Chilling on Allapey Backwaters + nightmare journey part 27-29th December 2010

Found a great hotel in Allapey with friendly staff and good food. The town itself was pretty uninspiring very busy with traffic and the food I ate on the first evening was pretty terrible too, there seemed to be a lack of decent restaurants in town.

I spent the first afternoon there looking into boat trips. Kerala is famous for its backwaters a series of palm lines lagoons and rivers running down the coast. It became clear pretty quickly that I was there at the wrong time of year. My initial plan had been to do an overnight trip on a houseboat but with the holiday season prices had sky rocketed, with a 24 hour trip costing around £140 pounds……well out of my price range obviously + not great value for money for that length of time. Instead I booked a day trip on a canoe with a guide along with a French Canadian guy I met in the hotel….

That evening was pretty chilled watched the South Africa V India test match along with the hotel staff and went to be early after having my first hot shower in almost a month!

Next morning we started earl and got a ferry from town for an hour through the backwaters to our guides village. We were joined by a Scottish and Dutch guy. Our guide was in his early sixties and a bit crazy, had a fondness for eccentric headgear and reminded me a a bit of an Indian Tommy Cooper. (see photo) . We ate breakfast at his house while he told us of the greatness of the local naturally made coconut beer, he seemed to have taken for granted the fact that we would be buying a bottle during the day.

We set out on the canoe around 10 and spent a very relaxed four or five hours cruising through narrow canals sided by rice paddies and palm trees. We paced through many small villages along the way, life here seemed very simple and relaxed, a world away from the traffic back in town. Was actually glad I hadn’t booked a house boat at this point as the canoe offered a much more intimate experience ( see photos for an idea ) .

In the afternoon we arrived back at our guides house and had lunch along with the coconut beer we had chipped in to buy along the way. Our guide drank most of it but in fairness it tasted like bounty flavoured paint thinner …so he was welcome to it .

In the afternoon went for a walk through the village and rice fields….realised at this point I had done far too little nature viewing on this trip….will have to make up for that in the far east!

Got the ferry back toward town and then had to get a local bus for the second half of the journey. By the time we got back to town was hot and tired. Went for a few cold beers in the local bar with the French Canadian guy and had a good chat about politics.

After that went back to the hotel and had dinner in front of Spurs v Newcastle live, which I stumbled upon while flicking channels. What a result ( ha ha Ben BTW). Slept soundly that evening and awoke to another hot shower!

That morning I went into town to try book a bus to the former French colony of Pondicherry on the East coast of India where I planned to spend New Years eve.

After checking around for a couple of hours it seemed all the busses were full, I decided to try my luck in the next major town to the south Kollam, and if not there in Trivandrum a city even further south where I knew there was at least one government bus a day to Pondicherry….big mistake turned out I had totally underestimated how booked out transport get during Indian holidays…..( makes sense though when y9ou consider how many people live here).

I took the bumper bus ( or “super-fast” to give it its official name , “super-painful” more like) down to Kollam, no luck there was told to go on to Trivandrum. Another 2 hours later I arrived at Trivandrum train/bus station hot and tired having just got a good kicking from the bus…..things were about to get worse…. The government bus had been booked out for weeks and wasn’t free until the fourth of Jan, there were no private bus available and the only train going towards Pondicherry was at 3.;45 in a the morning with no seats available ( ie standing sitting on the floor near the toilet blocks ) …….Arrrghhhhh decided this was my lowest point in India…the traffic was doing my head in. I decided to go for the 3.45 standing train option and hope I would be able to sit for part of the journey ( the full trip was 14 hours ). I booked a room in the train station retiring rooms ( actually really nice with ac and clean common bathrooms ) which at least offered me some peace and a place to crash for a few hours. I ate showered and went to be about 9 managed to sleep till 3 and woke up feeling pretty refreshed….”

“its not so bad I thought”…..how wrong I was…….I had been told by enquiries the previous night the train was at 3.45am so I got on the train leaving at that time and managed to find a seat straight away …..but something didn’t seem right….I realised after a while the final destination was in the wrong direction….fuck….no staff on the platform to ask so had to run all the way back to enquiries where I was told my train was actually on platform 3 not 4 and was about to go….legged it over there and there was no train in sight…..bollocks!

