada.

-The food! I miss eating with my hands, miss the spiciness of the food, miss the price of the food, and miss the comical Tamil-English translations on the menus. I miss my favourite foods: masala dosai, thali, and cashew barfee (a yummy desert)

-meeting people from all over the world. We met so many other backpackers and tourists that we were able to chat with a form fleeting friendships with, it was fantastic!

All-in-all India was the trip of a lifetime for me. I had an incredible time, learned so much about a culture so different from my own, and yet so wonderful and unique, met so many people, gained the self-confidence that I can travel on my own, and learned so much about myself and what I want to get out of life. I definitely have the travel bug now, and am excited for my next adventure: 8 months in Reno, Nevada, doing a Restoration Ecology Internship along the Truckee River, Lake Tahoe, and in the Sierra-Nevada mountains.

Thanks India!

Bangalore and Hampi

As promised, here is my blog post for Part I of the final 3 weeks of my amazing adventure in India!

Bangalore - January 21-22
Hampi - January 23-26
Goa (Palolem Beach) - January 27- February 1
Kerala (Varkala Beach) - February 2-8
Madurai - February 9

Bangalore

I took the bus down the ghat from Kodai to Bangalore to meet up with Cyd, who had been at a theatre festival in Chennai for the week. Although I did not know it at the time, it turns out I was very lucky to get into Bangalore when I did. I arrived in Bangalore at approximately 5:30 am, got off the bus, found the driver who was picking me up, and got to my friend's apartment by 5:55 am. I found out later on that a bandh had started in Bangalore at 6:00 am. A bandh is where a political party calls a general strike in order to protest a government decision. The city grounds to a halt - shops are closed, buses don't run - the streets are basically emptied for the day, and can become dangerous for those who do not adhere to the bandh rules. On that day in Bangalore, some of the bus drivers had ignored the bandh by braving the empty streets, only to get stones thrown at them and be driven off the road. So I am glad I was safely off my bus and inside the apartment just in time to avoid the angry bandh stone-throwers.

Driving through Bangalore though was the most Western experience I had had since getting to India. Bangalore is quite a modern, multicultural and international city, and I felt like I could have just as easily been driving through the streets of Toronto. After a day in Bangalore though, I already missed the more endearing qualities that more "Indian" cities have, including the swerve and honk driving method, the cows, goats and chickens that provide formidable obstacles in the roads, and the traditional sari and lungi-clad townsfolk.

We got to the train station later that day after the bandh, only to experience an encounter with a Hijra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia), India's version of a transvestite. Hijras are males who dress as females, and often have mutilated their genitals in order to try and be more womanly. They make a living by begging, and will approach Indian men asking for money, threatening to show their mutilated genitals if they don't get a sufficient amount of money from the man in question. Other beggars expect to receive 1-3 rupees per person, but these Hijras won't be happy without at least 100 rupees, enough to buy about 3 full meals in India. Apparently men would be severely embarrassed if a Hijra were to drop his/her pants and show him the mutilated genitals, often resulting in a hundred rupee donation to the begging Hijra. So I was sitting on the train when a Hijra came up beside me leaned over me and stuck his/her hand right under the nose of the Indian man beside me. As he/she leaned over me, I could distinctly smell sweat, and could see the layers of caked make-up over the clearly male facial features. After a few-minute exchange in Kannada, the language spoken in Bangalore, the still empty-handed Hijra moved on to another victim, thankfully without giving us any view that we didn't want to see.

Hampi

Driving in an autorickshaw towards Hampi from the train station in Hospet, we suddenly begin to see these curious piles of rocks coming into view. As we get closer to the town, we begin to understand why everyone says that Hampi is their favourite place in all of India to visit. Hampi is a geological mystery that is almost surreal to experience. There are rocks randomly strewn all across the landscape, many of them balancing precariously, making it almost impossible to believe that this topography was formed naturally. Hindu mythology decrees that the landscape was formed by gods throwing the boulders at each other during a battle, which is actually exactly what the topography looks like.

