Playing with the kids

Most of the problems in India are invisible to the traveller, so the lives of the beggars and the kids who sell things on the street are a mystery, but one of the most heartening things I have done here was to play with the kids selling postcards in Varanasi.

Varanasi

Varanasi is probably the most spiritual place in India as far as the Hindu religion goes.
I'm in a guest house in the thick of it, but step out the door and you find yourself in a maze. The alleys are about 2 metres wide and you can't get more than about 15 yards without having to press yourself against the wall to pass a motorbike, a ginormous cow or a funeral procession.

The funeral processions can be heard coming, which gives you time to jump to the side instead of getting run over. The body is wrapped up and run through the maze to a chorus of "Rama Rama!" or other such chants.
They all end up at what is called the burning Ghat, which among the huge piles of wood holds several smoky funeral pyres at any time.

We took a boat down the river at 5am the other day to watch the people do their daily washing. Washing in this river is said to cleanse the soul of sin, so you can imagine its a pretty popular Hindu swimming spot.
In such a holy river, there were an awful lot of everyday things going on down on the Ghats in the morning, like a line of children in swimming lessons, a group of washing men flogging out the clothes on their stones, and loads of swimmers.
If we went swimming, we would almost definately die. The safe limit of faecal colliform bacteria for swimming is 500 per 100ml. The river contains 1.5 million per 100m, but the Indian locals who swim here every day clearly have much more powerful immune systems than us, since they all looked perfectly unharmed.

The other day we watched the nightly puja ritual while being sold post cards. The post card seller was a 6 year old called Haresh. He was a perfect salesman, knew all the necessary English and all the tricks. The little kids doing selling the face paints were all under 13 and were working to pay for school every day. We moved out onto a boat, and watched the ceremony from they water. All I can really say is it was quite stunning to watch and more than a little bit mystifying.

Sadhus are everywhere in their orange clothing. Some of them paint their entire bodies white which looks fun. You can't really sleep every long because a Sadhu with bells likes to sing really loud in the morning.

Anyway I must go because I have a Sitar lesson to attend.

Indian Railways Sleeper Class

This time I was with other people, which was less lonely, but funnily enough made it seem longer, and also highlighted some of the damaging psychological effects of prolonged public transport experiences.

But really, where else can you fall into a curry while playing hide and seek on a train?

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.

Goa again

em...yup...


we are a little bit stuck in Goa. Only a little bit though. Can't quite get a train to go the right direction.

Hampi!

Had a few problems with the buses. Really surprising, I know.
I spent half the journey pulling my hair out with grief while the bus was stopped for no tangible reason and my friends had knocked themselves out with sleeping pills.
But we arrived and it led, as all buses do, to yet another incredible place. Hampi is a good few hectares of ancient Hindu ruins which were once home to a whole civilisation. There are temples, ancient markets, all sorts. 50p hired us a bike for the day and we cycled around the sites in the searing heat. At one point a gardner decided to make an extra Rs 10 by dropping his hose and giving us a guided tour of an underground passageway.
It's full of banana trees, temples, oddly balanced rocks and laziness.

Today we got a guy to give us a lift up the stream on his Moses style reid basket boat. There are loads of temples and meditation building ruins at the side of the river. If you were big on meditation, they would probably be the best places to do it in the world. We also saw the place Hanuman was born. Hanuman is a big deal. There are 36,000,000 Gods and Hanuman is in the top 5 most popular. His face is still in one of the rock formations.

It's been a good little excursion away from Goa. We're back there tomorow. Back to the beaches.

G-G-G-Goa

I'm back in the state of sand and it's gone with an absolute bang this time. I couldn't feel more like I was in Goa.
Last night, for instance, we were sitting round a fire, on a beach, all seven of us, plus a bunch of other people who we met in our beach tree huts, and three aged hippies, one of whom was one of the most fantastic guitarists I've ever seen, drinking beers, chatting and "jamming" with the aged hippies. How is that for Goan.

We did the famous Anjuna flea market on Wednesday, where they sold all sorts of stuff. A guy even managed to paint, "Archdeaconfauntleroy" on a grain of rice for me. We went and sat in a beach restaurant and watched a live band with sitars and such like before going out to some insane trance party in a club in the middle of NOWHERE.

There are loads of little shaks with cats to stroke and sitting of the beach with a guitar the dogs come to listen too and keep you company.