Went to the station masters office where I actually got some reliable but disappointing information. The train I wanted actually left at 3.35 not 3.45, for some reason it had not been listed on the departures board and in any case I was told the wrong time to begin with. The next train I needed was at 4.20pm …12 hours away …gutted …gutted …gutted…….felt so angry I was numb to the world. This would mean doing the 14 hour standing ride overnight and would mean sleep depravation also I wouldn’t get to Pondicherry till the morning of new years eve…..

Kerala was beginning to turn into a nightmare…took ages to get here in the first place and since Kochi nothing had gone to plan…..to use an Indian phrase it was “fucking with my happiness” ….I debated going straight to Madras that morning and then trying to head back down to Pondicherry that evening but the only way to do it would be to get a 5am train to Madras that wouldn’t get in until 11.30pm…….

Luckily I still had my room in the station so went back to try sleep for as long as possible finding it hard to believe how bad my luck had been in the last week…..Had such an amazing time in Goa maybe its just the universe balancing itself out again……

Didn’t really sleep much as I had gone to bed so early the night before + I was thinking how much I would like to throttle the staff on the enquiry desk. Next morn/early aft chilled out and prepared my self for possibly the toughest transit journey of my entire travel career…….Pondicherry better be good...........

The long trip down to, and xmas in, Fort Kochin 23rd -26th December 2010

My original bus ticket to Mangalore was at a discounted rate for a seat in the drivers cabin. However when I turned up at the bus stand with my booking agent he was told that I couldn’t travel in the cabin as I was a foreigner…….I had just spent all morning negotiating with various touts and booking agents in town to get this ticket as all the trains and nearly all busses were full for the xmas period . In order to be in Fort Kochin by x-mas morning ( and not sat on a bus after a sleepless night ) this ticket was my last chance, so I wasn’t best pleased with the mix up….after 20minutes of phone calls and further negotiations I was told there was a spot on another bus leaving that afternoon but I would have to pay full price and get to a different part of the city in order to catch it. I reluctantly agreed, forked over the extra rupees and was then taken on the train by one of the tour agents to a local station 20minutes away. I was then told it was a ten minute walk to the bus stop…this involved walking across the railway tracks and then through a slum area ( pretty interesting). Got t o pick up point easily enough but then ended up waiting for 3 hours for the bus to arrive in the heat. Was getting more and more tired by the minute after little sleep the previous eve. I was convinced at one point it wasn’t coming and all was lost, just as I had began to psyche myself up to another night in the salvation army hostel the bus appeared…it wasn’t quite the luxury ac sleeper bus I had been promised but by this point I didn’t care and just wanted to crash…That I did, and woke up 3 hours or so later to find myself in Pune…“Pune again WTF??” “ Good lord please tell me I’m not gonna get stuck here again!” Luckily it was just a quick stop on the way south and I managed to sleep for most of the night in moderate comfort with the aid of diazepam (despite the dude next to be constantly encroaching on my space in true sub-continental fashion….)

The next morning I awoke to some spectacular rural scenery, Coconut Palms, rice paddies and lush waterways….. in fairness much nicer than Goa…after an hour or so I reached Mangalore and got a rickshaw to the government bus stand . The last afternoon bus to Kochi had already left…I had missed it by an hour thanks to the delay in Mumbai the day before…..ahhh fuck man ..I felt like ripping my hair out…

I was told by the very unhelpful information officer that I could catch a government run bus to Kochi if I went to a neighbouring town called Kasaragod. I got the local bus there for 1.5hours only to find that the only connecting bus to Kochi left at 6 in the evening…this meant that I had six hours to kill and would have to catch a another night bus that evening , meaning I wouldn’t be waking up in a bed on xmas morning as I had hoped…..not a happy camper at this point ….

I spent a couple of hours in the bus station catching up on some long overdue blogs while being studied by a gang of local on lookers.......at 4ish I went to the bus conductors office to enquire about the bus and was invited to wait in their office where I chatted with a couple of the inspectors…both friendly guys who’s job seemed to consist of sitting around reading the paper and every now and then wandering around the bus station to make themselves look a bit busy…when one asked me why I wasn’t going to Goa for xmas I told him I had already been and there were too many white people…they found this hilarious and afterwards made it their personal duty to get me on the bus to kochi ..they phoned ahead for updates on its arrival and then escorted me personally onto the bus…..in fairness the six hours passed really quickly the inspectors were pretty hilarious….

