Jun 2006

Hi there,

My last entry was written in Kochi (Not Kocki as previously stated, I doubt that's even a place!) where we caught the first bits of the monsoon weather and spent three days enjoying the excuse to get a bit of reading done, play lots of cards and finally venture out in the early evening, when there was normally a bit of a dry spell. It doesn't really cool it down much, just turns the place from sauna to steam room pretty quickly. Kochi was really nice, it's made up of two islands off the mainland, one which is a naval base and the other, Fort Kochi, an old Portuguese fort, which is where we stayed. You could tell it would be spilling over with tourists in the right season, but again we missed that all. You could see it for the fishing town it used to be with these enormous Chinese fishing nets that are cast into the sea all day, taking 6 men and a system of counterbalanced rocks to shift. We spent a fair bit of time watching those, and gaping at the enormous fish and little sharks that they'd pulled up.

From there we went on to Alleppey, and spent a heart-stopping forty quid on chartering a houseboat fr a day and night, which took us round the beautiful Keralan backwaters. It was really spectacular, even in the rain, which only seemed to make everything look more green and alive. The food and hospitality were amazing too, it was the most relaxing thing we could have done, and worth every penny. We had a great guesthouse in Alleppey too, a real family run place. We spent the evening in the living room talking and watching football with the owner, and eating one of the most delicious home-cooked meals we've had here. The plates just kept coming out, each more delicious than the last, and all vegetarian too. We've eaten fish maybe 3 times while we've been on the coast, but other than that it's been an entirely meat-free month!

From Alleppey we spent about 4 hours on the floor of the noisiest, bumpiest, swerviest and beepiest bus we've ever been in, and were eager to get off at Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala (until we saw the rats and roaches). It was really just a stopping off point, and having witnessed some pretty gruesome crash-carnage on the road in, I was keen to leave the next day. Our journey to Pondy, the tiny French enclave on the South-East coast of India was 16 hours by a bus similar to the previous one, only this one had the unfortunate addition of all-night Bollywood at DEAFENING volume! I quite like to watch it for the dancing and stuff, but it really was ear-piercingly painful! We got through it though, a little ruffled and even more devoted to rail travel, and set about finding a place to stay in Pondy.

The town is host to the Sri Aurobindo ashram and a slightly strange community who live by it's principles, in what is supposedly a self-sufficient international community called Auroville (google it!), and we are staying in one of the ashram's guesthouses. It has a few oddities, such as no noise (at all) after 9pm, and names over all the doors of all the rooms (we're staying in 'Imagination'). In a fit of mischievousness we joked about replacing all the names of virtuous traits like 'Kindness' and 'Progress' with things like 'Obstinance' and 'Moodiness' but didn't think the ashram folks would see the funny side, so we left it.

Today we discovered the third best thing about India after the Taj Mahal and biriyanis: mopeds! We've been carving up the streets all day, although you have to be pretty cautious as there don't seem to be any rules to it. As neither of us has ever ridden one before there was a brief spell of being overtaken by pushbikes this morning, but now we are lording it over anything slower than an entire Indian family on a motorbike. They get a bit sluggish.

We're doing a bus tour tomorrow so we'll have our tartan blankets ready to go over our knees, and hopefully there'll be no more Bollywood. We lost our Lonely Planet, so it's the next best way to orientate ourselves. I daresay the day after will see some more moped action!

Our next move will be on the 1st of July, when we'll be getting a bus to Chennai to catch the 33 hour train to Delhi fro our flight out. We don't really want to go back, as South India has really just served to illustrate how stressful the North is, but we only have one night there before flying to Bangkok, so we'll just make the most of it. After the last 2 weeks or so since we've really started to enjoy India we can't complain too much.

Hi all,

adter the last entry we spent a few quite amusing days in the real hippy-haven part of Goa, listening to trance covers of the most unlikely 90's one-hit-wonders. Anjuna had a strange feel to it as everything seemed to be shut up for the low-season, which we actually preferred... until we spent a night in a very budget guest house, in the company of a whole colony of cockroaches which wanted to fight us for the beds. Not a wink of sleep was had, and a sharp exit made the following morning as soon as we could get out of the place. We headed the few miles along to Vagator and indulget in a place triple the price of the night before, but worth every penny.

