India In Review: The Plight of a Brown American in India

Despite it's status as my motherland, I never felt a strong draw to come to India. When I knew I was coming to Asia, I added it to the long list of countries I planned to visit because... you can't go to southeast Asia and not visit India. My original plan was to spend eight days here. I had it all mapped out. A day here, a couple days there, eight in total and then I'd be off. I ended up spending 27. And not because India was that particularly great, honestly. A lot of it had to do with poor planning on my part, and forgetting to take into consideration the amount of time it would take to travel. I mean... India is BIG. Like... really big. Let me put this in perspective for you:

India's outline superimposed on the United States
... and some of Canada... and  some of Mexico (via buzzfeed..com)

This all seems so obvious, but it worth saying aloud. India isn't this singular entity of India like I used to think about it as from half-way around the globe in my comfy San Francisco apartment. The different parts of India are very, very different. And I wanted to make sure I saw all of the things I had originally set out to see, from the north all the way through the south. Which meant I was here for a month. I still didn't see everything. Some places I wish I had spent less time. Other places I still didn't get to see at all. But overall, I'm happy with the way this trip turned out.

A lot of what you hear about India is totally true. There is poverty everywhere. Everywhere. People talk about how in India you can see the extremes of wealth butted up right next to each other. My friend KB explained that the reason you see slums surrounding multi-million dollar homes is because the people that live in those slums are the people who built those mansions, so they live close by out of necessity.

I'm reminded of an episode of The West Wing where Donna goes to visit Gaza and is reporting back to Josh. "When you get... into the streets, what hits you about Gaza isn't the overcrowding or poverty. What strikes you is something else: idleness. The sense of the people waiting but with no expectation. It's hard to convey."

I'll caveat all of this by saying that while I was here for almost a month, my interactions with the locals were almost exclusively limited to transactional encounters: hostel proprietors, shopkeepers, waiters, cab drivers, ice cream guys, and ticket sellers, so that likely is coloring my perspective on the situation. But I saw a lot of people here who don't seem to have a lot to do. I don't even know that "idleness" appropriately captures it. I think "resignation" is better. People seemed resigned to live the hand they've been dealt. Even the shopkeepers sit outside of their shops all day, waiting for the couple of sales they might make in a day and not doing much else beside talking to the shopkeeper next door. I guess it's no different than a lot of places in the U.S. but somehow it feels... sadder because it's in India.

There's also a sense of comradery and intimacy among the people here that you don't see in the U.S. Complete strangers talk to one another as if they've known each other their whole lives. People can sound like they're arguing when really they're just having a normal conversation.

I can imagine that it must be incredibly difficult to be a woman here. Most everything seemed to be done by men. Occasionally there'd be a woman in a position of authority, but they were few and far between. Rape was a topic that was a common occurrence in the news. I honestly don't think it's any worse a problem here than it must be in many other parts of the world, but I think it get's a little more attention here because 1) I think there's a bigger international spotlight on India than there is on a lot of other countries, and 2) India is a lot bigger, so as a sheer numbers game, it happens more often here than in smaller countries, but still makes national/international news. Still, I met plenty of female travelers who told me about how many people they knew were shocked and scared to learn that they were traveling by themselves through India.

The servant class is fascinating to me here. Like in Bangladesh, it's totally normal to have servants and drivers here. While staying with KB, I heard her explaining to one of her servants about how the Earth revolved around the sun. This servant was a teenage girl. It's hard to say how much of her lack of educational opportunities had to do with her being female and how much had to do with her just being part of a lower class, but in either case, it was maddening and saddening to see. Servants don't even really interact with the people the serve, outside of anything transactional. They might talk a little, but not really. They're there to serve, not be friends. It's amazing. Amazing in the "I'm amazed that that's how this works," not amazing in the, "this is awesome!" sense.

