Munnar Hotels
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The Book
Entry 7 of 12 | show all | print this entry |
since our arrival in south india just over a week ago, our trip has taken on a different flow. goodbye to days of wandering through cities and falling through sewer grates, hello to the gentle breeze up your sarong and the blackness on the underside of your now flip-flopped feet.
our time in north india was comprised of sight after sight after sight: from temple to mosque to taj mahal to fort and then back again. we covered an incredible amount of ground in a few short weeks, driven by the compulsion to see everything we could. by the time we caught our flight south, we were exhausted. travelling is tiring in general, but the gargantuan struggle surrounding any transaction in india - the hassle of waiting for buses that never leave at the right time, trying to find your way to hotels that have apparently 'burned down' (even though you just spoke to the manager 15 minutes ago), haggling over 32 cents with a rickshaw driver out of some poorly prioritized but seemingly immensely important principle - meant that we were ecstatic to find a place to spend a few days without worrying too much about where and when we'd go next.
varkala was ideal. we spent 6 days there, during which i spent at least 20 hours playing frisbee. without exaggeration. i can't even hope to do the place justice in words (i'd upload pictures, but sorting through the more than 1300 photos i've taken - so far - seems like more hassle than i'm prepared to deal with right now), but i think you'll get the picture if you mix and match some combination of the following words: cliff beach sand frisbee beer fish markets tchatchkas bikinis yoga meditation hippies indian ocean sunset body surfing waves. varkala is one of those places that is touristy without being Touristy, where edgy travellers can come to feel the Authenticity safe from the scrounge of Package Tourists, but can spend their days eating wood-fire oven pizza and chocolate croissants, shopping for tchatchkas in a recreated version of a tibetan market, and sunbathing in bikinis on a policeman protected beach cleared of leering indians, leering indians being a big concern for many female travellers but not for those travellers blessed with uncommonly hairy backs. in this sense, varkala is the mecca of the lonely planet generation.
it was nice to spend some time having conversations with other travellers that could last more than a meal or two; our constant movement has meant that most of my time has been spent one on one with daniel, allowing us to reach that comfortable married state where we don't really speak to each other much beside the odd grunt or comment about how incredible the raptors are. but actually meeting - perhaps interrogating is a better word - other travellers gave me some interesting insights on this culture. some things that only i might find interesting: at least 40-50% of travellers are maintaining some sort of travel blog; at least 60-70% of travellers are travelling with a local cell phone; and almost all travellers are travelling with some sort of guide book, usually the near ubiquitous lonely planet.
the lonely planet - colloquially referred to as The Book (said with appropriate awe) - has had an incredible effect on travel in india. it's developed an extraordinarily reliable voice, and proves overwhelmingly effective at funnelling thousands of travellers to the same 5 hotels and restaurants in its recommended cities. because so many travellers are dependent on The Book, local hotel owners not fortunate enough to be recommended are forced to react in one of three ways: a) by paying rickshaw drivers and other random indians exhorbinant commissions to accost travellers disembarking from buses and trains and divet them to their hotel - a popular scam here is for a rickshaw driver to offer a reasonable fare to your chosen hotel and then to drive you to three other hotels on the way, in search of commission; b) by renaming their hotel to match the name of a hotel recommended in The Book, which causes a considerable amount of confusion for a traveller who arrives in a town and finds three identically named hotels located on the same street, and is met, in his desperate attempts to establish which is which, by the quintessential asian reply: "same same but different"; or c) by outright lying, by placing the lonely planet logo on their sign, their window, their advertisements, and their business cards, and hoping most travellers just don't check. it would not be an exaggeration to say that i've seen more lonely planet logos than coca cola logos in india. despite being a Book owner, i despise it, because i think it presents backpackers with an overly generalized view of what the ideal trip in india should be. it has become my life's ambition to provide travellers with better recommendations than guide books, and if you think that i'm exaggerating then clearly you have no idea how enterprising and/or stubborn i can be.
after six days of lazing on a beach, we reluctantly packed our things and recommenced the act of travelling. we had made some good friends in varkala and were sad to go, but fortunately we've proven exceptionally effective at striking up conversation with anyone (attractive) that we meet. after taking the train two hours north to the small town of alleppey, we sat down for lunch and, an hour later, had arranged to spend a night on a houseboat with three daniel-aged english girls. daniel was ecstatic. kerala is marked by a network of hundreds of kilometers of rivers, canals, freshwater lakes, and lagoons, and a popular tourist activity is renting a luxurious houseboat and spending a day and night doing absolutely nothing but eating, having daniel-aged conversations, reading, and drinking beer. and so we did. and it was great: relaxing and quiet, and an interesting experience to see how these backwaters formed the basis for keralan village life. it was particularly nice for me becaue i had just finished reading the god of small things, an excellent book - which i highly recommend - set in that area of the world. and, sigh, another spectacular south indian sunset.
from alleppey we spent a night in fort cochin, visiting the spice markets, churches, mosques and synagogues! and attending a local kathakali dance show, where heavily made up indian men dressed up as women and performed incredibly expressive and complex dances to tell some of the more important stories of hindusim. we were suitably entertained for 45 minutes and then left. yesterday we took a bus away from the coast, climbing up into the hills to munnar, an oasis surrounded by tea plantations as far as the eye can see. after the ridiculous heat and humidity of the coast, it was nice to feel a little cold, although i'm finding wearing shoes incredibly oppressive. last night, we had another lonely planet generation experience - spending the night in a hotel filled with israelis, which included complaints drugs loud noise music more complaints too much hebrew to comprehend and a lot of bad attitudes.
because the experience of wandering around and eating more food than we could handle for $1 a person is more strenuous than we planned, we expect to hang out here for a couple days, to do some hiking and to rent some mopeds. at that, my mom has already composed her 'make sure you wear a helmet' email. i want to say something now about the food here - it amazes me that i've gone this long without talking about it - but i'm too hungry, and pretty soon i'm going to start eating the leftover curries stained into my shorts.
despite india, some things don't change.
jordan
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