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.

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!

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.

Kerala beach resorts - Kovalam

Kovalam was a bit of a shock at first, so excessive was the chaotic over-development of the place that there was no vehicle access to our hotel, or to any of the others along the main waterfront drag. And in the afternoon the staff would unblock the blocked main sewage drain of our supposedly 3-star hotel with a bowl and a spoon. There was the usual filth and litter everywhere too. And a big army of very persistent hawkers and legless beggars forever on the prowl.

But the place had its charms too. Lots of inexpensive restaurants, with excellent seafood and the usual range of tourist and Indian dishes, a fleet of local fishing boats that you could watch going out every evening, bootleg beer freely available, and big ayurvedic European ladies doing salutes to the sun on the beach.

Fishermen's (drunken) picnic

We spent Christmas Day at a rather fine upmarket beach resort about an hour's drive south of Trivandrum. We were enjoying the wonderfully generous hospitality of our Trivandrum homestay hosts and their resort-owning sister, and we had the run of the place for the day. But one unexpected restriction was that we couldn't actually go onto the beach.

Christmas Day was the one day of the year when the beach was the sole province of its real owners - the local fishermen and their families. Every other day the western tourists could bathe, parade, or sunbake, show off a few acres of white flesh if they liked. It was tolerated. But not today. The locals had their civilian marshals posted, and were turning back any intrepid westerners, like the Swiss family we'd got to know, who tried to crash the party. At the resort itself, the security staff had locked the bottom gate, and were politely explaining the situation.

They were having a lot of fun on that beach. They were all Catholics, we were told, so not only were they celebrating Christmas Day, but they were also celebrating it with alcohol. Much of the fun consisted of groups of men throwing each other into the water. Likewise groups of women. Always segregated sexes, always fully clothed. No wonder they didn't want the westerners there to complicate it all!

Churches, mosques, and temples of South India - Temples

Here's the Sri Chamundeswari Temple near Mysore,which is a temple to Shiva. Shiva always has his bull, Nandi, nearby, so that's him below, in 5m high statue form.







The nice little collection of musical ladies is at Aazhimala Temple in Kerala.

Then there's the Shri Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum, and the Suchindram Temple, near Kanyakumari - currently undergoing some maintenance or restoration work.



The majority of the population are in fact Hindu, despite the fairly large numbers of Christians and Muslims in the south.