MUNNAR AND THODUPUZHA

Munnar is tea country, with vast estates where the shining bushes, cropped into neat islands that packers can reach across, roll away as far as you can see over the misty folds of high hills. 

The pickers move from one block to another, the scattered figures, bags over their shoulders, harvesting silently like feeding insects. 

The tea factory we're taken to is proud of its precise craft but has an informal feel to it. Deep in the gloom of its spaces and different levels, a complex system of uniformly dust-coloured belts, grinders, shakers - all looking like an inventive cartoon by Roald Dahl - performs  the dance steps of a sophisticated, strictly-prescribed process. Yet the workers move the leaves from one stage to another with a garden shovel and if you swept up all the tea spilled on the floor of the factory, you'd be able to offer a high class, if  dusty, cup of tea to a very large gathering.

Not too far away is a company that keeps 17 elephants for those who want the excitement of a brief swaying progression up a small rise to a hairpin bend, where the patient beasts need delicate footwork to transfer their weight for the ponderous lurch back to the starting line. For most  riders,  it takes only 3 or 4 mighty footfalls for them to fall in love with their elephant. The floppy bottoms of their ears wave like clothes on a line, and on their heads is a sparse covering of long black hairs  that stand up like the tender wisps on the heads of new babies. The atmosphere is charged with the strong smell of elephant, coming from  large  damp patches on the path where the fierce flow has cut out its own river bed, and the sculptured piles of steaming dung - disturbingly  meringue-shaped. The warmth beneath us of the  elephants' leathery backs makes us feel closely connected to our lumbering bearers. The operation has a slightly run-down feel to it - but perhaps that's just the effect of the dusty path, vegetation and elephants, and certainly the money side of things is a slick operation. A young man with an impressively large camera comes with us on our seven minute safari, calling 'Hello' softly from beside the path to persuade us to look at the lens. His efforts are quickly transferred to a CD, so that ten minutes after our ride we can walk away with a record of our daring, and of  the friend who let us ride, legs stuck out like  dividers,  on his awkward, friendly back. Before we dismount we're given a small basket with 5 chunks of pineapple and corn to reward the elephant. It knows this routine and the large trunk, like a vacuum cleaner hose, immediately curls backward over its head, waiting to close around its trophy, deposit it in its mouth and quickly snake up and over again ready for the next chunk. Elephants are intelligent; they curl up their trunks only 5 times. An elephant knows when it's game over. 

They seem happy enough. One appears in the clearing carrying in its trunk a mass of greenery

which a man hacks into smaller pieces to feed these jungle porters. At least the animals get a good feed and - surely almost unfailingly - the awe and affection of their riders.

When we walked into our hotel lobby, earlier in the day, as well as being struck by an unusually beautiful  staircase

we were introduced to the impressive costuming and makeup  (which takes hours to apply) used in local traditionaldrama.
The crinoline skirt, always worn by a male,  whose  endearingly everyday black toes show underneath, is a surprising garment for such a warlike figure. 

On our way back after the elephants, we see a performance of a story from the Mahabharata  at a small local theatre - with that crinolined hero.

 The audience watches with rapt attention.

The performance is accompanied by music like the sounds from an extraordinarily noisy kitchen - much of it performed by a drummer with curly drumsticks. 

I particularly liked the demon disguised, for nefarious purposes, as a beautiful woman. She  - that is he - wiggled her eyebrows and twitched and mumbled her lips in a brilliant display of the fascinations of wickedness. 

The theatre held, as well as the small stage, a square pit where, after the drama had run its course, a team of young men gave a passionate display of martial arts.

Shiny-dark bodies - disciplined it seemed to the measure of a  hair, leaped, lunged, slashed and sprang armed with a gleaming  armoury of staves, blades long and short, whips and spears. Sparks flew, weapon and shields clashed in a terrifying maelstrom of desperate speed, flashing light, brutal collision and violent intent

Our last stop on this journeey is with Shiny's parents who live on a country road just out of the Kerala town of Thodupuzha. The flat house roof has a pitched roof, open-sided, built over it, to deflect the torrential waters of the monsoons here. 

