... in which your tireless traveller explores the remnants of Kochi's glorious Dutch past, spends time on the backwaters, and spots leeches, wild elephants and tea...
KOCHI/COCHIN
All good things must come to an end, and Holland's 130-year reign over this South Indian port town ended when the Brits treacherousely nicked it from us in 1795 (after we had rather violently kicked the Portuguese out before us, in 1664). Bad things come to an end too, and for the first time in several days the storm, now known to be a real tropical cyclone, moved north and let the sun come through again.
The storm had been unsuspectedly violent - a dozen fishing boats and crews have gone missing, and the Indian Lakswadweep archipelago (also part of the state of Kerala) was battered, with many houses and forests destroyed and animals drowned. All we got on the mainland was tons of rain - 60cm in the space of a few days. But the rain is only really bothersome for tourists here - the locals are delighted that it is now only 29 degrees and quite sweaty instead of 33 degrees and very sweaty. The farmers are overjoyed as the rain probably means the crops (that were suffering in the dryness till now) are saved.
For the Keralan on the street, nothing changes - Keralans always carry umbrellas in summer, against rainfall or otherwise against the scorching sun that gets you sweating heavily in seconds, so if it rains or not, they'll use them anyway. Having compared both extremes, I prefer the summer rains to the summer sun actually.
Kochi is a city surrounding a lagoon-like river estuary, with a few islands and the old Fort Kochi peninsula next to the narrow channel where it all mouths into the Arabian Sea, and where the tide comes surging through a few times per day.
There's a modern part called Ernakulam with the bus stations, train station, cinemas and surprisingly modern 'skyscrapers' (one under construction which is to have a traditional Keralan roof perched on top of it). But all the sights are in Fort Kochi, the place the Portuguese, Dutch and British used as a base.
Kochi is proud of its colonial background, and is the only city in the world that had three successive colonisers, retaining a bit of culture, some heritage and a hangover from each. The streets actually have just a bit of a Dutch feel to them, many of the town houses are Dutch-built and look slightly like what we have at home, and on the old maps the fortress had bastions ('punten') with names like Gelderland (the province where my parents live), Utrecht (the province and city I studied in) and Vriesland (where our cute black-and-white cows originate from). For me it was fabulous to stroll around my first real Dutch colony.
A history book written by a local teacher enlightened me on Kochi. Arab traders had been here for centuries before the Portuguese under Vasco da Gama arrived here in the 15th century. The Dutch, jealous of the ideal port geography and the huge and profitable spice trade, attacked the Portuguese fortress in 1663, and again in 1664, winning the very violent sea and land battles after ships and fresh troops arrived from Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Rather embarrasingly, we then proceeded to plunder the place, killing many of the locals who had surrendered, destroying 10 of the 12 Catholic churches (Holland being Protestant), and burning down the Portuguese library, which was the most important library outside Europe. Not too different from what happened in recent European wars, and provoking a strong reaction from the international community then, too.
The history book comments that the Dutch "unlike the Portuguese, made no investments in schools or charity, instead purely focusing on trade and profit". And as monuments to Dutch rule are absent: "their sole object of remembrance is the Dutch cemetary, where are buried the leaders of the vandals, the plunderers and destroyers for whom a mausoleum is unwarranted". (But he omits to tell that later on in Portuguese-ruled Goa, they did import their cruel Inquisition, burning many Hindu 'savages' and destroying temples out of religious zeal). To compensate the loss of the library, the Dutchies did start a two-decade project of catalogueing tropical India's plants and their medical uses. This resulted in the Hortus Malabaricus books, which served to improve medicine a lot throughout the world.
Not too much is left of Dutch 'Couchin' - bits and pieces here and there: a few narrow streets, a palace, a church, the contours of some of the bastions and an overgrown (and apparently despised) graveyard. Still, it's interesting to imagine those pioneers who came here centuries ago to work and sweat in Kerala's hot climate, often to die young of diseases much worse than Delhi Belly.
Apart from the spice trade, Kochi was used by the Dutch to repair and supply ships on their way to/from 'our Indonesia', and for shipbuilding. With a steady supply of excellent tropical wood, the biggest ships in the world were constructed here. (The British after us restricted shipbuilding when the cheaper Kochi production seriously threatened the wharfs back in England - the Kochi tradition nearly died).
