Kerala

In Goa I actually got a semi permanent tatoo of a crocodile on my elbow so when I extend it the crocodile breaths fire.

However, we left Goa after a 3 hour night, spent most of the train journey knocked out and arrived in:

Thinuvananthapuram.

This is in Kerala, the monsoon debut state, right at the bottom tip of India. It's a communist state and has 100% literacy rate. Our first stop was Allepey and our day on the house boat. The town of Allepey had a long green canal running through it, and you could watch more and more house boats appearing as you drove closer to the famous backwaters.

The Kerala backwaters are quite an amazing part of the world and also quite hard to make sense of. Its a bit like an Indian venice, but even still very different. Not quite canals, a sea or farmland, it was a bit of all three. Rice fields and large areas of water were separated by long walls that made a sort of water roadway. We mowed along past all the women doing their washing on the steps down to the river. The house boats look a bit like dinosaurs and have thatched roofs; Ours was like a floating hotel, and I have stayed in hotels which were more expensive and far less luxurious. At one point when we were just having a little break, a small man in a paddle boat drifted up next to us, popped his head over the side and offered us to buy some freshly caught prawns. Yes please. We ate them for dinner, having had them cooked by the staff.

Legends spread all over India, and back in BRCM the boys did something called the "Kerala boat race" where they all had to make a conga line and do a sort of squat hop to the finish. Half a month after I left the place and I saw one of the boats they were imitating all those hundreds and hundreds of miles up north. A Snake Boat. Big long thin vessel, which on the boat race festival holds 120 crew all rowing at the same time.

We had barely stepped onto dry land when we had to go to Cochin. This involved getting hour-and-a-half long rickshaws and encouraging them to race so that we would get there faster. A crash and a wheelie later we arrived at the small old European style town with wooden buildings. The three things I wanted to do in Kerala were: houseboat, fishing net, Kathakali dancers.

Pretty much the first thing we did in Cochin was not just see these gigantic fishing net contraptions but actually operate one. The line of huge spider-like wooden framesgoes down the beach and every five minutes or so the fishermen get up from their perches and pull the giant net into the air. While we were there it only returned one fish. It seemed rather an effort to go through for one fish.

"Jew Street" was not especially Jewish, and the synagogue was closed, so that was a shame, but we were wondering when the Jews came over here. They must have come over with the Dutch or French. There are quite a few more Synagogues in the south than there are in the north, where the Jewish community is practically non-existant, except in Pushkar where one is needed to convert back all the Isrelis who go and convert to Hindu. I was once actually confused by an Orthodox Jew as being one, (probably due to curly hair) so I thought I'd fit right in. However as I said it wasn't particularly Jewish. It was a bunch of gift shops.

In the evening we saw the Kathakalis, which was yet another incredible dance experience. We watched them putting their make up on for an hour before the programme started. Keralan dancing is all about the facial expression, so it takes the form of quite a flirty, animated dance. Their eyebrows are exaggerated with the face paints. The programme showed all the lesser dances before the real Kathakalis came on, and when they did... the SIZE of them. They are dressed in the most ridiculously big costumes so that they could barely fit on the stage. Kathakalis represent different emotions with facial gestures, so a man sat on a stool and did a dance of about 12 different emotions using only his face, without moving his body.

So it was a bit of a crash through the palm tree state, but I saw everything I wanted to see. Life is much more relaxed down south. More coconts, less camels, much more humidity and roughly equivalent amounts of elephants.