"Do drop in at the Dew Drop Inn..."

April 6, Kallar
Well, some big changes in plans over the last couple of days, but everything seems to be turning out quite well. I’ll start from where I left off the other night. I got up early to do a bit of sightseeing before I went to my dance lesson. One of the most emblematic sights in Kerala are the Chinese fishing nets that line the waterways of Kochi and the backwater regions. I needed to see these for myself, so I walked down to the water for some photo ops. I got sort of lucky, because as I was setting up a good shot, I noticed the men operating the net beckoning to me. They invited me up onto their contraption and one of them took my camera and started directing me around the thing, snapping pictures all the while. I got to help pull the net out of the water, I held a fish, and I sat and looked out onto the water. I think some of the shots came out pretty nice. Anyway, after this, of course, they hit me up for some money – their way of fishing is dying due to a combination of the effects of the Tsunami and mechanized fishing methods. I gave them a few rupees and escaped before they could get any more off me. I popped into an internet café while I was waiting for the breakfast place I wanted to go to to open and tried unsuccessfully to upload my blog. It’s so frustrating to depend on technology that consistently fails you. I’d rather not deal with it at all.
After I got over that irritation, I sat down and had some fresh squeezed pineapple juice and a lovely veggie omelet. The Swedish couple at the table next to me started laughing at my attempts to eat while at the same time waving away and killing the tons of mosquitoes that were trying to eat me. We had a brief chat and then I headed off to my lesson. There was another girl taking the class with me who had been coming for a few days in a row, but she was not a dancer, so the class actually moved at a good pace for me. The style we learned was called Mohiniattam and it was hard! For most of the hour and a half long lesson, I was in a full squat position. My legs were burning by the end – especially since I haven’t been doing too much rigorous physical activity since I’ve been here – and I was soaked through with sweat. The movements are so precise and require you to not only use your hands independently of each other, doing different hand positions with each one, but each movement has eye choreography as well. I could blame my lack of ability in that department of my contact lenses, but I have to admit that I’m just not that good at it! One thing I really noticed while doing this new style of dance was how much influence choreographers like Jack Cole and Bob Fosse drew from Indian dance. I swear, some of the movements felt exactly like things I had learned in college or in classes I’ve taken in the style of those choreographers. It was really interesting.
After class, I did a bit more sightseeing, but the day had gotten so hot that I had to go back to my hotel room and lay down for a while. It’s one thing to stay out during the middle of the day in a beach area, but in a city there’s just no relief from the sweltering humidity and sun. I woke up in time to go to the 5 o’clock cooking class I had signed up for earlier. A plump, jolly lady named Leelu Roy does two hour long classes out of her house and she tells you the recipes while she demonstrates five dishes and then you eat! She was great and I learned how to make chapatti, fish curry, lentil curry, and a couple of others. (Dad, we’re cooking when I get home.) It was great to be in someone’s home, making food and learning about what really goes into the food I’ve been eating for the last two months. I also had the great fortune of meeting some really wonderful people in the class. Matt, Sally, and Lucy were all taking the class with me and they seemed very nice, so I invited them out for a drink after the class was over. We headed to a little bar that was filled with Westerners and I got to know more about them. Lucy was from the Czech Republic and she had been traveling alone for about two months (she was supposed to have come here with a friend who then bailed on her and she came anyway) until she met up with Matt and Sally about a week ago. Matt and Sally were a couple from the UK who were on the last month of their pre-wedding eight month world tour. They had been all over Canada, South and Central America, Asia and were finishing their trip in India. It was incredible to hear their stories and see their pictures. What an amazing luxury to have that time together and to make all of those memories before embarking on married life… Sally invited me to a yoga class she had been taking for the last few days in the morning and we parted ways, agreeing to meet at 7:30 the next morning.
I met Lucy and Sally at the Ayurvedic center the next morning and we walked with the yoga teacher to a house where he had been given an open rooftop to teach his classes. There were two other women in the class and it was fantastic to have such a small number of people – usually yoga classes in New York can have up to thirty people in one studio! It felt so good to move and really exercise my body after a fairly long time of not doing a whole lot of physical activity. The class was intense and included chanting and meditation as well as some very strenuous poses. I happen to still be very flexible, so the teacher was impressed with me and really pushed me. I did some poses I had never even attempted before – including the Scorpion, which is a very difficult position that involves standing on your head while bending your body backwards into a C shape. Needless to say, I am very sore. After that two and a half hour class, we went to our respective hotels for a shower and met up again at this little restaurant called the Teapot for a nice breakfast. They had seen a sign the day before inviting visitors to an orphanage nearby, and we had decided to make a visit to the children and also to donate some clothes and supplies. I brought a bag of clothes that I hadn’t left at Shanti Bhavan, but wanted to get rid of, and after we ate, we jumped in a rickshaw and went. Unfortunately, we weren’t aware that there were designated visiting hours and we arrived during lunchtime, but they let us in anyway and we had a look around. The orphanage was an off-shoot of Mother Theresa’s homes in Calcutta and it was a place for mentally and physically disabled children. It was rough. The kids all seemed to have very severe Cerebral Palsy and they were not very aware or able to do anything at all. The patience and dedication of the smiling, friendly women who were their caretakers is something that I don’t think I will ever be able to attain. It seemed like such thankless work, and so difficult. I had an easy time at Shanti Bhavan – the children gave me back tenfold what I offered them – but to work with kids that can’t even speak or play… that is an entirely different story. We didn’t want to interrupt lunch, so we stayed for a short time, gave our donations, and went back to Fort Cochin.
