Our taxi driver this morning was a jerk. He was supposed to be there at 4:45 and was not there on time and you could tell he was pissed he had to be there so early. We paid a fortune for the 10 minute ride to the Mumbai airport, much much more per mile than the 1 hour ride we had taken the night before. He definitely had an attitude and did not speak nor understand a word of English! So why is he the guy taking foreigners to the airport???

We had a scary landing in Kerala at the Cochin airport but at least it was a successful landing. We were wheels down and close to landing and all of the sudden we went straight back up really fast. We circled for a bit then came back in for a rough landing where when the pilot hit the breaks our Kindles went flying down under the seats several rows down.  Fortunately the man across the aisle saw where they went.

We had arranged a hired driver to take us to Munnar, a Hill Station, which were resorts built by the British when they ruled here. The last hour or so was up the mountain on switchbacks. So I am thinking, good, at least there won’t be all the crazy passing anytime anywhere and driving on the wrong side of the road. I could not have been more wrong! He (and everyone else) were passing on the switchbacks, sometimes while talking on their cell phones!!!!! A harrowing 3 hours later, we arrived at a beautiful resort, The Leaf. It was beautiful, quite, and calm and no blowing horns or barking dogs. (A quick note about the most of the hotels we visited in India. Upon arrival they give you a refreshing drink of some kind, variations on lemonade, rose water,etc. They also will place a Tilak or red mark on your forehead as a form of greeting and welcome.) A wonderful respite from the craziness of the cities for the last 3 weeks. A nap refreshed us both from the overnight flight to be able to sit by the pool for a bit later on. The temperature here is great: a lot cooler. We actually both wore long pants last night!

A Spice plantation tour we stopped at was a huge disappointment. It was just some plants set up along a very dangerous path that had been sniffed and cut to within a inch of their lives for the tourists. We opted out of a couple of tours of lakes with boating; turned out to be a good decision…no big deal because they were man made lakes. But we did do a tea plantation tour and that was very good. The tea plantations are just beautiful. The women who pick the tea have to be half mountain goat. They have to pick at least 21 kg of tea a day but can pick more to earn more. That is 46 pounds of tea leaves which is a lot bulk wise because tea leaves are not heavy! They use a kind of hedge clipper with a bag attached to the bottom. When that bag is full, they transfer it to the bag on their backs.

Then we visited a school/workshop for “differently abled” people where they dye textiles using natural dyes and batik methods and paper products. It was great to see and right up my alley!

In the evening, we headed to a cultural folk dance and a martial arts demonstration. They were both really bad. The martial arts demo was more gymnastics (flips, handstands, etc) than fighting and the dance was a guy in a fat man suit wiggling his eyebrows….I kid you not!

Word that the opposition party in Kerala was going to stage a strike tomorrow reached the ears of our driver so we left the hotel at 4:00am in order to get to our next hotel before they blocked the roads. Apparently all business and schools are closed; the state basically stops. We were told that on average there are 2 strikes like this a month! We made it to our hotel with 2 road blocks; one with no stop and one with several minutes stop. We left a beautiful hotel with fabulous food and staff to come to a so-so hotel with crappy food and we are stuck here all day: no elephant ride, no national park, which were both on the schedule. So we figure we will spend the day planning for Vietnam…but the wifi is crappy!!! It is going to be a loooooooong day! And we are waiting in the lobby for our room to be ready with 4 bars of a Kenny G song playing over and over…no exaggeration….it is the same 4 bars, then it stops, then it plays again and this went on for over an hour….we are in Kenny G Hell!!!

Well, the wifi got better; lunch was better than breakfast. I swear , though, they are keeping an eye on us. The hostess came over while we were waiting for our lunch and tried to start a conversation but her English is so bad, the experience was painful. And she just stood there, and stood there, and stood there.We went back up to our room and sat on the lovely patio overlooking the forest and worked on plans for Vietnam.

Now one thing you need to know is that eating out in India is very time consuming. They cook everything fresh so it is a minimum of 20 -25 minutes between the time you order and the time you get your meal. We were going to walk into town because we were told after the strike ended at 6pm, stores would open but it has been pouring for the last couple of hours. We decided we did not want to wait for dinner in the dining room, so we tried to call room service. After the second call and we got nowhere, Buzz went down and found out that because of the strike, one of the chefs could not get here so they did not have half of the items on the menu. So we ate bread, fruit, chocolate, and warm beer for dinner! Funny, we made it 2.5 hours to avoid the strike but he couldn’t get to the hotel from across town. This little smattering of people in the video below held up an entire town today; I feel really bad for all the shopkeepers who lost a day’s income for this:

We ended up having a pretty good night’s sleep for sleeping on a slab of cement. The electric has gone off numerous times (as it has almost everywhere else we have been) but at least they had a generator so it was always only off for a minute. No hot water or water pressure in the morning so the maintenance guy game up and fixed it yet there was not enough for 2 showers so I got nice and cooled off! Breakfast was abominable….how can items coming straight out of the kitchen be cold???? We were very glad to leave The Spice Grove Inn and head to Aleppy.