On the tip of the peninsula, the Fort area houses the narrow streets I mentioned, and some huge old residences that would not look out of place in the posher areas near The Hague in Holland. The St Francis church, not burnt down during the capturing of Kochi, was renovated and protestantised by the Dutch, and houses Portuguese as well as Dutch gravestones, just like in churches at home. The stones mentioned the names ('Hester van Hovingen, Isaac van Dielen, Lea van Kouter') the age ('twee en dertig jaren') and profession ('meester handelaar') of the deceased. It's fabulous to see old-style Dutch so far from home.
The 'Dutch Palace' on the southern side of the peninsula was actually built by the Portuguese to please the local ruler. It was renamed after it was heavily renovated by the Dutch in the 17th century. One room is full of old Dutch maps of Kochi ("Couchin met zijn onderhoorige landstreken anno 1691") with distances measured in "Rijnlandsche Roeden". The palace also has some great Hindu wallpaintings (dating back to the time of Dutch rule) of Krishna's life and times. Strangely, no guidebook mentions the inspiring ones in the underground sleeping chambers, which are so raunchy that it's funny - Krishna using all his eight arms to full effect, to please a crowd of sexy slaves. In the background, herds of copulating animals including lions, tigers, monkeys, horses and elephants. It's good to see Dutch values spread to all corners of the world.
Next door to the palace is the area known as Jew Town, the place where traders lived and had their warehouses facing the calm waters of the lagoon. The streets are still lined with dozens of medieval and modern warehouses, trading in tea, coffee, rice, cardamom, chillies, nutmeg, pepper and coir (the rope made from coconut husks - big business). The heady smell of the products hangs everywhere. Shopfronts are basically open offices, with clerks sitting behind samples of stocks (like 15 different types of rice) and stacks of papers. Computers don't seem to have been introduced here - it's still done like it always has been. Trucks block the street, loading or unloading goods, and some produce still arrives by boat.
In the middle of Jew Town stands the 'oldest synagogue in the commonwealth', built with Dutch help in the 17th century. The clocktower has four faces, with the numbers different on each face: Jewish, Roman, Malayalam ('Keralan') and Hindi. Inside the small building, the floor is covered with old blue Chinese tiles, and Belgian glass chandeliers hang from the ceiling. But with most Jews having left to Israel and just 14 practicing Jews left in Kochi, it's a dying community.
IRINJALAKUDA
In Kochi's synagogue, I met Volker again, a German traveller who had left Hampi at the same time as me and Eva, though he stayed in Bangalore, parting with the true words 'we'll probably meet again somewhere'. Together, the same afternoon we left Kochi on a nighttrip (as opposed to a daytrip) to the village of Erinjalakuda, 45km away, where one of Kerala's many pre-monsoon temple festivals was taking place. The festival was a ten-day event, with basically the same happening every day, all taking place in the huge courtyard surrounding the main temple building (which is forbidden for non-Hindus).
Under a huge purpose-built roof next to the temple, 14 elephants were lined up, happily munching on huge palm leaves. All were dressed with silver and golden ornamental shields on their foreheads. They were tied down with chains to prevent a massacre if one should panic between the crowds of pelgrims. On top of each elephant sat three temple aides, the front one holding an ornamental umbrella/parasol upright, the middle one holding two furry/feathery things, the rear one holding two round things.
In front of the elephants, a line of oil lamps, a bunch of priests holding up burning (and heavily dripping) oil torches, and a large group of drummers, cymbalistsm, flutists and people with large trumpets. They were playing a ear-splittingly loud and complicated rhythm, that was sometimes backed by flutes, then by trumpets. Every few minutes the cymbalists would join in, chinkity-chinging along for a minute and raising the tempo a little.
Starting very slowly, the music would get the hundreds of pilgrims assembled in front of the line of elephants slowly waving their hands along (or plastic flowers, or those balloons that magicians use to make bunny rabbits). As the pace increased, more people would join in, and once it reached an impressively fast pace, the crowd would cheer along as the cymbalists made it go even faster. The atmosphere really was that of a rave party, with the music climbing to a climax every few minutes and the crowd getting happier all the time... but these people were not popping XTC, they were high on religion.
