Market in Madurai

 Well we didn’t go to the flower market yesterday because it was too late to see it at its best, instead a visit to a palace and a street market. The palace serves as a due warning to those who check their horoscopes everyday. Only a quarter of it remains, the rest was demolished by the raja of the time whose’s astrologer informed him that it would be unlucky to live there. As you do, he started to tear down the palace and was using the stone to rebuild a new palace (perhaps called dundemolishin), [Sue insists I add a groan from her at this point] but died at 75% complete. This remains.

Then a walk through a street market which evoked that familiar composite feeling of fascination and despair. Fascination at the vibrant, colourful affirmation of  humanity striving and achieving under (seemingly) intolerable conditions.

The despair? We stopped to wait for our air conditioned car to pick us up by a restaurant, serving freshly cooked Indian bread and omelettes. 

I’ve always thought the story/parable concerning the beach full of washed up starfish was slightly hypocritical on one side and callous on the other. Two men walking along the beach, starfish as far as the eye can see. One man picks up a starfish and throws it back. ‘Why did you do that, it doesn’t make any difference?’ asks the other. ‘Well it did to that one’ comes the reply. So we paid for one, very old lady to eat, which of course didn’t touch the rest of the beach or erase our guilt and hypocrisy.

Getting spicy in Thekkady

Up at 6.30 for a boat ride in the tiger reserve, the heart of which is a man made reservoir, we were sure to see many many animals so that was OK. Some of the boats were of a certain age, and our boat (see railing) was mostly green with some other colours thrown in. I think it was camouflaged.   

A beautiful cruise:

We saw three deer the whole trip. I consoled myself with the thought that I never see deer in Minnesota.

Our driver was keen to show us a spice garden, which although very much a shopping opportunity’ was great. Really interesting to see spices growing.

A pepper vine

Cardamom pods (the little green things on the horizontal stalks)

A vanilla vine - it takes five years from planting to produce a pod.

Bark from the cinnamon tree

Nutmeg

Just arrived in Madurai after leaving Thekkady this morning. A brief drink with the local pigeons and off to the flower market now. 

Tigger sends his apologies

 Onto the tiger reserve in the hills a great drive past rubber, pineapple and tea plantations:

Cooler in the hills and we were straight into a jungle walk with a local guide. To be honest it was more like a forest than a jungle. The local people have exclusive use of over 300 square kilometres of the jungle so you have to pay a local guide to take you in. The locals seemed to be part of the local ecology:

We saw bison:

Deer (I’ve never seen one in Minnesota), and a giant squirrel:

All of a sudden our guide gestured us to stop, went ahead and then called us forward, sadly not tigger but a wonderful sight nonetheless:

We watched for 20 minutes as a group of nine wild elephants just went about their business, a wonderful privilege.

And Tigger did let us know he had more pressing business:

Three meals and a house boat

The backwaters of Kerala are, with some justification, really well known, and we were looking forward to our 24 hours in this bucolic place. However, everything was just a bit over the top:

 

Captain Bligh/Susan had a crew of three, the driver the cook and the dogsbody, so in between just drinking in the landscape and the three meals that were provided she had plenty of people to organise. Some representative scenes below.

We scraped by on the meagre lunch, dinner and breakfast provided:

Bliss.

Sue adds - but way too much food.  Fortunately, the crew shared the leftovers.   

Final moments on the boat

Lost in Time in Cochin

 We have all had those moments when a smell, sound image or taste transport us completely to another time and place. The barrier of years between two completely separate events shatters and briefly they merge. There were four events in Cochin that warped my sense of time, not in the instant recall I’ve talked about above but in a more subtle slightly disorientating way. Just the feeling that if I could time travel hundreds, or in one case, thousands of years I would be having exactly the same experience. 

Some minor examples. We caught the ferry from our hotel to eat out, the ferry terminal was 200 years old and had not changed. We had to pay the princely sum of 6 cents each, here’s what it looked like. Fortunately there was a much shorter ladies queue and Sue could get my ticket

The restaurant was on the seafront with the inevitable mosquitoes, as The Dalai Lama said “if you think you’re too small to matter you’ve never shared a bedroom with a mosquito”. Sometimes the Indians do the bare minimum, but in the battle against the mossies they went nuclear

An unfortunate man (with a pO2 of about zero) waved a vast smoking pan of the local repellent everywhere

It hung around for about 20 minutes and asphyxiated every flying insect as well as a few diners. This method has also been around for several centuries.

Then the Chinese fishing nets, these were introduced by the Mongols 900 years ago, same spot same design.

And then disorientation of millennia at a Shiva temple, it was a festival day and we were lucky to see…..

The smells the sounds and the sights were mesmerising and this ceremony has been going on for over 2000 years

We loved losing time in Cochin

Cruising in Cochin

 Finally headed to the south of India, the north’s greener, cleaner and less meaner sister. We arrived late afternoon, but just in time for a freebie boat ride

View from our window

Views from the cruise. More tomorrow