Weird Kerala

The old policy of doing no research whatsoever and saying yes to things yielded homoerotic results in Kerala recently. Like a normal person, I tend to offer some kind of perfunctory response if someone comes at me and says 'hello' or 'how are you?' or 'what is your name?', but I've come to realise the gravity of this assumption in India: it is an error, nearly always meaning you're about to be extorted or have some totally balls product offered to you. Although I am close to perfecting my 'talk to the hand' palm off, otherwise known as 'the Kanye', I forgot myself when I got off the bus in Kumily, dazed after a long and dusty bus ride from Munnar hill station. A squat man thrust a brochure in my face some moments after my feet touched the tarmac and after some frantic bartering, I was enlisted for a 90 minute Ayurvedic massage, mainly just as a result of wanting the guy to leave me the fuck alone. I rocked down to the centre later that evening after a rough as houses pizza dinner (see photos) and was promptly told at the desk that I could have the full body version of the massage for zero extra cost. This seemed like a no brainer. I was there on the seemingly never ending quest for a 'culturally authentic' experience that constitutes travelling, and besides, bargains should usually always be snapped up so I went for it, expecting an EU-style pleasant back rub and pat down. I was in for a surprise though because the tiny 50 year old man with hands like iron and a chesty cough immediately made me strip naked and don what can only be described as a tissue nappy held up with string that would soon turn completely transparent. Once I was in my nappy he sat me down and poured an immense amount of oil all over me, coating my head, torso, face and legs with it before madly scrubbing my scalp in that way you do, aged 9, to your younger sister when you want to really mess her hair up to annoy her. After that he made me lie face down on a wooden table, took the nappy off and slathered my back and bare arse in much more oil, bade me relax and spent the next hour running his hands up and down my body front and back, generally rubbing the shit out of me. He thought I was OK with everything because I lied and because I was able to let my body go slack through sheer force of will, little did he know however that my teeth were tense and gritted powerfully through a combination of trying not to laugh and wanting to cry out. It was decent enough if you like that sort of thing and it was an experience, so they said, to be savoured and never forgotten. I can't help but agree with the latter part of that statement. I will never have one again. After Kumily I went to Alleppey, which was nice. On one of the days I did a nine hour tour along the backwaters with a monosyllabic fisherman, taking breakfast and dinner in his house whilst he and his wife ate in the next room, occasionally peering at me around the corner of the door frame as I sat there alone. He also took me for a 'Toddy' which is basically coconut beer that tastes nothing like coconuts or beer. This tour was the main thing I did in Alleppey other than sit smoking on the beach and playing Carom with some French. This was because the whole experience was coloured by dramatic events the morning of the canoe tour when I realised that I'd lost my belt and, in the process of looking for it, discovered a dried dead frog in my backpack. This terrible discovery raised many questions: 1. Why has this happened? 2. How has this happened? 3. Did the frog live in my bag or simply go there to die? 4. My body is covered in a vast constellation of mosquito bites. Are the two events linked in some way? 5. Was the frog planted there by the scum who stole my belt? No one can know the answers to any of these questions, least of all me. Only one thing is certain though, a dead frog was a serious thing to find and the repercussions have not yet sunk in, either physically or mentally. I'm in Varkala now and it is very pleasant - loads of nice beaches. I will leave today and go somewhere else.

