1.4-15.4.2011

The route was: Kovalam-Kanyakumari-Quillon-Alleppy-Varkalam-Trivandrum.

When we took the flight I was more thrilled than when we first came to India. Then we went straight to Kovalam. The beaches there were ok. The people made it  a really nice place to stay. Our hostel was great, with a swimming pool that we used both day and night. I thought seriously to move into the pool permanently because of the weather. Fortunately we could enjoy of a little monsoon, in which I got so wet that I didn´t mind to jump into the pool with my cloths on…because, really … it made no difference… We spent 3 days there and the fourth day we decided to move on.

We took the first Indian train of our lives from Trivandrum to Kanyakumari.  Kanyakumari was lovely. I loved the ambience of this little city and there was some beautiful places to visit near the city. Like Suchindrum, this huge beautiful white temple. There were altars dedicated to every God of the Hinduism and I can tell that many of them look quite the same, so I got lost. So I asked this holly man dressed in a cape where is the main entrance? Instead of taking me there, he started to introduce me to all the God´s of the building’s first floor at light speed. The brother of Ganesh, the cousin of Ganesh, the eldest brother of the neighbours cousin of Ganesh , et cetera. And I hadn’t had the time to tell him that what I just wanted was to know how to leave that place when he turned he smiled and asked me for hundred rupees. So I look at him with my: Are u kidding me? face and thank him and walked around until I found my way out. We visited Thrivarappu waterfalls and Pandapurakuram palace and Mathur hanging bridge and the temple of the snake God, and saw the mountains; it was really a very nice journey.  We spent a couple of days more there, eating awesome food, swimming in the rooftop of a hotel, giving quite a show from the balcony of our hotel, to the 60 people that came to the outside of the hotel to follow one of our little disputes with Linda, in which I imitated different animals as loud as I could to make her open me the door of the balcony…  hanging with a couple of guys we met and then while we still loved that city, we left to the next place.

We arrived from Kanyakumari to Quillon, were the rickshaw driver and the hotel keepers made a conspiracy against us, so we had to stay in this 2 star hotel which was the only place not infected by cockroaches that we found. There we were kind of the middle the jungle, but fortunately near an isolated beach just inhabited by stray dogs and crabs. Soon we were surrounded by kids who probably hadn´t seen a tourist before in their lives, so they were quite exited.

The nearest restaurant was in a 20 minute walk, and we were starving. Receiving the attention of every person we face on the road, we almost give up and we were almost prepared to a death by starvation when we finally saw it, the restaurant next to a 4 meter statue of a naked woman. Witch lead to our dinner conversation the ironical contrast between the secret admiration (almost worship) of nakedness and the modesty in their way of dressing, in which an uncovered shoulder can become a scandal. 

The sun was setting down, so we decided to take a rickshaw to our hotel. The only guy who agreed to take us there was this too-exited looking young man that turned on the huge speakers as we walk into the rickshaw. So we had this Michael Jackson song destroying our eardrums and this rickshaw driver who stared at Linda and didn’t pay attention to the road. So he had the great idea of trying to harass Linda while driving at 50Km/hour in a crappie road full of bunches. What he hadn´t thought about was the angry feminist next to Linda. So I started to hit the guy to stop touching Linda. The conclusion: A small rickshaw accident, where the rickshaw lost one of its mirrors and the two angry tourists… and we couldn´t know what happened to the woman who jump into a bush, because we were busy running to our hotel for shelter.

Of course it did not stop there but as we enter our room, someone started to knock on the door in the middle of the night and we could not use the bathroom, because there was this enormous mutant cockroach.  And we were both so frustrated and tired than It felt impossible to try to kill it, because with the burden of the course of being a woman in the middle of nowhere, and all menstruated, that cockroach swelled with the weight of our own distress, until it wasn´t anymore a mere cockroach but a symbol of the wickedness of this world.  

The next morning we were happy to leave Quillon, and we went to the ferryboat to a trip that lasted 8 hours through the beautiful and famous backwaters of Kerala. 

