India Journal, Part I
Sunday, January 7-Friday, January 12, 2018
Sunday, January 7 - Monday, January 8, 2018
After spending a week in New York, I returned
to Chicago the afternoon of January 7th for a two-day stopover
before I was to head out to India for a month.
I knew squeezing a trip to NYC right before going on an extended journey
through the subcontinent would be cutting it close, especially with such a
short layover between trips, but there was a Moscow Poker Group “Reunion
Tournament” in Brooklyn on Jan. 6th that I wanted to play in and
since this was my first time visiting the Big Apple since I lived there, I
wanted to have some extra time to visit with old friends, hit some restaurants
I missed and spend some time at my favorite NYC dive bar- the Sly Fox. (I hope to write a blog about this NYC trip
sometime in the future, but for now, this short summary will have to
suffice.)
I had a ton of things to do during my two-day Chicago
layover, including spending a couple nights at the Ale House before taking such
a long reprieve, but I returned home to find a water pipe had burst in my
basement. There was four-to-five inches
of water pouring through the entire basement.
It was not the homecoming I wanted, but such is life. I immediately dropped my luggage at the door
and ran downstairs to deal with it. I
spent my entire layover getting my house cleaned and dried out, getting the
pipe fixed and stable and getting my stuff together for the long journey. It wasn’t easy or fun, but when you plan for
six months to take a month away from your life half a world away, you have to
suck it up and push forward no matter what is thrown at you. There really isn’t any other way.
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
After an intense day of trying to get as much
done from my remaining to-do list, I arrived at O’Hare with just over an hour
before my Emirates flight from Chicago to Thiruvananthapuram via Dubai. When I checked in, the nice lady at the
counter obliged my request to change my middle economy seat and gave me an
emergency exit window seat for the almost 13 hour flight to Dubai, but I was
stuck in a middle seat for the last leg, a 4.5 hour trip from Dubai to
Thiruvananthapuram as the flight was “oversold”. Considering what I had just gone through
with the flood, I was grateful to have the window seat for the first, longer
leg of the trip. It was actually a great
flight, as by the time you get in the air, settle in and have a few drinks,
it’s going on midnight and it’s easy to sleep your natural cycle. I was totally stressed out and exhausted, so
once I put on some blinders and plugged my ears, I passed out for most of the
flight.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
I arrived in Dubai and went straight to my
connecting gate. I was hoping to change
my seat from a middle to an aisle or window- no luck. No seats had opened up. I was screwed. Maybe I would get lucky and would be between
two girls. No such luck. I boarded and was between two big/overweight
guys. Things were not going my way, but
at least I was going to India. It was
not a comfortable flight and since I would be arriving around 3:30am, I tried
not to sleep anymore, as I knew I would have to sleep again once on the
ground. I watched a Thai film about a
bitter old woman who magically becomes 20 again and decides to take advantage
of the change to live the life she always wanted. It was a decent, though somewhat predictable
film.
I always like watching foreign
films and the ones that make it to the major airlines are usually entertaining.
I had wanted a Japanese film, which are
some of my favorite foreign films, but none on offer jumped out at me. They all seemed a bit too “millennial”,
focusing on sci-fi stories and gang/violent tales…I was looking for something
more philosophical, “Suddenly 20” seemed to fit the bill.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
Thiruvananthapuram, India. At 3:30am the airport was totally
packed. I got in the “E-Visa” line to
claim my visa. It was an efficient
process, but they took my fingerprints electronically, which I didn’t like or
want, but I didn’t really have a choice.
Who knows where those can and will end up?
Once I got through immigration, it took around
an hour for my bags to come out. I spent
the time studying my surroundings. The
airport was literally bursting at the seams with people. It was loud and chaotic with every conceivable
looking ethnicity all around. I loved
it. When you fly into O’Hare or JFK at
4am the place is deserted, not here.
Also, the smells were potent and diverse going from incense sweet to
body odor to exhaust/pollution and back again.
Watching the conveyor at the baggage claim was
also something new. It seems that
Indians shun traditional luggage and travel with boxes. 80-90% of the “baggage” was cardboard boxes
either heavily taped up or wrapped in plastic “cling-wrap”. I have never seen anything like it- one box
after another kept rolling out (literally) onto the conveyor belt. When I was packing in Chicago and checked my
baggage allowance, my ticket said “two bags whose dimensions do not exceed 59
inches.” That means if you measure the
length, height and width, the total number of those three sides (in any way)
has to be 59 inches or less. I hadn’t
seen that before. Now, seeing all these
boxes rolling down onto the conveyor belt, I realized the meaning of this
strange baggage terminology.
By the time I got through customs it was well
past 4am. I met Irina with her cab
driver and we headed to the village of Kovalam (about a half hour drive). It was dark and there weren’t many lights, so
I didn’t get to see much on the drive in, but again, the smells were
overpowering and changed often. The air
didn’t smell clean until we got well away from the airport and city.
After a few hours of lying in bed and
unsuccessfully trying to sleep, we all got up and went down to the beach. It’s about a seven-minute walk from our
house. We’re living in a very green and
fertile part of the country. It’s quite
beautiful. As you walk on little winding
streets and pathways, you pass a lot of palm trees, houses, kiosks, some rickshaw
drivers trying to coax you into taking them and garbage. By garbage I mean rubbish- on the sides of
the streets, next to sidewalks, in the yards or the houses. I was actually prepared for this from when I
was in Nepal, so it didn’t mean much in the overall scheme of things and there
is a natural beauty that actually overpowers it. That being said, it seems that makeshift
garbage dumps are just the way you deal with so much rubbish in over populated
and under serviced societies. The
rubbish is usually burned at dawn or dusk every day or two.