From the corners of the guttering hang chains down which the water can course more diffusely to avoid beating into the soil.   


Her elderly  father's garden grows coconuts, which he can reach with a ladder as the palms are still quite small. 

He's slight and neatly built, strolls for 45 minutes every morning rain or shine, but his days of shinning up coconut palms are over, and he has a local man to help with the digging. In his proud garden, pineapples can be seen in the heart of their small palms, green beans climb a frame, there's a patch of a leafy green vegetable a little larger than spinach, plants promising long yellow tomatoes are in flower, and cucumber plants, or are they gourds, starred with yellow blooms, grow in the fronds of a palm branch.

 With a careful hosing most  days, everything is growing vigorously in this red soil so fine it looks creamy as an Indian curry.

An adjoining property has rubber trees.  Half coconut shells catch runder probes in the trunks;  over each shell  a small shield shelters the rubber harvest from the rain.

The lush vegetation suggests that anything that can survive heat would grow rampantly here. There are many large homes in the neighbourhood, belonging to landowners who have done well from the land. Some of the houses wouldn't look out of place in a wealthy Auckland suburb.

The daytime temperature is in the high thirties/early forties with the highest humidity I've felt since Chongqing in China, and dips only slightly over night. When I awake,  I watch the first grey morning light wash the sky through the window and listen to insistent ,noisy bird calls more like an Australian than a  New Zealand dawn. The family's day starts at 5 so that most work can be completed before the heat bites like a tiger and traps us inside, where we wait in the slightly cooler house, like beasts in the heat of the day panting in whatever shade they can find.. The fans whir and move warm air about, the front door stands open upon a still, too-bright  world, the women keep up a constant low chatter. In the late afternoon, life stretches itself and stirs again, and when the temperature drops a little in the evening, we can  walk along the side of the small irrigation canal in front of the house.

It also serves for washing clothes. Everyone knows that clothes are never so clean as when beaten on stones. 

Dusk lasts longer  here than further north where night drops like a sheet. This richly fertile countryside glows green; the light's liquid-soft; boys - slim dark legs like mosquitoes - take exuberant running jumps  off the bank into the water, where fish rise, silently lipping the surface. Shadowy figures wash shiny vessels and clothes on the banks and a woman tries to herd a straggle of undecided ducks, quacking at them with an urgency they obviously don't share. Before the rains, the local authorities close the sluice gates at the distant dam that feeds the canal, so that the water level drops and it can hold the torrents of monsoon rain between its 7-foot banks.

Our last Indian drive before the return to Kochi to fly to Singapore is into the high country near Thodupuzha. At the highest point on the road I feel I'm as high above a valley floor as I've ever been, and where the peaks meet the sky above us is almost as far. Villagers' homes nestle in the trees or line the road without decorative flourish. A woman herding a dozen goats looks at us keenly, unimpressed, as we pass; a stray dog scratches his back contentedly on the road. The modest everyday, with all its difficulties, is being lived out here with stubborn ingenuity in a natural setting of incomparable splendour and vast mysterious spaces. 

This Indian journey - or was it perhaps  a pilgrimage - is almost over. This is the last in our selection of tastes from the magnificent, endearing and sometimes deeply troubling bubbling pot that is India.

For many of us, relationship with this subcontinent is firmly established when we receive our first large, warm Indian smile. I know whose smile I want, but will have to wait for the photo. I'll hope one day to post it below. 

KOCHI AND KUMARAKOM

India is, from one angle at least,  one big smile. If  she wants to ask something of a traveller she speaks quietly, touches THEIR sleeve gently. Here in Kochi (once Cochin) the smiles seem to have grown wider, and break more quickly from these often slightly darker faces. India is home to terrible things as well, but the fearful doesn't deny the reality of the smiles - just makes them more remarkable, more poignant.

In the decoration of Tamil Nadu and now here in Kerala I think I see evidence of a non-derivative indigenous art at the same time robust and sophisticated, with strong lines and earthy colours. This is an Indian style I haven't met before.

