The Final Days

Cruising Kerala

December 20th I waited for my friend Mary outside the sleek terminal building at Kochi airport, along with a fair-sized crowd of locals. It cost 75/- to get into the terminal -- and then only into a small area just inside the doors. The new international terminal was supposed to bring in tourists, but it's used mostly by Indians traveling to and from the Gulf States for work, and The Powers That Be don't want all the family members that show up to meet them cluttering up the building. In India and Pakistan airports don't seem to be regarded as public spaces as they are (or were) in the U.S. -- flying out of Chennai, as at Karachi and Agra, I had to show a ticket before I was allowed into the terminal.

I figured Mary would be tired (year-end is tough for marketing types), and needed a gentle introduction to India, so before I left the U.S. I had arranged a two night trip on the Kerala backwaters. I had to arrange it again in India, as the first company messed up our Christmas hotel reservations, and then wanted an outrageous amount (at least it seemed outrageous after my exposure to Indian prices) for transport to and from the houseboat. Thanks to the Internet, I found another company with more reasonable rates, and I handled the hotel snafu over the telephone (not from my hotel, but from one of the many ISD/STD/PCO places with metered phones).

A complex network of shallow lakes, rivers and canals meanders behind the coast in Kerala. The gleaming waters are dotted with the leaves of water hyacinth, and also with fleets of former rice barges, or imitation former rice barges, for those who want to cruise. The barges are fitted with superstructures made from coconut fiber, providing a shaded sitting area, one or more bedrooms with minuscule bathrooms, and a kitchen area. They come with a captain and a cook, but generally not with electricity and therefore not with AC. The nights were hot, but the days, spent drifting past palm-fringed shores, listening to the occasional temple bell, were idyllic. Still, after two days I was ready for dry land -- I'm no more a cruise person than I am a beach person. (Warning -- this is strictly a bring your own beer event, at least on our cruise.)

A Kochi Christmas

Back in Kochi, we moved into the Malabar House Hotel, and were wrapped in luxury and elegance. (Since I was splitting the cost with Mary, since it was Christmas, and just because it looked like a wonderful hotel, I had decided it was worth the splurge.) As I get older, Christmas keeps arriving faster and faster, and I was just as happy to spend it abroad. However, I did spend it in a relatively Christian part of India -- Kerala is 25% Christian, with a tradition dating back to the early years of the Christian era, and the reputed arrival of St. Thomas the Apostle. We attended the traditional Anglican service of Nine Lessons and Carols (some carols in English and some in Malayalam) at St. Francis, and Christmas Eve mass at the Roman Catholic cathedral (with a Latin mass). We also visited the synagogue, emblematic of a Jewish presence that dates back 2,000 years, but is now much reduced by emigration to Israel.

Malabar House celebrated Christmas with some excellent meals, a visit by the Anglican choir, and Indian music and dancers. The menu for December 25th, printed on heavy paper inside a folder decorated with photos of loose spices describes desert as: "Kalpana's fruit salad marinated in honey, mint & lime and served with xmas pudding." Mary and I also spent an evening watching traditional Kathakali dancers. The first hour, when the actors put on their make-up and demonstrated a remarkable series of facial and eye movements, was as fascinating as the performance.

I also indulged in my last massage of the trip at the hotel. Two women masseuses came to our room, and we took it in turn to lie on sheets on the floor. Another oily massage, it was a novel experience to have four hands at work instead of two. My muscles relaxed gratefully under their ministrations.

We took the night train to Chennai for my final few days in India. I had saved my souvenir shopping to the end, so that I didn't have to carry the extra weight, and Chennai did not disappoint. I bought salwar suits in the bazaar, and presents in the well-stocked state government shops on Anna Salai. I bargained in the bazaar, but not in the government shops -- a rare luxury. I also had a final tussle with a taxi driver -- in Chennai the taxis used their meters, but this driver was trying to take a detour, aiming to turn right when my map clearly said we should turn left. We turned left, and the map proved correct.

Our next to last day we took a car and driver to Mamallapuram for one last temple. Fittingly, this was another shore temple, on the same coast as Kornak, which I had visited in the north ten weeks earlier. Beautiful carvings, a balancing rock and delicious shrimp may have made me careless, but I remember Mamallapuram as the place I nearly lost my camera -- along with the 1 gigabyte microdrive containing almost all of my photographs from the entire trip... Perhaps the fact that I had just bought several statues of Ganesh, the god of good luck, saved me.

We Head for Colder Climes

Christmas in Kochi, New Year's Eve in London. It seemed like a good idea back in the summer. It was a good idea, of course, but it would have been better if the box of winter clothes Mary had mailed to London had actually arrived. We shivered. I also became aware that the correct color for London was black, not the blue and khaki I had been wearing for months. It was quite a shock after the riot of color in India.

I traveled to London in style on British Airways on my One World Award. I had one of the new-style business-class seats that actually reconfigured into a bed, in its own little cocoon. I'm 5' 5", and it was just big enough for me to lie flat. It was bliss. That was on frequent flyer miles. We used some of Mary's Marriott Hotel points to stay in a riverside room at the Marriott County Hall, which occupies half of the old County Hall (what else?) right across the river from the Houses of Parliament and next door to the new London Eye. (The river view was wonderful, but so is the location, and if you're willing to settle for the location without the view and the luxury, you can stay more cheaply in the other half of the building at the Travel Inn.)

Theaters, restaurants, the new Tate Modern, time with my sister and my niece -- as always, I loved London. But, finally, it was time to go home to North Carolina. I expected to thaw out when I reached home, but instead a snowstorm started two hours after I landed.

Last words

Aside from the piece on Mysore, all the other ramblings from 2001 were written on the road: handwritten in spiral-bound Mead notebooks and then typed on keyboards of varying quality in Internet Cafes across the continent. I prefer to write on a keyboard, but that was hardly practical. I became quite fond of the notebooks, and discovered that I hadn't taken enough. In Khajuraho I bought, with some difficulty, a thinner, larger, notebook which didn't seem to work as well. After I met Mary I didn't write in India, even on the houseboat, and the Mysore piece was written after I got home and was sitting out the snow storm -- snow is a big deal in North Carolina. But then daily life closed in, and somehow I never got around to writing the final piece on Kochi and Chennai. When I wrote about the trip, it was articles I hoped to publish, and then I got a part-time contract job as a technical writer and wrote about networks and software.

I spent part of the summer working with the 2,000+ photos from the trip, producing a 240-slide Power Point presentation. Then I put together this web site (I plan to sell the presentation through the web site next year). After it went live I called Mary and asked her to take a look. Almost her first comment was: "something must be wrong, I can't find Chennai." So, instead of spending the afternoon figuring out how email worked on my host site, I finally wrote the last words about Kochi and Chennai.

I hope you enjoyed the trip.

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