Personal space and personal hygiene are also very different here than they are in America. By personal space, I really mean lack thereof. There are no physical boundaries between the people here. When you're waiting in line, the person behind you is always pushing your forward. And not by accident, they are actively pushing you forward, even if there is no place forward for your to move. It's not rude in this culture, it's just how it is. Body odor is also all around you. I never got used to it, but it also wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be in most cases. But sometimes it can almost knock you off your feet. No one here seems to notice.

I ate with my hands more and more as the trip went on. If you've never eaten a full meal with your hands before besides buffalo wings, I highly recommend trying it at least once. You feel connected to your food in a way that you don't get when you're one step removed when using utensils. You get to know your food on a deeper level. The consistency of it. The temperature. The texture. It adds a completely new layer to one's gastronomic experience. If you do try it out, don't be shy. It's not like eating a bag of Cheetos where you try to only use two fingers to minimize the amount of Cheeto dust you have on your hands. You've got to dive right in. Get a little messy. Remember, you're going to wash your hands when you're done anyways, so have at it. Also remember, there's no wrong way to do it.

Certain aspects of the infrastructure are huge problems here as well. Most of the places I went to were one giant trash dump. A story I left out of my experience in Amritsar was when I was killing time before heading out to the Attari border. I bought some ice cream but I held onto the wrapper until I could find a trash can because I refused to contribute to India's pervasive trash problem. I finished the ice cream and went to another shop to buy water. After I purchased the water, I asked the shopkeeper if he knew where I could throw away my trash. In response, he waved his arm out in front of him, gesturing toward the vastness of... the street behind me. Which was already filled with trash. Later that day, I had an almost identical experience after I returned from the border. I was holding onto the plastic water bottle, and one of the friendly locals went out of his way to tell me I should put the bottle behind the tire of a parked car so that it would get crushed.

The train system here is abysmal. First off, the booking system could use a massive overhaul. If I'm in India's shoes, there is no question in my mind that I invest a few million dollars and a few months to hire an IT consulting firm to redesign the flow of train bookings. The payoff in efficiency would be enormous. As a foreigner, it's incredibly difficult to book your own tickets. You're basically forced to go through a third party. It's almost impossible to book a ticket a couple days in advance, you've got to do it way before that. And then there's a limited number of last-minute tickets that become available for purchase at a certain time of day, so there's a mad dash to get them before they're gone. For a significantly higher price. Some train classes you don't have an actual seat, so you have to get their early and rush to get a good place in line so you can guarantee your spot on the train. There's a officer there with a long wooden stick to beat anyone into submission if they're out of line, or trying to cut the line, or get too rowdy. Trains are also perpetually late for what seems to be no good reason.

Sanitation is a disaster. Water is a disaster. Public safety standards are a joke. Construction workers don't wear helmets. They're just guys off the streets who needed jobs.

All of this is to be expected in the third world, but it doesn't have to be like this. And I have to imagine this is changing. I'm sure if I had come here 10 years ago, today it would look completely different. The last time my dad was here was a decade ago. When I was making this trip, he warned me that it would be hard to get cash because there are no ATMs. But of course there are ATMs! They're everywhere! Progress is happening, albeit slowly. I saw this ad in an airport from HSBC and I totally believe the headline is true:

It was a totally unique experience being a brown American in India. It definitely had it's pluses and minuses. On the one hand, if you weren't paying too much attention to how I was dressed, you wouldn't immediately know I was a foreigner. This meant I got hassled on the streets waaaaay less than a lot of the other travelers I met. Fewer people asking me for money or trying to sell me something (though I still had quite a few people doing both). It also got me out of some hairier situations because I could play the dumb foreigner card. On the other hand, once people realized I was a foreigner, I was treated the same, if not worse, than other foreigners. As soon as I opened my mouth to talk, prices became doubled. I got a huge variety of reactions from people when they found out I was American. Some people were in disbelief. I got the question "are you sure you're not from India?" more times than you would think. Other people would get frustrated. Why wasn't I talking to them in Hindi? I know you're from America and you don't know Hindi, but... why don't you know Hindi? I know you don't know Hindi but... why aren't you talking to me in Hindi right now? There were even some twinges of anger or disgust. People's body language and tone of voice were conveying an impression of, "how dare you not speak Hindi right now, stupid American." I also totally caught some people way off guard. When I was exploring Delhi with met my first hostel friend, a white Englishwoman, she would talk to me in her English accent and the people around would look and think "oh, an English tourist." But when I spoke back to her with a strong American accent, those same people would do a total double-take and you could tell were thinking to themselves, "WHAAAAAT!?!?!?!"

