Nothing To Report

The clothes pile is still waiting to be put away, its been cloudy and raining nonstop for over a week, and I am getting over the flu. It has been an uneventful week, with nothing to report. I got what I thought was bad food poisoning on Saturday and was knocked out for a few days and now I've just been going to work and sitting around at home. Since a bunch of expats have all had the same symptoms, we've now decided that it was the flu, and it sucks. This weekend I don't have any plans, so hopefully I'll be able to do something other than lying around. Now that I've had a hiatus in hyderabad I need to get on the ball to plan my trips for the rest of my time here - there are some big ones! Malaysia, Nepal, Thailand- its time to start planning!

Hampi- Boulders, Bananas, Naughty Monkeys, Bathing Elephants, & Temples Galore

I've been a bad blogger, I admit it. I tease with pictures and then wait days until I sit down and actually write something. The problem is that when you have too much to say, you just don't want to start because you know it will take you forever to finish.

I've crossed the halfway point. I'm a week away from my original point of departure (need to call Singapore Airlines, NEED to do it!), but now that my time has been extended until September, I'm a little more than halfway through. I'm excited about the extra time, both because my job here is interesting and I love the people, and because now I can fit in the trips I haven't had time for. I've been doing a pretty good job of traveling since my 4 week haitus, and now I'm back for my first weekend in Hyderabad in 5 weeks.

My clothes have slowly migrated from the closet to a pile on my chair to the point that there aren't any clothes left in the closet. Maybe in all my spare time this weekend I'll be able to move them back to the closet so that they can start their slow and stenuous journey back to my chair, just like the penguins, taking weeks to march across the bed, through their day in the sun, the laundry, and finally onto the chair to meet their long lost mates where they huddle for warmth in my chilly 17C room.

I've started dreaming about food from home. I love Indian food, but ironically my favorite Indian dish from home, chicken korma, seems mysteriously MIA. I have yet to visit a single place anywhere in India that serves a chicken korma remotely similar to my favorite dish from home. I first became addicted to it at the Orange Sign Bengali restaurant on Brick Lane in London, so I have hope that it is native to Calcutta (now the only major city I haven't visited, and a stronghold of Bengali culture) and that I still might have the korma of my dreams in India. But mostly I miss salad- yummy, fresh salad with fresh spinach, avocado, mandarin oranges, candied walnuts and vinaigrette - fresh caprese with fresh mozzerella balls, grape tomatoes, and greek olive oil - tomates raillenos con ricotta e pesto - mmmmmmmm. I reached a point yesterday where I would have paid $100 for a grilled chicken tostada salad with extra guac and sour cream from Baja Fresh. Shannon and I have decided that we should create a Mexican restaurant in Hyderabad and name it Bajaj Fresh (Bajaj is one of the conglomerate companies like Tata that seems to own everything, including an Indian car label). We can serve real grilled chicken tostada salads to all the expats and become the hottest new hang out in Hyderabad. We can put this idea on the 'wouldn't it be funny if' wall with pimp-my-rickshaw.com (which, btw is already an owned domain.)

Real monsoons have finally rolled in, although I've been told that they'll get really bad in a few weeks. Yesterday we had our first real storm. The sky turned black, and I have never seen it so dark during the day, not even in Richmond, VA before the dark summer storms. But now the storms are only lasting a few minutes. We can watch the lightening from our office windows, and watch the rain fall in sheets. I don't envy all the people who use mopeds as their sole mode of transportation. They must just be used to being wet all the time for 3 months. Apparently its going to be like this until I go home, thus I will have been here for precisely the worst 5 weather months of the year. I think it builds character, plus now I have a more realistic view of what its like to live here (or so I keep telling myself;)

So, last week after coming back from my awesome but tiring trip to North India with Yev I was ready to just crash and spend the weekend in Hyderabad. That was until I was given the option of taking a night train with a bunch of expats to Hampi, a place that everyone says to see, but no one can really explain why. One plus of the place is that you can't fly there so only really die hard tourists and expats ever get there in the off season (apparently its overrun by partying, teenage Israeli tourists doing drugs in the high season, or so the residents told us). So we got our '2nd class A/C' tickets (it turns out there wasn't any first class cabins on the train, so second was the highest you could get), and on Friday four girls-Shannon, Kerrie, Allison, and I- headed to the Hyderabad train station for our 12 hour journey to central Karnataka.