While the beach isn’t something reminiscent of
the white sands and sky blue waters of the Caribbean or Hawaii, it is quite
beautiful and timeless, which is something I personally love. There is an old operational lighthouse at one
end atop a hill that is clearly something from a different era. I immediately felt that this place is lost in
time and as I laid on the shore taking it all in, I marveled at how, from just
viewing my surroundings, the year could just as easily be 1920 instead of
2018. For me, this was a perfect way to
begin this journey/experience and exactly what I hoped for before embarking on
it.
My itinerary is fairly straightforward. I’ll spend a couple weeks down here in
Kerala, acclimating to my new surroundings, hopefully avoiding typhoid,
Japanese encephalitis and all the other potential hazards that the CDC warns
travelers of. I’ll hang at the beach,
while also doing an Ayurveda treatment.
Then, I’ll travel up north for a bit to Delhi, Agra, Varanasi and
Rajastan/Jaipur before coming back south.
We are playing with the idea of doing a short trip to Munnar and Cochin
for a couple days at the end of the trip, but I’ll see how I feel after the
northern journey. Either way, I will
have some more days on my timeless beach before flying back to wintery Chicago
in a month. When I travel to places like
this, I prefer not to cram too much into the itinerary. I take a less is more approach and like to
get a feel for the places I visit. I try
to get below the radar instead of just seeing a lot of different places on the
surface and jumping around all the time, but this is India- a huge mystical place
and I decided to try to at least see a few more places than I usually would to
get a better lay of the land, as there is a high likelihood that I will return
and it would be good to have a bit more knowledge for follow-up trips.
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| My "Timeless Beach" with an operational lighthouse from a previous era. |
Friday, January 12, 2018
My second day here. We started by going by to the beach. All the stress from the flooding of my
beloved house has disappeared. I have
started reading Dreams from Bunker Hill
by John Fante. I stumbled upon this book
in Myopic Books on Milwaukee Ave in Wicker Park when I went to find some
reading material for this trip. Myopic
is a great bookstore, which are getting harder and harder to find these
days. I hadn’t heard of this title
before, but have always loved Fante, so this was an easy pick-up. Just reading the first few chapters, I can
tell it is going to be a good one. I
learned from the biography in the back that Fante wrote this book by dictating
it to his wife after he went blind late in life. It is his last novel. The voice is classic Fante, but also a bit
more mature that the early Bandini Chronicles
with tight, pithy sentences that jump off the page. It is easy to hear his influence on
Bukowski, who once called Fante his “savior”.
After spending half a day on the beach, we
decide to eat some lunch and then take a rickshaw into the main city for me to
get a better understanding of my surroundings.
Lunch was tasty- butter marsala, some spicy Indian chicken, French fries
and naan bread….it was all delicious and cost around $12 and it was enough for
three of us to have lunch. India is very
cheap for the value if you go beyond the top tier hotels. For instance, the house we are renting is only
$350/month. It isn’t elegant or upper
class, but it is a two bedroom, two and a half bath with a kitchen and living
room. It is clean and comfortable.
After lunch we went home, changed and then
grabbed a rickshaw into the city. The
rickshaw is a very Asian mode of travel and it somehow fits into the organized
chaos that is seen when driving on the roads and in the cities. There aren’t any lanes to stay in or even a
median dividing the traffic- it’s a free-for-all with everyone grabbing any
space forward that they can find. It’s
pure madness and it’s something I totally enjoy…except for the pollution, which
is quite heavy once you’re in the thick of city traffic inching forward next to
a bus’s tailpipe for five minutes. Indian
cities are, on the most part, manky, loud and intense. Personally, I think it is best to avoid them
whenever possible, but of course, they are a necessary evil and the big cities
should be visited at least once. They do
have a cultural appeal despite the shortcomings.
As before, the smells of India continue to
prove overpowering. You go from fresh
air on the beach, to incense filled rooms in restaurants and shops to smog and
fumes on the streets with sewage smells and decaying or burning rubbish hanging
in pockets all about. It is quite a
sensory attack on one’s system and after 45 minutes in the rickshaw, I wasn’t
feeling positive vibes. I was feeling a
bit light headed from the exhaust fumes though.
We stopped in the center of town and walked
around a bit. We passed a clothing store
and went in. There were some cool things
on offer, so I decided to pick some up an India inspired addition to my
wardrobe. I bought a few pairs of pants,
a couple pairs of shorts, three button down shirts and a backpack for a total
of $90. Amazingly cheap and (seemingly)
of good quality. I may go to a tailor to
get a custom Indian style dress shirt/coat for special occasions.
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| With Seeshoo in his rickshaw driving around town |
It seems that, at least outwardly, the society here is quite centered and philosophical about things despite the poverty that is all about. Crime, theft and assault do not seem to be anything to worry about, but that may be an issue up north in Delhi and the other places we will go, but for now, everything feels safe, comfortable and relaxed.
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| Spinach Fields of red and green |
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| Suicide Ridge- It's a long drop down a steep cliff |
We then went to an elevated ridgeline up the
road to watch the sunset. After, we
started heading back to the village. We
stopped for dinner along the way and had a great chicken curry, some Asian egg
noodles and a schwarma at an Indian/Arabic restaurant. It was really tasty and again, really cheap
($15). We took the leftovers back with
us. The jet lag was now catching up to
me, so when we got home, we stayed in for the rest of the night. I read some more Fante and crashed.
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| Fertile, green landscape is the main characteristic of Kerala |
My Ayurveda treatment starts tomorrow. Despite asking many questions about how it will be and what they will do, I have yet to receive any detailed answers and have no idea. I’m looking forward to it nonetheless…
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https://libertinereflections.blogspot.com/2018/02/india-journal-part-ii.html
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