Kerala

While staying in Goa (see previous post), me and Dan had also decided to venture further south to explore the southernmost state of India, Kerala. After spending a relatively uncomfortable night in one of Goa's commercial northern beaches colonized by old and young hippies, we headed towards the train station to jump to the next train heading south. Since we arrived in the station on short notice, the whole train was fully booked and we had no other option than to take whatever was left in the train, which, we were soon to find out, were two roughly human-sized slots in a train carriage filled with humans almost piled on top of each other. After downing the last beers for the road in one of the shoddy, quickly erected establishments around the small train station, we headed to the station and jumped into the train heading to the town of Kochi in Kerala.

Most of the train's passengers had hopped already in Mumbai, which meant that getting a seat was going to be out of the question for the most of the trip. Seats in Indian trains and metros are a luxurious and scarce resource coveted by all. Getting a seat is a cruel game of survival of the fittest and he who has the sharpest elbows emerges as the victor. Women and the elderly are usually given way, but since the biggest proportion of India's population consists of men between the ages of 15 and 64, fighting for the seat amongst men is an unseparable part of everyday. Unable to find a seat, we dropped our backpacks on the corridor and sat on them, rather uncomfortably. The only place left was the small space between cars, which meant we were to spent most of our journey trying to dodge the people coming in and out. On each station I was trying not to get burnt by the metallic teapots of the chai-wallahs as they boarded the train to begin their robotic drone of a sales pitch, which consisted of a repeated CHAICHAICHAICHAICHAI! at regular intervals of clockwork precision. After arriving on the station, these men would appear out of nowhere and run through the train and vanish almost as quickly. The sixteen hour train ride remained mainly uneventful, with the exception of a drunkard who had taken an interest in me and Dan for some reason. During the ride the man kept eyeing us, eventually he got up from his seat and approached us trying to say something in very slurred Hindi while gesturing with his hands by pointing to his mouth with his thumb. The man's drunken grin spoke of dubious ulterior motives and we weren't entirely sure whether the man was gesticulating for sexual favours or whether he just wanted one of the beers we had in our backpacks. Eventually he got bored after realizing that he was effectively being ignored. As the train was nearing Kochi, the passengers got gradually fewer and we managed to ascend in the seating hierarchy first to seats and finally to luggage racks, which worked perfectly as beds. At this point, the only downside was that there was roughly 30 minutes left of the trip.

Finally, after a harrowing 16 hours standing and sitting at the shuffling feet of people coming and going in the corridor and then finally getting a 30 minute powernap lying on the suitcase rack, we reached the town of Kochi. After being used to the thick Hindi-accented English of northern India and the devanagari script, stepping out of the train was like entering a different country. The rickshaw-wallahs were eagerly offering their services in a z-accented English (as in "treazure") and road signs and street graffiti were written in a script that looked like something from Babylon 5.

The state of Kerala in the southernmost tip of India is an interesting anomaly in the Indian cultural and political map. Often regarded as the most developed state in India, it has the highest Human Development Index of all the states, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, highest life expectancy and, according to a study by Transparency International, the lowest level of corruption in India. The states has gone its own way of social development following a model of equitable growth which emphasises land reforms, efficient reduction of poverty, equal educational access and child welfare, which seems to have been so successful that Kerala is often regarded as a prime example of human development within a developing country.


The fact that Keralans are healthier and more educated that your average Indians seems to be linked with the state's culture of left wing political activism, which has resulted in beneficial reforms from the common man's perspective. It is often claimed that Kerala was the first in the world to democratically elect a communist majority government, The Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), has been in control for most of the last 50 years now. The party makes its presence well known; as you walk the streets of Kochi, or any Keralan town for that matter, walls and facades are decorated with hammer and sickle logos and red flags and public greenery is often decorated with monuments celebrating local politicians. The sort of pomp and pride that used to mark the public space in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. This combined with a pleasant tropical climate and the general high frequency of mustachioed men, one could've just as well been in Cuba.

(Photo: Daniel Gregson)

This man introduced himself as Jelal. After noticing our interest in the Communist party's presence in the city, he insisted on being photographed next to his party's monument. (Photo: Daniel Gregson)

The walls of the cities of Kochi, Aleppey and Varkala were covered with campaign posters.