Vagator was also a bit of a ghost-town with not much going on, but the scenery was beautiful, and it was so quiet that you could easily imagine how nice it was before it was developed into a holiday resort. We made ourselves regulars at a nice little bar and took advantage of a World Cup - Kingfisher promotion for a couple of days.

Good thing this was all very relaxing, because it was followed by a five-hour delay through the night at the train station, and then a 12 hour journey to Calicut, in the north of Kerala, intending to travel south and see some of the backwaters and Keralan beaches. We're in Kocki now, which seems like a really nice and varied city, and heading down to Alleppey tomorrow to continue the journey south.

Photos at www.flickr.com/photos/juliets_piccies

I'll write again soon,
take care

Juliet and Peet xx

We arrived in Delhi pretty hot and confused at 3am, and were met with a wave of suffocating humidity despite the time. We spent the first two nights in a really nice hotel, with air con and good views over the city, so we were able to get to grips with the layout a little better from there. We did a wee bit of touristy stuff, going to see the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid (an enormous mosque that holds 25,000 people in it's courtyard), but mainly we just walked around and tried to adjust to the heat and the culture. We found it really strange that although people will openly stop and stare at me for minutes at a time in the street, they will only talk to Peet. If I try to negotiate with a rickshaw driver or ask for directions I seem to be ignored until Peet asks the same question again. He gets served his food and drinks first, and wherever we go there are shouts of 'sir, sir, you want taxi?' and the like. Would not be a fan of travelling here alone.

Anyway, we left Delhi on a train to Agra, and after some tout-evading action we got a room in a place called Kemal's on the strip of town called Taj Ganj, where the builders working on the Taj Mahal set up camp. The guest house itself was unremarkable, but it had a roof terrace with an almost completely unobscured view of the Taj Mahal. On first sight it was completely unreal, and surpasses every photo or picture I've ever seen of it. We went the following morning at sunrise and walked round the grounds and inside the mausoleum, feeling lucky we're here in the low season, as there were only a few other tourists around. The rest of Taj Ganj was a pretty unpleasant place in all honesty, it was full of touts, scammers and some pretty funky smells. Perhaps it's better in high season as there are far more tourists to go around, but we felt hassled and defensive at every step. We had planned to stay another night and see the fort and the rest of the town, but we felt like moving on, so caught a bus to Jaipur.

Jaipur is very much a tourist-driven place like Agra, but with possibly even more visible poverty. Rats, street children, dead dogs and cows eating litter from enormous rubbish heaps all made us feel as if we really shouldn't be there. We stuck around only until we could get a train to Mumbai, and although we were able to have a reasonable time after planning our escape, we were really glad to be leaving.

We had planned to travel down through Rajastan with three or four other stops, but after Jaipur we felt so frazzled and stressed out by it all that we changed plans and caught an over night train, followed by an overnight bus, and arrived in Goa 3 days ago. Goa had never really featured in the original plan as anything more than an escape route, but in low season it's completely different to the Indian Costa Del Sol it becomes in the high season. Most of the bars and clubs are shut down over the monsoon, and there are only a handful of white faces - only a handful of Indian ones too really. We spent a couple of days in the capital, Panaji, which has only a hundred thousand occupants (bliss after Delhi and Jaipur), and soaked up the quiet atmosphere. It's an ex-Portuguese colony and had a completely different feel to it. It's Christian, full of European-style architecture and is still mainly a fishing town. I spent a day in bed unwell (not Delhi-belly, I managed to get a cold in 40 degree heat) while Peet did some exploring, and we had a couple of nice meals, but generally were just enjoying not being followed down the street by ten screaming vendors at a time. It's completely true that Goa bears almost no resemblance to North India, but that's what we wanted, just for a few days while we relax again.

On to Kerala in a few days time which seems like the sort of place Goa might have been before it was invaded by hippies. They're still here by the way, the die-hards anyway, and do not seem to want to make friends. We probably couldn't deal with the smell of their dreadlocks anyway.

Home now for rapid and frequent aftersun applications for me, and then perhaps a fish curry on the beach. Goa isn't so bad after all.

Cheerio.