Sovereign Nations

…Are indeed the rules of thumb in the Indian traffic “system”… System! Ok…

So, last night we were in a mood of celebration being as though we had just moved into and furnished our new digs. So we decided to go out for a nice meal. On the way there we got caught in probably the worst traffic jam I’ve ever seen, much less been in!

Ok, in the San Fransisco Bay Area there is a place called “The Maze”, it’s the confluence of traffic going in and out of San Fransisco, Oakland and Berkeley, CA. On average the California Highway Patrol log one death by auto accident every single day in The Maze, EVERY DAY!!!
Well I’ve driven in The Maze thousands of times but I have never I MEAN !!!NEVER!!! seen anything like I saw (and lived through) last night in Trivandrum, Kerala, India!

There we were just humming along down M.G. (Mahatma Gandhi) Road when all of the sudden we were literally surrounded on all sides by cars, rickshaws, motorcycles bicycles and peds coming straight at us in all directions at once and the most amazing thing about it was, when we finally came to a dead-stop everybody all at the same time broke out laughing and started talking all at once!!!
“Hello!”
“Where are you from?”
“Welcome to Kerala!”
“Nice Bike!!”
It was the best nightmare I’ve ever had, and not a single person died or even got pissed off enough to start shooting…

You know we’ve got a saying Dena and I,

“Let ‘em honk honey!”

And that is exactly what it is they do with my slow ass. I stay to the far (Left) side of the traffic and go just a little slower than the flow. It’s working out great so far and I’m learning as much as I can about driving on my “wrong side” of the road on a motorcycle that is built backwards, meaning the gear shift is on the right side and the back brake is on the left.

I’m learning at an incredibly accelerated pace being as though that pace is being guided by the very same flow of traffic.

Ok, on Friday June 2 in 1989 I was invited over to a client’s house to view the wedding photos that I shot at her shin-dig only a few days earlier.

She was all proud of herself because she was going to make a big “vegi-mexican feast” and we were going to go through her contact sheets and I was going to give her my ideas for my personal favorites, I hate weddings…

Anyway the client was paying me $1,200 bucks which at the time was a fortune so I’d pretty much put up with anything she could dish out including her version of a “vegi-mexican feast”.

So I straddled the ‘ol ‘81 GPZ 750 and headed East up 108th to Pen in OKC on a thick 5:00 crawl. Just past Greystone it opened up and I was running a little late so I goosed the GPZ up to about 40 and cruised through the Green at Pen and 108th.

17 year old Kelly Smith (not her real name but she never cared enough about me to give me her name but for some reason that is the name I have always given her…) was running a little late for her senior prom because she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to eat at the Prom itself and she could just forget about scoring a meal between the prom and the after party so she’d have to settle for a cheese burger at Mc Death’s on Pen at 108th. She got the burg, a large order of fries and an extra large diet Dr. Caffeine and slammed her shit-brown 1978 Buick Le Sabre into drive. Kelly was wearing a beautiful Pink frilly ball gown and unforgettable (please-fuck-me-from-behind) 5 inch lighting-blue, stiletto-pumps. She threw a hand full of money at the drive through attendant and stomped that right pump to the floor with nothing on her mind but an unforgettable night in her future.

I came through the intersection and saw the blur of a giant brown death machine! I slammed on the brakes laid the GPZ over and surfed it right into the side of Kelly’s car leaving a cartoon-ish fully splayed body in-print in the side of Kelly’s 1974 Buick Le Sabre. The GPZ slid under the car and I somehow ended up just behind it right under the drivers side door, Kelly’s door… I more-or-less came too to the sound of Kelly screaming bloody-murder trying to get her door opened.

The first thing I noticed was the fact that all the oil from the GPZ had emptied onto the hot Oklahoma-summer road and was burning my left shoulder. My legs were somehow jammed up under the car between the GPZ and the Le Sabre’s under-carriage but for some reason that didn’t hurt much. What did hurt (like a mother-fucker) was my right pinky and the two inch hole that I had bitten through the right side of my tongue.

After much effort on her part Kelly managed to get her door opened, while screaming “helpmehelpmehelpme!!!” When she stepped out of the car, she stabbed right in the middle of my chest with one of those (please-fuck-me-from-behind) 5 inch lightning blue stiletto-pumps. At the very instant the car door came open I knew what was next so I tried to let her know where I was but the only things that came out of my mouth were a caveman grunt and a five foot stream of bloody saliva that covered the front of poor Kelly’s ball gown from neck-line to hem. In one beautifully smooth movement Kelly dropped her extra large Dr. Caffeine on my face, jumped back into her defunct 1974 Buick La Le Sabre and quickly locked the door. She wouldn’t come out again until the cops showed up to coax her out.

…Well, I lived and to make a very long and painful convalescence a short (blog-able) story I’ll just give you the run down of the things I in fact lived through. Second degree burns on my left shoulder down to my left shoulder blade, that aforementioned two inch hole in my tongue, a broken pinky, a huge stiletto bruise on my sternum and an impact fracture in my T-7 vertebra.

Kelly’s insurance company paid me $20,000 USD for my troubles and I never once heard from her but I know for a fact that she will never forget that prom night.

…Why he should? (own a Motorcycle.)
To do an over-land tour from Trivandrum, Kerala, India to Croatia and write about it.

We found a place!  It’s a flat - the second floor (or first storey) of this beautiful house.  Unfortunately for us, but I’m sure they feel differently, it’s Ramadan, and the landlords are Muslim.  This is the very end of Ramadan, so it’s impossible to get anything done quickly.  We’ll be signing the papers and taking possession on Monday, the 30th.  We’ll take a bunch more pictures as we slowly clean it up and add some furniture and such.

Basically, it’s a marble floored, beautifully teak wooded, seriously windowed (and positioned perfectly for cross breezes), and comfortably
spacious flat.  The owners do not live in the house at this time and might move back from Singapore in a couple of months.  So we have the whole house to ourselves - not that we have access to the whole thing, but there’s no one to be bothered if we stomp around.  Wait - with
marble floors, I bet they won’t be able to hear us anyway…

Okay, back to the description.  The basics:

Two bedrooms,each with attached bathrooms, ceiling fans, windows that swing out toward the wide-open space above the neighbor’s house, and built-in wardrobes of some dark-red wood of unknown type but with capacities that will shame our pitiful collections of clothing. They’re maybe 200sqft each, and the bathrooms are sizable, with sit-type toilets and the usual full-bathroom shower setup.  We’ll sleep in one and set the other up as a shared office.  There’s no hot water heater, but the water tanks are black plastic and situated on the roof, so the water gets hot by mid-afternoon and stays that way for a while after dark.  Not that I’ve ever, since we arrived, turned on the hot tap in any place I’ve been…

Kitchen, at the back of the house, has a ton of cabinet space (of which we’ll use a little, I imagine), black marble counters, a sink, but absolutely none of the appliances one usually considers part of a regular rental in the States.  No stove, oven, fridge…but we have a plan.  It involves spending a couple thousand rupees on a countertop, three burner gas stove (a little bigger than what we had on Sapien) and a couple of rupees on an old, red, rusted tank of propane.  It’ll be just like the good old times, except that someone will come to swap it out every few months…Again, good ventilation, and everything is well built.