Fort Kochi, the older quarter of the city of Kochi, seemed like a logical start for exploring the state. Its mix of British, Dutch and Portuguese architecture, combined with a Jewish quarter with a 16th century synagogue and Chinese fishing nets from pre-colonial times serve as tangible reminders that Kerala has been among the most visited and busiest areas in India for centuries. As our schedule was tight, we were hoping to be able to take all this in a quick and efficient way. Soon enough, standing on one of the street corners of Fort Kochi, we were approached by an auto-rickshaw driver, who insisted on serving as our guide for the day for 50 rupees and take us for a tour round town. 


The catch for the reasonable price was that we were supposed to visit a few shops as mock customers, so that the driver would get his commission from the shopkeepers. This turned out to be standard procedure when negotiating with rickshaw-wallahs; visiting several shops would always bring the price down substantially. Buying something was never expected, this was obvious to the rickshaw-drivers as well as the shopkeepers. The shops we were supposed to visit were called emporiums, vast boutiques of overpriced Indian handicrafts from different sides of the subcontinent with over eager army of staff attacking every customer who might venture in and exhausting each one with their frantic sales pitches within minutes. The shops were always in several floors, filled with extravagant paraphernalia such as human-sized bronze statues of Ganesh the Elephant God. The shopkeepers persistently tried to convince me that these things were being sold constantly to foreign customers. I'm sure they are, if these shops are frequented by Russian oligarchs and Mexican drug lords looking for lawn decorations, that is. 


Nevertheless, our rickshaw-driver kept driving us around Kochi, past the British and Dutch colonial villas and houses and the Portuguese catholic churches finally to the Jewish quarter, where still few elderly Jewish gentlemen were spending their afternoons on the street corners around the synagogue. These few remaining people on this dwindling community are people whose roots in India can be drawn all the way to the era of King Solomon, during which the first Jews entered South India as traders and eventually settled there and integrated to the Malayalam community. Most of the Kochi Jews have now emigrated to Israel. While driving the narrow alleys of Fort Kochi, the driver kept pointing at places of varying historical interest at a exhausting pace: "British house! Dutch house! Portuguese House! Dutch cemetery! Jewish house!" Eventually the ride ended in one of the colonial cemeteries where our driver, who kept boasting with his sexual capabilities and communist affiliations, gave us a quick overview of the place and then hurriedly went on explaining how he used to take his Austrian girlfriend to one of the crypts for a little "ziggazigga", to use his term. After all, the man declared himself as "number one communist sex man". 


The next day we felt we had seen enough of Kochi and it was time to head south to explore the famous backwaters of Kerala - a vast lagoon-like areaa paralleling the Arabian Sea with endless labyrinthine canals where local fishermen have set up their villages. After reaching the town of Alleppey, one of the gateways to the waters, we decided to check in to one of the accommodations among the fishing villages. The rickshaw dropped us to a small sandy path on piece of land surrounded by rice fields on one side and the serene backwater areas on other. Despite the few houses along the shore, the village seemed almost deserted. We waited for a few minutes, a man appeared with a boat and called for us to get in. In order to reach the house where our room was, the housekeeper had to row to the other shore. The small hotel was built on a tiny strip of land in the middle of the rice fields and backwaters. After dropping our bags to the room, the man offered to take us for a little tour to the surrounding area. 

In the middle of the rural villages, pompous communist monuments celebrating the party and it's past and present leaders. (Photos: Daniel Gregson)

The backwaters are full of narrow canals, along which the locals live.

A view from the boatman's side.

The sun was setting and the villagers were taking their domestic animals back home.

The next morning we decided to keep going south to see some of the beaches of Kerala. After quick hesitation on the bus stop, we eventually ended up boarding the bus heading towards Varkala, one of Kerala's better known beaches famous for its impressive surrounding red cliffs. Few hours later we found ourselves standing on a beach surrounded by steep cliffs, on top of which, over the past years, a booming touristy village had emerged. The guidebook had recommended Varkala as a somewhat less commercial destination, which of course is usually the lethal blow to any deserted beach. As soon as a place is characterized as "unspoilt by mass tourism" in one of these guidebooks, it's only a matter of time when the place becomes another standard destination first for the Israeli backpacker and soon after the German grandmother, the British plumber and the Finnish car dealer. Varkala seemed to be no exception.

