Kerala: Jan 18 - 29

Thiruvananthapuram - Varkala Beach – Kollam – Allepy (by houseboat) - Kochi – Thrissur – Calicut - Kalpetta (by bus) – Kannur - Kasargord

The Keralan Panorama

Kerala’s is a conflicted identity.

The wealthiest state in India is simultaneously the site of the world’s first democratically-elected communist government and a tourism board that proclaims it “God’s own country".

So which is it?

Well, it's both. And like any realtor would tell you, it's all about location, location, location.

Hammers and sickles might be painted red across the countryside and stickered to the sides of cars that blast recorded exhortations from roof-mounted speakers as they crawl up and down the roads, but wherever you are, it's always the foreground that's most firmly of the people. Oftentimes it is the people. The smiling throngs whose million concessions to overcrowding create the familiar sensory barbs that can't be avoided when they're right in front of you.

Then there is the middle-ground and beyond; the tropical paradise we viewed as we rode from Tamil Nadu over the rise and fall of the last tremours of the Western Ghats. The drooping palms and comfortable towns, gentle rivers where poleboats carried soil past fishing villages--all close to the Indian Ocean and under a sky as constant as it is generous. Good enough for a god.

Like the hidden image in one of those old Magic Eye books--an image that can only be sustained if you know where to look--in the Kerala that we saw you could stand almost anywhere and gaze on a scene to make a landscape photographer tear-up.

Just don’t let your eyes drop

*

India, Not Indian

Still, there are exceptions.

Places like Varkala, with appeal that stretches up to your feet.

Varkala Beach is the sort of destination whose popularity with international tourists is based less on any showcase of national character than its absence.

What it does have is sand, laid out like a sunlit mat between the Arabian Sea and an Oreo-coloured cliff-face, where rough-hewn stairs zigzag 20 metres to a peak stringed with sunset-catching restaurants, souvenir shops, internet cafes, travel agents and resorts. Varkala Town – the closest piece of real, identifiable India – is a safe five kilometres inland, past an assortment of upmarket resorts and yoga retreats.

We had arrived mid-afternoon because some plans don’t survive contact with the sun. Originally planing to sleep somewhere else, we cut our cycling short, thinking that we would enjoy the chance for a swim and be ready to move on early the next morning.

We did. We weren’t.

Instead we realised just how good it felt to rest. Not so much from the cycling as from the stimuli it took us through.

Written down, it sounds especially over-precious, that we needed relief from others’ raucous poverty after barely two weeks’ overlap.

Still, we did. We learnt this on our first night as we sat, content and grateful, with our faces to the ocean and our backs to the rest of India.

One afternoon off turned into three full days of forgetting where we were. We walked the cliff-side path from restaurant to restaurant. We found dreamt-of foods, cheap beer and--for the first time in what we'd been assured was a booming IT state--reliable wi-fi. We jogged the length of the beach, lay on its warmth and rolled in the choppy surf.

I lost our room key. The only one without a spare.

We paid to be trussed in a loincloth of thin calico, basted in oil and call it a massage. We talked with an Indian waiter who dressed like Bob Marley, sang Barry Manilow and never once asked us about our jobs. We unlearnt the soundscape and smells of Indian streets.

At night, looking out to sea one last time before a deep sleep, the only sound was the faint crash of waves and the only light the far glimmer of fishing boats.

Tamil Nadu had been a few guidebook-described temple cities scattered on roads that more often ended with us staying at quieter towns. In these towns our arrival was routinely met with curiosity and sometimes more, as when we were cheerfully—but insistently—told that Virudunagar could not possibly hold any appeal for tourists by one of its few hoteliers.

At Varkala Beach, we stayed in an India that wasn’t Indian.

No-one thought to ask us why.

*

On a (House-) Boat

"I don't wanna stay at your party

 I don't wanna talk with your friends

 I don't wanna vote for your president

 I just wanna be your tugboat captain"

 Tugboat - Galaxie 500

Idleness is an easy habit..

The day we left Varkala it wasn’t to return to the patterns of cycling.

That would have been easy. We were rested. We were fit. And Kerala’s casual beauty and shaded roads lent themselves to long days of empty-heading pedaling.

But we didn’t do that.

What we did was ride—rested-ly, fit-ly—a bare 30 kilometres through a crisp Keralan morning to arrive at Kollam for our one big Indian splurge: a chartered houseboat up the backwaters of Lake Ashtamudi.

The houseboat itself was a familiar image of Indian holidaying: a tiered roof of thatched palm leaves and lashed bamboo framework bowed the length of the long, flat-bottomed barge, covering the large fore deck and hugging the aft bulk of our bedroom. Popular too: we boarded ours and met the crew – two ‘oarsmen’ and one cook – at a port with a dozen-odd other similar houseboats, some two-storied and multi-roomed.

What the houseboat wasn't was fast. It didn’t need to be. We were there because, for the next 24 hours at least, comfort trumped speed.

As we begin the meandering wetland path that would take us to Allepy, I settled into the cushioned bench, thinking about the nearly 100 kilometres we would no longer need to ride.The oarsman sat just behind the prow in a weathered wooden chair, adjusting course occasionally and resting one leg across the other, humming softly like a contented live-flesh figurehead.

We murmured slowly through wide horizons of water where Chinese fishing nets rested, counterbalanced and waiting. Saltwater turned to freshwater. Open wetlands narrowed and we entered a gently yawning corridor of coconut trees and small villages where incomplete snatches of canal-side life slid past: women in saris washing clothes on the water’s edge; children with shining smiles and dusty clothes playing cricket in a grassy clearing; old men rattling steel-and-rust bicycles along dirt paths; neglected tubboats fading against the brighter colours of their surroundings; old women growing piles of coir, the same straw-like fibres found beneath a cocount’s husk that had bound the planks of our boat’s hull.

These scenes arrived over a dimpled sheet with few smells but the water and a faint whiff of diesel. Sounds were hushed by distance and tempo. It was like I had imagined India would be before I knew anything about it – the sort of colourful that didn’t crowd the senses.

On board we did very little. There were fried masala prawns to eat, I read a novel front-to-back and when we moored in the afternoon Ben and I took a dip in water turning dark with the sky. One of the oarsmen told us of Kerala.

Mostly we sat in satisfied silence. When we did speak to each other it was with the languor so easily found on boats, where completing sentences seems too much to ask.

That’s effort better wasted.

Occasionally I would glimpse our bikes, stacked at the rear of the deck, and remember what they meant. Something about effort and, later, high mountain passes. But it was always easy to go back to the silence.

Better to just watch it all go by.