Monday, 10 March 2008, Cochin
Mar. 16th, 2008 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringMonday, 10 March 2008, Cochin
We’re onto Bombay time now. We passed the bottom of Sri Lanka, then headed for the tip of India and turned right to follow the coast northwards up to Cochin. Moving away from the Equator now, after coming close in Singapore, when we rounded the point of the Malayan peninsula. Stories of winter storms lashing Dorset on the news, but here it’s tropical heat. We’ve got a couple of weeks yet.
India off our starboard side, just over the horizon. India. Injah! The old jewel in the crown. The world’s biggest democracy. Maharajahs, elephants, tigers, spices, the Taj Mahal, and ferociously good cricket players.
Incredibly good waiters, too. We are totally spoilt, spoilt with a smile, by our regular dinner waiters Joe and Frazer, and at breakfast and lunch, or the odd dinner elsewhere, we are given silver service by sterling chaps in starched shirts.
The day began with misty buoys marking a channel, darker shapes of low land, and the startling presence of a vivid blue fishing boat close alongside, so startlingly close that Kerri drew the curtain lest I be tempted to wave at them in my half-nakedness.
Cochin harbour, when we were able to give it a decent look, is container cranes, ancient warehouses, interesting buildings in the distance, a merry fleet of ferries, distant vistas in the morning mist.
We’ve got an early start today, 0805 in Carmens right aft to assemble for our tour groups. We’ve been warned that Indian buses are unlikely to be airconditioned, so we make sure we have bottles of chilled water, sunscreen and insect repellent against the mosquitoes we might expect. As ever, the port presenter’s lecture warned against any exploration but those tours run by P&O, and we’ve surrendered to his threats of beggars and brigands to sign up for the “Backwaters of Kerala” tour, a combined bus excursion – an hour or so each way, with a boat ride in between.
We’re getting to be old hands at shore excursions now. I dress in cargo pants and good walking boots, my BookCrossing.com cap on top. A travel wallet containing bare minimum. My second best camera. Light pack with a light jacket, water, emergency rations, spare batteries, a couple of books. Nothing too heavy or valuable, though I take my phone and the issue of Aurora Today containing contact details, port agent phone number, timings etc.
We’re in bus five, we discover when we arrive. The staff wait at the entrance, we show our tickets, and they sticker us up with little colour-coded oval stickers saying “E1-5” or whatever. That’s tour E1, as per the list of trips, bus number five. It’s all impressively organised.
One thing we’ve noticed about port days. The routine is aimed at preventing the whole shipload of passengers from being in one place at one time. Instead, they assemble us in the theatres (and Curzons can take seven hundred people at once), sort us out, and dribble us out to the buses in groups, everything co-ordinated by radio. There are very few queues, and the whole process is very orderly, quick, and controlled.
Something has gone wrong today, however, and it seems that the scanner for our cruise cards isn’t working. Normally there’s someone to ensure that everyone who gets off the ship has their card’s barcode scanned out, and back in again on reboarding. This doesn’t happen today. We still have to show our cruise cards to get off the ship, but it doesn’t look like the computer is going to be able to keep track of who’s ashore and who ain’t.
A jumble of buses waiting outside, with guides to point the way. Each bus has a big sign in the window showing the same code as we’re wearing on our stickers. Just match the two up and we can easily ensure we’re getting on the right vehicle.
“It’s airconditioned!” a member of the ship’s staff exclaims. Apparently previous trips to India have not involved modern buses with airconditioning, PA systems, comfortable seats, etc. We’ve been warned about temperatures of 35 degrees forecast, so working airconditioning is a blessing.
There’s a bit of belt and braces about tour groups. We hand our tickets to the tour guide on entry, and later on a sheet is passed around for us to write our names and cabin numbers. Presumably someone checks to make sure everything matches. We have a local guide, who speaks English. Most of them seem to freelance, taking work as it comes, but so far they have all known their stuff. In fact they find it difficult to stop talking, explaining anything and everything in fine detail.
One of the passengers is also a member of the ship’s staff to look after us. They know the procedures and the local conditions, and they have a mobile phone with all sorts of useful numbers plugged in. Anything goes wrong, and the ship will know about it. They are drawn from the ship’s tour booking office and the admin staff, so that next cruise, they can speak with some authority about what passengers may expect.
This is a new tour, so it seems that the whole of the “Explorers” office are along with us.