There’s a back door that opens from the kitchen onto a small landing for the stairs leading to the roof.  Yep, we have a rooftop garden-to-be! We’ll probably not do anything super decadent with it (like install a hot tub or whatever), but it’ll be a great place to go stretch out, maybe do some morning exercising?  And I do plan to grow some basic vegetables on the roof too - tomatos, cucumbers, zucchini, hopefully some herbs…

Forward from the kitchen is the big room.  The part near the kitchen is clearly meant to be a dining room, as it has a hutch built into the wall there.  Though right now it’s very very dusty and completely empty, I hope that it will be nice looking when it’s clean and only mostly empty. It’s glass fronted, but not as fancy as the other built-in stuff.

Moving forward, the back bedroom’s door is on the left, then the front bedroom’s door.  This main room has two ceiling fans, and I imagine it very rarely getting hot because of the cold marble, flow-through air, and abundance of windows and doors and ceiling fans.  I think one of the things I love best about it is the windows.  They are all made with honey-brown teak frames.  The glass is frosted where it faces the neighbor’s house and has little overhang, but the ones in front are clear.  They have bars on the inside, which I think are to keep the birds out, since there are no screens.  They swing open like shutters and latch in the open position.  And there are dozens of them!

I mention the windows in front being clear…they don’t need to be frosted, because they open onto a balcony with a large amount of overhang.  They never get direct sunlight (so the frosting isn’t necessary to keep us cool), and there don’t seem to be any privacy issues.  The balcony itself is big enough to hang out on and snoop into the neighborhood beezwax, but the rooftop is so spacious we’ll probably hang out there more.

I skipped something!  Just forward of the front bedroom is the entry. At the ground level of the house, there are two marble steps leading to a lovely wooden door.  Inside that door is a marble staircase winding inside what looks like a tower from the outside toward our flat.  There are windows even in the staircase, keeping the air moving and the passageway well lighted.  Just outside the main door of our flat is a landing where we can leave our dirty shoes, in the Indian style.

Next - we have to get furniture!  We’ll get some of it right off the street.  No, really.  It’s a bunch of woodworkers who do rough-finished wooden furniture on the side of the main road here. They make it and pile it up on the sidewalk and sell it.  It’s mortise and tendon construction with the odd nail…we’ll have to pick our goods carefully.  We plan to get a kitchen table, some stools, work desks, and maybe a coffee table?  Side tables?  It’s the best price around and the stuff is actually built very well.  We’ll do some sanding, sealing, and painting (it’s a local softwood called anjali or jack wood and I’m not sure how it would take a varnish).  We’re spending a lot more on the bed - a pre-finished piece and a good spring-type mattress.  They don’t have much of that kind of thing - it’s mostly pallets with four-inch-thick pads.  I’m not sure what we’ll do about desk chairs - I’m tempted to buy a good one if I’ll be living in it for six months…

Then there are small rugs near the beds for our cold feet in the mornings, and maybe a big bamboo strip mat for the main room.  And ay-yi!  All of the kitchen stuff…I think we’ll keep it small…

We’ve done it all - or very close. We haven’t been in a helicopter or parachute or glider. We haven’t (yet) been on a motorcycle or scooter. (Actually, James test drove a motorcycle, but that doesn’t count as travel.)

Here’s what we have done, and what I thought of it:

Cheap-Class Airplane

We flew to Mumbai (named after the goddess Mumbadevi, rather than the Portuguese’s Bombay after Bom Bahia or good harbor). This trip took 15 hours of airtime - maybe 16.5 hours total with waiting time at JFK before we were cleared for takeoff and taxi time on the Mumbai end. It was sardine-style flying with (luckily) a relatively small older woman next to me. My greatest fear in anticipating that flight was someone with an ass the size of mine or bigger…ay - what a pain that would have been! Instead, we boarded the plane at 9:30pm and read, ate, and tried to sleep. The Indian Airlines flight attendants were nicely available, but not overly friendly. Chipper isn’t what I was after, though. There was a child - as you will already know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while - who was in great discomfort due to the pressure drop. Sleep was far away because crying was so near. When we arrived, the customs check went smoothly and we didn’t have to fill out a single form. This was surprising to us, as we’d heard much about the Indian bureaucracy.

Summary: if you’re rich, by all means pay for the bigger space. We would have spent more on the tickets than the entire rest of our trip had we gone with a real bed, but oh - did they look luxurious. Basically, long-distance flights will never be comfortable. Indian Airlines was no better or worse than others I’ve flown with. There it is.

Cars - Fancy Taxis, Hotel Taxis, and Private Cars

Okay - then we got out of the airport and started our bleary, nervous, nerved-up search for the hotel’s driver. We didn’t find him. Attempts to call the driver foundered on the barriers caused by cell-phone static, traffic noise, and language barriers. To make a long story short, a driver from the right hotel showed up for the wrong people (only because it wasn’t us) and we hijacked him. Our erstwhile driver would have to pick up the later people. The drive was exhilarating and terrifying and we overtipped.

We also had a short ride in my friend Vishal’s car with his family. Pretty much like a cab, but with a more careful driver.

In Delhi, we got picked up by an autorickshaw driver and shown around the Sikh temple - no charge. He did ask (no pressure, you can of course say no) if we would be willing to go shopping (no need to buy if you don’t like) in a fancy hotel taxi he owned. For each shop we entered (just walk in and look around, maybe 10 minutes), he received a fuel voucher worth, I guess, a lot. We acquiesced and had the bizarre experience of being deferentially ushered, sweaty and smelly, into the nicest shops we’d even set eyes on since arriving. The taxi itself was less fun than an autorickshaw, but I can see how some people would prefer being separated from the outside world. Not us!