After maybe half an hour of speeding up, the heavily sweating drummers (and the bouncing audience) would be frantically keeping up the pace, still managing to keep the complicated rhythm structures intact. Then all of a sudden the pace would slow down dramatically to maybe a fifth of what it was at the climax... and the whole thing would start all over again. Sometimes the whole party (elephants, musicians, light-holders and all) would move to the other side of the temple to a similar roof, continuing their revelling there. This all took place from about 21:00 to about 02:00, after which in one corner of the temple grounds the Kathakali dancing began.
Kathakali is the centuries-old traditional dance of Kerala, and it is not just a dance but a religious act, a form of prayer. Kathakali always enacts scenes from the old Hindu scriptures, with texts sung and music played by a band, while the actors/dancers do the moves. The dancers are dressed in outrageous costumes and have heavily painted faces, resembling the gods or demons of the story. They say nothing, but enact the texts mostly with movements of hands, eyes and cheeks... which makes it hard for non-Hindu westerners to follow for a long while at three o'clock in the morning.
The acting was good though - a whole range of emotions conveyed just by a few facial movements. Of the crowd of Indians assembled before the stage (including many families with children), about a third were fast asleep on newspapers spread on the hard, humid ground, all the way through the event - most Indians go to bed together with the sun, and staying alert at 03:00 is quite a feat. Volker and I gave up at 02:30 and headed for the hotel, heading back to Kochi the next morning, after viewing the morning session of drumming.
ALLEPUZHA AND THE BACKWATERS
The whole area between Kochi and Kollam, 70km south, consists of rivers, lakes and islands. Water coming down from the Western Ghat mountain range has changed this flat area into a waterworld known as the Backwaters. Two hours by bus south of Kochi, Allepuzha/Alleppey is an old spice-trading town where canals run from the backwaters into the heart of town, where once ships arriving from the towns at the foot of the Ghats traded products that were loaded onto sea-going ships to Arabia and Europe. It's a dump now, with an unspectacular centre, but is the starting point of many boat trips into the backwaters.
You can opt for tourist boats (200-1000Rs), or for the elegant but slow houseboats that offer accommodation too (3000-6000Rs) but I opted for some couleur locale and boarded the normal ferry boats (a great deal at 10Rs for a 3hr trip) that connect all the houses and villages spread through the Backwaters: one trip of 3 hrs to the village of Nidamuda and back, and one 3hr trip to Kottayam, to continue my travels.
In the Backwaters it all looks very Dutch, except maybe for the palm trees. Large lakes and rivers are lined with narrow strips of land (usually 5-10m wide and very long) on which stand the houses. Behind this, the rice paddies spread out (for 100-500m) after which there is another strip of land with houses. Along the rivers and canals, there are landings for the ferries every 500m or so - the ferries zigzag across the rivers, not only connecting towns with villages, but allowing locals to use them to get to the other side of the river, as bridges only link some of the narrower canals.
It's all very green, verdant, lush and pretty, and the sight of locals whacking their laundry on the stones along the canals, boatsmen transporting anything from huge tanks of fresh water to palmtrees and and washing machines (!) is amazing. I was thinking it would be a great place for Dutch style ice-skating, but unfortunately the temperature never drops below 25 degrees, and the natives prefer to play cricket.
I stayed at the Sona guesthouse in Allepuzha, a beautiful old Keralan house in a garden full of flowers, spice plants, banana trees and coconut palms. Every now and then I heard the rustle and heavy thud of a coconut crashing down - it's essential to carefully select a place for your hammock or deckchair in these parts. My huge room had doors opening to the veranda (originally an Indian word, by the way), letting in the heavy garden smells and the sounds of crickets, gravity-driven coconuts and birds.
The guesthouse owner told me about the Communist uprisings in 1947/48 that he witnessed as a child - Kerala never was part of the British Raj, but had its own king who was despised by the commie movement. He told me that the revolutionaries used a secret language to confound the merciless secret police, and they spoke the language of Kerala backwards. Coincidentally, the Keralan language is called Malayalam, and is the only language-name on the planet that is a palindrome - the same if read backwards. If you've read Arundhati Roy's 'God of small things' that is set in Kerala, you may remember that the children also speak Malayalam backwards with each other. Travel and reading gives such simple pleasures of discovery!
