Staying comfortable

We stayed comfortable on our South India sojourn by staying in comfortable homestays or in rather nice 3 and 4 star hotels and resorts. The price was typically $25 to $30 per night for the former, and $60 to $80 for the latter, and if it hadn't been peak season, even better rates would have applied. Of course you can get by on far less if you stick to budget hotels. (And we were caught out by one budget hotel masquerading as a 3 star one, in the beach resort of Varkala. It wasn't quite the paradise it claimed to be.)

School excursion season

The week before Christmas was the school excursion season in Kerala. Depending on who you talked to, the school term had either finished for Christmas, or was still underway but it was Excursion Week.

Either way they were everywhere, and the big highlight for many of them was to bump into a foreign tourist or two. These two groups here were from a boys' and a girls' school, both Muslim schools, on their outings to Pookot Lake, a beauty spot in the Wayanad region.

You can tell that it's OK to photograph them - half of them are already photographing you, after all, as you approach! Then they bombard you with friendly greetings and questions, and introduce you excitedly to their teachers, and in one case, their school principal.

Best and cheapest

Hiring a car  and driver seems to be an easy thing to arrange in India, and we used this mode of transport three times on this trip - for periods of four days, two days, and one day respectively.

It's not actually cheapest. It's considerably more expensive than the extraordinarily cheap trains and buses, with a typical rate of about $40 per leisurely day, including the driver, his accommodation and his other expenses. So it's very affordable for your typical western tourist, and  incredibly convenient.

'Best and cheapest' was actually the frequent refrain of our first driver, Anujee, who was with us from Bangalore to Calicut, with stays at Mysore and Wayanad along the way. He took great pride in delivering us to lots of excellent little cafes and roadside stalls for our snacks and coffees. They were always the 'best and cheapest', just as he promised they would be.

It's recommended you give your driver a tip of $4 or $5 per day at the end of the hire. Some of ours were so good - so helpful, courteous, and informative - that we gave them a little more. We soon got into the routine also of having them join us at the table for our in-journey snacks and meals, and paying for them whenever they would let us.

We weren't quite sure what to do about the habit of at least one of them of sleeping in the car, while we were in our very comfortable hotels. We eventually reasoned that they had probably been given an allowance for paid accommodation - many hotels apparently have cheap accommodation available for drivers - but had probably opted to pocket this instead. They seemed very happy with their lot anyway, and always turned up in the morning with a freshly cleaned limousine.

Not so many years ago in India the only car you saw or got to ride in was the good old Ambassador. Now it's all changed. We rode in a variety of perfectly modern small white cars, made by Indian and foreign owned companies.

These drivers fortunately tend to be a different breed from the bus drivers. By and large they try to shield their delicate foreign passengers from the horrors of the traffic outside. The trucks and buses hurtle around, trying to kill each other and us. We concentrate on gently and submissively avoiding them. We did see the aftermath of one small bingle between two small white cars, but we ourselves came through it all unscathed.

One unexpected little expense on one of our car journeys was incurred when we parked on an innocent looking patch of roadside for a few minutes. When we came back a very official looking chap had turned up and was filling out a parking ticket of some sort. No way was our driver going to handle this one - he turned it straight over to us. The fellow wanted 20 rupees (40c), and of course didn't have change for our notes. Usual story. We went through all our wallets and pockets, collected all our little coins together, and they totalled 17 rupees. He settled for that.

Kerala's fabulous food

There's lots of fresh seafood, exotic fruits and vegetables, beautiful subtle spices, about 37 different types of rice. There are dosas, appams, Malabar biryanis, and there's coconut with almost everything. And yes, there's chilli. I was a bit worried about that at first, but it was never out of control, and usually in visible chunks, so I could remove most of them if I needed to.

This was my fourth visit to India, and not only did I not get sick like I usually do, but I even put on weight for once!

Mysore: no eyesore!

Which quite surprised me - it's actually rather a nice city. And the palace - the former seat of the Wodeyar maharajas - is splendid indeed. One of India's grandest royal buildings.