Summary: still better than trying to negotiate for a ride all the way down to the CST area first thing when we arrived. Otherwise, no way. I’ll go rickshaw every time…

Trains - Rajdhani/Shatabdi, 2AC, 3AC, CC, 2nd Class Unreserved

I’m not going to provide a complete breakdown of the train system and classes, but we have taken a lot of them and you’ll be able to put together a pretty good feeling based on these descriptions. The Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains are a little nicer than the average, and they feed you something like four times a day. The charge for the ticket includes the food, and it works out a little expensive (compared to the same food other places), but it’s brought to you regularly and you don’t have to worry about cost or payment. The trains make good time, and bedding is provided for overnight trains. We took a Rajdhani from Mumbai to Delhi and then a Shatabdi from Delhi to Amritsar. Definitely the most comfortable train travel we did. The class we took was 2AC, which means that there are two tiers of beds, top and bottom. You have four beds on one side of the train, meaning four seatmates during the day. The other side of the train is just two placed long-ways, and I don’t like those seats so much.

When you go 3AC, it means sitting three people on each bench during the day and sleeping in racks of three at night - not enough room to sit up if you wake up before your bunk-mates. It’s okay, but not nearly as nice - especially since I was trying to keep my hurt foot elevated!

The chair cars are either air conditioned (CC) or not air conditioned. I think - though I’m not sure - that there are reserved and unreserved non-AC classes. The AC chairs are a lot more comfortable than cheap-ass plane seats, but otherwise, it’s just another chair. The unreserved train we took was very exciting - we boarded in the rush and press of bodies all trying to get on first so that they could cadge a seat. I was still limping pretty good, but pushed aboard with everyone else. By the time we got to a reasonable area, there was only one butt’s worth of space on a bench, but the whole luggage rack was empty. I sat below and James climbed onto the luggage rack with all of our bags. Another man got up on the other luggage rack - he stretched out and slept! James read, and though I checked up on him regularly, he seemed comfortable enough! I’m really glad he sat up there - he got a beautiful shot of a girl in lavender napping in the window with greenery flashing by outside…

Summary: It’s worth the extra price to go on the Rajdhani/Shatabdi trains if you are already planning on going 2AC. My favorite train experiences were on these trains. For any ride of only a few hours, the unreserved seats are fine, though a bit of a struggle. The chair cars seem best for trips of 3-6 hours - otherwise I think I’d prefer a sleeper regardless. Note: we haven’t yet gone 2nd class sleeper.

Buses - Private and Public

The first bus we rode was private and airconditioned. It was sort of an accident. We were trying to get to Agra from Delhi, and we’d gone to the bus depot. All of the regular busses were saying that they’d be leaving in a couple of hours and the first bus that said they were leaving right away was AC. What a bummer! AC was okay, but the exhaust was leaking into the cabin and there was no fresh air to blow it away. I was dazed and stupid by the time we reached Agra…We were well amused by the self-proclaimed MTV and soap opera star Rakesh Jain. He seemed surprised that we didn’t recognize him…

From Kollam to Alappuzha, we took a bus. It was a regular Kerala State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC for kind-of short) bus, and it was the bumrush through the door to get seats. Barred holes rather than windows and a daredevil drivers would have made the ride more-or-less pleasant and entertaining, but it got really annoying instead. First, we busted through the crowd and got aboard almost first. I grabbed the front seat, right behind the driver, because it had the most space for legs (and luggage). With all of our stuff, we took up three (tiny-assed) seats in a bus where there were a couple dozen people standing. Guilt won, and we squished so that a very very skinny girl could sit on the bench with us. Then the fighting started. The press of bodies and the heat of the day weren’t as bad while we were moving - the auto-AC provided by the wind was good enough. But when we stopped for a long, long time, while the conductor and three passengers fought about whether or not their transfer ticket was valid…well, that was a drag.

We’ve taken similar buses a couple more times - but these rides have been about a half hour or less, and much less packed. The intra-city buses are harder to deal with than the inter-city buses.

Summary: Not a bad way to travel. It’s cheap, there are plenty of them running all the time, and if you don’t have any luggage, they’re fine.

On the Water: Launch and Ferry plus Rowboat

We only did a regular launch once - on the way to Elephanta Island. It was a little noisy, a little smelly, but I loved every second of being on the water again. Have you been to our latest sailing website at www.svsapien.net? Then there was the row to the Sangam - the confluence of the holy rivers (the Ganga, Yamuna, and Sariswati). We also got on the water taking the ferry between Cochi, Ernakulam, and Vypeen Island. That bay is very industrial - only I could get a nostalgic tear in my eye from the sight of cargo ships unloading (ah, the Oakland Inner Harbor…).

Summary: a lovely way to get to some neat stone-temple caves or to the spice-trader part of Cochi. Of course, I’ll get on the water for no reason at all, so I’m prejudiced.

Autorickshaw

In Mumbai also began our love/hate relationship with autorickshaws. I love riding in them - narrower than a car, they worm through traffic and always beat the bigger vehicles. I hate dealing with people out to cheat me. We’ve had so many drivers try to charge us anywhere from two to ten times the correct fare - and sometimes we didn’t realize until after. It’s pretty upsetting and there was a whole period where James and I constantly felt like targets. We’ve only in the last week or so really gotten the hang of paying what we ought. And here’s how you do it: get in the rickshaw, tell them where you want to go, and insist they use the meter. If the meter doesn’t work, get out and try another one. In Mumbai, the meters were a rate-card behind, so they had laminated paper cards with the rate chart and you should always ask to see it before paying. In other places, every driver claims their meter is broken. Here in Trivandrum, you have to hop in, tell them where you’re going, and tap the meter until they start it. If the driver starts moving before starting the meter, tap his shoulder until he gives in. So far, that’s worked every time. And if you have a mobile phone (many travelers get them for the short term) and you find a driver you like and trust, you can probably get his mobile number and call him for rides. That means waiting, of course, but…

Summary: I really think it’s a great way to travel in town. It’s not very expensive unless you’re being ripped off and it’s quick and easy. Just beware.