We spent a day more in Alleppy, as Linda rested in our hotel room; I went around the riverside discussing of philosophical maters with this French gentleman that I met in the boat. As we returned of what had to be a small walk and became an 8 hour tour; a storm started again that was really something. You could see a sky full of stars illuminated by the beauty of the lightnings. And it rained and rained and rained.

The last days in Varkalam made Linda happy. We could lie on the beach as long as we wanted and the only task for the day was to find a nice place for eating.  Varkalam beach was nice, with a great cliff witch edge were full of little shops overprized for the tourists. We stayed in a very clean nice and cheap hotel called Momy bamboo house, and I recommend the place with all my heart. I spend so much time lying in the hammock reading the four books I carry with me (And I did not finish any of them). 

But something that was definitely worth it was the Black beach, a non-crowded beach next to Varkalam beach. With its beautiful black sand, and only a couple of people more, and most of them were fishermen repairing their nets. And if you just keep on walking you would find beach after beach, one more beautiful than the previous one. Totally isolated beaches were to enjoy the most beautiful sunsets in the world. The only company that I had there was this dog who followed through my walk, whom I called “Dingo”. It´s a pity that my non-working camera was stolen/lost (probably lost) and I couldn’t take any pictures of those places. 

I left the place sun tanned, but not sun burned, because the voice of my sister, who is a nurse, kept warning in my head as my conscience: You´ll get skin-cancer! And I saw to my future if I wouldn’t have been cautious: the image of a sun-worshiper granny as wrinkled as a raisin.

So we parted to Trivandrum, or that’s what we thought. Because after a little discussion we didn’t focus on the trains and we found ourselves in a train going to the TOTALLY OPPOSITE DIRECTION!  And when we asked which the next stop was? …of course… it was our favorite place in the whole Kerala: Bloody Quillon! But it gave me a great moral lesson and Linda got a real trauma in a very overcrowded train back to Trivandrum. But I think that was an experience that brought us closer to the Indian culture.  

Zoos make me sad … Especially when I see birds in cages; I just get always awfully sad. I don’t even feel with the energy of becoming a crazy activist chaining myself to a tree or breaking into the zoo by night to liberate all the innocent slave animals. It´s just this melancholy, like when someone gives me flowers, and I have to see them die slowly day by day. It´s the most depressive thing I know.  I saw this huge gorgeous eagle who hit itself against the wall, and this hyena clearly in a nervous breakdown chasing its own tail and the most depressing looking lion, whose roaring sounded more like complaining that anything else.

And I did all that as a tourist you should not do:

1. I walked alone all day, just randomly though Trivandrum, while Linda recovered from her traumatic train experience.

 2. I was sooo thirsty after a long walk through the Zoo without having breakfast that I just drank from a sink to wash your hands, because the row for the sink for the filtrated water was too long.  Not even locals do that, because they know you can get even cholera :S

3. I just bought cheap food from all the filthiest looking hutches and did not even mind when I saw the amount of those green flies that usually like spending their time on shit.

4. I bought ice-cream, which u shouldn’t buy because usually it has melted and froze again a couple of times by the time you eat it, because the breaks on the electricity are so common here. 

But I blessed the food confidently and was very happy that I did not start to puke in the middle of any of the art galleries, or anywhere else, because I have really been blessed with an iron stomach.

Then I saw the reptile house, and the aquarium, and the natural history museum and three art galleries and a culture house and I met many Christian people and I spent some time with children, and I prayed and God was with me, so I just loved it so much <3 

And now I am here writing in the plane, feeling myself a business woman with the monotonous sound of the keyboard and trying to sit straight to look even more professional (but I am dressed in this progressive tourist style, so it does not work). And I am happy, I feel more confident because I know that I can survive in any part of the world. And at least half of this vacation I have spent traveling around and we have been safe, and most of the time I have had fun.

And now I am flying to Mumbai again, and this time I am prepared.