Tying up Kerala

Kovalam's beachfront boardwalk.

Since the backwater trip, I’ve now seen the beach towns of Varkala and Kovalam. Varkala is mostly a backpacker and long-term stay hangout. Kovalam is more of a (small) package tourist resort with mostly older folks from Britain.

Earlier in Cochin, I had taken an Ayurvedic massage – I came out of it feeling quite pummeled. Not knowing whether I had a sufficiently authentic experience, I was naturally left with no choice but to take a second Ayurvedic treatment! This time I took it in Varkala, and the provider came highly recommended. Well, the second massage beat the pants off the first, what with the masseur walking on the back and all. Also, in this case there were often two masseurs working synchronously on either side of me.

In Kovalam, I was gratified to discover actual, intact surf boards! As far as I can tell, these are the only surf boards, rented out by the only surf instructors, in all of India. (With any luck I can prove myself wrong in coastal Madras). The waves in Kovalam are ideal for learning - for example, it's hard not to catch a whitewater wave. As of yesterday I've graduated from long boards to midsize boards. And I even managed to get up on a short board! I'm really working on catching the open face of a wave instead of whitewater now. Among other things, it requires my weight to be centered further back on the board. If I didn't have the itinerary clock ticking, I would stay in Kovalam for a week to continue practicing, since it's cheap living here. ($4 a night plus $3 x 3 meals on average.

Now I’m making my way to Kanyakumari by bus. This town is located at the southernmost tip of the country, where three seas – the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal, meet by convention at one point. Shortly after, the formerly French colony of Pondicherry is begging to be visited.

Maybe if I disable this ship's propulsion, we can maroon ourselves here for a long time . . .

I'm writing from the Keralan backwaters. The waters are a network of navigable freshwater canals, running up and down the Kerala coast just a few miles inland from the ocean. The guidebook Lonely Planet calls a houseboat trip along the canals “one of the top 10 things to do before you die”. Looking out over the palm trees lining the banks, after having sipped coconut juice (and looking forward to a coconut-coke-rum I’ve dreamt up) I find it hard to disagree.

I’ve rented a two bedroom houseboat on behalf of myself and two British I befriended since arriving in the state. The vessel includes a kitchen with chef, captain, and engineer. For our funds, we’re served excellent local style meals plus tea, coffee, and water as we like throughout the day. It’s been outfit as an eco-friendly boat, boasting twice the fuel efficiency of its competitors, with all on board amenities plus sewage treatment to boot. In other words, guilt-free, pleasant-as-hell travel.

(…)

It is night now – I’ve just come from seeing one of those sights that make me wish I had a $1000 camera. I’m on the upper balcony deck with the Brits sipping our coconut-coke-rum under a near full moon. Mist is climbing over the water, and looking down the canal, the rows of palms that line it seem to point the way forward, towards an unforeseeable but desirable destination.

Earlier in the evening as our boat was docked, we walked along rice-paddy fields. I saw simple but effective irrigation pump stations in action, maintaining the water level for optimal growing conditions. Like many Keralites (Malayali), the locals were very friendly and warm, and after having spent the better part of a week in the state, I’ve learned to respond to their overtures with genuine affection and not distrust. At this time two kids treated me to an impromptu tour of the rice-reaping and threshing operations. Of all things they could ask in return, they wanted pens – simple, functioning, ballpoint pens. It’s not that they don’t have access to cheap pens of decent quality – those are readily available in most markets today. Instead, in recent decades the Malayali government began putting an extraordinary stress on education and literacy, but the young people often lacked quality pens with which to practice their language,
Malayalam. (If you had 56 letters in your alphabet, you’d need to practice them a lot too). With the tourism through the backwaters, the kids along the banks years ago learned to ask for pens of foreign (quality) origin from the travelers, who were only too happy to oblige. In recent years, locals now have relatively easy access to these kinds of amenities. But the cultural valuation of pens stuck, and so the kids continue to ask for them, still perceiving a stronger sense of quality (or maybe just style?) with foreign-made pens. I was only too happy returning to my boat to forage through my luggage for the ballpoints I was never using, continuing a tradition nearly two-decades old.