The local bus was a cheap ticket but was designed sometime in the 1970’s by my reckoning …It had little if any suspension and seemed to have hard metal surfaces everywhere waiting for you body to collide into….this was my 3rd night in a row spent on the road and having caught a night bus like this on my last trip to India I knew my body was in for a battering. I prepared for the worst….For the first couple of hours had a triple bench to myself…not too uncomfortable even though every slight pothole in the road would make your body leap from the seat and land back down again painfully….I was then joined on the bench by a rather large fellow…still enough room for both of us though…2 hours later disaster struck as another fat guy joined us meaning I was pressed tightly into one corner against a metal hand rest….looking round I couldn’t believe my bad luck…the only two over weight people on the bus, and there both sat on the same bench next to me!! ….needless to say no sleep was had that night, and by the time I reached Kochi at 5am on xmas day I felt like my kidneys had been used as punching bags all night…..

Was relieved to get off the bus though …I had to negotiate a few more city busses to get to the area of the town I wanted to stay in……The city hadn’t woken yet and the xmas decorations on local houses and churches gave me some comfort….It felt like Christmas alright …so glad I didn’t stay in Goa …..

At 7am I found a decent room in a home stay next to the town basilica a few streets back from the sea…..crashed out until midday then forced myself to get up. Had a Christmas shave and went out to town ……My body felt destroyed from the previous three night’s cramped conditions, but I also felt a decent amount of satisfaction that I had made it in time for Christmas despite all the set backs …Looking round the area of Fort Kochin was the perfect place to spend it…an old portugese/dutch trading colony the streets were very quiet with lots of bright Indian style xmas decorations and mostly families on holiday visiting rather that drunken extroverts……

I spent the afternoon by the sea shore watching a large group of Indian holiday makers playing chicken with the waves in the harbour…( see photo)

The harbour incidentally was not quite as picturesque as I though it might be the oil refineries on the opposite side of the water made me make a mental note to avoid any fish that might have come from the famous Chinese fishing nets set along the sea wall……

I had a nap in the after noon and then went out to eat a solitary Christmas curry…met a cool German guy called Lucas in the restaurant who was also gonna be dining alone. We ate together and then went for a few drinks and talked about party/festival organisation ( he was a DJ who organised events in Germany )…….I headed to bed around midnight totally exhausted but feeling like I had had a good Christmas day …(my first alone outside of my home countries and first in warm conditions).

The next morning I woke with a mild fever and stomach problems….think I must have ate something bad during the night bus marathon. This in combination with my still pain riddled body meant I wasn’t I much of a mood to do anything….I managed to eat a bit eventually and then spent an hour or so in an internet café before having to head back to the hotel and its lavatory facilities…….Spent the whole afternoon and evening suffering from the fever and trying to sleep it off…that evening felt well enough to go watch a really cool Sitar and Tabla concert at the local cultural centre and then eat a light dinner…

Crashed early again and felt marginally better the next morn…fever gone but stomach still not right…in fairness I had been pretty lucky on that front so far this trip to India so couldn’t really complain too much…after a few hours I caught another local “bumper bus” (thankfully only for 2 hours this time) south to the small town of Allapy, where I would seek a boat ride on the famous Keralan Backwaters….

I went through hell to get to Kochin but I think it was worth it, Although a tourist town it still maintained its colonial charm and the Christian decorations made it feel properly like xmas…..there wasn’t a great deal to do there but it would have been an awesome place to relax for a couple of days if I hadn’t got ill again halfway through….but as many a local has told me over the last six weeks “ these things happen this is India!”……

Palolem beach Goa 15th- 22nd December 2010.

The semi sleeper bus to Goa was pretty decent and the Bollywood movie they showed was actually very enjoyable even though the sub titles were intermittent. After getting to the southern city of Margao we got a local bus further south for 1.5 hours to Palolem beach. Palolem is one of the most southerly and under developed beaches in the state. Although still relatively underdeveloped upon arrival the place had changed a lot since I was there in 2000. There were 5 times as many shops, beach huts, and restaurant s there as well as 5 times as many western travellers and plenty of families on holiday. Still the beach was still just as beautiful and pretty chilled even with constant enquiries from locals selling jewellery and sarongs amount other things…..