In Chennai, you feel the strong historical presence of the East India Company. Here in Kochi the presence that haunts is that of Vasco da Gama, who, doubtless startled, made landfall here, having found the vital sea route to India. Was it sheer navigational genius or was there also one of those  visitations of luck that so often attend  well-prepared and persevering geniuses. He was first buried here and his remains later taken to Lisbon. His tombstone remains in the church of St Francis, the lettering of his name now hard to read, but here in a neighbourhood of Kochi where mangos are hanging green on the trees and frangipani in flower, where teak and rosewood grow in the churchyard, the faint 'da Gama' tribute to the stranger mariner  for me threw back a powerful  line over centuries and all those sea miles to the place and the time  he came from. 

 

The roof of the church remembers him too, taking the shape of an upturned boat.

The church's  air cooling system before the days of ceiling fans,  a punkah, can still be seen - the name apparently has a connection with pankh - the wings of a bird which produce a draft when flapped. The punkahwallah in this church, by flapping - not wings -  but lengths of cloth suspended on frames above the pews,  kept his  various fair-skinned rulers from suffering the heat too painfully  at their devotions.

Walking out  from the church into a scorching day, it was good to walk under some shade where boats were pulled up on the shore by the fish market. 

This was a good selection of the local catch, and the general fish species aren't hard for a New Zealander to identify.

.

Prawns here look inviting, and tasted even better.

This species, pearlspot,  seems to be the most common fish in local cooking, with a firm flesh and robust taste.

The auction at the fish market was in its dying stages as we went past, but there was still passion in the gestures and postures of those who'd taken part. Had we been a few minutes earlier, I might have caught a very lively video.

Kochi has a large traditional laundry, where clothes are washed by slapping them on stones, pressed with irons weighing 7 kg (one was wielded with particular triumph by a 86 year old) and dried on lines in a area the size of a sports ground. Charges are modest compared with hotel laundry prices, and the enormous bundles of laundry showed that the business here is good - and must be thoroughly professionally run, in spite of methods that suggest simple cottage industry.

Kochi today has a distinctive law shared with other parts of Kerala that cows are not allowed to wander free - they must be tethered, though I've met the occasional cow that doesn't seem to know about this. Further north cows were everywhere in the streets; they seemed  happy among the crowds and traffic, nosing about in shop doorways, delicately searching in piles of rubbish, and undulating their sacred bulk serenely across the roads just whenever it suited them. Here in Kerala, I was relieved to see cattle in more familiar settings

but who knows which environment cows prefer?

As I'm trying to write this blog, there are frequent power cuts, plunging the hotel room into darkness and me into acute frustration - so much so that I never now sit at my ipad in the evenings without a torch beside me. But at least I've learned the cause of the outages -  ongoing disputes with neighbouring state Tamil Nadu over water  ownership, and therefore hydro potential.

Another surprise  for me  In Kerala has been to learn that the communist party (democratically elected) is very strong and for some years governed the state. It did much to end  exploitation and the caste system, and carried out valuable land reforms, but the strong labour unions made the state unattractive for capital investment and the party has lost a little support for the time being. I find it  fascinating,  especially after a year in China, to learn that India, which seems to have an extraordinary ability to fuse apparently irreconcilable divisions, can combine elements of democratic and communist principles and process -  as though it's the natural thing to do. Perhaps it is. 

Kerala has the highest social index in India, infant mortality is negligible, there's good health care. The Catholic Church, - much of it follows the Syrian rite here -  played a large part in social development as a pioneer in health and education. Given her model social systems, which are studied internationally for their effectiveness, I was puzzled to read in 'The Hindu" published in Chennai, that Kerala has one of the highest reported incidence of crimes against women - until I was told that this is because such cases can be reported in this state in the confidence that they will be taken seriously and measures taken to punish the offenders. Apparently some other states offer less confidence to victims. Incidentally, the state of Kerala  has three things in common with West Bengal: their citizens are well-educated - more likely to take an interest in issues and debate them  than  in other states, they have both had communist state governments, and they are famous for their seafood. 

Kochi has a large backwater area around the port where we spend a pleasantly lazy afternoon, leaving behind commercial Kochi

and puttering slowly around its shores in a small launch, watching the occupations and recreations  this wide water allows.