When we got on the train we discovered that none of our seat/beds were together and I was ready to abandon ship - dumping my entire weekend stash of cookies, crackers, water, and juice on Allison- until the conductor saved the day by giving us a cubicle of 4 together (with a curtain).

In bed in our night train 'cabin'

It actually worked out better than I could have imagined, and we hung out for a few hours and then went to sleep. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Grand Central Sheraton in Bombay for providing me with a gimmicky but extremely useful 'sleep kit' which I grabbed the last time I was in Bombay, which includes a sleep mask and the best ear plugs that I have ever tried. It turns out that with earplugs, an eye mask, a bed, and the rumbling train, I can actually sleep on a moving vehicle. We arrived at 5am, just pre-dawn, and were met by rickshaw drivers sent by our guest house. I'm really glad they were there, even though they drove the worst autorickshaws I've ever seen (an believe me, living in Hyderabad, the bar is low), because Hospet, the town with the train station, was pretty dodgy early in the morning.

We rode to Hampi for half an hour, as the sun rose, past sugar cane fields and banana plantations and villagers getting ready for their days. Some people were sweeping in front of their houses, many people were making chalk symbols on their porches, shepherds were driving their flocks, oxen were pulling carts of bananas and grass. Hampi is a very picturesque place, I'd say that it and the tea plantations around Munnar are tied for the most picturesque places in India. The entire terrain is the same as Hyderabad, huge rocks, left over from the oozing super-volcano of the Deccan flats millions of years ago, mark the landscape and make it look like a storybook. Except where Hyderabad's giaint round boulders are surrounded by dry plains, Hampi's boulders are surrounded by tropical foliage, soft green grass, and rambling streams of clean water. The sky was blue, and the air wasn't polluted, which we all noticed immediately once the sun came up.

A woman writes a chalk symbol on the porch
The sun rises over Virupaksha Temple - View from the roof of the guest house

Our guest house had a great location right in Hampi between the main temple and the river, and had a nice roof top restaurant where we all drank about a million litres of chai. If it weren't for our guest house's location it would have ended up at the top of the shit list. The rooms were dirty, gross, and not air conditioned. The sink drained water onto the bathroom floor so that if one person brushed their teeth, the pasty water would go through to the bathroom floor and stick to it, waiting for the next time someone needed to use the toilet so that they could get a foot covered in old toothepaste water. There wasn't any toilet paper or towels, the bedding was gross, the windows opened into the hallway so that even though the temperature outside was mercifully cool (probably about 30C), the rooms were still hot. On the second day a cockroach ran across Allison's bed while she was lying in it, and on the night we stayed there, Allison opened her door to find random people sleeping on the floor in the hallway. Had it not been for the location and the roof it would have been a total loss, but even with those, Lonely Planet really missed the mark with their 'extremely clean guest rooms' description. If these were 'extremely clean' I really don't want to see what the ones that weren't described as clean looked like. For those of you who may plan a trip to Hampi, this place was called the Rama Guest House and it may be the nicest place to stay in Hampi (yikes!) - it was so dirty that on our night train home we were all impressed by how clean the train was.Our sketchy bed with its mosquito net

The first day we got the rickshaws that picked us up at the train station to drive us around the many temples around Hampi. We got to the first one and the rickshaws were already broken down. The rickshaw driver who was the 'tour guide' didn't know anything about the temples, and after the first temple we fired him. He followed us around a while and finally said '"well, what do I do now?"and I said 'you lied about your rickshaws. They're broken and you don't know anything about the temples. Mayng Hyderabad Mayng Hoong (I'm from Hyderabad), and we know that you're cheating us." Then he offered to drive us home and I said, "No. We'll walk." I was so angry because not only was he trying to cheat us, but he was wasting our time. He had spent half an hour trying to fix his rickshaw and then tried to drive us in it while it was clearly broken and making horrible noises. I was more worried because here no one will ever admit there's a problem, he'd rather blow up the rickshaw by kicking it and doing weird things to the engine and fuel tank than admit that it was broken. So we walked back to a temple and ended up hiring a certified guide and two new rickshaws for the same price as we had been paying the first guys.