We checked into a local guest house that was just off the beach and very quiet. By the looks at some of the ramshackle beach huts that’s had popped up everywhere in the last decade it probably one of the nicest places to stay in the area. Headed straight down to the beach and dipped my feet in the water ..felt instant relief and calmness felt like id been trapped on the skeleton coast and just managed to find my way to water …was gonna enjoy winding down over the next 7 days. ( see photo). One point of interest here was the amount of locals I saw playing football on the beach and wearing European club football shirts….another change in India over the last decade…last time I was in Palolem it was only cricket being played on the beach.

With Kate and Nina usually off doing there own thing I spent most of the week hanging
with Kaveri and we became very close friends….he whole week basically consisted of getting up at noon, eating breakfast, swimming and lying on the beach then having dinner and a beer in the evening…..by the end of the week felt as clean as I ever have in my life…really enjoyed being able to wear flip flops all week in stead of past their wash date socks and shoes . The only minor annoyance/gripe I had that week was the amount of western partiers hanging around …the place really had the feel of a Mediterranean party beach at times rather than the local charm it displayed a decade earlier…..my whole Idea for coming to Goa for Xmas was to see Indians celebrating in festival style……the sight of 20 aussies in Santa suits eating an Xmas dinner one night convinced me I wasn’t going to find that in Palolem…..I decided I would head south to Kerala for Xmas instead as there was still a big Christian population there and it seemed to promise a more rustic charm….

First I offered to take Kaveri back up to Mumbai on an overnight bus before heading south again on my own . Its pretty common for attractive and modern Indian girls to be hassled and even groped by men when travelling alone so I did the proper thing and escorted her back home. After saying goodbye to Kate and Nina. We got the bus back to Mumbai where I said goodbye to Kaveri after making plans to meet up in the UK when she comes there to Uni next summer. Will really miss her company…. have never meet someone I have so much in common with and get on with so well, will be looking forward to meeting up in the summer for sure!

I then found another night bus heading south to Mangalore from Mumbai in the afternoon…my plan was to get a connecting bus from Mangalore the next day to the old Portuguese town of Kochi in southern Kerala in order to reach on Xmas eve …turned out to be the start of a journey of epic frustrations……..more on this soon….

Over all Goa was a great and very memorable time, without going into detail I can say it was one of the best weeks of my life and the perfect recovery period from the previous 5 weeks of Indian hustle and bustle. Left the beach feeling totally refreshed mentally, and ready for the last week and a half on the subcontinent…..lets see what other adventures India has left in it before I head to Taiwan and semi normality……

Mumbai again, Pune nightmare trip + return to Mumbai 3rd -14th December 2010

The sleeper train from Udaipur to Mumbai went smoothly enough with the help of some store bought Valium , ( you can buy just about anything at Indian pharmacies without a prescription) and some decent conversation with some Dutch girls sharing the same berths as me who were doing the same trip as me but in reverse. Got some interesting tips off them for the Chinese leg of the trip.

Got into to Mumbai in the morning and headed back to the salvation army hostel to take a dorm room for a couple of nights. I then booked a train ticket to the far south of India ( 26 hours in total travel time) a couple of days later. My plan was to spend a couple of days doing extra work on Bollywood sets and try meet up with my Indian friend Bhavana who I had met in Turkey over the summer before heading south to Kerala and working my way back north to Goa for X-mas……things didn’t quite turn out that way.

The first night I was in town I decided I was feeling well enough to go for a few beers and hit the local sports bar in Colaba. First people I met at the bar were two Indian English brothers from Canterbury. Hung out with them for the rest of the evening , was hilarious seeing the locals reaction to them and their British Drinking habits. We tried to get into a local nightclub that wanted to charge us 1500 rupees to get in (about 20quid,) told them to forget it and went to another local bar to finish the night off along with a South African dude we had met. At the end of the night the others went home and I ( being in crissy good-o mood) decided to stay out for another drink got chatting to a couple of girls from Mumbai and ended up going to a night club with them along with some English friends called Kate and Nina. In fact we went to the same night club that I had tried to get into earlier with the guys from Canterbury. The cover charge was reduced to a fraction of the price when I was with locals ( typical ) Got on really well with one of the Indian girls called Kaveri she was a law student who had travelled the world quite a lot with her family and I seemed to have tonnes in common with her. We made plans to meet up again the following night and check out a club night at another Mumbai night spot.