This is a larger launch - carrying a number of passengers and with space for wonderfully noisy water parties -  than the one of a similar design that we had to ourselves.  

Fishing is big business on the backwater. We watch a boat cleaning its net

It's frustrating not to be able to see more closely what they were up to, but I find and photograph a postcard showing local fishermen obviously engaged in the same sort of fishing

As the light fades we'ew able to see Chinese fishing nets 

and the gantries of the container port.

A two-and-a half hour drive the next day takes us to Kumarakom and the backwaters of Kerala.  Their origin is interesting - I'll quote from a guide: 'The backwaters were formed by the action of waves and short currents creating low barrier islands across the mouth of the any rivers flowing down from the Western Ghats range, and forming 'a network of interconnected canals, rivers, lakes and inlets, a labyrinthine system of more than 900 km of waterways - including three large lakes.' The life forms reflect the coming together of fresh and sea water in these backwaters that serve the local people for transportation, fishing and agriculture. We spend the day in a houseboat attractively fashioned of  bamboo, coir, palm leaves and wood.

 Before their potential as a tourist attraction was recognised, these vessels were used as rice transporters, and we can see the livid green of rice paddies beyond the palms  and other vegetation that line the shores.

At a leisurely pace, the engine just a faint throb, we follow the shore closely enough to watch the life there. 

washing vessels

and clothes

unloading a boat

ducks so plentiful that there was a recent proposal to cull them, at which the local people quickly collected and presented as many  duck recipes as possible, to advertise the ducks' delicious potential. The proposal to cull them has been dropped. 

other craft.

 I watch an elderly woman leap lightly into her boat -  as naturally as I'd get into my car.

The shoreline is fascinating, with its glimpses of domestic intimacies and wild life, but the boat itself is a delightful companion with its cheerful captain under his parasol, 

and the stylish lift of our bow ahead.

PONDICHERRY

Pondicherry is a tropical paradise with a French twist and a Tamil stamp. You think you've felt heat further north, but as you step out of the car here it  wraps around you like a soft hot cloth from which there's no escape  except under shade or  a fan. In the grounds of this languorous  hotel of blinding white arches,  

idle pools of lotus leaves and sculptured blooms, thatched cottages among oleanders, workers wander slowly, men sometimes bare- chested. The dining room is open on all sides to the gardens, and the pool has pavilions with columns wrapped in trails of gossamer material that wafts in the mild breeze off the Bay of Bengal. A palm-lined road runs past the hotel beyond the gardens, and beyond it gleam the pale waters of a back water from the Bay.

By the corner of a city street, there's an elephant

 shuffling patiently as it amuses the townspeople and advertises the near presence of a  temple devoted to the elephant God. 

A small girl is shy of the enormous apparition, but fascinated, 

plucks up enough courage to try to make friends, 

and, glimpsed later beyond a  mutilated tusk, looks thoughtful about her massive new acquaintance,  

The devotees we walk among in the main hall of the Hindu temple seem not at all put off by the scaffolding above us, the crumpled cloths and dust and broken masonry under our feet. The temple is under restoration, and decorations that have lost their paint over time are now being triumphantly repainted in colours that shout generous, earthy reverence.  What god could resist such exuberant devotion? If it's true that we make our gods in our own image, then perhaps it's because Indians live so closely  with great numbers of others - and apparently cheerfully - that it's  natural to the Hindu to have many gods. Surely the gods too must enjoy plenty of company and the excitement of  complicated relationships. And the Indian love of colour and noise - it seems there's no such thing as too much of either - so it makes sense that the vast company of Hindu deities should be approached with  blinding colour and maximum din. 

Along Beach Road,  where the townspeople throng to enjoy the relative cool of the evening, boys scramble over Gandhi's monument and little girls slide down the smooth ramps that support it.

The light's fading and it's hard to pick out faces, but an ice cream against a small South Indian face is unmistakeable. 

 The lighthouse, a high and rather inelegant  canister, sends out its vital light, while policemen in uniforms with French echoes project stylish authority as they wander...and watch.  

French is still spoken here in Pondicherry by some of the old residents.