There is not much to tell about Varkala. As beautiful as the beach itself was and as refreshing the Arabian Sea was, we felt a day's visit was enough and decided to start heading back up as soon as possible. This, however, did not prove to be as simple as it seemed. December is considered peak season in South India and the days around Christmas are especially busy, meaning all transport is often fully booked well in advance in every direction. We obviously had not taken this into account. The slight crawling feeling of stress started to take over as we realized that we could not leave the beach and we had to catch a flight back to Delhi in a few days. Sitting in an internet cafe wondering what to do, an Australian backpacker tipped us that a Russian travel agent next door had ways to get people tickets in sticky situations like this. Without further ado, we ran to the agent's office. Behind the counter was sitting a big muscular man with face frozen in a bored blank stare. The man promised to help us after we had explained our unfortunate situation to him.  Typically, what he would've done in a situation like ours, was that he would have sent one of his men to sleep at the train station at the ticket counter and have them go for the a train ticket as soon as the counter would open. This time this was not an option, because we were trying to get tickets for trains that had been fully booked many times. It was clear that he was at this hour more interested in closing shop for the day and therefore left for the nearest bar, but left one of his men, a South Indian man with a somewhat lazy habitus, to take care of business. He promised us tickets for the train leaving towards Goa the next day. Come tomorrow, we get a call from him who says that booking the train for the day was unfortunately not possible, but instead he promises that if we meet him in Alleppey, he will get us a train ticket there. Since we had not much choice at that point, we hopped on a bus and headed back to Alleppey, only to discover that our man had not exactly gotten us proper train tickets, but instead a ticket for a waiting list. Just as we were ready to take our money back from the man by force, he promised to find a train to Goa as soon as possible. Having little choice but to trust the man, we had to stay in the Venice of India for a bit longer. The next day comes, and goes, no sign of the man. Second day comes, still nothing. On the third day the man appears in our hostel, holding the same piece of paper saying that we were on a waiting list, numbers 66 and 67. Despite this, he keeps convincing that he has seats for us, the only thing we need to do is head back to Kochi with him to meet his friend who works there as a ticket inspector. Otherwise we would have taken our money back from this man, but his relentless efforts to organize the tickets for us convinced us, and so we hopped on a train back to Kochi, where we had arrived five days earlier.

Few hours later we found ourselves sitting at the Kochi train station sipping coffee with our South Indian ticket hustler, trying to kill time waiting for his friend to arrive in the next train. A couple of hours went by, our train was supposed to leave at eleven o'clock, when suddenly around six o'clock he realizes that his last train back to Aleppey was leaving. The train he was supposed to take started moving, so he quickly gave me the train ticket saying we had spots 66 and 67 on the waiting list and 1700 rupees in cash. We were supposed to locate his friend, the ticket inspector, on our train and give the ticket and the money to him, and make sure that no-one would see us, we were not to approach any other ticket inspector, only him. The clock struck eleven, the train arrived, doors opened, people started boarding, no sight of a ticket inspector. Running back and forth the train carriages looking for our person ticket inspector, we started to gradually get nervous. I jumped off the train to search for the man on the platform and almost hit a young man in a uniform. The young ticket inspector smiled and greeted me with a "you're the ones looking for seats right? Just go on in, I'll be there in a minute!" We boarded the train and sat on one of the beds. The train started moving and the inspector came to us. I handed him the money with the ticket, slightly nervous as there was full train compartment watching bribery taking place. I would have expected him to quickly hide the money, instead he nonchalantly placed the stack of 100 and 500 rupee bills on his lap where everyone could see it, and started making some arcane scribbles to our ticket, giving it an instant-upgrade from waiting list to air-conditioned sleeping compartment. It was obvious to everyone there what was happening, but as it seems, this sort of grass-roots bribery is so mundane in India, that it's accepted simply as a way to take care of business. This is what our ticket man had told us too, that the real problem was the large scale corruption in the houses of representatives, whereas small daily bribery like this is there to merely make things run more smoothly. After filling the ticket with all sorts of number codes, our partner in crime handed us our half and left. It was getting late and the anxiety had worn us out, I fell asleep almost instantly as the train was taking us back to Goa again.