It was cool being there in the off season because at a lot of the places we were the only people there. After several hours we were beat and ended up at a government run hotel, which also happened to be the only place in the entire town where alcohol was legally served. We sat for hours eating thali and drinking kingfisher until we dragged ourselves out to finish the tour of the tons of temples. Hampi is the remnants of one of the greatest empires in Indian history and is completely surrounded by huge temples. The British and then the modern government have tried to restore a lot of the monuments to increase their tourist value, but instead a lot of them just seem fake. Some of the rennovations are still going on, and you can see temples being built up and 'aged.' One of the temples had very scandalous carvings, reminding us again that Hinduism in the distant past was very sexually liberal.

We pose on a temple overlooking tropical banana orchards

A blind beggar waits among the banana trees near some of the many temples left over by the Vijayanagara empire.

The four girls at the Lotus Palace

Shannon enjoys fresh coconut juice

The Vittala Temple

After a whole day of site-seeing we went back to the guest house and relaxed drinking chai. We went to dinner at a restaurant offering 'killer al capone pizza' - luckily we didn't die, but the pizza was so soggy Shannon ate it with a spoon (sarcastic mmmmmm). After dinner I went to sleep early and Shannon, Kerrie, and Allison had adventures in trying to open a wine bottle with no corkscrew or glasses.

The second day I woke up early and discovered that I was locked in our room. One of the many excellent features of the ‘hotel’ was that the door always needed to be locked, either from the inside or the outside. Kerrie had gone out earlier, and so, unable to lock from the inside, she ended up locking from the outside. I stood at the window yelling ‘hello? Anyone?’ until some passing kids and their amused mother came and let me out. Luckily, I got out in time to see Lakshmi, the local temple elephant, have her bath in the river (where everyone swims, bathes, and does their laundry). After her bath, the man and boy who had been washing her climbed onto her back and headed up the stairs back to the temple. In order to get a possibly brilliant picture, I made a beeline across grass, which turned out to be a foot of deep squishy mud, as a local curiously asked Kerrie, ‘why is your friend running through the mud?’Lakshmi, the temple elephant, gets her morning bath in the river as a woman does her laundry behind - hope Lakshmi didn't have to poo...

After changing my pants, shoes, and washing my feet for 10 minutes and putting my only shoes in the sun to dry, I sat back down on the roof with some chai.

Later in the day we made our way to the big temple in the middle of the town that is still in use. It was full of naughty monkeys who steal bananas that are brought in to feed lakshmi, the same elephant from the morning, as she ‘blessed’ worshippers with her trunk. I found the temple grosser than normal and was really glad to put my shoes back on at the end.

A naughty monkey waits in the shadows for a banana to steal from Lakshmi, the elephant (back right), who gets bananas and money for blessing worshippers with her trunk at the Virupaksha Temple

We watch the Tungabhadra River with our jasmine strings 'motia bahar' from the temple

We ate lunch at the mango tree restaurant where you sit on the floor at tables that are all facing the river. There is a giant swing and the food was good, even though were constantly bombarded by flies. With a lack of anything else to do, we decided to cross the river, where there are guest houses and the big drug parties during the high season. When we got there it was ghostly silent and there was no one around. The guest houses and restaurants were closed, and there were a few random foreigners wandering around, and a few villagers were working in the fields.

I swing, overlooking the river, at the Mango Tree restaurant - The best restaurant I've been to in India, even though we had to sit on the ground

After getting creeped out, we decided to head back to the other side of the river. On our way the clouds opened up and we had our first experience with the monsoons. The rain and wind were so hard that the speedboat motor could push us across the river until the rain lightened up, and we sat on the river in a speedboat getting completely drenched. It was a fitting place to get our first real monsoon.

After some final shopping and showers we headed to Hospet where we found a real hotel with a real restaurant. We had a leisurely 3 hour dinner (including a section on the menu labeled ‘titbits ;) and then headed to the night train for another 12 hours of fun. It was a beautiful place that I’m glad I’ve been to, and the trip was fun with the company, and I’m glad that I’m not going there again or taking such an adventurous trip without some time to rest and relax ;)

Hampi Historical Stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampi

The Taj Mahal

Guest Starring Yev Part Dva

On Wednesday night we flew to Delhi to begin our North Indian adventure, through Amritsar and Agra. In Delhi we saw a gorgeous Muslim tomb built by one of the rulers from the same family line that built the Taj Mahal, and due to the steamy temperature of 47 C (117 F), it was empty- Not one visitor. Now mind you it was a Thursday, possibly during Muslim prayers and the heat was around 117F. However, it was completely empty. Arguably one of the top three tourist destinations in Delhi, not to mention the city itself is 20 million people strong, and we were there all alone, except for the couple of “guides” that followed us around and attempted to tell the history of the place for a tip. I finally acquiesced to one and learned all about the place for a mere 20 rupees, or US 50c. Well worth it.

