On the move

On Friday, I went on seven buses to the southwestern coast of India, in the state of Kerala, not too far from Sri Lanka. It took nine hours to get there but the travel doesn't really bother me because it's so interesting to watch what's going by. The buses passed through about 800 million small towns and villages on the way, including one at the very top of a mountain. It was a really bumpy journey up the mountain and there aren't any guardrails. It's normal for it to take forever to get somewhere here even if the towns aren't that far apart from each other as the crow flies because of mountains and a lack of roads/highway system. The railway system is extensive but not very direct between small towns. It made it much clearer what people mean when they say that India is a developing nation and what, exactly, Third World means. I passed through towns where the families had two walls and no roofs and their home was one room. The other walls would be pieces of tarp. Some of the houses were made out of sticks and some of them had collapsed on one side. Some of the homes were gigantic, had a car and three motorbikes parked outside, and overlooked beautiful valleys. We passed people bathing and washing their clothes in waterfalls and rivers. It didn't scream poverty to me because no one seemed unhappy but I thought back to the US and just how far "ahead" of this kind of disparity we are. I was looking at CNN's obesity map of the United States and half of the states have a population of >25% obese. The rest are at 20-24%, save Colorado which is 15-19%-- all up from >10% in 1986. There is easy access to good food, hospitals, prescription drugs, roads and fresh water in the US so now we're ruining our health in the other direction. And obsessing over the psychology of our actions while we do it.



On a similar note, I've been thinking about the difficulty I had booking a flight out of here to Ghana. The problem was that the airlines and travel agents both needed me to pay by cash via demand draft (similar to COD), or to send it by courier to their offices seven hours away. I could only pay with a credit card if I paid in person and online booking was not possible. The lack of a comprehensive credit system here was very difficult for me to comprehend because America's is so advanced that it's unusual for someone to pay cash unless the purchase is less than $10. I'd say about 80% of the sales at the bookstore I worked at last year were credit. In India, this is unfathomable. On the bus, fruit and nut merchants would come up to the windows to sell their wares while it was stopped and I was thinking about how little they must make and what their lifetime income would be compared to the average American. The vendors will never have the chance to make that much money. However, they will also never have the chance to accrue the thousands of dollars of consumer debt that some of my friends face.

Mountain shop:


Rice paddies:


Saw quite a few child workers during the trip. This kid was selling cotton candy, he's not even that young. Some of them, especially girls, are like six:


The beach/town is called Varkala. Small hotels and shops are on top of a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean. The shops had every sort of item a tourist might be interested in: small figurines, candleholders, loads of fabrics, what we think of as Indian clothes (which are not what they actually wear) and shoes. There were some jewelry shops run by Tibetans and Nepalese. I met a guy from Bhutan. The other good thing was the restaurants. They were pretty cheap and served western, Chinese and Indian food. And it was more ok for women to drink alcohol and smoke there, because it is so touristy, so I had three drinks in two days but still managed to shock an Indian man despite the environment. I ordered Chinese food on Friday night because I miss it and was expecting chopsticks for some reason but the dish came with a fork! So, I used a fork for the first time in 2 1/2 months. On Saturday, I had western and it made me a little sick. The same thing happened the two times I had western food in China. I think it's my body not being used to it, not the quality of the food.

Ganesh and Jesus on the bus:


View from the bus:


There are two beaches; one to the north where most of the Indians go, and one to the south where most of the foreigners go so the women can wear bikinis and the men can wear trunks. Indian swimwear is T-shirt and knee-length shorts, regardless of sex. The area and ocean are really beautiful; just like a postcard with palm trees everywhere and waves that break far from the shore. I don't know how I ended up in a tropical paradise, it's never been my wish! But I enjoyed it anyway. I got a nice and awkward sunglasses sunburn, so I look like a pink raccoon right now.

Stray dogs all over Varkala, too. They're really tame and have a defeated attitude; not all excitable and jump-y like escaped dogs in America. The sand underneath the top layer was black.


As you can see, the beach was super beautiful and easy to enjoy. The undercurrent is really strong, stronger than anything I've ever experienced before. As long as you don't go out too far (like no more than 20-30 feet from shore), it's ok, you catch the next wave in, but it is a little scary at the beginning; I just kept thinking back to the guy from my high school who died in the Mexican undertow. Beach regulation and lifeguarding are not nearly as extensive here as they are in the Sttaes. The beach was fun and good until Saturday night. I went down the stairs from the cliff to sit on the beach and look at the nighttime ocean but there was an overpowering stench of poo and dead. I kept going, just to investigate, and found one of the hotels was dumping raw sewage straight into the sand, right where I had been laying earlier in the day! Completely disgusting.

Indian Ocean as the next Lake Erie:


I was talking to a guy from Germany on Saturday at the beach. He was born in 1988 in East Germany and said that, generally, that side of the country is still economically underdeveloped and depressed. The young people leave as soon as they can because there's nothing to do and, culturally, there is nothing. The west is much more modern and still widely preferred.

I'm writing this in the midst of one of the numerous power outages that happen everyday. It's not particularly inconvenient because the computers are on a different power circuit and almost never go off but the lights and fans go off about eight times a day for anywhere from five seconds to twenty minutes each time.

The host family serves coconut chutney quite often. It's a sort of coconut sauce to go with dosai or flat pancake or whatever. They get the coconuts from the palm tree behind their house. The coconut man comes and climbs up the tree and knocks them off! That's his title and his job. Awesome.

Coconut shells behind the restaurant:


Lunch off a banana leaf: