Kerala

Will Sanders is a humongous doofus who clearly does not care about the feelings and interests of his true blog believers. (Sorry Will, I'm a little late with the public shaming. But that means you are REALLY late with the blog update).
Amy Bugg Burk on my facebook page 




I have been meaning to sit down and write this one for a while, but I haven't really been able to work out how.  I went to India with good friends and I am not sure that was the case when we got back to Hong Kong.  Travel with people means being around them all the time, and maybe this wasn't the right mix of people.  I will say this was one of the greatest trips of my life all the way up until the last day which was when the fit hit the shan.  I will also say that I see no point in using a blog to process conflict on the trip between me and my friends, even though things were said to me that I still take a good deal of umbrage to a few things  I thought I knew my friend and his wife fairly well and that they knew me.  They got the same me I always am, which caused the wife to become quickly annoyed and therefor impossible to deal with.  On the last day I was told that it was all my fault, I talk to much and when I do I talk about strange things that normal people don't talk about.  I thought she knew me before we went on the trip, she clearly did not.  So that sucked for the last few days of the trip, and also to a lesser degree it was a drag dealing with someone who is snappy and seems angry at you but you don't know why.  On the last day she told me laughingly that 'I have a breaking point, Will'.  So do I, so do I.  But that is as far as I go into that.  Done.  Fuck it.  Don't travel with people, and if you do travel with people that you really know and know how they travel and most especially people that like you.  That is important.  Regardless of all of what I have just said it was in easily in my top five trips of all time and here's why:

We went to Kerala, South India.

It was incredible, I would say think Southeast Asia but with better food, less tourists, and a bit more work and thought and blood and sweet and tears and stories going into getting from A to B.  Everyone always says what a difficult place India can be to travel in, they tell you about the vast cities like Delhi where the begging children eat from trash cans and the lepers and the poverty screaming at all your senses on all sides everywhere you go every minute of the day.  I didn't find that to be the case with Kerala, which is far less populated reletively, India still being India.  In the south where we went I just didn't see rich people aside from us tourists but also didn't see too many people unable to eek out a meal and food for them and theirs.  What I found were people who were happy to see me, they smiled as their heads wiggle the way Indian heads inside India tend to do.  The Indian head wiggle is simultaneously polite and intensely pensive and joyful and natural.  Indian people seem to stop wiggling their heads when they leave the country, but inside India conversation just goes along with a side to side head wag which I found myself unconsciously doing fairly quickly.
The food was unreal, the out of the way food stalls and hole in the wall shops we found contained the greatest curry, briani, papadum, and hell I have no idea the names for most of the stuff we ate but man it was good.  We went to a great place that was an old concrete tower that had a circular walkway lined with tables snaking it's way up and up and up this column for breakfast one morning.  We went to another place that was a bar where my friends wife was the only woman, it was a dark room of men drinking beers, but only men.  And I don't think it was a gay joint, just a new culture norm we didn't know going in.

On the first day we went to a zoo, it was supposedly the zoo that inspired the one in life of pi.  It had large enclosures of animals, but was also in an overgrown forest, the canopy of green hiding cages and deep enclosures of birds, lizards, and monkeys.  We sat for a time to escape the heat and a parade of families came by and I found myself so overcome by the beauty of the people.  The woman wore their bright color saris and the men were all very dignified in business shirts and slacks.  The little girls were all decked out in jewels and makeup and bright dresses and big hats and looked like little princesses, all adults seemed to walk holding the hands of a little kid. Watching the whole endless procession I had one of those moments you have when you travel.  They are indescribable, they are brief minutes where your whole life falls away and you are left with the power of a moment that will forever change your perception of everything in some small, often unnoticeable yet profound way.  After you have enough moments like this you are fucked forever, you'll never be able to see a picture of something happening in another country as a remote and unreal thing ever again. You'll see the world with new lenses that will alter you once and for all.  And that is how travel changes you, and India seems to fester with these moments.  And if you haven't before you die get out there and see something and go someplace, see if you don't see what I mean.
I was looking at some flamingos and heard a massive rustling in the trees above, I looked up to see hundreds of bats the size of black cats with webby vulture wings hanging in the trees above and all around, had they been awake or dangerous we'd have been goners, luckily they were neither..  The hippos looked like muddy logs which floated and there was some kind of ferret looking varmint  running amok here and there.  As we walked a little girl came up to the wife of my friend and asked "Excuse me miss, but what is your good name?"  Cutest thing in the history of cute things that little Indian kids have ever done.  Little Indian kids are so cool.