For their trouble, the Malayali boast a 97% literacy rate, which pretty well smokes the competition in every other Indian state. If I ever felt a sense of despair for peoples’ livelihoods driving past the most wretched slums of Mumbai, then here instead I see unabashed aspiration and sustainability. It’s refreshing for someone who needed to see it.

Tomorrow morning the captain will drop me at a highway that crosses the canals, where I will catch a bus to Varkala beach. More upcoming destinations that are likely before next post are Trivandrum and Kovalam.

First distilled ruminations . . .

I wanted to post some lingering thoughts I've been able to distill through recent conversations with folks back home.
First, on Bangalore, since I've recently closed up shop there, and catering to the engineers among you - The city's got a lot in common with Silicon Valley, venture capitalists and all. However as an economy they still rely on innovation, direction, and income from places like the valley. The startups I've encountered are engineering services oriented, not making IP from scratch. It's true that I've read that new technology / web app startups of the type that proliferate Silicon Valley exist in some quantity in Bangalore, but the engineers that I meet and articles I read in the everyday reflect the former (services) variety much more, so I have to believe that it's the more important sector. The eagle-eyed among you may imagine there's a selection bias in the locales of the city that I've seen. This is possible, but I think it unlikely.
Then regarding social observations: I find it educational to see what life is really like on the ground, since all I ever really knew about India is through the lens and pen of media (both Western and . . . Bollywood), and through friends who are originally from the subcontinent, but who can only realistically represent a small fraction of the population, speaking either of economic or demographic backgrounds.
I've come to realize is that India is not one country in the sense that the US is one country. It's better compared to Europe for the sense of disunity in place between people from different states of the country. It would be hard to blame anyone for this - If folks in Oregon and Nevada spoke and wrote in a completely unrecognizable language to us in California, we'd have a hard time relating to neighboring states as well. (Except given India's geography, it would be more accurate to use states like New York and Pennsylvania to highlight the contrast of culture vs. distance in comparing the US and India; the density of Indian states resembles more New England than the spread out West Coast.)
As a general travel update, I've visited my first palace! It was in Mysore, and it was . . . big. I'm afraid I don't have much to add on that. Whatever you can imagine when you hear the word "palace", is probably not far off. At least rely on your vivid imaginations until I can post photos.

Back to Backpacking

I've just concluded my (first) stay in Bangalore. The city's ubiquitous technical industry and cosmopolitan attitude have hit close enough to home that it's not hard to imagine returning in the future. Feeling comfortable with the number of inroads I made into the engineering community, I decided it was time to move further south.
I'm in Mysore now, three hours southwest of Bangalore by bus, which means I covered all of 70 miles. This is about the number of miles between San Francisco and Morgan Hill, a drive which normally takes as many minutes to complete. Distances mean a lot more in India than in the States. Naturally, urban distances are doubly more difficult to traverse. In traffic-clogged Bangalore, even if you have twenty minutes to make it to a meeting just 2 miles away, God help you.
As I write I'm in a budget hotel near Mysore's palace, on the Internet through my phone's crawling data connection. I watch as the mosquitoes in the room stealthily grow fatter at my expense. It's time to invest in a mosquito net, as soon as I can find one. In the meantime, I'm applying liberal amounts of the dwindling supply of bug repellent.
After so much time spent in cities, I'm trying hard to see the more remote palaces and temples. It's a challenge for someone who would much rather visit the local museum of industrial history. I'll scratch a few must-see religious sites off my to-do list before heading to Kerala for a week of surf lessons followed by lazy houseboat rides down the network of backwater 'highways'.