India! Outside, we’re looking at colonial era warehouses in a vague Art Deco style. They don’t appear to have been maintained much since construction some time between the two world wars and they look rather dusty and dirty. Between two of them a tall water tank rises, and from the slab cast iron sides of the ancient structure a thin stream of water leaps out, falling twenty metres into a puddle where thin black birds drink and socialise.
I’m almost certain that these birds, resembling half-pint crows, are the same birds I’ve seen in Texas called “grackles” by the locals and regarded as pests. Maybe we’ll see some Indian mynahs later on, regarded by we Australians as rapacious plagues.
Leak aside, the bit of India we can see doesn’t appear to have seen any rain for months. It’s all very dry. Buildings and vegetation alike are covered with dust. The monsoon isn’t due until June, we later learn, and when it arrives, it rains solid for three months.
Our guide climbs aboard, does a head count up and down the aisle, and hops onto the microphone, preparing to fill us as full of local knowledge as he can possibly manage.
And we are his willing audience. Both eyes outside the coach windows as we leave the docks, both ears inside for the commentary. Heads swivel from side to side in response to the sights available, directed by the guide, “On your left you will see a temple...”
My initial impression is one of seediness. Typical of port areas, perhaps, but here the facilities are run down, even when in full use. Grey buildings contrast with brightly coloured trucks, each bearing a flamboyant name above the cab, often of a religious nature to reflect the creed of the owner. Christian churches abound here, side by side with Hindu temples. Sometimes the only apparent difference is the sign of a cross, and the shrine by the entrance may contain a smiling Mother Mary or a limber goddess of many arms. Perhaps one day they will converge, and the Holy Family will join the genealogy of Shiva and Kali. Perhaps inside the halls, the priests are preaching along these lines already.
The trucks have an air of handicrafts about them. The doors are constructed from wood, and above the cab we see a little platform for extra gear. Never just a driver alone, and an offsider or two shares the seat.
Even our own coach reflects this, for the driver has an assistant in a closed off cockpit. Later on, his job will be to get out to guide the driver in tight positioning, but for now he sits quietly.
We pass Cochin’s old British railway station, the tracks and platform under impenetrable vegetation now. In the more modern town is a new station, and this one on what was once the built-up dredging from the port is no longer convenient. Across a lake, and into the main town.
The shops and commercial buildings are continuous. Advertising hoardings rise in front of windows, and every possible surface is devoted to messages for either the shop, or for phone networks or chains of jewellers or other lifestyle goods and services.
The people on the hoardings are all shown as clean and prosperous, dripping with gold, smiling and confident. The actual people on the streets are less perfect, but they are neatly clad, and everyone has shoes. “95% literacy here in the state of Kerala,” our guide tells us. “Best in India!”
Odd. From what the port presenter was telling us, I was expecting beggars in rags. Some of the houses here are actually quite grand, and it is certainly not a slum, even if the layout and architecture sometimes looks very foreign.
People are everywhere. It is about nine o’clock, so this is to be expected, I guess, and I look on them with keen interest. The women are wearing saris, many of them, brightly-coloured amongst the drab background. Men are less gaudy, but they are also wearing skirts, or “dhotis” as the guide points out. These are for the white ones, and the less formal coloured variety have a different name. Every male above a certain age has a moustache, and sometimes a beard. Our bus driver has a trim triangular one, and I half expect horns, for he drives like the devil.
Everyone does, and I gasp in horror when someone casually drives the wrong way down a busy road. Amazingly there is no collision, not even a squeal of brakes. Other drivers merely move aside to let the renegade pass, squeezing lesser vehicles further onto the verge. There is a gradation of traffic, from buses and trucks thundering along in the centre, through private cars to tuk-tuk taxis, motorcycles, bicycles and scooters, all manoeuvring within centimetres of each other, all expanding and contracting as the road allows.
No sounds of brakes or crumpling metal, but everywhere, every vehicle is sounding their horn. Never silent. It is a signal that a heavier or faster vehicle is behind, and the drivers, if at all possible, move to one side to let the other pass. Our bus would come up behind a slow-moving truck, blow the horn and move over into the oncoming traffic. “He’ll never get past in time!” I’d say to myself, and then glance down to where a car or motorcycle crowded with people was overtaking us at the same time.
I don’t know how, but it all worked.
The tri-wheeled tuk-tuks were even more exempt than other traffic. They would blithely travel the wrong way down the far side of the road, mixing it with the pedestrians. More than once I saw a line of them, all facing the wrong way, nobody giving a damn.
I looked at them with professional interest. Used as I am to manoeuvring a large sedan in tight places, these nimble little vehicles would be just the thing for city streets, able to exploit opportunities, leap onto footpaths, drive through houses and so on where even I might hesitate.
They were motorcycle in front and tiny car behind. At a pinch you could fit two on the front seat, but the driver seemed to sprawl over the room available, tucking one foot up underneath. At a pinch you could fit two in the tiny back seat, but often as not three or four would squeeze in. This is a vehicle hardly bigger than a motorbike, remember, but there it would be with five aboard, travelling the wrong way down a busy street.
There were more robust taxis based on the old Hindustan Ambassador. Using a solid old Austin design, built of recycled British battleship armour, this was my idea of an appropriate vehicle for the streets. A decent amount of room in these cars, too. The Indians used them for transporting cricket teams.
We left the built up areas and hit the suburbs. Here the houses and shops were metres apart instead of millimetres. It was still an unbroken strip of development. And people. And enough room to fit six vehicles abreast on a road designed for two. There were temples and churches, schools and colleges. Little lumber yards with real lumber. In log form. Elephant logs but no elephants.
The children were walking to school. Lots of children. I could see where the 95% literacy rate came from. Clean and cute, the girls had ribbons in their hair, and they smiled and waved when they saw a busload of tourists pointing cameras at them. They were awesomely beautiful.
“It’s their examinations tomorrow,” explained our guide. “They are serious today.”
There was actual vegetation here in the outskirts. Huge trees spreading over the busy road. “They call them rain trees,” said the guide, fount of all knowledge. “After it stops raining, they keep on dropping water on people.”
The trees were dry after months of drought. I would have called them dust trees. But there was plenty of greenery around. Vacant lots and people’s backyards apparently turned into jungle after a week or two in the rainy season.
I wondered what all the people did during the monsoon. All those beautiful saris. Add umbrellas to the busy streets and there’d be no room for rain.
The local buses were prepared for rain. They had fabric covers over the open sides. You could roll them down instead of having window glass.
Did I mention the local buses? In contrast to the unremarkable vehicles we were riding in, airconditioned tourist coaches, the same all over the world, local Indian buses were handbuilt. They had open windows. Wooden seats. Two drivers. About a thousand people inside. I could just imagine them in monsoon conditions with the opaque fabric covers secured.
Buses and people and trucks and people and taxis and people and tuk-tuks and people and motorbikes and people and bicycles with three aboard. I was beginning to understand how India managed to have a population sixty times as big as Australia in a tenth of the space.
In truth, I really cannot put my initial experience of India into words. Not words that do justice. I’m running through an art gallery and trying to copy every detail of every painting. I’m glancing into a national museum and writing a history book based on my fleeting impressions. I’m sniffing the air in a crowded market and trying to list every item on sale. It can’t be done.
The bus whizzes by sights that baffle me. Shopkeepers fastidiously brooming the dust from the footpath outside, while next door mountains of rubbish gather and a pile of dry leaves smoulders. A statue of a god in a swimming pool. Women washing their clothes in a pond full of filthy water.
We turn a corner, a traffic cop in a little shrine in the middle of the intersection, and here is a river, busy with boats. Four other large buses crowd the narrow road and we draw up behind them. We are here.
The tourists climb down and are shepherded onto the boats. One bus per boat. We sit in white plastic chairs on the top deck, a light plastic canopy to shield us from the sun, and the drivers’ offsiders load lifejackets from the ship into the lower deck. India’s notion of safety first does not square with P&O’s, and I am glad that someone is thinking ahead.
I have a book in my pocket, a Mills and Boone romance, and I contemplate surreptitiously throwing it ashore or onto a convenient boat deck as we pull away. But this is India, and with a dozen people cramming every spare metre, there’s no way I can release a book unobserved. I’d have people swimming across, book in mouth, to return me my property. Or have it handed back on my return.
I slide the book down beside me, and leave the line of buses. Doubtless the drivers and offsiders will spend a pleasant hour or so tangling and turning them in a cramped laneway so that they are facing about for our convenience when we come back from our cruise,
“This is Alleppey,” the guide, “known as the Venice of India, because of the many canals.”