Bicycle Rickshaw

This is the only form of transportation that I’ve taken that I can really say I won’t be doing again. Well, at least not with another person. Basically, James and I don’t fit in these little things. We took one to the train station from our hotel in Amritsar. Not only did it create bad bruising on our hips, we had to get out for a big hill and help push! I think these guys work hard and deserve not to pull my couple-hundred pound ass around…

Summary: Maybe if you’re smaller…

Foot

After our day and a half of sleeping, we began what was to be our main mode of transportation by time spent - walking. We walked north the first day, using an overhead causeway as a breadcrumb trail back to the hotel. Then it was south. Then in every place we’ve been since, we’ve walked. James has cinched up two holes on his belt - me one. And have we ever seen India! I like walking best because it’s so wonderfully fluid. You spend exactly as much time you want looking at any given thing. We haven’t been anywhere much where there were long stretches of barren vistas. Everything has been busy and entertaining, and photogenic.

Summary: do it until you fall over. Then get a good night’s sleep and do it again!

When I first started seriously thinking about coming to India in December of 2007 I knew that I would be coming here for the primary purpose of finishing the work of fiction that I have been writing for the last 10 years. It’s an epic adventure story about FM Radio and the people that made it, and made it great.

Like I said it’s been in the making for ten long years and I knew that coming to a place where I didn’t speak the language and all I had to do was travel, read and write was the only way that I would be able to direct my focus enough to finish this incredible story that so deserves to be told. So to keep my baggage to a minimum I figured I would have to bring along the one book in my life that has haunted and inspired me more than any other work of literature that I’ve ever read, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Gravity’s Rainbow- A musical Novel about a guy who can see the future when he gets a hardon (among many other things…) was published in 1973 when Pynchon was 36 years old and the lies and folklore around the creation of that incredible work of fiction are almost as funny and interesting as the book it’s self, ok maybe not, but there are some very funny things about the life of Thomas Pynchon in the 10 years that it took him to write GR. During the writing of Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon went to Cornell University in up-state New York and studied engineering but dropped out after his second year and the death of his best friend Richard Ferina to join the U.S. Navy, after that but still during the writing of GR he wrote and published two works of fiction called V and The Crying of Lot-49. Both books were well received by a critical elite but Pynchon was himself relatively unnoticed at the time by most readers of English fiction. Also during this time (late ‘50’s and throughout the ‘60’s) he was a writer of technical-manuals for the Boeing Aircraft corporation, which to me explains allot about the quirky technical bullshit aspects of his writing. I know very little about the guy Thomas Pynchon with the exception of the written words above and a few other od’s-n-in’s

For example; He has an intense aversion to the mainstream media, he won’t do interviews and nobody seems to know where the fucker lives! I toured with a guy in 1990 that told me he performed Pynchon’s 3 wedding ceremonies but that dude, “The Reverend Chumly” lied about everything else that came out of his mouth so I’d never believe such crap from the likes of him. Pynchon’s managed to foil some pretty dedicated stalkers as well; like Lew Barlow a dude that spent 20 years compiling all known information about Pynchon only to discover on his death bed that he was living across the street from Pynchon’s parents in Glen Cove, NY. What an asshole! He (Pynchon) is also a MacArthur fellow which partially explains how he can afford to remain so elusive. He’s been on the Simpsons 3 times and he and Salmon Rushdie are supposed to be friends and correspondents.

Me, I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow 6 times over the last 25 years and to this day it remains my favorite work of 20th century American fiction! It is an incredible (Heavy-Ass’d) Tome that not only won some of the most prestigious awards in the field of literary fiction like the National Book Award in 1973 but In the same year, the Pulitzer fiction jury unanimously recommended Gravity’s Rainbow for the Pulitzer Prize however, the Pulitzer board vetoed the jury’s recommendation, describing the novel as “unreadable”, “turgid”, “overwritten”, and in parts “obscene”, and no prize was awarded. But for me the most important aspect of this book is the fact that it inspires me to write whatever it is that’s on my mind in whatever way I feel like writing it, essentially, that book taught me how to write.

Shit, the first time I read Gravity’s Rainbow was 1982/83 (all of the sudden a very long time ago) and it took me almost exactly a year to read! It busted my balls to no end and by the time I finished it in August of 1983 I had quite literally forgotten what the fucking thing was about. Every other time sense then that I’ve read The Tome (as it’s become known on my most recent India travels, mainly because the sheer weight of the large print version of the book) I’ve read it in conjunction with two or three other works of fiction so really I think I missed one of the main points of the very way it was written. This time though, I opened it up to the first page as soon as my plane left the ground on my way to India and I finished it five weeks and 3 days later in Trivandrum, Kerala, India 12,000 miles and 776 pages from where I began! All of the other times that I’ve read The Tome have been in a state of distraction that quite thoroughly took my attention away from way that it was written! What do I mean by ‘The Way’ that it was written? Well, even though it took Pynchon over ten years to write I now believe it was written to be read in one sitting… I know, I know 776 pages is a fuck-load of sitting but if you decide to pick up Gravity’s Rainbow after reading this please do yourself the favor of sticking to it to the very end, it’s so worth it.

…As for me and my 6th reading of The Tome I now believe that I am ready to take on a project of the magnitude of the book I’m writing. It’s called !RADIO! Vol-1 and it’s about the insanity of the inventor of FM radio and his dreams of the future of his invention (Among many other things…).

From 9/15

Oh, have I ever hated children! All of the whining, screaming, sobbing, screeching, happy, sad, bratty, loud, spoiled, and inconsiderate versions of childhood. I spent years without having children in my life except when they were imposing in restaurants, stores, buses, airplanes (the worst), etc, etc, etc. When I realized that their happy noises were unbearable to me…I knew I was right not to have or adopt any. And that’s before any considerations of overpopulation, which I believe to be the source of all evil in that it represents a pushing of finite resources that encourages selfishness, protectionism, isolationism, hoarding and discourages sharing, openness, caring. Even though overpopulation has encouraged exploration, the pressures it creates demand an exploration by conquerers, pillagers, and settlers of already occupied lands.

I was afraid that a country of one billion people would turn me off because of the children. Because of the having of children, partly. But also just because of the children.

A billion people, and how many of them under 12? I would ordinarily say too many. Enough that population experts are positing that India’s population will surpass China’s by 2050. Not exactly the best way to make India #1.

But in an honestly foreign environment, where I am constantly aware of my insufficient melanin, sweaty clothing, and complete illiteracy (about which more later), nothing makes me feel better than the reaction of children.

Children mean more to me now. Willingness - to smile, engage, react, enjoy. To react.

