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!