A few from Munnar countryside

The childish pizza

There is a tremendous amount of platonic man love over here

The fisherman's house and one of the canoe tour

Appalling

Hampi Fear

I will recommend Hampi. It's pretty idyllic there, huge mysterious boulders that could have been dropped out of the sky, monkeys and mad temples and a lazy river that does well at sunset. My only caveat would be that you should go fully prepared to be meithered for postcards everywhere you go and be ready to encounter plenty of dread locked bongo playing types in MC Hammer pants who listen to Thievery Corporation and have cut glass torsos that they spend hundreds of hours on, yet claim never to do anything to. People who belong in Bristol basically. As I said last time, we rode bikes about and we swam in fresh water lagoons and all that other smug stuff. Up at the temple on one of the days a monkey started on Alex, which was quietly hilarious yet also terrifying. It wrapped its arms around his legs at one point and all I could think about as I fled around the corner of the temple to save myself was that I hoped it would come nowhere near me as I was too much of a tight arse to have all of my rabies jabs before I left. Later on in the five days we buzzed around the ruins of temples, which I know is magical and all that but which I find pretty tedious after half an hour or so. Evocative and mystical feelings can go only so far when you're sweating your tits off around some rubble - though I admit the carvings were pretty awesome and we also saw a Cobra - which some Indians made me take a photo of: my heart again filling with fear as I got close, at the thought that something might happen to me. On one night we chugged the magic mushrooms I brought. We were going to have them in the day and swim at the reservoir then be down in time for nightfall so we could go for dinner and endure some more of the mystic warrior zen chill step tunes they play in most of the venues. We left it too late though and when night fell still nothing had happened so we decided to head back. I came up hard as I was riding a motorbike in the dark through an Indian Village, and it was honestly one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. The road swelled, babies and people looked massive, as did the lights of the tuk-tuks and other bikes, and I became convinced I was going the wrong way and I was doing it at 100 mph. I was probably only going at about 20 though, if that. I managed to sort myself out slightly once we'd left the town (it looked looked like a ghost tunnel and people kept talking to us), and we eventually found an ancient aquaduct where nearby some men in robes were chanting outside a shrine to some deity that had a tiger bursting out of it's belly. The stars were shining like mad and the lights from the road kept lighting up the ruin whilst the men sang and I thought my head was going to explode. I'm not making this up. Later we climbed up on the rocks above the town and the three of us talked about how scared we had been; well, how scared Rupert and I had been, and it was hilarious (mushroom hilarious) and a lot of fun, but I'm not sure I'd do it again. Too much of a blag. I'm alone again in Kerala now, staying in Fort Kochi for one more night before going off elsewhere. Weirdly, I ended up having dinner with a 50 odd year old Dutchman who visits Goa every year the other night. I suspect he is a sex tourist - it's in the eyes - but he claims to be quite good friends with the trumpet player from UB40 who later went on to be in the Fine Young Cannibals. I used to absolutely buzz off the FYC's when I was a kid so that pleased me and enabled me to overlook Tom's suspected sexual deviance. Last night I tried to go to a festival with loads of elephants but a huge monsoon stopped me. I love lightning so I tried to take a few pictures of it, snapping away excitedly with my slow camera whilst the glum Indians waited the storm out as they must always do, but turns out it is very hard to catch on film (who knew?). Few more fairly standard pics below.

Rupert at some of the ruins.

These were the best ruins BY FAR

The Cobra

Fort Kochi

The storm last night. There was so much lightning it was like being under a strobe but the last pic was the only time I managed to catch it.

Knackered/lost in Mumbai

Whenever I mentioned I was going to India the vast majority of people smirkingly asked me if I was 'going there to find myself', and I would of course say: 'no, no not really', then tell them to fuck themselves and then smash a pool cue around their heads (in my mind). Now that I'm here though, I think that whilst I haven't exactly found myself or anything lame like that, I have realised a few things more clearly. The first thing I have realised is that my sense of direction, although I knew it was bad, is terrible. Not just terrible, worse than I could ever possibly have imagined. Worse than anything. What possessed me to start this trip in a 603 km city with a population of 11 million people I will never know, but I did, and it resulted in me essentially getting lost on average about five or six times a day for four days. Naturally I blame the Indians as much as myself. They don't like to admit they don't know where you want to go so if you ask for direction they just smile, point vaguely West and say something cryptic like 'second place', or they yammer something unintelligible at you and you end up too embarrassed to admit you don't know what they've told you so you just walk on none the wiser, walking further from the intended destination than ever before. I don't know why I do this. (Is it a British trait or a personal one?) regardless, you see what I've been dealing with. My incompetence has meant my initial sightseeing was far from ideal to begin with, traipsing in 35 degree heat for hours, delving into my rucksack every five minutes to consult my shit Lonely Planet map (a guy I met calls it the Lonely Liar) and then still getting it wrong. Still, I saw loads of the city and found some pretty rad stuff even if I did find it by accident. The Victoria Terminus station was one thing - amazing - and I also saw Haji Ali's mosque. The mosque is mega, like something our of Aladdin, standing in the pink sunset on a jetty in the Arabian Sea, although there were pure beggars hanging outside next to loads of goat and cows and mounds of appalling shit, waving stumps and so on around which kind of dampened my mojo of discovery somewhat. I also saw some mad sunsets at Back Bay and the Hanging Gardens too where they hang dead bodies for some reason (though you can't see them) which attracts eagles and other large and intimidating birds. I also rode the train, hanging out of the door, up to the Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat where loads of blokes were washing laundry, which is honestly a lot more interesting than it sounds. Other shit too which I cant be arsed to describe. I realise I'm banging on a bit here now but suffice to say I caught a 15 hour night train from Mumbai and a load of mental buses to Hampi where I am now where I've been riding motorbikes around the mountains. Hampi is a place that I can honestly say is as close to a paradise as I've ever seen. The highlights of the journey to Hampi were being surrounded at Guntakal station by about fifty children like I was Charles Bronson in the Magnificent Seven, and being awoken from my trusty valium sleep in my 'sleeper carriage' (sleeping on the the bunks is like trying to sleep on a washing machine) by a screaming baby and having to sit there in the dark whilst the mother changed the kid's nappy and filled the entire cabin with the smell of noxious milky poo vapour. I will leave you with that. Below are some photos, although another thing I've realised is that I'm not a very good photographer either.

