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.