I can’t say that I’ve stopped wincing at the start of a hungry infant’s wail or an angry toddler’s scream. I still hated large parts of the (oh-so-comfortable, air conditioned class, chair car) train ride from Ernakulam to Trivandrum on Thursday the 18th. We’d paid the extra for the reserved seating because it was a five-plus hour ride and we wanted to be guaranteed a spot for our asses. But really, I had a much more enjoyable ride on the wooden bench in the 2nd class car from Alappuzha to Ernakulam. It was more quiet, the children better behaved. Of course, James had to sit above me on the luggage rack, but he did get this wonderful picture…

Walking down the street, children from ages four to fourteen are the people most likely to smile. I’ve made a sport of stealing smiles from the unwilling, and I am olympic class, if I do say so myself. But the children aren’t unwilling - they’re smiling first. Actually, they’re running up to us, chasing us down, yelling hello, how are you, where from, hi, your goodname, hello, hello, hello! When they’re not demanding handshakes and grinning at us, they’re sneaking shy looks and grinning at us, or sometimes staring boldly, straightfaced, with awesome focus.

So I like these children because they like me. That’s pretty easy. Who can resist a beautiful youngling who is entranced by your very existance?

It’s not just that, though. Barring the almost unwilling noisiness of the uncomfortable or uncomforted child, I don’t see much bad behavior. The spoiled-ass brat is a rara avis around here, it seems. Parents sometimes try to rein their children in before they see that James and I are into playing the ambassadors with their kids, and they always give in when they see we’re happy to play with them for a bit. But the tantrum is unheard of, resistance is rare, and fighting one’s parents - ye gods! - no way!

We’ve been traveling by pretty much all the methods, and we’ve only dealt with the angry brat scream in expensive train classes. It makes me think of the movie “10 Questions for the Dalai Lama.” In the movie, the first question is, to paraphrase, why are poor people happier than rich people? This documentarian had just spent months traveling India and he saw the same things I’ve seen. The Dalai Lama’s answer was, to paraphrase again, because the rich worry about getting richer or becoming poor while the poor just live. I think he has a great point, but I think he’s missing a facet.

I think that being raised rich leads to bad behavior. If you accept that people in the US are, on average, richer than people in India, and that rich kids are more likely to be assholes, then my experience make more sense. The five year old boy who runs chai to the local businesspeople will never, can never, pitch a fit in a supermarket because he wants the marshmellow cereal. Therefore I like him better. Do I think it is right that he work? Maybe it is. Maybe people are better off in the long run when they learn young that life requires work. Do I think it is right that he experience even one day of insufficient food? Certainly not - I will not argue that poorness is a more moral state than richness, not when being poor and suffering go so often hand in hand.

So while I will not try to convince everyone to become poor, I would like to suggest that the values of the poor make for better children. Work, play, music, stories, creation, serving and being served - these are all things that one can experience whether rich or poor. An eagle eye for opportunity, an impetus to strive, and the knowledge that you live in a world that is not yours - these are experiences of the poor. If everyone cultivated an attitude of stewardship rather than one of ownership, worked hard, and worked toward their goals, civilization could be achieved. There are the latter conversations about good and bad goals, but for now, let’s just stick to the first step.

…To that guy that was traveling in India with the rock star of this site?

Last we heard from him he was bitching about some shit on a train…

Well, in less then a month I’ve traveled from one side of the Indian Sub-Continent to the other!

I’ve been from Amritsar to Trivandrum…

…From The Ganga to the Arabian Sea…

…From the desert to the rain forest…

…From the Monsoon to the drought…

…And I’ve only been here for 5 and 1/2 weeks!

I love this place more then I ever thought I could. The smiles are easy, the judgment is slow, the price is right and the travel is more inspiring then I can keep up with with my feeble grasp of this stupid language!

Wow, India!!!

We got stymied.I would usually find a place to live on Craigslist (for a large or medium sized town or a city), through the newspaper (smaller towns but big enough to support a paper of their own), or from posting boards at places like supermarkets (any of the above, but especially small towns).

Craigslist was a bust for us in Kerala. We found two things - the guesthouse in Varkala and a house in southeast Alleppey. Neither one of them worked out. But still that was more action than we were getting from our other venues!

Before coming to India, I ran searches on rentals. I found one site in particular that seemed promising - with a fairly healthy number of listings in the Rs. 1000-3000 range, it made me think that once we were here, we’d be able to find things for even less. That hasn’t worked out at all - there’s not a hot community gossip forum with all the dirt on good homes for cheap…or at least not one speaking English. Riiiiight. The language thing.

I can forget sometimes how limited we are by the need to find people who speak good English. For simple things, we’re okay. When we walk up to a hotel reception desk, they already pretty much know what we want - the conversation is about AC or non-AC and price. Still, we’re having this check-in chat in English. A little better at a restaurant - if they understand “veg”, we’re usually happy with what we get. Also, the only words we know in Malayalam are food words, so we can request specific dishes - thali, masala dosa, paneer, chapati, naan, vada, idli, garam (or masala) chai. If they start asking us about other things, we have to revert back to English - rice, spicy, more, water - and if they hand us a menu that’s in the Malayalam alphabet, we’re lost.

Okay - so we’ve established that the language barrier could be blinding us to housing opportunities.

Also, we only want to rent a place for 6-8 months. It’s not really any different here from other places - landlords prefer long-term tenants. There are a serious number of options made unavailable to us right there.

And then there’s the fact that this place is cell phone crazy, but not as excited about email. Totally capable, and most people I’ve talked to have had email addresses, but they prefer to transact business via phone. Here’s a quote from the standard email I’m sending in response to online ads: “If you prefer, I can call you, but I have an easier time communicating by email because I do not speak Malayalam and have not gotten used to the Keralan style English yet. Once I learn Malayalam it will be much easier! I’m sorry for the difficulty in communicating on my part.” That’s me trying to admit that I came to a place I wanted to live without learning the language and take responsibility for any misunderstandings. Then when I did call one guy, I didn’t realize that it was Rs. 1 per minute, and I got cut off 60 seconds in…

Now for the up-side. We just in the last couple of days found a few good websites. Here are two that seem to be giving us good possibilities: 99acres.com and magicbricks.com. I started out liking pathcity.in, but I can’t figure out how to contact people about the properties. I mark that I’m interested, but that doesn’t give them any info about us and our needs…

So now is the perfect time to gush about Anandalaksmy. It’s a restaurant with free wifi. That’s what drew me, and that’s what keeps us there for hours (7 1/2 hours today…crazy!). But since we’ve been going there, we’ve watched locals eat some great thing in metal (did you read the one about the thali?), some great thing on palm leaves (sadya, anyone?), and much more. In watching, I was able to feel comfortable about ordering and digging in with my fingers - I knew that everyone did it! Really, though, it’s the people who have made us welcome, drawn us back again and again and made us feel as though 8 hours is not too many! Several times, the guard (or doorman?) has surreptitiously flipped the Closed sign to Open as we walked up. And I’m almost sure that they actually close between lunch and dinner - exactly when we’ve spent the most time there! And it’s a newish building, clean, simply decorated. Even squeamish Europeans should be able to eat in (emotional) comfort.