It's been an interesting role reversal being in India. If you look at me from a sociological perspective, it would be fair to say that my race (genetics) is Indian but my ethnicity (culture) is... American. It might seem kind of weird to think of "American" as an ethnicity, but it is. And I really do identify more as American then I would as Indian or Guyanese. So in America, I match ethnically, but looking totally different racially. In India, I match racially, but am totally different ethnically. At home, I often forget that I look totally different than the white kids I hang out with. I remember one time back in high school I was having a conversation about how at lunch the school yard was fairly segregated by race, with "us white kids" on one side of the lunch area, before I realized I had lumped myself in with "us." I guess it's the product of growing up in middle class America constantly surrounded pretty heavily by white people. In India, I often forget that I looked the same as these people. It's hard to convey how weird that it, by the way, not remembering how you look to other people. When I saw Indians in India, my brain thinks "foreigners" which is closely connected to "doesn't look like me."

This was my first time really being surrounded by brown people for an extended period of time. This must be what it's like to be white in America. Which I guess I never really knew because I'm not white. I think the self-image I have of being American is what has made it so hard to identify people who look like me. Which then also feeds into the very confusing mental state of not knowing how much I really should be identifying with this culture. Regardless, I understand India so much better than I ever did before. And I understand a piece of my history so much more than I did before. I think one of the biggest takeaways is that mentally, I need to stop denying that I'm Indian when people ask me where I'm from, and rather embrace the fact that I've got a long, rich history with this country and it's people. I might not know exactly which people or where in this country specifically, but that doesn't really matter.

I grew a lot as a traveler as well. This is my first time traveling outside of the country on my own and I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. And I did. (To some extent. I still knew people in a few places here who helped me out along the way. I think Cambodia will be the real test though. I don't know anyone, don't speak the language, and don't look like the people.) I booked hostels, navigated transportation, made friends, organized my own trips, fed myself, washed clothes, (washed myself!), kept myself relatively healthy, changed money, avoided getting mugged, avoided getting arrested, exposed myself to new cultures and experiences, and became a lot more comfortable with being on my own. I was sick here. A lot. And it rained here. A lot. And I got cheated here. A lot. I could have gone without all three, but I do think they contributed to the sense of "if I can do this, I can do anything" that I'm taking with me from India.

50 Things I hadn't done a month ago:
1. Lived out of a backpack for a month straight
2. Worn the same two sets of clothes for a month straight
3. Visited a Hindu temple
4. Took part in a Hindu religious ceremony
5. Walked through the streets barefoot
6. Saw the home of Mother Teresa
7. Went to Victoria Memorial
8. Explored an Indian slum
9. Got a shave
10. Ate a cheese naan
11. Celebrated a birthday by myself
12. Taken a train for 24 hours
13. Used an Asian-style toilet
14. Stayed in a hostel
15. Made hostel friends
16. Ate a Maharaja Mac
17. Used Indian rupees
18. Purchased a foreign phone
19. Rode on the back of a motorbike
20. Visited Jama Masjid
21. Almost got arrested
22. Visited the Red Fort
23. Climbed over a barbed-wire fence. Twice.
24. Got lost in an urban jungle
25. Had the best biryani in New Delhi
26. Rode in an auto (the Indian kind)
27. Meditated in the Lotus Temple
28. Visited the Taj Mahal
29. Learned how hand-crafted rugs, marble work, and tapestries are made
30. Visited Qadian
31. Went to Bahishti Maqbara
32. Visited Hoshiarpur
33. Climbed up the White Minaret
34. Visited the Golden Temple
35. Fell asleep in the Golden Temple
36. Rode in the back of a van with a malfunctioning door
37. Saw the Attari border closing ceremony
38. Went to the premier Indian vacation spot, Goa
39. Befriended an Indian shopkeeper entrepreneur
40. Went to the land of my people (maybe), Kerala
41. Became someone's first international friend
42. Saw a Kathakali show
43. Went to Jewtown
44. Got an Ayurvedic massage
45. Took a 6-hour cab ride
46. Went to an Indian hospital
47. Stood on top of a waterfall
48. Visited the Connemara Tea Factory
49. Went on a spice walk
50. Rode an ELEPHANT

Thank you, India!