Spent the following day chatting with other travellers in the hostels that now seemed to be full of English people heading to Goa for x-mas. That evening met Kaveri in a local bar and we went to a club nearby called the Blue Frog. Was as good as any night clubs ive been to anywhere in the world. There was an English DJ called Simon Beckford. Playing along with the local psytrance D.J. who was excellent. The night wasn’t cheap though 15quid entry and uk prices for beer, however worth it just for the experience, turned into a great night.

Was having such a great time hanging out with Kaveri decided to stay on in Mumbai for a few days and eventually we ended up booking tickets to go down to Goa for a week with the English girls. Spent the next few days hanging out with her and exploring areas of Mumbai that I would have never seen if I didn’t have a local companion. The Bandra area of the city is pretty happening with a good arts and music scene and a cool sea front view. ( see photo) Mumbai truly is a city of contradictions, some areas extremely poor others extremely modern and developed. It is a good analogy for the modern India and spending extra time there really seemed to illustrate the amount of development that has taken place in India in the last 10 years. Unfortunately it seems that the gap between the rich and poor has also increased just as much as the counties economic growth.. Met some really cool people through Kaveri during the rest of the week and hanging out with an Indian definitely helped to keep costs to a minimum ( e.g. locally priced cabs/ rickshaws). Went back to her house for dinner one night and met her parents ( also both lawyers ) who cooked me a great south Indian meal and had plenty of travel stories from when they were younger + some good tips for me in India. The week was really fun but was basically living like back home , caught a few movies ( bizarre they still have intervals in India and often stand for the national anthem before the show starts) and ate good food at various local restaurants. Felt pretty healthy at the end the week but my budget was in tatters…..

A couple of days before we were due to head down to Goa I heard about an Indian music festival in the nearby city of Pune and decided to go check it out on my own for a couple of days…Along with a bill consisting of Indian Rock and Metal bands some western bands were playing ( magic Numbers/ Asian Dub Foundation ).

The festival was in the Korregan park area of the city that is famous for its yoga retreats. Unfortunately upon arriving after dark I found that pretty much every cheap guest house in the area was booked out and ended up driving around for 2 hours with a rickshaw driver looking for various forms of accommodation. The worst of which I saw was some student accommodation that had a room in a shared flats with a blood stained mattress for 500 rupees a night ( “no thanks clart ill pass on that” ) I ended up checking into a very nice but well over budget hotel near the train station at 900 rupees a night. Was pissed of that I had to spend so much money but the room was clean and had a TV with espn showing premiership games ( some consolation) . That evening I felt physically exhausted and pissed off esp. as all of Pune resembled a giant traffic jam. I did manage to find a local bar/restaurant that had excellent Indian food and really cheap whisky. For around 3 pounds got a curry with 2 chapattis and a cheese pokara with unlimited finger snacks + peanuts to start and a triple whisky and coke…felt so much better after…left a generous tip and went back to the hotel to chill….watched Bolton v Blackburn on espn and ate some Bang cookies from Jaisalmer…slept like a log in a comfy bed .

The next day I got up early to try and find the festival and get a ticket. The directions on the website were typically vague and I ended up getting a rickshaw back to koregon park where no one seemed to be aware of the event. Everyone wanted to point me in the direction of the local Osho ashram ( details on wiki) where many westerners go to practice Yoga and free love…you can see a lot of them walking around the area in red dressing gowns….

“Nah fuck that new age shit man, I just want to see some Indian death metal bands and rock out”

I eventually ran into someone who worked at the festival and was told I could buy tickets from the local hard rock café…no one seemed to know where this was either….after another hour of walking through permanent grid lock with the constant sound of car horns in the air I had had enough, it was around 4pm and my distain seemed to be focused solely on the western new agers walking round in imperial guard uniform, (for no reason other than they seemed really pretentious to me at the time, probably an unfair assessment born out of frustration)…at 750 rupee a ticket for the day and with only half a day left of the festival by that point decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and got a cab back to my hotel with my tail between my legs…..ah well at least I got to watch Spurs v Chelsea on TV that night after another excellent meal at the same bar as the previous evening and a couple of Rajiput cookies for desert to ease the digestion….the next day ended up getting a chicken bus back to the outskirts of Mumbai and then had a nightmare trip back into Colaba on the local trains.