But back to the housing…we are going to see an apartment just south-east of the zoo tomorrow at 5pm, and then a house about 10km from the center of town (northwest) Sunday morning (no time set - he’ll be there all day). The property I was most excited about was a fully furnished 3 bedroom near downtown - of course they rented it while we were still on the train heading this direction. Sigh. I hope to get more responses from the dozens of messages I sent - there’s another fully furnished place with a washing machine (swoon!) that seems perfect, though I didn’t reach them when I called. Sent two messages…we’ll see.

So what changed? Well, partly it was our budget. We were really really into the idea of spending $200 US per month and getting everything we needed. Now it’s looking like about twice that. (Still great compared to even an inexpensive place to live in the US.) At this rate, we could still stay for over 2 years, but I’d rather not get busted right down to nothing at all…especially if we have to go back to the US for some reason after here. (Some reason would be something like failing to get work permits in the places we’d rather go next. The US definitely offers us that - the ability to work.)

Now it’s just more of the same - asking people, sending messages, hopefully looking at places. Actually, in my dream world it’s not more of the same. I’d much rather get a place rented this weekend and move in by Monday. I’m tired of hotels and definitely tired of carrying all my worldly possessions around (though James has been taking more of the load over since I hurt my foot).

So wish us luck!

We got hijacked on the way to the bus station. No, really. Okay, not exactly.

We flagged down a rickshaw, dickered for the price, and settled on something I was okay with. As we were doing this, a car pulled up behind us. After some talk in Malayalam between the drivers, the car’s driver came up to us with the rickshaw driver. The offer was a taxi ride from Varkala to Kollam for rs. 300. That sounded pretty good to me, though I really have no idea what it should have cost. We accepted the offer, and took the easy ride to Kollam. Except for the usual hundred near-death experiences, it was a very easy trip. The driver is very fond of the “Hugging Mother,” a woman who has an ashram around there. As near as I can figure out, she believes in hugging people. Yep.

We managed not to get sidetracked to stand in line for a hug and made it to Kollam in the early afternoon. We had the guy take us to the Government Guesthouse, a 200 year old mansion in a park area. After walking around with raised eyebrows at the twenty-foot ceilings and enormous rooms (including the cavernous bathroom), we wandered out to the Amusement Park.

We were more looking for the jetty (you know, boats and water, we like that kind of thing), but it was only rs.5 each, so we said what the heck. The concessionaire waved us in with a “Happy Onam” and we replied in kind, surprised and tickled that he didn’t charge us. It was more or less a kid thing, of course, so maybe he just knew we weren’t going to stick around for long. Nice guy either way.

We wandered along the stretch of shore inside the park, looking at the old boats laid out on their sides. Along the water’s edge, semicircular concrete outcroppings with concrete benches had been installed.  Many of them were sliding into the water, but we perched our butts on one that seemed rather solid.

From the next area over, we heard a cheery hello. A group of young adults waved and called to us and when we responded enthusiastically, they came to visit us.  Actually, they kind of rushed us!  We have the usual where are you from, what is your name conversation, then got the low-down on everyone’s ambitions in life. All were in college for something - teaching, nursing, engineering, IT…they were charming and excited and I was in love with each of them just a little. The only thing they were split on was going to the US - some thought that would be perfect and others wanted nothing to do with it.

After the rest of our short stroll through the park, we walked around in circles a bit, got some good photos, and went back to the room, resigned to a quiet evening.

The daily power shutoff happened at 9pm, but in the distance we could hear music.  Without being able to read, we were a bit restless and decided to hunt down the festivities.

It was an Onam festival, of course, but this was a youth performance kind of thing.  Totally cute, very enjoyable.  The funny thing was that they seemed to have a CD of the music, but it wasn’t in order and they could never find the right song - it took so long between performances!

Do you remember that scene in “The Baron Munchhausen” when they finally find the rest of the Baron’s gang of heroes and they’ve all been stuck in the belly of a whale playing a stupid card game for YEARS!? And then the Baron, as if under a spell of some kind, sits down at the card table, gets dealt into the game, and from that point on he starts growing old, do you remember that?
Well, that card game is Varkala, Kerala, India and the belly of the whale for us was the Sky Lark Guesthouse!!!

I mean, from the outside Varkala looks like a fun card game, with all the right elements like a beautiful warm black-sands beach on the Arabian Sea littered with coconut palms and big breaking waves, a cinder-block walkway along the red cliffs 40 feet above that aforementioned Sea and a ton of beautiful old guest houses and eateries to choose from but what we didn’t notice right out of the gate was the absence of the most important elements of our travels in India so far… The beautiful, quick-to-smile-and-welcome-you Indian People! What we got instead was the white, underdressed, over-intoxicated, chain-smoking European elite and a non-stop barrage of carnie-style (mostly child labor victims) sales fanatics in front of every shop and restaurant on the strip along the cliffs! It was such an incredible drag that we just had to stay for almost a week…

(What-the!?)

I know, I know, I make it sound so good I bet you’re asking yourself, “Why stay at all, why not just move on for christ-sake?”

Well, I’ve thought about that quite a bit over the last few days of being back in “the real” India and my knee-jerk response to a question of that magnitude would have to be, “We thought we were mistaken! Really!!! We hadn’t seen or even heard of anything so fucking California in all of our travels in India so far that it just didn’t register as being true.”
Ok, ok, from the beginning…

So there we were in Trivandrum (digging it) when we saw an ad on Craigslist.org for The Sky Lark Guesthouse and Restaurant in Varkala (it sounded a bit cheesy with this “Where East meets West” bullshit slogan but we thought that maybe they were just trying to cash-in on some of that good-‘ol travelers’ money, no shame in that ‘eh?) and that same day one of the regulars at our favorite Chai-Wallah, Manseer was telling us that we just had to go to Varkala to see the beautiful cliffs and swim in the Arabian Sea! Of course Manseer is from there (and kind of home-sick ‘cuz-a going to school in Trivandrum) so he was really into us experiencing his home and reporting back to him in a positive way. So we sent an e-mail asking about the possibilities of a long term stay for a couple-a-writers to the woman that runs the guest-house and she responded quickly with a very obvious English-as-her-first-language reply. It said a bunch of crap about how there were quite a few writers in Varkala (a lie) and that we should fit right in (a misnomer). She also talked about pricing in U.S. dollars which was our first clue that not only was she not Indian but she had no intention of catering to Indian people at all. Once again, we didn’t want to be judgmental of a scene un-seen so we gave her the benefit-of-the-doubt, jumped in an auto-rickshaw and headed to Varkala from our very cool digs in Travandrum.