How it started

How it ended

Yes, It Is Actually Called Jewtown

HA left pretty early the next morning for the next leg of her journey, so ROR, JI, and I went for brunch at... you guessed it, Kashi Art Cafe! We walked around for a little while and found this store that sold spices and chocolate. But the cool thing was that they all came from this guy's family's own spice farm! Obviously, we had to buy some chocolate. I got milk chocolate because I always choose milk over dark, but the other two chose dark. This is probably the one time you'll ever hear me say this but... the fruit & nut dark chocolate was actually better than the milk. Which is actually probably true for all artisan chocolates.

After checking out that side of town, ROR had some more asinine flight things to take care of because, it's India and things are asinine here, so JI and I went exploring on the opposite side of the city. It was a Monday and still Onam, so the streets were pretty empty. We did find a few cool shops with ridiculous hand-made goods so I decided this was a good place to buy some gifts for the family. After some lively and successful haggling, I walked out of there with some beautifully hand-embroidered trinkets. I've had to keep the purchases to a minimum throughout my trip because I have to 1) fit everything into my backpack and 2) carry those things with me for the duration of my trip. But I'm in Kerala and on the off chance that my family is actually from here, it'll be nice to bring back a little bit of Kerala to home.

After that we kept walking and found Jewtown! It's exactly what it sounds like; it's the Jewish enclave of the city. ROR had told us he went to a place called Jewtown, but then I just made fun of him because obviously that's not a real place. Turns out it is. Sorry I'm not sorry, ROR. We were going to go into this super old synagogue we found there, but we would have had to check our bags and JI didn't want to part with hers, so we skipped it. Which is fine, I didn't really have my heart set on it.

Not Jewtown, but close enough

On the walk back, we took a different route than on the way there. We passed by a sweets shop. JI saw what to me looked like... pretty normal cakes, but to her were a little mindblowing so I bought her some cake and picked up some plantain chips to bring back for ROR. He's been having kind of a rough day with his whole flight situation, and who doesn't like plantain chips?

It started raining on us while we were about 2/3 of the way home. And I'm proud to say I got up almost all the way back home without asking for directions or using a map (one guy volunteered his help on the last turn, and in fact, had we gone with my gut and not taken the guy's advice, we would have gotten home faster).

We got back later than expected, so ROR had already gone to dinner at a place close by. JI and I went to go meet up with him and about 10 seconds before we got there it started pouring hard on us. We arrived soaking wet and found ROR sitting with two new friends! A couple from South America who has been traveling for like... a year already. Crazy. They were awesome, really friendly and in such great spirits despite the fact that the guy was feeling pretty sick. I ate what was left of ROR's curry, but JI didn't seem so enthused with the menu so she barely ate.

It was still pouring when we left and we were too far from the street to find a cab so I braved the rain and stood by the street to hail a cab for about five minutes. We made it back to the hostel, but it was too early to call it a night and I was craving some more of that chocolate, so we went back out to find the shop. Earlier in the day, proprietor told us he was going to close at 11pm but we got there around 10:30pm and he had already closed up shop. Womp womp. We could see it was closed from afar, but just to make sure, I walked all the way up to the front door. ROR told me that he was telling JI that "[R] is probably the kind of guy who would break in, take some chocolate, and then pay for it and leave a note inside." How does he know that already?!