Trying to board an busy Indian train with a backpack as well as British manners and health and safety awareness is hard, the locals simply push in both directions rugby scrum style while shouting at the top of their lungs, with many people jumping on and off while the train is moving . It took me 3 trains before I managed to get on…. ( for those of you who know the Manmud station- “leap of faith/madman in a dress” story from my India 2000 trip, I can assure you my train jumping days are over )

Spent one more night in the salivation army hostel, ( which was now occupied by a different set of pasty British travellers sitting around in their pants to avoid the heat while waiting for trains south to Goa ). After hanging around with some really cool Indians all week was somehow getting sick of talking to other travellers and the toilets in the place were a disgrace, was happy to be seeing the back of it. Checked out in the morning and then spent the afternoon chilling in the local park watching local cricket matches and talking to some college students who had bunked lessons for the day. ( see photo) That evening got the night bus with Kaveri and the rest of the gang to Goa.

So Mumbai my pit stop tuned into an extended visit, largely thanks to hanging out with one of the coolest people I’ve ever met and getting a great local insight into the city…didn’t end up meeting with my friend Bhavna in the end ( who was on the road herself ) or working on Bollywood again. At times the Mumbai hustle and bustle was hard to take…all and all a good section of the trip, though was definitely ready to chill in Goa and do nothing on a beach all day but swim and get some sun on my skin…we headed to the southern beach of Palolem where I had spent some time 10 years ago with Balloon city Rob…will be interesting to see how much its changed………

Udaipur 1st-2nd December 2010.

The night bus sleeper compartment was pretty dire, nice to have your own space but was bumpy as hell…got thrown all over the place all night and hardly slept. Got into town at 6am and teamed up with an Argentinean guy and Brazilian girl from the bus to find cheap rooms….we got a rickshaw to the Lal Ghat area of town and proceeded to look at about 6-7 different hotels before we found one that was suitable. While walking around got a chance to take in the beauty of Udaipur’s setting. Ringed by green hills the city is built around a still lake that is flanked by Ghats, temples and Palaces. A stunning setting!

After checking in, had my first hot shower in 3 weeks…amazing! Then chilled out for a while before exploring the town…. To be fair there wasn’t that much to do in town with the main attraction being the lake shores, City Palace and Lake View Island Hotel. ( The Bond movie Octopussy was set in Udaipur) . The city palace was awesome lots of amazing glass inlay work and a great view from the top. Spent a few hours there enjoying the sunshine before my cold started to bother me again. Had an early dinner that night and then retired to my hotel room and dose up on paracetomol before catching up on the sleep I had missed out on the previous nights rollercoaster on wheels.

Things didn’t quite go to plan….the house hold next to the hotel were testing there PA system for a wedding the following day until around 11pm. It was while the music was blasting into my room that I realised the poster on the wall opposite my bed was actually covering a hole in the wall Shaw shank redemption style…not great…still managed to doze through the worst of the noise and then slept soundly after it had finished….

The next morning I slept in until around midday and had a slow start to the afternoon….felt a lot better. I spent the afternoon reading in a café near the lake shore and enjoying more sunshine (even more enjoyable as I had just checked the Uk weather forecast …looks damn cold…..think I got a bit sunburnt today ha-ha). That evening I walked for about an hour to the sunset point on a hill above the Palace and lake…the views were incredible ( see photos ) spent about 2 hours on the top feeling very philosophical as the sun slowly set behind the hills casting magnificent colours across the lake.

On the way back to town splashed out on a good meal in a pricy restaurant and spent nearly my daily budget on food ( has to be done sometimes when your felling ill). That evening I jumped on a night train to Mumbai. Had got lucky and got the last tourist quota ticket going but had to leave a day earlier than I planned as there was no train on Fridays…

Overall Udaipur was awesome , short but sweet the view from the sunset point was the best I’ve seen in India…felt pretty rough for the 2 days I was there but managed t o nurse myself back to health pretty quickly and felt relatively good by the time I left ……wish I had an extra day to climb some more hills, but am close to having just one month left in India and want to get down south asap…..first a quick pit stop back in Mumbai though…..