Of Baked Beans

Bangalore must be the most livable town in India I've seen; certainly the most familiar to a Californian.
Maybe it feels that way because of the foreigners in the area coordinating IT work. But in fact
it's the thousands of young professionals with regal-sounding British/Indian accents running
around making the city hum, who you could otherwise not distinguish by look or by attitude from the yuppie population of any major US city. It's cool to make contact with the engineering and business community here in roundabout ways, getting to know the kinds of projects that people do and what small organizations are capable of. People are naturally busy, but when you catch them in their free time they are eager to get to know a foreign soul with a different kind of story than the typical.
The hard deadline for Bangalore nightspots is 11:00pm vs. Goa's 10pm, but I'm holding out for more secret late night events.
The post title refers to Bangalore's new official name, Bengaluru, which translates to "Baked beans". Old habits die hard, especially given locals' own reinforcement of the deprecated name, hence its appearance throughout the post.

Clandestine Gatherings

After my last few days in Goa, I decided it deserves a little more credit than I gave it during the previous post - the missing parties after 10:00pm turn out to flourish incognito. As is true with many things in life, you just have to meet the right people. I decided to post a primer on how to find late night parties in Goa.

1. Get out of the touristy areas: Whether you're in Baga or Calangut, however enticing the nightspots are for staying open late, you need to get out of there. The real party's elsewhere, and those partiers *hate* everything having to do with these two developed beach towns . . .
2. At around 8:00pm, hop on your motorscooter, friend in tow, and drive around secluded and dusty Anjuna and Vagator aimlessly (these are areas where the long term foreign population staying from anywhere between 3 month and 30 years reside, often in remote ramshackle guest stays that rent barely in excess of $1 a day): When you hear the music blaring over the hilltops, stop the bike and wander on foot till you find the clearing where the rave is taking place.
3. Meet as many people as you can: Not everybody knows where the post-10pm party is, and this way you're more likely to meet the owner or organizer of the next rave that night. It helps if you've dressed like you're going to Burning Man - it breaks the ice a lot more easily. No, I will not post action shots.

The first outcome of following this primer found my friend and me in an abandoned church converted to a home stay / club venue. I felt fortunate that the guests were only 50% Russian instead of the typical 90%, so I could converse much more easily.
Consequently the last few days (read nights) in Goa were much more entertaining, and it wasn't with just a little fast-onset nostalgia that I boarded the Kingfisher jet to India's mini-Silicon Valley.

Let's see, I'll take a polio with a side of typhoid

So some of you might be wondering what it takes to prepare for a trip like this. Preparation is an ongoing endeavour, because every few days to a week you're hitting the Lonely Planet to call ahead to book the next budget accomodation (with wi-fi, preferably), along with other minutiae like making photocopies of your passport/visa/driver's license or getting flimsy but important documents laminated. I'll work tidbits about preparation in between future posts, but there's one important one I'll talk about here, which is medical prep.
The first step I took was to go to the local Department of Public Health clinic. They run a non-profit office staffed with travel nurses, and offer a smorgasboard of vaccines for varying prices. A single administration of one vaccine might run anywhere between $30 and $200. Polio's cheap, Rabies is expensive, and the rest fall somewhere in between. They ask you the list of countries you will likely be visiting, and generate a printout describing the risk level of any diseases of concern in each country. Since the printout is in prose and not itemized, you have to sift through and put together your own list. At the same time you consult with a travel nurse. Mine was very good at helping me assess the risk level, such as whether you'll be in a rural or metropolitan area (rural = higher risk for most diseases). That's an important point about assessing risk - you don't *have* to get all the vaccines you're supposed to. You don't even have to get any at all, and many people don't and are fine. But you want to leave home with a sense of security about where you're going, and most people are willing to put down a few benjamins for that achieve that.
So you put together your list of vaccines, and when you refer to the vaccine price menu, you balk and decide to call your (shudder) HMO instead. My HMO wouldn't be able to provide any shots until after a phone consultation, which wouldn't take place for another two weeks. But free's free in the face of a ~$1000 vaccine regimen, so I decided to hold out. To justify the travel nurse's consultation time (which they charge you for anyway if you don't get any shots), I took my first adminstration of HepA/B which is called Twinrix.
Long story short, over the course of the next month and half (three further visits to the HMO) I got in addition to the childhood/high school/college shots,
HepA/B, DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis), Typhoid, Polio (booster), Rabies (3 shots over 1 month) and Japanese Encephalitis (3 shots over 1 month). I also got 300 days worth of doxycycline medication to protect against Malaria. Since this medicine makes me sick, I'm looking to get my hands on some Proguanil before I get to the Keralan backwaters.
Luckily, there is little need for concern over malaria in metropolitan Bangalore, which I'll cover next post . . .