a bit of Victoria Terminus (really doesn't do it justice)

Sunset at Back Bay

The mosque (it's a lot bigger in real life obviously)

Although the water by the mosque was inviting, I had unfortunately forgotten my swimming trunks

It would be easy to be mean here but this woman was one of the nicest people I've met whilst I've been away.

Another of the sleeper carriage - unfortunately it has me in it. Apologies.

Alex and Rupert bossing it, and my bike. Costs a quid and you get it for the day.

A couple of the Jurassic Park style views from Hannuman's temple up on a boulder mountain in Hampi.

A wonderful bistro in Mumbai and a crap shot of Hampi where you get the ferry over to the hostel where I am inflicting myself.

Arrival.

I am sure that those of you bothering to read this will be delighted to hear that I have arrived in Mumbai now. The three valiums I ate made the flight dreamy, the landing surreal and made me too terrified to do anything but shuffle timidly to a grinning taxi driver on arrival, paying the man far too much to get me to where I needed to be. I have barely left Europe my whole life so imagine my slack jawed disbelief at the sight of this very hot and very strange place filled with people lying on the floor, shouting, running and weaving wicker baskets beneath tarpaulins under motorway overhangs. After a hair whitening hour long taxi ride through dusty traffic (traffic laws? WHAT TRAFFIC LAWS??)to the Gateway of India, a huge monument overlooking the harbour, I wandered around for a while to attempt to find my bearings, but found them largely elusive. Some half hour or so into my uneasy two mile sojourn around the streets of Colaba and the surrounding market area of Fort, I was accosted by a man with a moustache named Babu. Babu tried to sell me a map I did not want and was delighted to hear that I am an Englishmen; the next thing I knew he was buying me a cup of chai tea and we were having some beers, however, I soon found myself paying for everything including a 'salad' for him, and ultimately sat there looking at the door whilst he described his appreciation of cricket to me in incredibly broken English. Having escaped from Babu, scribbling his number down in my notebook with the empty assurance that I would call him and we would meet up again today, I went to 'Leopold's' (against Babu's advice), a supposedly trendy hotspot that, after my bloody minded insistence that I go there, ironically turned out to be of poor quality. Still, they served me curry and cheap beer and I was able to amuse myself with dry judgmental assumptions about the clientele, so it wasn't a total loss. After dinner I walked around some more and tried to take photos but the flash on my camera appears to be faulty. This, in addition to the aggressively slurred shouts of a man demanding to know why I was taking photos, led to a swift retreat back to my cheap and cheerful salvation army hostel for the evening where I was obliged to ignore the lizard that bolted from the door when I went to brush my teeth, and compelled to perpetrate a small cockroach holocaust before bed. As I hurled myself into a rather sweaty slumber I managed around two minutes of conversation with my American bunk mate who seemed pleasant enough. However I discovered this morning that he has now left India for good. I hope it wasn't something I said. I am now in an internet cafe about to go on another wander. Later I am planning to visit the Global Pagoda and some place called Elephanta Island, both of which must be accessed by ferry. Apparently Elephanta Island has a massive statue of Shiva, which presumably gives it its name. Either that or there are a number of rampaging Pachyderms trapped in a very enclosed space where they send annoying tourists such as myself to, for a small price. After that I shall probably eat more curry and drink more beer.