Remember how JI barely ate? Turns out she was still hungry so we went to another place to grab some food. I convinced her to try lamb for the first time and I think she liked it! She also told me that I was her first international friend! What an honor! We called it a night after that. A pretty good close to my time in Fort Kochi. Tomorrow I'm headed to Thekkady for elephants!

Kerala: An Anthropologist's Dream

Whatever you do, don't step on it. Also, pray for a windless day.

BP's doppelganger left this morning so it was just the four of us for the first half of the day. We made our way back to Kashi Art Cafe for brunch again. It turns out today in Onam, a holiday celebrated in Kerala and the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. Onam is a 10-day Hindu festival that has to do with the god Vishnu and some other details I don't fully understand. I can tell you that they make these beautiful floral carpets called an "onapookkalam."

OLD...

After brunch we walked around town for a while. I finally made my way to a church on this trip, the  It was beautiful on the inside, and like... 5,000 years old (historically inaccurately blasphemous? perhaps). Maybe 500 years old.

...REALLY, REALLY OLD.

*Actual motorbike does not
come attached to a car

After the church, as we turned down some random street we saw a huge crowd gathering, and it turns out they were filming a commercial for a motorbike! The dude in the commercial was some famous Bollywood actor I've never heard of and the girl was a runner up in some beauty pageant who is now trying to parlay her good looks and moderate success into an acting career, as one is wont to do when one is that attractive and that moderately successful. People seemed to be really excited about the dude, but to be honest, I felt like the woman was really getting shortchanged in the proportion of attention she was receiving from the crowd. ROR tried to sweet talk one of the crew assistants into telling him where they were getting drinks later in the day, but he got shot down. Womp womp.

These were lined up all along the waterfront

When we want to walk by the waterfront, we saw these HUGE net contraptions they use for fishing. The entire apparatus tilts over to submerge the net, and then they pull it up to catch all the fish.

After our walk, one of the guys and his gf also had to head back home, so it was just ROR and me for the rest of the day. ROR was going to be there another few days, as was I, so it worked out well.

Backwater fish, yum!

Later that day, we went to get Ayurvedic massages. I'd been hearing about these all throughout India. It's supposed to be some ancient massage technique native to Kerala that's just now gaining popularity as an alternative medicine treatment (I'll spare you my rant on alternative medicine), but I figure I'm here, so I might as well try one out. So we walk into the place the Rastafarian-looking dude at the hostel recommended. We're greeted by an old woman who puts a menu of massage options in front of us. We choose the standard 1-hour massage. I've got a show to catch later in the day and there's only one masseur available at the moment [side note: all massages (...legitimate, non-sketchy massages) are same-sex in India] so ROR let's me go first. So I walk into the room. It's hot. There's no ventilation. There's a kind of gross, oily massage table in the middle of a dimly-lit room full of lots of other crap. He hands me what looks like a rolled-up napkin and I'm not really sure why until I unravel it and it vaguely resembles a paper thong because... it is in fact essentially a paper thong. I'm apparently supposed to wear this after I strip off all of my other clothes. So I don the napkin I've been provided and lay down on the table. He then proceeds to douse me in what feels like a gallon of oil. I mean, I am COVERED in a layer oil. The massage itself is painful. Not painful in the "oh man, that was a great massage!" kind of way, but the, "I walked down the wrong alley in Compton and got brutally mugged" kind of way. Afterward, I took a shower and try as I might, I think I only managed to get about 75% of the oil off of me.

Right now my own face is showing a combination
of fear, horror, and morbid curiousity

After my massage, I went to the Cochin Cultural Centre to go see a performance of a traditional art form in Kerala called Kathakali. You may recall that back at the Kingdom of Dreams in Gurgaon a few weeks ago, I took a picture with a woman (turns out it was probably a man) dressed in this ridiculous costume and attached the caption "...WHAT?!". It turns out I have discovered what "WHAT" is. It's Kathakali. I didn't know anything about this show beside that I've seen signs for it everywhere and ROR has seen one of these shows already and recommended I check it out. So I did. I arrived to an empty theater. On the wall are huge pictures of a woman (...turns out it was probably a man) with various facial expressions, each titled with a different emotion that I assume the face is supposed to be emoting. I sat down, and over the course of the next 15 minutes, another six or so people also come in. Then these two guys come out onto the stage. One is a big, fat dude, and the other a tall, fit guy. I came an hour early because you can watch the actors put on their makeup, which as it turned out was (though painstakingly long) pretty interesting to see. After about 40 minutes of them putting on makeup, their two characters emerged, the fat guy painted with a green face and the skinny guy made up to be a woman with a yellow face. They left the stage and about 20 minutes later the show began.