(This is not the time or place to go into full detail of our 90 minute, teeth-gritting, bone-chilling, white-knuckle ride through the back roads of monsoon-season Kerala, India with an insane driver of a three-wheeled, two-stroke death machine! I’ll just say, WOW, we lived… Again!)

Anyway…
We showed up a bit frazzled but alive and ready for the next chapter but nobody was home at the Sky Lark Guesthouse. The house had been recently painted a bright yellow with a red floor on the front porch with all these cheesy, squiggly starfish designs (with eyes in the middle) painted in all the colors of the primary wheel as well as other (I get chills up my spine to even call it this) “art” covering the outside of the building with an unattributed, un quoted-quote over the door that read, “Just Be…”(cringe!). We looked at each other and sneered but decided we’d hide all of our worldly belongings in the back of the house anyway and strike-out on foot for the salt water that we could taste in the air from the guest house and maybe even find a place to stay that wasn’t going to cheese us out so badly. We found our way to the water easily enough, oo’d and ahh’d at the incredible Arabian Sea for a half hour or so then headed up the cliff to check out the venders to see what was what. At first it was just only a little annoying that all of the children sitting in front of each store along the cliff-side had the very same spiel, something along the lines of “You see my shop, no buy, only looking…” But after a very short while it got really old, these little kids dressed in the garb of the store that they were carning for, with their big sad eyes selling someone else’s junk, it pissed me off to no end!

So we got fed up with that quick but were still so moved by the incredible raging Arabian Sea that we decided that we’d head back to the Sky Lark to get our stuff and get the fuck out of there as quietly as we could. On the way back to the guest house we found quite a few other guest houses that suited our needs and didn’t insult our aesthetic so badly but upon our return we found that the front door of the house was open, ug. I took my shoes off and went in and there in the front reception area sat a very plain looking, 30ish box-body of a woman with a smug ‘you’re-in-my-place’ look on her face who said to me, “Hi there, are you Dena’s other half?”

Boy do I hate that one! I mean, I’m already shaken to the bones by a “I can’t really believe we’re still alive” rickshaw experience, creeped-the-fuck-out by the 26 “Free Tibet”-Tibetan Gifts shops in a ¼ of a kilometer along the Sea front (in South India mind you), pissed off at the 60 child carnies, appalled at the lack of variety in the menus and the prices of the 42 restaurants in the same distance as aforementioned gift shops, but Dena is a whole person with or without me thank you and I’m in no mood to argue that point!

My response was a stoic, “Hello, I’m James. Don’t you mean ‘Where West meets East’?” Her smile collapsed in to something forced and before we could get into a decent fight about her lack of creativity Dena came in behind me saying, “Hi I’m Dena” and suddenly, just like that, I was very efficiently removed from the rest of the conversation.
Now, I have been a musician for most of my life and one of the most amazing things about my body is; to protect the delicate bones in my eardrums from the harmful and destructive sound waves of my percussive toys my ears automatically fill with a thick reddish-brown wax that becomes a hard plaque that makes me quite deaf if I don’t have it professionally removed every five years or so. It gets much worse if I’m recording in a studio because of the constant use of headphones. Well, just before we came to India we put out an album of 15 songs that not only did I play on but I co-produced as well so the plaque in my ears had built up much more then I had expected so by the time we got to the Skylark Guesthouse I was completely deaf in my left ear and about 40% deaf in my right. Essentially, if you’re not talking very loudly directly into my right ear or at the very least at my face I cannot hear you at all…

Once Dena walked into the room at the Sky Lark guest house (“Where East Meets West”grrr!) I turned my head to the right, exposing that very boring woman to my deaf ear and then went about exploring my new environs. When I do that all conversation kind of sounds like all the adults in the old “Peanuts” cartoons and I can concentrate on more interesting things like how (in the fuck!) all of that horrible “artwork” followed us into the main room of the house. Arg!
The sun had long sense gone down and we were tired so by the time we finished all the tourist paper-work we were both totally un-motivated to move on. So we found a room in the up-stairs portion of the house that ‘ol box body hadn’t gotten around to painting yet (meaning no starfish or bubbles on the walls) and took it. We wearily stepped in to the belly of the whale and sat down at the card table…

After showers and before we settled in for the night Dena filled me in on her conversation with our host. As it turned out she was from Vashon Island (a little community just off the coast of West Seattle in Washington State) and used to work very close to where we used to live on Capitol-Hill in Seattle. She came to India “a little over a year ago” with every intention of traveling all over but never left Varkala because she, “just fell in love with the place”. She told Dena about how she just loves all the “local boys” and how she went in debt asshole-high to buy into this guest house and how “Truly un-satisfying” it was during the Monsoon season and how she was going to go “back home” to Vashon (like she wasn’t at home already in her fucking guesthouse) for next year’s Monsoon!

…Don’t over react! I told myself, don’t judge, relax… too late, “Fuck her let’s get out of here tomorrow”!

“Ok,” Was Dena’s thoughtful reply.

We struck out again on foot for food this time after getting settled and discovered a very intricate, maze-like system of back-streets with high walls on either side leading from the road the guesthouse was on to the cliffs, it was one of the most interesting things about that part of Varkala. Finally we made it to the cliff-side and quickly picked a place to eat. If you (dear abused reader) ever decide to go to Varkala please do yourself the favor of not ever eating at any of the restaurants on the cliff-side! The food really is all the same; tasteless, uninspired and overpriced!
We walked into the place and the only other groups of people that were there were (of course) a group of loud, cigarette puffing, beer drinking, shirtless, barefoot English tourist on one side and the same scene speaking Italian on the other. We tried (unsuccessfully) to get a seat up-wind from all of them and went about our business trying to find something good to eat on the menu. I had yet to see anything even close to resembling a decent pasta dish in any of the places that we’d eaten so far in our Indian travels so when I saw a Pasta Con Fungi on the menu I shrugged and ordered it.
Now, all of you spoiled Americans and Europeans out there take heed! Just because it’s on the menu in India (especially during the Monsoon) that doesn’t necessarily mean they are actually serving that particular dish on that particular night…