Goa Post-Mortem

I'm tying up about a week in Goa, staying just a little longer until I depart for my next destination. So far I've seen beautiful empty beaches and bustling tourist-filled beaches. For me the charm in Goa is hearing every shop, restaurant, and bar whether day or night playing trance techno. You don't see this anywhere else in the world that I am familiar with (not much right now, but I am working to change this), although I imagine Spain's Ibiza would be similar. The unfortunate difference between Goa and Ibiza is that Goa is no longer the party center that it once was. This is due less to the fickleness of European, Russian, and Israeli ravers, and more to ordinances passed by the local government banning "amplified music" after 10:00pm, citing the bad influence on local youth. Some popular hangouts get around this with bribes, but the majority of places have had to follow this rule or close, effectively killing nightlife throughout Goa. Maybe the local youth would benefit better from serious education supported by taxes on cover charges/drinks at the otherwise banned parties.
As a result of the government's crackdown, in walking around Baga or Anjuna beach even before the mandated closing time, you see a huge overcapacity of bars and clubs, which is another way of saying that they're mostly empty, and that they were built under conditions of much larger crowds. In the busy season of Christmas and the three weeks following, they get their crowds (even from America, which is shocking from my experience of not meeting a single American here). But in this, the 'shoulder' season between February and May, my understanding is that traffic is far below what it was historically.
I convinced an American buddy from Bombay to fly down for half a week to hang out until we go on to our next respective ports of call. He's been thoughtful enough to show me the nuts and bolts of running a business remotely, something I've been keenly interested in. Speaking of business instruction, specifically, negotiation skill, I got the firmest accolades from a local vendor from whom I was purchasing towels along with my friend. As my friend was stammering to negotiate prices, I took control of the situation, coming in with a laughably low price of 50 rupees a towel ($1.25) against her asking price of 600 rupees ($15). Over the next few iterations of bargaining we each shaved margin from our respective positions, but I wasn't satisfied (even though I would have no problem purchasing a towel for $15). I pulled my friend and walked out the door knowing the magic trick that makes vendors start playing fair. It didn't take long after for her to meet my price. The kicker is that after the transaction was complete, she called me a very bad man, and my friend a very good man for originally considering her original pricing scheme. So I guess I'm a bad man, but it never felt so good. (For those sympathetic to the poor vendor's situation, you may console yourself that she is doing fine for having a storefront on the main drag of the main tourist city of Goa, and that she sells many towels to many foreigners in excess of $15, and further that she wouldn't have made the sale if she wasn't making money on the deal. I dare say she was probably still making 50-100% margin off our transaction).
And finally, my verdict on Goa: Without the trance-fuelled nightlife that made Goa so popular for over a decade, all it has left are its beaches, which exist in better quantity and quality elsewhere in the world. My advice to Americans looking for an exotic locale to relax in for awhile-- lie back in Cancun, sip pina coladas in Puerto Vallarta, or when you've got some more time, go surfing in Bali.
Next stop: Bangalore, center of the "New India"; Recent experiences are telling me to expect supermalls next to slums. We'll see soon if this plays out . . .