Before

After

This show is apparently geared toward tourists so it wasn't a traditional Kathakali show. Instead, it began with a short lesson on what Kathakali is. Turns out this was an art form that was developed in the 1600s in Kerala and still survives (barely) through today. The all-male actors don't speak, but rather communicate via incredibly hyperbolic facial expressions and movements. For example, to express a romantic interest in another character, an actor would very rapidly raise and lower his eyebrows. The dude dressed as a woman gave an impressive demonstration. If you tried to raise and lower your eyebrows are fast as you could, you wouldn't even come close to what this guy could do. Human facial muscles shouldn't be able to move this fast. He must be an alien. Another way the actors communicate with the audience is with the help of a drummer, who sets the emotional tone via music throughout the performance.

After the introduction, we were told the storyline of what we were about to see. Something to do with a king falling in love with a demon who was pretending not to be a demon but then the king finds out she's a demon so (spoiler alert!) he kills her. And even though they went through the whole story with us at the beginning, I still had NO CLUE what was going on throughout the 30-minute performance. It's kind of like that first time you went to the opera, but were too lazy to look at the program before the show started and then you realized all too late that everything was being sung... in Italian, and at the end of the show everyone else is like, "wow, that was amazing" and you were like, "what just happened?" ...No, just me?

Not really sure why there are a bunch of faces
of creepy old men lording over these performers

After the show, I went back to the hostel, which was conveniently a five-minute walk away. I didn't see ROR around and I was starving, so I left the hostel to go find some food. On my way out, there were these two Asian girls who definitely assumed I worked for the hostel (which is fair, I'm brown and I'm in a hostel in India) and asked me a question to which I said I don't know but then I asked them about their dinner plans and invited them to have dinner with me. We ate at the restaurant next to the hostel. The girls, HA and JI, were both from South Korea and as it turns out didn't actually know each other until they met a few days ago. They were both pretty shy, but we had a great conversation and out of nowhere about 20 minutes later ROR found us in the restaurant, so he joined us for dinner. Afterward we showed the girls around the waterfront area and happened upon a dance performance that I imagine is Onam-related.

A classy dinner, obviously

We went to one last bar (nautical-themed! and super fancy) for the night before heading back to the hostel. HA and I went for another walk for about an hour before rejoining the other two and calling it a night.

CONTINUE ON to Fort Kochi Part 4: Are You My Ancestor?

The Backwaters of Fort Kochi

The hostel I'm staying at is right next what are known as the backwaters of Fort Kochi. When I was in Goa and trying to book a tour of the backwaters, the pot-smoking travel agent dismissively referred to the backwaters as "where all the [expletive] flows out from inland to the sea." Knowing India... there's probably a lot of truth in that. Nonetheless, the waters are actually pretty cool to see. Just don't think about it too much.

Kashi Art Cafe -
where if you tilt your head just so, you too can have a stiff neck

When I woke up, I re-met the three dudes staying in my dorm. It turns out they grew up together in Muscat. If you, like me, have never heard of Muscat, then you, like me, would probably also nod your head, smile, and continue engaging in conversation until it is later revealed that Muscat is a city in Oman (the capital, actually, though that tidbit didn't come up in conversation). They've since all scattered, but are reuniting here in Fort Kochi for a few days. Also, one of them is the Indian doppleganger of my friend BP from college. It was uncanny not only how much the two of them looked the same, but also had the same outspoken "whatever, I'll do what I want" personality. Definitely made me do a double-take a few times throughout the day.