By this point in the day, it had reached hell temperature, so we sought out the one air-conditioned coffee shop in the area and parked ourselves there for a while. We were able to use the internet and chat and that was very nice. The three of them were such nice people and had a lot of interesting experiences and thoughts to share. Now, I had originally planned to leave for Alleppey and the backwaters that afternoon, but after speaking to the owner of my hotel, I had been convinced to stay one more night and leave instead for Munnar the next morning. This seemed like a much better plan, and also gave me the chance to see a performance of Kathakali dance in the evening. Matt and Sally had already seen a performance somewhere else, but Lucy said she would like to come with me, so we set a time to meet for dinner, and Lucy and I went to the Kathakali Center to watch the performers apply their make-up before the show. As I said before, the make-up is a lot like Chinese opera; each stock character has its own base color and all of the facial features are extremely exaggerated with black contouring. The make-up took about an hour and then there was an explanation of the art form and a demonstration of the various aspects of the performance before the actual play took place. Each dancer, musician, and singer in Kathakali trains for a minimum of six years in order to become a professional. The dancer don’t sing or speak, but their faces and hands are trained to do things that I have never seen before. As in the other forms of Indian dance, eye movements are one of the most important things. I don’t know if I can even describe how fast and intricately they move their eyes. It looks like something out of The Exorcist! Their facial movements are also crazy – they twitch their cheek muscles and furrow their eyebrows and quiver their lips and all of the various “looks” and moves convey different emotions and states of being. They also do a series of 26 hand positions called Mudras that mean different things, although I’m not really sure what. The performance was strange, but so interesting. I’m really glad I didn’t miss it.
After the show, I had a lovely dinner with my three new friends and then went back to my hotel to pack and get to sleep so I could be up at 6:30 to catch the ferry to the bus to Munnar. Unfortunately, I didn’t do much sleeping since it had reached around 90 degrees in my room (I know this because my alarm clock has a thermometer on it). I woke up in a pool of my own sweat at around 2 a.m. and went into the main area of the house where I proceeded to try everything to cool myself down a bit – including sticking my head in the freezer. The staff member on duty came out and saw me sitting at the table with my head down, trying to sleep in the slightly cooler spot. He took pity on me and turned on the A.C. in my room for a few hours free of charge. I was finally able to sleep. The rickshaw driver picked me up in front of my hotel and took me to the bus station, where I found out that I had gotten wrong information about my bus time. I had to wait for about an hour and a half, but hey – this is India. I was sad to leave Cochin. I had many wonderful experiences there and learned a lot. I really felt that I got to be a part of some very exciting Indian culture and that brought me even closer to understanding this country.
So, Wilson, the owner of the Spencer Tourist Home where I stayed in Cochin, had arranged a stay for me at his other property in Kallar, a small village about 15 km from Munnar (he gave me “the good price”). Munnar is known for its huge tea plantations, mountainous terrain, and cool climate. The city itself is not so great, so I didn’t feel bad about not staying there. After a hot, sweaty, aggravating, four and a half hour bus ride (which cost about $2.00, so I can’t really complain), I arrived at the Dew Drops Homestay. Once I saw the gorgeous place and met the happy, attentive staff of three, I certainly didn’t feel bad about not staying in Munnar. The thing about traveling by bus in India is that, unless you are getting off at the last stop, you really have no way of knowing where you are supposed to disembark. There aren’t any announcements, and there aren’t any signs, and when you ask people to help you, they have no idea what you are saying. I knew I had to get off at Kallar, and I knew it would be before Munnar, but I didn’t know anything else. So, when the bus sped through a tiny string of shops and I saw the word “Kallar,” I screamed at the bus driver to stop, pushed over a bunch of people to get my bags off the bus, and fell out onto the side of the road. I then dragged my stuff over to a group of rickshaw drivers and hoped one of them would know the Dew Drops. One did, and I threw my bags in and we started up a long, winding road that lead about 7 km into a forest.