We went to an area called the backwaters.  We were looking for a guest house mentioned in the lonely planet which we couldn't find and luckily ran into another place which was became one of my all time favorite guest houses.  This was a three story place with an open roof for parties.  The guys who ran the place were completely sweet and wonderful hip young guys.  I found myself smoking hash with them and the other tourists, the first time I have been high in maybe five or six years.  I remembered quickly why I had stopped, it becomes impossible for me to interact with other human beings in that condition.  Yet at the same time I felt so unbelievably blissfully chilled out and happy.  The dude I was hanging out with was a trekking guide who had just come from a spell in Nepal. He had recently quit his job because he hated it.  He told me a story of a particularly unhappy group of German tourists who became so angry that their seats for a traditional ceremony weren't good enough so they actually threw a phone at the poor guy.  We listened to music and I had forgotten how cool that is when you are high.  It was a wonderful night, but the next evening when the joint came around I passed on it.  I think once every five years or so is good for me, I am so old and boring now, oh to think how we mellow with age.

The thing to do in the backwater is to get a house boat which floats you all day and all night around in lakes and rivers.  We didn't feel like blowing the money and when I actually saw the house boats I was glad, they frankly looked a bit boring and maybe even a little opulent.  We opted instead for a small canoe which came with a guy in the back paddling.  Now I love to canoe, I have been doing it since I was knee high to a grasshopper and I recon I can canoe pretty good.  I was worried a bit about the dude paddling, I sort of wanted to do it myself.  So for the first hour or so I helped in the front, I really wanted to go in the back and steer so I pestered him all day.  This was a tiny man who spoke no English but managed to push this boat all around in the canals and massive open lakes.
Along the way little kids ran along the shore in the villages and called to us for pens.  "Pens mister, pens mister".  This was because they always tell people going to the North that when you are faced with armies and droves of child beggers it's best to give them something they can use like school supplies, little pens and pencils and so forth.  This is something they can use in their schools and in many cases if they are given money it is for an adult who will take it from them anyway.  Well in the backwater we have completely sufficient villages where food is grown and things are shared.  Money has crept it's ugly way into things here or there, sure but for the most part they are well outside that whole financial trip.  But look out happy villiage children because here come these boat loads of fat tourists from other planets who want to throw pens to the children like beads at a martigras float because that was the only way to keep sane in the face of massive child hunger in other areas, even though like I said these kids are fine.  And as a result you have perfectly healthy and in all other respects happy children taught to beg for pens, why?  Because they have found that they have little else to collect and trade with their friends so now they are all plastic pen hobbiests.  Aw things could be worse there.  I didn't have any pens and shrugged and the kids laughed and ran along side our boat waving anyway.  Bless them.
So at the end of the day the old man who was driving the boat let me take the wheel.  I drove the canoe straight down the canal like an arrow, and when we got to the open lake that was was so large it actually had waves I managed to keep us where we needed to go.  We passed a bunch of men on the shore who were yelling something at our guide, and I realized it was something along the lines of "Hey, are you taking a nap to let the tourist do the work?"  And our man waved them off with some curt reply which didn't stop their laughter.  At any rate I made it go and I made it go straight and true.  Once we landed and had lunch the old man lead us through beautiful marsh areas past a village of houses that were all built in the middle of a lake.  Some had bridges, others had a boat on the shore just to get to and from the front door.  Our man showed us his house, which was half finished or possibly blown out concrete block which was short a few walls.  Damn.
But I got on well with him, despite our language barriers.  In the end we were walking and he came and put his arm around me and I did the same.  Someone got the picture, so here it is.


Me and our canoe guide after a long day of paddling together.


I found myself all alone at one point, on a beach that locals call the secret beach.  The three of us had rented beach chairs under a patio umbrella.  The other two had announced that they were going to find a drink and I should stay and watch the stuff.  Three hours they were gone, and the sun tan lotion had run out, and I couldn't leave that area because if I had all our stuff would have walked on.  So I pulled out a small drum pad I had been carrying and a pair of sticks and started banging away.  I was practicing double stroke rolls, paradiddles, and swiss tripplets mostly, which happen to be a few of my all time favorite drum rudiments.  After a while two young boys who wanted to play with my drum pad.  I showed them how to paradiddle and they picked it up ok.  Then an old man came and stooped down and started playing Indian rhythms.  Later the bartender at a restaurant would show the same patterns to me and a man from Cuba who spoke no English as we drank into the night.
Then they all left me there.  A while later a whole posse of teen age boys showed up.  They bombarded me with questions and wanted to take turns playing my drum pad.  The old man who we had rented the chairs from came and started yelling at them in another language to split.  They went about 100 meters away where they all started playing in the ocean.  The old man turned to me and said "They bad, they just want alcohol, very bad."  And it went like that, every so often they would come and talk to me and then the old man would run across the beach with his fist shaking.