KUMILY AND PERIYAR NATIONAL PARK
On the Backwaters public ferry to Kottayam, which is on the eastern side of the backwaters where the foothills of the Western Ghats hit the water, I met Tanja, a German girl travelling in the same direction, and my companion for the next few days. It's that easy. We had lunch of uthappam, which sounds like something obscene that inhabitants of the eastern Dutch region of Twente do, but actually is a thick pancake containing coconut, tomato or onion, and served with coconut chutney - delicious.
Then, the 4hr bus ride up the steep slopes of the Ghats to Kumily, the village near Periyar national park. Riding through plantations of cardamom and rubber (hey, I hadn't seen that yet) and getting better and better views of the rolling hills and mountains in the distance was great. The road went up and up, the mad driver of the state-owned bus racing like a lunatic to catch up with the private bus to Kumily that was picking up lots of people that he would like on his bus. This made the trip very uncomfortable (the bus swaying dangerously from side to side in bends, with everyone having trouble to stay on their seats, and being told curtly to hurry up when getting on or off) but none of the passengers seemed to mind a bit. I guess an early/quick arrival is worth the risk of having a early/quick death.
Kumily is a small hilltown with a main street, tourist shops selling spices and tea, a bus station, the gate marking the border with the state of Tamil Nadu, a few restaurants (strangely always called 'hotels' in South India, though only flies sleep there). The first day we took abus 20km into the plantation-covered hillsto visit a small tea factory. It was notone that was recommended by all the local rickshaw drivers, so they were delighted to see foreigners visit them, andone of the managers took two hours to show us around and do a tea-slurping session with us. Basically, making tea is very labourous and takes several sessions of shredding, sorting, drying and fermenting before it looks and smells anything like what's in those little bags in your supermarket.
Our guide apologised that their quality of tea was rather low ("Oursnotso good - this one is much better, see?"), and it could only be sold to the Russians after mixing it with higher-grade tea from better areas. Exporting to Europe was out of the question - that would mean investing in much better machines, and also strictly selecting the tea that comes from the farmers. With tea coming from many small farms that used lots of chemicals that was impossible. Only huge tea companies like the giant Tata Tea could do this - by owning all the plantations and having special areas for organically grown tea (which sells especially well to the Germans).
In the afternoon, we rushed to the entrance of the Periyar National Park, one of India's biggest (777 square kilometres) andmost popular. It's well-visited because it's easy to see wildlife - a few times per day, boats with dozens of happy Indian tourists and the occasional foreigner set out across the artificial lake at the centre of the park. The lake has flooded several small valleys, creating many secluded areas and places for animals to drink and wash.
We hopped on the 16:00 boat (early morning and later afternoons are best for sightings) and were dumbfounded to see a herd of wild elephants after just 10 minutes of sailing. A group of eight, a few mothers with two small ones) had assembled near the lake to eat grass and drink. despite the rowdy Indian families we were able to get quite close, they did not seem to mind. Just a little further, three wild dogs (which looklike foxes) were waiting in the high grass: they had killed a small deer earlier, but cheeky crows had taken over the corpse and the dogs were waiting for them to leave. Around the next bend there were large herds of wild boar, deer and Indian buffalo (basically 2m-high cows). Apart from a few birds (cormorants, Bhramin kites, herons, back storks and egrets) we also saw a family of otters messing around at the waterside - two adults and four playful young ones who didn'tmind the boat too much. All that in 1,5 hours and for 90Rs - an excellent outing.
The next day we set off for some serious nature-revelling. We joined a private jeep tour into the heart of the forest. Not cheap at all, at 1500Rs, but really worth it. Charles, our guide, picked us and another English traveller up at 05:00, and we drove 30km around the park to an entrance that does not see the busloads of tourists near the lake. After entering the park through some teaplantations, we passed two strict checkpoints (passport checks and registration) as the park opened at 06:00, and entered the wild area after another bumpy 10km.