Reflections on Cochin

Backwaters

A major part of the Kerala experience is the backwaters experience. The state has an awful lot of water, as in interconnected rivers, lakes, lagoons, and canals. And there are lots of opportunities to enjoy it all.

The ultimate experience is said to be a few days on a houseboat, but we found during the Christmas/New Year peak season, this was going to be a bit expensive, and settled instead for three separate shorter cruises on smaller boats. It was extremely enjoyable.

Pictured here are scenes in the Poovar, Kollam, and Kumarakom areas.

Kerala sunsets

Views from Waterscapes 

Resort, Kumarakom, Kerala

Odayam Beach, near Varkala 

Kerala politics

Now here's an ambitious topic! What a lot of it there is, and so many political parties, complex alliances, corruption charges, posters, marches, and demonstrations galore!

I can't claim to have got my mind around it to a very useful degree, or around Indian politics generally, but it's rather magnificent to get a glimpse of it all.

Here are a few pictures I snapped, which illustrate some of it. In recent times, Kerala's often been governed by a left wing alliance led by the Communist Party of India Marxist. When they are out of power it's been a coalition led by the good old Congress Party. The third big force in Indian politics - 'new broom' Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP - hasn't yet quite got there in Kerala, but we saw a very serious and enthusiastic march by a group of supporters, waving their new brooms and machetes rather menacingly to signal their intent to clean up the place.

Another march, pictured below, was by supporters of the incumbent Congress state government. They too looked rather joyless. They looked very convinced indeed about the seriousness of their task (to keep it unclean maybe!) or dare I suggest that they were just being paid to do it?

You'll notice there are four different brands of communist parties represented in these pictures. As I said, it's complicated. Here's Wikipedia on Kerala politics. They know it better than me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Kerala

The burnt-out bus? I'm not sure. It's on the border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu. I tried to find references to it, and learned that in September last year, in response to the jailing of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister for corruption, there was widespread rioting, and burning of government buildings and buses. Maybe this was one of those buses? And I just read that before her political career, she had been a film star - that's another common quirk of Indian politics.

Godzone!

Complete with the obligatory bird excrement!

The phrase 'God's own country' has been used before, about a few different places! Like Australia and New Zealand, for a start. And I just googled it and discovered it's been applied to the US and to Yorkshire too!

Anyway, Kerala's running with it, and they've got a point. It's got a lot to offer for tourists, and by Indian standards it delivers a comfortable, relatively low stress sort of holiday. And in addition, they've got a lot more gods than many places, with all those Hindu ones as well as the Christian/Muslim one!

I visited Bangladesh in 1985, and the slogan their tourist bureau was using was 'Visit Bangladesh before tourists come'. I quite liked that.

Adivasi

This lady is a Keralan 'adivasi', a member of an  indigenous 'tribal' group, in the Wayanad region, who I was introduced to. It's often been said that some indigenous Indians look effectively identical to some Australian aborigines, and I think this is a good illustration.

I gather there's still lots of discussion, and lots of research being done on the links between the two populations, but I've been reading that there's a view that about 4000 years ago there was a migration wave from southern India to Northern Australia, and this brought about similarities in DNA and in languages, and brought the dingo to Australia.

Here's an interesting piece on this:
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/5/1803.abstract

Kerala beach resorts - Varkala

The beach resort of Varkala was a cut above Kovalam, we thought. It seemed a little bit cleaner, brighter, more wholesome all round. More relaxing places to hang out, and a rather dramatic setting, with much of it strung out along a clifftop walk.

There's still a bit of dirt and litter around though, but the cliff provides a convenient way to dispose of it. Sweep it all over the edge! And the traders in the tin shed trinket shops along the cliff top walk were right up there in the world champion perseverance stakes. They were also rather personable and quite seductive though, and yours truly found himself buying T shirts, tailored trousers, miniature auto-rickshaws, the lot.

Lonely Planet says Varkala's the kind of place where the days turn into weeks, or even months. You stroll the tourist strip, you do excursions to the nearby backwaters, you wander north along the path to the next beaches, where it's all much quieter and even more scenic. I can see how it happens.

There again you could join the throng down on the main beach, where the blue-clad lifesavers blow their whistles almost non-stop, to no avail and for unknown purpose.