I was met at the driveway by Nithin – the head staff member – and two other young men. They put my things in a beautiful, clean, modern, red-tiled room and assured me that Wilson and told them I was coming and I was to get “the good price.” Nithin, it turned out, was a 23 year old guy studying to be an airline worker. He told me that for the last month he had be the only person at the hotel and that the other guys had just arrived yesterday. He said there hadn’t been any guests for a week, but that when there were people there, he cleaned, cooked, and guided them around. A lot of responsibility for one kid. I settled my stuff in the room took a short nap while Nithin prepared my lunch. It was heaven, laying on the clean, sheet-covered bed and feeling the blissfully cool breeze blowing through my open window. A welcome change from the stifling heat of Cochin. I got up an hour later and ate my vegetable curry (how unexpected!) and then Nithin suggested we set out on a little walk to the estate’s dairy farm. Let me just try to describe to you how beautiful it was there. The hills were filled with embarrassingly green trees, coffee, cardamom and pepper plants, flowers, birds, ducks, cows, goats, bugs, you name it. It was lush and wild and absolutely breathtaking. We followed a small path to a tiny little farm on the crest of a hill. There were rabbits and goats in little pens on the way up, and then we came to a small open barn with about twenty cows lined up, all munching on fresh grasses. No corn, no hormones, no meat – just grass, the way cows are supposed to eat! There was one huge bull and a few little calves running around. One man owns and runs the farm and he tends the animals, milks the cows, and creates bio-gas fuel from the manure. Pretty cool. After the farm tour, we were going back to the hotel when Nithin said that he had to go to the nearby village to get a chicken and some veggies for dinner. He asked if I wanted to join him and of course I agreed. The village consisted of about ten shops lining both sides of a dirt road and a little church. Now, I didn’t really think that “getting a chicken” would mean going to the Stop’n’Shop and picking one out of the refrigerated section, but I also didn’t consider that we would be going to pick out a live one, either. We did. We went to the shop, Nithin asked for a chicken, and the shop owner took a squawking, screeching bird out of a small pen and slapped it onto a scale. We then went next door for tea and fried banana while the poor little clucker was dispatched, plucked and cleaned. I felt a bit guilty, but I guess it’s important to think about where your food comes from.
When we got back to the hotel, we found that two more guests had shown up. Barbara and Pavlos were a middle-aged Greek couple who were on a two-week vacation through Southern India. They were very nice and Barbara was quite a talker. We had dinner together and shared a beer, and then I crashed in my room and fell into a lovely sleep.
Then next morning I woke up early and sat on my little front porch to write a bit and enjoy the view. I had a small breakfast and then Nithin took me on a walk to a small waterfall about 2 km away from the hotel. It wasn’t a particularly spectacular specimen, but the walk was gorgeous and it was nice to hear the rushing water and get my feet a bit wet. When we got back, Barbara and Pavlos were up and wanting to go to the waterfall, so I took an afternoon rest and waited for them to come back, since we had arranged to take a trip into Munnar and see the tea museum and tea plantations later that day. At around 3 o’clock, the rickshaw came to pick us up and we left on one of the coolest rides I’d seen so far. The tea plantations are enormous, set on the sides of steep mountains, and the most brilliant shades of green. The bushes are low and flat on the top and they look a little bit fake – like something you’d see in a video game or cartoon. It’s amazing to think that one of India’s largest crops – and one if its most emblematic products, tea, was something that is left over from British occupation. Some Brits needed their tea, and they brought some plants with them, made the Indian workers cultivate it, and left them with a lifelong habit and a major export. I guess not all results of colonization are bad. Anyway, we drove through Munnar (a real dump, thank God I didn’t stay there!) and came to the Tata Tea Museum, the only place around that you can still see how tea is processed. It was pretty interesting, despite the fact that the guy giving the description of the process was speaking barely decipherable English. I was able to glean that all types of leaf tea (herbal is different) - white, green, black, and tea that goes into tea bags – are made from the same plant, but processed differently. I didn’t know that before. We got to see some of the machinery, which looked like it was a relic from days gone by, and watch how tea gets dried, smooshed, oxidized, dried, and sorted. We also got a nice little sample of some chai at the end. Then it was time for a little internet (in the tiniest internet café in India) and then back on the rickshaw and home to lovely, clean, peaceful Dew Drops Homestay.
Barbara and I had agreed that last night’s dinner was a little on the bland side, and we were also facing an evening free of any possibility for activity, so we asked Nithin if he would let us help with dinner. He enthusiastically agreed and told us to give him twenty minutes to cut veggies before we came down to help. We made our way down to the kitchen – a very big, clean, nicely outfitted one – and rolled up our sleeves. We helped make vegetable curry (shocking, I know), lentil curry, chapatti, and rice. It was fun to be cooking and I really impressed everyone with my Food- Network-stolen technique of smashing the garlic with the back of my knife to get the skin off. It’s the simple things.
Oh! I forgot to mention that Rinjo, the smiley driver who picked me up from the airport in Cochin, was the guy who drove the Greek couple from Cochin to Munnar. We had a very happy reunion when he came with them, and then he showed up again with another couple as we were cooking. It was sort of nice to feel like I had a little friend in India. He greeted me as if we were long lost siblings and every time we parted, it was with hugs and promises that he would be contacting me on my e-mail. We had a very nice dinner with such a strange combination of people. Me, Barbara, Pavlos, and Rinjo… Very cute.
By the time we finished eating, it was time for me to tuck myself in, since I was catching the 7 a.m. bus the next day for my journey to Alleppey.