We capped off the day with a trip to Barista Coffee. Think Starbucks, but with coffee that isn’t burned and without the smell of trendy yuppie elitists emanating from the overpriced coffee. In fact it’s a very nice, very clean chain that sells coffee, smoothies, shakes, snacks and desserts. We had cold coffee drinks, made by adding ice cream not ice (since you can’t drink the water and the ice doesn’t have a manufacturer seal so it’s a bit dodgy), with some awesome chocolate cake. It was yummy and helped us forget that the outside temperature was hotter than any square inch of the US at any point during that week.

The next day we got up early to take a 7am train to Amritsar in Punjab by the Pakistan border, the home of the Sikh religion. Trains in India are a bit scary. Even the US newspapers report on accidents, terrorist acts and general mishaps that befall the Indian rail system. But it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that taking air, and is financially accessible to some more of the other 99% of the country’s population that cannot afford to fly. Except for the fact that the five hour train ride turned into almost seven, which should not be possible given there is no traffic, the train was pleasant and our first class air conditioned cabin was, indeed, air conditioned.

In Amritsar we stayed at the top rated hotel. It was $40 a night, had about half a dozen small lizards crawling around the walls of our room, had their own cattle for milking and the cold water was a frosty 95F. Needless to say, we weren’t in Kansas anymore. But our hotel also had air conditioning in the room, endless refrigerated bottles of water and pepsi and an attentive staff that was available all day and night.

We shared the car to the hotel with a couple from Israel, Naama(sp?) and Ibrahim, and their Turkish friend, Jack. Not sure whether they were Palestinian or Jewish and not wanting to cause another international incident at the India/Pakistan border, we hopped around the subject of Juddaism for a while, until it came out that all three of them, including the Turkish guy, were Jewish. They were nice enough and we spent the rest of the evening with them carpooling to the Pakistan border (where we joked that we really didn’t want to get lost and end up on the wrong side of the border, especially the Israelis, who are literally not allowed into Pakistan) dinner at the hotel and walking around the golden temple.

Amritsar is well known for two things, their nightly border ceremony with Pakistan, as seen on National Geographic and PBS, and the golden temple- the most sacred site in the Sikh faith.

The border crossing was cool for one reason, and one reason only; we were a stone’s throw away from Pakistan. Do you remember that episode of the Simpsons where Homer is in Australia at the US embassy, and he jumps from inside to outside of the gates, yelling “America, Australia, America, Australia…?” I kind of felt like that. There was this fence that split the land as far as the eye could see. There was no difference in the way the land looked, but just on the other side of that fence was Pakistan, a country that carries with it very negative connotation of safety, personal freedoms and general individual rights. Not to mention that our friend Osama probably lives somewhere within its borders, or possibly in Portland (it’s hard to tell). Anyway, I thought that it would be great fun to jump from one side to the other yelling “India, Pakistan, India, Pakistan…”, but just like Homer in that episode, I would have been punched in the face and dragged off. Another international incident averted by television.

The rest of the ceremony was quite frankly lame. Some crowd chants, some music playing, some marching, an eventual lowering of the flags as the border closed with the same importance as a convenience store, and that’s about it. Oh it was also hot, really hot, and the fact that we were sitting on concrete benches didn’t help. I tried starting the wave but no one else was into it. I should have jumped up and done a Bollywood dance routine, but alas I’m white and don’t have much of a groove.