We first drove through a vally with hills rising steep up on both sides, covered with light forest and grassland. After just a few minutes we saw another herd of wild elephants, walking around the top of the ridge, warming themselves in the first rays of sunlight, and grazing on (what else) elephant grass. Charles explained about their group behaviour and we went on to drive slowly through denser forest and grassy hilltops with fabulous views over the massive park. We stopped for breakfast at an eco-lodge next to a lake in the middleof the park, where we also met a group of four Austrians, the only other tourists we saw, who were also on a jeep tour.
Afterwards, a guide rowed us across the lake and we started a 4hr trek through tropical rain forest - a great experience. Huge trees, shrubs and bushes of bamboo and palm trees wereall doing their best to absorb all the sunlight - it was quite shady at ground level. Millions of leeches were doing their best to get into our trousers, despite the specialleech-socks we were wearing and the salt that was put on our shoes - three of the buggers got to me (one on my wrist and two on my chest that must have jumped from a tree), but they're basically harmless, just sucking up alittle blood, and they let go when you put salt on them (which is not so harmless).
Spotting wildlife in the jungle is difficult and amatter of chance, and we were lucky to hear a buffalo in the distance, and especially lucky to see a family of rareand endangered lion-tailed macaque monkeys high in a tree above us. Theyonly live in these mountains, and there are not many left on the planet, maybe 4000 and 600 in captivity. They are difficult to count as they move around a lot. In Periyar there maybe 1000. Soon after the trek the rain started to come down and we headed back, spotting the same herd of elephants munching grass. Another fabulous day. Maybe I should have studied biology instead of geography.
MUNNAR
A four-hour busride up into more serious hill and mountain landscapes broughtme to the town of Munnar. It was founded by Scottish settlers (and often reminds one of the highland landscapes) who discovered the unused area was great for making a fresh cuppa tea - and now it houses some of the biggest and highest tea estates in the world, all managed by the Indian industrial giant Tata.
It was pouring with rain when I arrived, which is unfortunate as Keralan busesseldom have windows - there's no glass, just a hole that can be covered with a harmonica-style metal shutter when it gets too coldor wet. With the road serpenting it's way past steep drops, a few of the Indian passengers got sick and just stuck their headsout into the rain to throw up - nothing unusual in India.
Staying at the guesthouse run by Joseph Iype (who also features in Dervla Murphy's book 'On a shoestring to Coorg'), I joined two Swedes for a hike through the incredibly green tea plantations and the remaining pockets of forest and cardamom plantations, and the following day met up with Volker again to travel to a national park that held a special type of mountain goat - the Nilgiri Thar - though we didn't see any.
When the rain stopped, the landscape was beautiful, but very similar to the foothills of the Alps in Switzerland or those of the Carpathians in Romania. Nice, not spectacular. But good enough for hundreds of Indian tourists from the scorching plains of neighbouring Tamil Nadu state (where it was 42°C). It was funny to see shivering children in wolly hats, women wearing fleece jackets over their sari dresses and men phoning home from the internet/telephone cafe saying "It's soooo coold here, only 20 degrees!". Actually, without the rain the climate can be compared to a very nice spring day in Europe.
For the first time since departure, I was wearing more than just a shirt, and at night needed blankets. As the rains persisted, a low pressure front over the Arabian sea was again causing rain over most of South India, I decided at least to get to warmer areas. The famous four-hour bus ride on the British-made road from Munnar to the coast at Kochi got me nearly 2000m lower, 12°C hotter and much more humid. The landscape was fabulous - dense wet tropical forest with steep ravines, huge roaring waterfalls and occasionally some villages.
Following my general plan to head up to Delhi quickly to get to the Himalayas, I got off the bus just north of Kochi in the town of Aluva to get some breakfast, check email and see if there were train seats available to get back up the coast, possibly via one last beach in Goa.
It's in Aluva that I got some news that lead me to abandon southern India altogether, in record time. I'll leave you with that cliff-hanger for now.
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Next up: absconding to Delhi, after a mishap
Weather: cold at 15-20°C and raining, sometimes hard. Real mountain weather.
Mood: cool and peaceful.
Stomach status: tiptop.
Sign of the day: 'Blessed Kuriakose Elias Memorial Waiting Shed' (name of a crumbling shelter for waterbus passengers in the Backwaters)
Munnar Hotels
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