…No Pasta Con Fungi, next! I had pasta on the brain so I picked the next one down on the menu; Pasta in Marinara. Dena stuck with a sure thing and ordered a Paneer Butter Masala. We ordered a bottle of water, and happily sat there trying to count the fishing boats off in the distance on the slick black Arabian Sea.
The Monsoon is the season of cleansing, the rain comes in fast and hard with an awe inspiring torrential violence that fills the cisterns, washes the streets and leaves with a whisper! Traditionally it is supposed to happen all over Asia but in recent times the Monsoon has been occurring mostly in the southern parts of Asia from about 19 degrees latitude all the way down the equator. It is the time in India of new things, weddings, children, vast green fields of rice, kind of like spring but much more intense. In Varkala they say that during the Monsoon nothing ever dries and from what we saw that’s true enough. The streets were always full of muddy water and the ground was thick and soft to walk over but the smells in the air were pungent and full of life.

So we’re sitting there on the cliff at night in Varkala watching the boats off in the distance starting to wonder why our food was taking so long when we noticed that a bunch of guys had started to collect the place settings from the other empty tables around us, our waiter comes over to us and asked us if we wanted to move up stairs and that’s when we noticed that all the lights from the fishing boats had suddenly disappeared from being engulfed by a monsoon storm. The wind kicked up to a brisk 15 knots so we grabbed our drinks and headed up to the restaurants “protected” area up-stairs behind a thin wall of bamboo blinding. Then it hit! The winds suddenly kicked up to about 25 to 30 knots and the rain just dumped with a sound that was similar to about 80 decibels of static. Even I could hear it! Our protective wall of thin bamboo buckled but held and it instantly got wet and cold all over the restaurant. The English had another round, the Italians left and all the employees of the place huddled down stairs in the kitchen. The static turned to a roar and the electricity suddenly went out. Our waiter came shuffling up the stairs wrapped in a table cloth carrying two candles and a box of wet matches. After three of the matches came apart in his hands he asked the English for a light, they concede and he lit our candle then lit theirs and came back over to our table to let us know that our food would be out in just a few minutes. Well about 20 minutes later he brought us our cold, tasteless food and we ate in the (not so) romantic candle light and a real-time, screaming Monsoon storm. After eating our cold and rained on Paneer Butter Masala (wet-orange-mush) and “Pasta with Marinara” (egg noodles in onion-ketchup) the rain just stopped so we paid with a pretty hefty tip, broke out the flashlights and made our way back to the guesthouse. Day one in Varkala!

We didn’t really want to drag our stuff all over Varkala so we stayed at “The Wale” and spent the next five days exploring our environs and planning the next leg of our adventures on the (oh-so-slow) computers at our local internet café and avoiding box-body at all costs. Part of the reason it took us so long to ditch that card game was we were stuck there durring the anual Onam festival and trying to travel in Kerala durring Onam is like trying to travel durring the X-Mas season in the states, it has to be planned months in advance!

On day two we walked the entire length of the cliffs “mall” from North to South (about 3 km) and at the end found what the locals of Varkala called the “Locals Beach”. Oddly enough the Locals Beach was also in contrast to the beach on the North side of the cliffs, it was a white sands beach. We sat there relaxing for quite some time and had a great political conversation with a bunch of communist from Alappuzah. After all that we then kind of accidentally stumbled into a bar and that is where we stayed, ordering too much food and too much rum for the next six and a half hours.
Now, this is not how we normally discover a place and Dena and I have tried to analyze, re-analyze and ultimately over-analyze why it was we just out of nowhere decided to get rip-roaring drunk in the middle of the day. I mean really, it wasn’t the fact that there was a bar every 15 meters along the cliffs that did it, it wasn’t the fact that we saw more pale, pink, patchy skin in the 3km stretch along the cliffs then we had so far in all of India, it wasn’t the fact that the local people (with the exception of our communist friends, and they weren’t local really…) didn’t want to have anything to do with us. No, it was simply the fact that we had absolutely nothing better to do then to get our three sheets into that wind, and really, our only consolation prize was that we did it in a locals bar. We really did have a great time, two guys that came in for a while bought us a couple of drinks and our bartender and waiters were really cool and very generous with the booze. I ordered a seafood biriani that was the spiciest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth and our waiter got the biggest kick out of that, really, my nose was running like a fountain and I was sweating so heavily under my eyes that it looked like I was crying like a little baby. The waiters took pictures of us, we took pictures of them and we all got very emotional at the end as we left. Dena and I then stumbled our way back to“The Wale” and passed out.

How’s this, a picture of girl in a chartreuse knitted bikini passed-out curled up around an Indian toilet with gritty, yellow puke crusted from her chin to her big perfect tits with a long string of drool eeking out the side of her mouth and into the toilet, under that the sign reads; “Varkala, where East meets West!” Or how about a billboard with a picture of a shirtless white dude lying face down in the surf wearing a pair of pink -polka-dot boxer shorts pulled half way down exposing the upper half of his harry rash mottled crack with a big bottle of beer in one hand, at the bottom right hand corner of the sign it says simply; “Varkala’s calling…” Or a T.V. commercial of a beautiful white sands beach, all you hear is the surf and some sea gulls off in the distance then the camera pans to a dangerously sun burned sweat-slick pink guy in a black speedo with sand all over his face, he’s projectile vomiting a 12 foot stream of orange-masalla-bile into one of the locals dug-out canoes, and at the end just before the fade out at the bottom of the screen it reads; “Varkala, Just be…”

On day 6 we packed our bags, paid our bill at “The Wale” and set off to find any mode of transportation we could find to Quilam. We got about a block down the street when we ran into a very cool cab driver that took us there for a really great price… “Seek and you shall find!”

We were in Varkala for a total of only 6 days and although it’s true that we didn’t enjoy it much compared to almost every other part of the Indian sub-continent that we’d traveled to, Dena and I have a way of making any situation a grand adventure. We tend to love each other more than our surroundings so ultimately the memories that we take away from a place are the things that made us happy just to be with each other…
We laughed and held hands in a vast grassy-green field in a monsoon rain, we swam in the beautiful Arabian Sea, we watched thousands of broad winged raptors swoop and dive in a seemingly endless dance in the piercing blue sky and every night we lay in each other’s arms under the coolness of a spinning fan dreaming of our next adventure together, but that wasn’t Varkala, that was Dena Hankins and James Lane, together in India.