Kashi Art Cafe - "We're expat-friendly!"

We all went to brunch together at this awesome spot called the Kashi Art Cafe. I think this was the first time I'd eaten fresh fruit in a long, long time. I'd been warned numerous times that you can't trust the fruit here because it's washed in the water you can't drink. At this point I've been sick so often, even while being careful about what I eat, so why continue to deprive myself if I'm going to be sick anyway? Plus that fruit looked GOOD. One of the dude's brought his girlfriend to brunch with us and she spent the rest of the day with us too.

The view from the airline's 6th-story office. Not bad, Oman Air.

After brunch, one of the dudes, ROR, has to change his flight but to do so needed to physically go to the airline's office for some asinine "this is how it's done in India" reason. So we took a ferry (we're in the backwaters, remember?) to get there.

I love ferries. Maybe it's because I don't spend all that much time out on the water, but ferries are awesome. They're like buses... but in the water! Water buses! Mind-blowing.

WATER BUSES ARE AWESOME

Afterward ROR's successful flight change, we went to another bar for drinks. While I was there, I was telling the others about my journey to find my roots. ROR's family is from Kerala and he was like "well, we'll have to make sure you find them while you're here." He also started trying to teach me a few words in Malayalam, the language spoken here. Turns out instead of assuming I speak Hindi, people should really be assuming I speak Malayalam. I'm terrible at languages though, so I pretty much immediately forgot every word he tried to teach me.

The food wasn't... meal-y, so in the cab on the way home we stopped by Domino's. Because where better to eat in India than Domino's? (ok, ...it actually was pretty good.) We finished off the night at a seaside bar. Backwater-side bar? It was on the water. It was cool.

CONTINUE ON to Fort Kochi Part 3: Kerala: An Anthropologist's Dream

Why I'm Headed to Kerala

I want to ride an elephant. We'll have the discussion about the ethics of elephant riding in a later post, so hold on to those self-righteous thoughts of outrage for just a bit. The fact remains, I'm in India and I would like to ride an elephant. I mention this because Kerala is not your typical tourist destination. I wasn't coming here to "do" anything other than... see if people look like me. So I decided to add a little adventure to my trip. There are a lot of places to ride elephants in India, so I did my homework and found a place that sits right with me (see what I did there?). That place is in area called Thekkady and the closest airport is in Fort Kochi (aka Cochin). So I made that my next destination. I left Goa in the afternoon, flew two hours to Chennai, a one-hour layover, and then another hour to Kerala.

Once I got to Kerala, I didn't want to take any chances with sketchy cabs, so I waited another 30 minutes in a line to get a real cab. Luckily my driver was awesome. The fastest way to my hostel involved taking a quick ferry trip, so we did that. Which was kind of a cool addition to the journey.
When I checked in at the hostel, the guy at the front desk was like "oh, you're here with a bunch of friends, right?" and I replied, "no" but I'm my head I replied, "no, but thanks for rubbing it in, jerk." Jokes, jokes. The dude was actually a super cool guy, tall, lanky, long hair, sort of Rastafarian-looking, and really nice. I went upstairs, put my stuff down, and came down to relax a little in the lounge. I met some cool people, one of which was biking around the world. He'd gone something crazy like 30,000 miles on his bike. What?!

I didn't hang out for long because I was exhausted. I went back up to my five-person room and I was kind of glad to see that there was still no one else there at the time (though it looked like most of the other beds had people's stuff on them). I passed out pretty quickly, but a little while later, I figured out why the guy at the front desk thought I was there with friends. It turns out those other beds were occupied by three friends who were here on vacation. They came in and didn't realize I was sleeping at first. Which is totally fine because it's a hostel and you just sort of have to get used to these things. These guys turned out to be super friendly. They introduced themselves and invited me to drink with them. I politely declined and they politely decided to take it to the lounge so I could sleep, which was awesome of them to do. After which I very quickly passed out again. SLEEP: it does a body good.

CONTINUE ON to Fort Kochi Part 2: The Backwaters of Fort Kochi