Cyd and I spent our first day in Hampi wandering around, climbing on rocks and checking out temples. We then joined a long line of Indians going to what we assumed was a temple. After following them for maybe 15 minutes, they all veered off towards a lake and started undressing. We then realized that we had stumbled upon the local laundry and bath day. All of the locals headed down to the water and jumped in, washed themselves, and then their saris and lungis. After washing them, they laid their clothes out on a rock to dry in the hot sun. The thought of all us Kitchener locals heading down to the Grand River every Saturday to bathe and wash our clothes in the river is just a bit ridiculous.

During our stay in Hampi, people kept telling us to climb up Matanga Hill to watch the beautiful sunrise. We were told that in order to get there in time to see the show, we had to leave at 5:30 am. So after trying and failing 2 mornings in a row to get up at 5:30 to see the sunrise, finally on our last morning there, we dragged ourselves out of bed in time. We left at 5:45 am, with nothing but a flashlight, to join the throngs of other tourists we assumed would be climbing up to see the supposedly spectacular view.

Turns out that we were the only ones. With our tiny flashlight beam, we stumbled our way through the pitch black boulder-strewn landscape, trying to find the trail up to the top of the hill. We eventually found the trail and began our ascent to the top. After about half an hour of climbing, it was still pitch black, and we were still the only ones on the hunt for the sunrise. Almost at the top, we came to a narrow 4-foot ledge we had to cross with a sheer drop on one side, and a rock face on the other. I crawled across it, but Cyd was too scared, so I got to the temple at the top of the hill just in time for the sunrise! I was the only one there, other than the "chai guy", a man who makes a living by climbing up the hill before dawn each morning to sell tea to the tourists who climb up to see the sunrise. The sunrise was absolutely spectacular as it burned a bright fiery red, climbing up over the amazing rock-strewn topography. About half an hour later, the rest of the tourists arrived, a group of about 30 rowdy German tourists. Cyd was then able to crawl across the ledge and came to join us to watch the sun rise. The monkeys also swooped in with the tourists, having realized that being at the top of the hill at sunrise meant a  guaranteed tourist-supplied breakfast. We were appaled though that the tourists were terrorizing the monkeys, by tempting them with bananas and then hiding and throwing them. Making the monkeys jump for the bananas, rip open grocery bags to get at bananas, and swatting the bananas between their hands on the ground as the monkeys tried to catch it. As a result, the monkeys were extremely aggressive. I was drinking tea, and at one point a monkey came up and tried to grab the cup from my hand. I said shoo and waved my hand at it, causing the monkey to bare its long, razor-sharp teeth and jump up at me, just missing my arm. It was quite terrifying, as the last thing I wanted was to have to get rabies shots for a monkey bite.



During a hike with Mark, we sat down for a yummy lunch of kidney beans, papaya, chickpeas, pineapple and cabbage eaten on leaves from nearby banana trees.



Taking pictures out of the train window on the way from Bangalore to Hospet.





Ox-driven cart. Quite common in India.

Piles of rocks and old ruins in the geological mystery of Hampi.

Matanga Hill, where we climbed up to the top to see the sun rise.

Achyutaraya Temple.



Townsfolk headed down to the lake on laundry/bath day.




Getting ready to bathe.



Laying out their saris to dry.



...obesity...what?



Vattakanal Cliffs

This morning Vera and I got up bright and early at the crack of dawn to hike to the Vattakanal Cliffs, the pride and joy of Kodaikanal. These cliffs boast the most beautiful view in the town, but if you get there later then 7 am, they will have already clouded over and the view is lost.

Lucky for us, the view this morning was absolutely breathtaking! As I sat at the edge of the cliffs, taking in the beauty of the mountains, a large troupe of monkeys suddenly came wandering up and starting hanging out near me. Some were napping or eating, others were play-fighting or grooming each other. It was one of the coolest experiences I have ever had!

The "winter line", it has something to do with inversion...obviously I must not have been paying attention during that Meteorology class.

View of the plains, far in the distance.

Mountains and valleys.

The monkeys arrive. They are all straining to get a look at Max the dog, an intimidating  rottweiler.

Chilling with the monkeys. Vera now refers to me as Jane Goodall.

Having a snack.

Just doing what monkey's do.