The golden temple on the other hand was breathtaking. I never knew that Sikhs were tremendous showmen, but there you go. They built this temple shrine in the middle of a lake, now an aquamarine pool with giant goldfish swimming around and Sikhs bathing in the holy water. Then they coated the outside walls with gold and lit it up like a Christmas tree. Needless to say, at night it’s amazing. Also there is a ceremony where the sacred text is carried out of the temple into storage on a golden throne every night, so the place is pretty much packed with people from sunrise to well past sunset. Within five minutes of arriving I was approached by an Indian-English Sikh. Interesting fellow, he was there on a two-month externship at a local hospital. He is a medical student back home in Norwich, and recently went gung-ho into being Sikh. He spent the next hour fielding my questions (ranging from “how do you fly with that knife around your neck?” to “how did your parents react when you decided to do this?”) and in general praising the Sikh faith. It was like a walking Wikipedia entry, although without the benefit of others objecting to the level of bias. To summarize his opinion on the subject, Sikhs are good, Sikhism is good, and as any decent minority they have been persecuted in India for generations. He also showed me into the special queue to help carry the book on its thrown as it was carried out of the temple. And, I had my shirt wrapped around my head the whole time, since you have to cover your head in Sikh temples.

After jumping the train back to Delhi, our next destination was Agra and the Taj Mahal. We got a car to drive us from Delhi to the Oberoi hotel. The hotel was awesome. The room faced the Taj, the service was top notch, and they even got us an anniversary cake. The next day we actually went to the Taj Mahal. We got there at 5:45am, and waited in line until 6am when it opened. It was worth it. Our pictures were tourist-free and the Taj really is an amazing architectural achievement. We sat on the bench immediately in front of the Taj and watched tourists take ridiculous pictures for an hour, and put the “we’ll take your picture for $5” hawkers out of business by taking pictures of people for free (muahaha). Ashley had about 5000 pictures taken of her in her sari by Indians who were fascinated by the strange specimen of a white girl in a sari. Inside the lights were off and it seemed very bland and uninspiring, but from a distance it really is remarkable (see the pictures for yourself).

A ten-day adventure was capped by the crown jewel of Indian history and architectural splendor. I was ready to go home and away from garbage on the streets. I missed fresh fruits and vegetables, the ability to brush my teeth using tap water and driving down the street without fearing for my life. But overall, I now appreciate my modern conveniences and the easy flow of life in California more than ever.

North Indian Adventure - Delhi & Amritsar

At the top of the Golden Temple

The sacred Sikh text is carried from the temple in the golden sedan, fanned with feather fans, as if it were an ancient king.

Kids who followed us around asking us to take their picture

Yev and his new Sikh British Friend

The Golden Temple at Amritsar

The colorful crowd pack into the stands awaiting the nightly changing of the flags at the border

India - Pakistan - India -Pakistan...

What you can do at historic monuments when no one's around

At the empty tombs in Delhi - The people in the background vanished before we got to the tombs- maybe the 117 degree heat melted them ;)

Special Guest Appearance By Yev

Do you remember those Scrubs episodes when the writers clearly don’t have any good material with JD as the main character? To solve this problem they simply have JD “tap” one of the supporting characters like Turk, Carla or Elliot and the whole episode is shown from their perspective using their inner monologues. Think of this as a “very special” episode of Ashley’s blog as she taps out to her version of “Elliot” (sort of)…

While she may have never mentioned it before, my name is Yev and I’m her boyfriend. A little context here may be useful. We’ve been dating since freshman year (5 years) and I’ve been her travel companion, bag attendant and general sherpa-of-all-trades as we’ve traveled to England, Scotland, the Czech Republic, Fiji, Australia, France, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Ukraine and, most recently, Italy. Now that she’s been in India for quite some time I’ve decided to track across the Atlantic to set out on our newest adventure. Amazingly our flights started in the same place and flew in exactly the opposite directions - mine through London and hers through Singapore – to ultimately make it to the same place, proving once again that the world is in-fact round.

All right let’s get right to it, we’ve got more than a week of tromping to catch up on.

I first saw Ashley on Friday as I landed in Cochin, otherwise known as Kochi to our postcolonial Indian friends (most cities in India have two names, think Mumbai/Bombay). The flight was two hours late, but as I would come to find out the more appropriate description would be the flight was only two hours late.

Observation 1: Indian air travel is not for the faint of heart.

First your flight will inevitably be late. This in itself is OK because US flights are late all the time. However the problem arises in that unlike US airports, once you cross past security into the waiting area there is very little to do and sometimes its impossible to go back into the general ticketing area which may have a bit more in terms of entertainment, shopping, dining options, etc. I actually witnessed an irate, native Indian, business class traveler verbally berate an airline employee because he could do nothing to let him go back outside of security when it was announced that our flight was two hours late. All the while they were standing next to the head of the security checkpoint as he barely flinched, pretended to ignore the traveler and ultimately said, “no exiting the security area”. Ironically enough I was able to grant exit by telling them that I needed to go outside in order to change my US currency to rupees (yay capitalism) in order to call Ashley about the flight delay. I think it may have helped that I was clearly a foreigner and armed to the teeth with travel gear. However, in general the plane gets you where you need to go so I guess its OK.