So Buzz wanted a couple of beers. Kerala state runs the liquor stores. We saw some that had huge lines of people waiting at them. Buzz stopped at this one; you can see his orange sleeve behind the cages you have to walk through. The guy in the white shirt outside is, Mr. Jhoby, our driver.

On the way to Aleppy, our driver started telling us about coconut toddy. We didn’t quite understand what he was explaining but he explained it was low alcohol, like beer, and did we want to taste it. I used the phrase many Indians use and I have come to appreciate: “Why Not?” So a few miles later we pulled over and stopped at a restaurant looking place and he led us to a private table that is screened from the other tables by a curtain (in this case, green burlap) on all sides. The toddy was brought in a clay pot and it was delicious. It tastes lemony and is quite refreshing. We were going to stop and get wine for the houseboat but decided to get toddy instead. So he poured us some more in an empty water bottle and they punch a hole in the top so the fermenting liquid does not blow the top off. Between our driver’s explanation and a Google search we learned that the sap of certain palm trees is drained from the palm where the coconut was attached and boom…you got toddy. Nothing is done to it; you drink it like Mother Nature intended. The tree is drained daily and will only produce a few coconuts rather than the hundred a non-toddy tree will produce. And it has to be drunk within 12 hours because it starts getting really sour. Another day, another surprise.

Aleppy is where we get on our houseboat. The houseboats are reincarnated rice barges and you cruise around a lake and the backwaters and stay overnight on the water. We have a captain and a cook and a houseboy for just Buzz and I!! We cruised for about 45 minutes then they served us lunch followed by about 3 more hours of cruising. We have to dock for the night by 5:30pm; it is the rule so that the fisherman have a chance to get out on the lake. There are so many houseboats ( we later found out 1500 with more being built every day) and this is not even the high season!! A bit before we docked they served us masala tea and some fried onion appetizers. A crow helped himself to the items we didn’t finish. We will be served dinner in a little while and in the morning after breakfast, we will cruise for about an hour back to the dock.

Along the ride back to Kochi, we stopped at a beach which could have been beautiful except for the huge amounts of trash on it. But there was a crew of women starting to rake it up when we left. We also stopped at some Chinese fishing nets and the fisherman worked them for us a couple of times. They are very cool.

We headed out for lunch after we checked into our hotel and then headed back to the room to organize. We will have to ship another package home so we organized that and separated the dirty clothes out: we will have access to a washer and dryer in Hanoi on Tuesday. Yea! Then we headed out to walk along the beach and see the Chinese fishing nets in Kochi. The were all broken and the beach is a mess. We were planning on spending tomorrow on the beach but no way. India is starting to wear on us. They have so many potentially beautiful places but they have trashed most of them, very frustrating. For instance, we are walking along a fairly nice and new paver walkway along the beach and then we come upon this:

We headed out to a little street café and ordered grilled King Fish and it was fantastic. For whatever reason, they also brought us an order of french fries and said they were free. As I mentioned before, there is definite profiling going on here. We were talking to an American at the last hotel who is Indian and he got his room last, after the whites, even though he arrived first. Yet, the snide comments (even though we don’t understand them) and dirty looks were back again today.

A couple of words about Kerala. When one of our taxi drivers in Mumbai learned we were going to Kerala, he called it India’s Heaven. It is beautiful in the mountains; the tea plantations, flowers blooming everywhere. Now here is the interesting thing: the strike the other day was by the party not in power in Kerala. The party that is now in power is …get ready for it…. communist! Yet Kerala is the most educated, most Christian, and most prosperous state that we have seen. There are houses here that are gorgeous in any time zone. Yet the people here are less friendly than just about anywhere we have been. This country is such a paradox. The countryside is littered with these 3 and 4 story “shrines” which in the rest of the country would have a Hindu god but here it is a saint and Mary and Jesus…and they are all really scary looking.

Sleeping in a little, taking it easy, working on the blog, getting a package ready to send home with souvenirs and a couple of things we really don’t need, like a hair dryer (my hair is dry in minutes and I am not about to blow hot air on myself purposely here!) We did some shopping and walking around and came across this powdered watercolor stand…the colors are made from ground semi-precious stones and natural dyes….gorgeous!

Later we stopped at the same street café we went to last night and had a Kerala Seafood Feast. We split this and it came with lemon rice and fries and was $18. Fantastic! )

While waiting for our dinner, I took this shot of the Rain trees above our heads.

We mailed a package home…hell, we could have bought everything at Pier One for what it cost to mail the package. The clerk gave us the first price and we said no way and the price dropped by 1/3 immediately!! Still a rip off but….we will have to be a little more careful in what we purchase.

We had arranged for a driver through the uncle of an ex-colleague at J&J to take us to the airport and a museum we wanted to check out but the guy called today and said he could not get us a driver so we paid ¾ room rent to have the hotel room until 6pm when a taxi could come get us. We are happy sitting in the AC; it is so hot today and the sun is not even out! Our flight for Hanoi leaves at 11:30pm and gets in at 11:30am. Our only hope is that Vietnam, at least the north part, will be cooler.

We want to take a minute to thank everyone for all the supportive (and humorous) comments on the blog posts. It makes us feel not so far away and gives us strength to keep on going when everything feels overwhelming. Thank you so much for being our family and friends…we love you all.