I found myself all alone at one point.  The other two were off someplace else which was ok.  I was in a mountain town that had rolling tea plantation hills.  One day the taxi's, or auto rickshaw drivers called a strike in protest of the government cutting down the forest.  This meant that all the places where people go to hike around would be fairly inaccessible for a day.  I was staying in an amazing villa that overlooked the whole valley almost all the way up the side of a mountain.  I hiked up the hill that morning, I guess I was sort of thinking a nice little walk after breakfast and before lunch would be just the thing.  Well at the top of the hill I could see that I was now on the edge of a plateau and that . I was on a ridge that went along a mountain range.  I was already so high up, but there was a hill that looked like the top so I started climbing that way.  Finally I got to the top and couldn't believe how high I was but also that there was an even higher peak just ahead.  So I hiked along an narrow path to the next peak only to realize there was yet another peak.  They were like stairs, each one higher and higher and the pathways getting more and more narrow and next to huge cliffs.  After a couple of hours I was so high up that on the peak I felt more comfortable sitting or laying down, the view from the top went on for hundreds of miles and it looked like a really, really far way down.  I was looking at one more peak, this one was really tall.  This one had a really narrow path that went over nothing.  This one scared the hell out of me.  I didn't have any water, I didn't know where this went, and I told myself I was getting tired so I turned around and went back down.
The way down I started thinking that a fear of heights, my fear of heights is completely baseless.  Fear is like pain in that it serves to alert us when something is wrong.  Being all the way up a mountain triggers that as our brains know that if we were to jump off the edge it would be danger.  But the path was a path and it didn't really look like there was real danger.  I was pretty sure I would be fine yet in my guts I had the fear.  I thought on that the following night.  The next morning I packed water and asked for some toast in a bag.  So armed I set out to go straight back to where I had gone the day before.
The second day had much less visibility.  Finally when I got up there it was so overcast that the top of the peak from the day before was burred in marshmallows.  I started for the highest one but just as I started a cloud cover rolled in and I couldn't see the trail in front of me.  This was a no go, so I turned around for the second time, this time really disappointed.  I found a mossy hill nearby where I laid under a tree and read a few chapters of a book I had.  Then I closed my eyes for a time and listened to the gentle with and buzz of the odd fly here or there.  Finally I opened my eyes to see a blue sky.  Interesting.  Back up the hill was clearing up, it was still cloudy but I could now see the other mountain starring me down.  So I was there on the next to hill thinking, waiting.  Finally I started in that direction.  As I did an entire trekking company of Scottish tourist came from the other direction with a guide.  They seemed confused as to how I got so far out there on my own.  I told them I was out here defeating a fear of heights, one of them congratulated me as they past.  Here it is, the narrow path with endless nothing on either side.  Here it is, the top of the world that I backed down from twice.  I put the song I wanna be 500 miles by the proclamers in honer of the Scottish trekkers I had passed and after listening to that song about six times I was up there.
On top an Eagle circled lower than where I was.  There was a cross and a path that lead further along the ridge.
Finally the path ended in a rocky cliff and the clouds started coming in again.  I had a really bad five minutes where I thought I was supposed to find a way down this impossibly steep cliff but then backtracked.  I found another trail leading into the forest which I followed.
I started seeing tree houses in the forest.  I was some sort of live up in the mountain treking resort, which had a restaurant and as it turned out a decent but massively overpriced chicken mesala.  The rain poured as I sat having my lunch, I waited for it to clear and was again off.

Now I found myself in lush green hills of tea plants all in rows.  I followed the path and it turned into a dirt road.  I kept on, and it started pouring down heavy rain.  Nothing for it but to keep on.  I must have hiked in the pouring rain about two hours maybe more.  Finally it ended with a proper paved road with yellow lines with long houses on either side.  I waited under a concrete structure for a while, lost, soaking wet, in India.  I finally went and asked a woman if she could tell me where I was and how to get back to my town.  Her whole family sat me down and brought me hot tea.  The man was an auto rickshaw driver who was off due to the strike.  I secretly wished at that point that I could have hired him to drive me back to the guesthouse but I didn't.  I would never ask anyone to compromise their integrity.
It turned out that I was two clicks from my guest house anyway, and furthermore (get this) I had just walked 14 kilometers.  That's right.  I climbed the mountains, explored the forests, braved the weather and in the end a dude gave me tea.  Turned out that I had inadvertently discovered the high intensity trekking route that people usually hire companies to organize for them.  I got back at about 4 in the afternoon asked the people at the guest house for hot water and fell asleep waiting to have a shower.

One more cool story
It was blazing hot and we were at a bus station that was absolute chaos.  The signs were all written in a different alphabet and crowds of people standing in the open air heat.  The buses were non air con traps with people standing by just waiting to jump into one the way a cheetah jumps on a weak zebra.  I felt a hand on my shoulder and spun around ready to deal with someone who wanted to hassel me.  Instead I saw a man who was grinning from ear to ear and waving happily at me, just glad to see me was all.  I smiled and waved back, he was a very nice man.

Amazing trip

fantastic food

wonderful people

Go to India.