The next day we had the full Cochin experience; walk by the water in the main city, watching the sunset in Fort Cochin as an army of kittens paraded around looking for the fresh catch, a canoe ride through the backwaters (used as a laundry, bath, and pool at the same time), oh and one other thing…having the driver side mirror ripped clearly off of our tour van by an oncoming bus and having it fly through the aforementioned van as we continue to weave in and out of traffic. This brings us to:

Observation 2: Driving in India is unlike anything I have ever experienced before…read scary, life flashing before your eyes scary.

Here is the thing, while there are marked lanes on the roads, streetlights sprinkled around major intersections, and a smattering of traffic cops, driving in India is completely and utterly out of control. Cars, trucks, busses, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, cattle and goats weave in and out of lanes, squeeze through the tiniest openings and cross into oncoming traffic if there is even the smallest chance that they may not end up slamming head on before dodging back into relative safety. At least when you take an auto-rickshaw they can’t go very fast, and when you take a hotel or hired car they generally do what they can to keep their car in one piece, but these facts do little to assuage one when you sit in a car and experience the madness that I think directly correlates with a group of people migrating from bicycle to car use without so much as an adjustment in driving behavior despite the 5x increase in average speed.

The next day Ashley took me to see the 500-year-old Cochin synagogue (see previous posts for interesting facts). The Jews here did a fantastic job of completely sequestering themselves from the rest of the population. So much so that as soon as the congregation dies off, which may be sooner rather than later, as the youngest member is a 34-year old who is obviously the byproduct of generations of inbreeding, the state will inherit the synagogue, which includes the sacred Torah. This would be OK except that sacred places and monuments here have a tendency to slowly disintegrate. This brings me to my next observation…

Observation 3: Indian monuments are amazing, and it’s a damn good thing that we get to see them now, because they simply won’t last.

Indian monuments, churches, mosques, temples, castles, etc., are amazing, rivaling their European counterparts- the only problem is they were more amazing 20 years ago, and more amazing 50 years ago, and so on. While their European brothers go out of their way to restore historic structures, in India they sit around and slowly disappear. Murals fade away, stone walls crumble and fall, graffiti and trash permeate on the facades and grounds of the most amazing structures I’ve ever seen. But what do you expect? This country has other pressing needs. Water, energy, food - it’s a grab bag of social issues that take precedence over the preservation of century old buildings. Such is life.

We then flew back to Hyderabad where I spent the next three days hanging out in hotel Google. We spent an evening at the old fort ate a really good authentic Indian dinner and witnessed some general guest house staff shenanigans which included them pounding on Ashley’s door for five minutes as I was taking a nap simply to attempt to clean the room for the second time that day (yes it was still clean from the first time). The one thing that did stand out for me during my time in Hyderabad was how fairly benign the city’s trash problem was, and in correlation how nice the city smelled.

Observation 4: Indian cities, even the large developed ones, smell.

It really makes you appreciate the amazing innovation that is the landfill. Aggregating trash into one central, and hopefully distant, location is a wonderful phenomenon. Indeed driving through an Indian town you see trash everywhere. Even the large historic monuments are littered. Because of this certain parts of the city smell very badly (think New Jersey). I can only imagine that this problem gets worst when it rains and the trash begins to rot. To really prove my point I’d like to reference an episode of the Simpsons, which we ironically watched in India, where Apu reacts to a particularly bad smell by saying (with a bad Indian accent), “That is the worst smell I’ve ever smelled, and I’m from India.”

Kerala Part Deux

In our auto-rickshaw in Cochin

Sunset at the Arabian Sea

Women do laundry in canals in the backwaters of Kerala

Yev and I take a canoe/snakeboat through the backwaters in Kerala

A traditional woman spins rope out of coconut stringy stuff (that's a technical term...) Villagers all along the canals were spinning rope this way

In a village only accessible by canoe and dirt roads

Soaking in the backwaters (not literally cuz it was swampy and gross...)