Canelletto might differ in his view, just gazing around. Here are old tour boats, half-sunken, rotting away in a backwater. Here are a hundred houseboats, bamboo upperworks on black hulls. A wide expanse of water, palm trees on the far side. Floating rafts of weed. No cathedrals and gondolas. No buildings once we leave Alleppey town itself behind, save for low dwellings scattered on the shore. Venice doesn’t have this much jungle.
But for magic and atmosphere, there is nothing like it. The universal Asian haze only adds to the charm, and I try to imagine the dawn with the sun coming up out of the interior.
For the next hour or two we motor through canals narrow and wide. Waterways natural and manmade. Bridges here and there, just wide enough for a sari-clad woman and a couple of kids. Canoes gliding along, a cargo of fish, or rice, or fruit safe in their hulls, a lone boatman paddling or poling the wares.
Each house has its own little dock or jetty for boats, and a set of stone steps descending into the water, a combined laundry and kitchen sink. Here the women beat their washing clean, or rinse out their cooking pots, or scale fish with a cat or two in watchful attendance. Toddlers and preschoolers look on, waving at we tourists. Older children are in class, perhaps picked up by a schoolboat, perhaps walking along the canalside paths.
Vegetation is thick, screening houses and dusty yards. Chickens and goats and ducks and dogs roam around. Occasionally tall cloth or plastic sheets make fences against the gaze of curious tour boats, but for the most part we are one with the village life for passing moments, the local folk barely glancing up from their everyday chores.
Even without tourists, there are boats and canal traffic passing every few minutes. The place is alive with activity. Further, the waterside paths carry pedestrians. The same women in their bright clothing as we saw in the town. Men in their dhotis. And a few children, inexplicably out of school. They call out to us, “Pin, pin!”
We look around, mystified. “They want pens,” explains our guide.
Not so outrageous a request from scholars. I am minded of my own infant schooldays in Queensland. We used slates and pencils, and a Bic biro was what the big kids used.
Pens were found and thrown ashore. Smiles all round. The request was repeated here and there throughout the trip – we began to wonder if there was perhaps some sort of cottage industry in the resale of pens from distant places. I held firmly onto my gold pen, but Kerri threw one lad a plastic pen from the Singapore Health Commission, and perhaps it is being proudly used in school even as we speak. Or offered for sale in some canoe hawking stationery.
Venice it wasn’t, but there were canals aplenty. I was quite lost after an hour amongst the turns and junctions. I kept on expecting to run out of waterways and be back at the starting point, but each time I was surprised when we rounded a bend and a great unfamiliar vista opened up.
Here and there beyond the canal banks, there were open fields. Rice paddies, now drained for the harvest. We passed one huge pile of rice, and later on there were folk loading huge bags of it onto an enormous boat.
Everywhere there was activity. Women diving for shellfish, children fishing, a gang of workers building up the banks, a temple being decorated for a wedding.
And, unlike the town, there was no sense of crowding. Each individual house was set well apart from its neighbours, with the rice fields spreading out beyond to give a feeling of space. It was all neatly balanced – fields and jungle, water and land, open expanses and tight waterways. One got a feeling of calm purpose to the life here. The people might not have been rich in material possessions, but I could certainly think of worse ways to live.
Perhaps this explained the hundreds of houseboats. Visitors came from all over India, and all over the world to hire one for a few days or a week or more. Three, four or five bedrooms, a kitchen at the back and a large open dining and living area in front. A crew of two or three – a captain to steer and navigate, a steward to cook and serve. Maybe others – some of these boats were very grand two-storied affairs.
The hiring day began at noon, and as we made our way back to the buses in the early afternoon, we passed a succession of newly hired houseboats heading out into the canals. In one, the steersman sat under a pink umbrella, another had a guitar-playing duo providing music to cruise by, another had a cook preparing lunch on the rear deck. It all looked extremely pleasant.
And all too soon our idyll amongst the water lanes was over. Here the other boats were tying up beside the buses, the vendors of peacock plume fans and carved cobras were moving in, and I still hadn’t released my romance book.
I could have thrown it to some kid instead of a pen, I guess, and I dare say that some Hindu mother would gain some pleasure out of a British romance, but it’s a BookCrossing book after all, and I’m selfish enough to want to hear back from it eventually over the internet, and it seemed to me that the Internet hadn’t yet found this happy corner of the world.
Besides, I might have thrown it short and had it plop into the water, and that would be the end of my book then and there.
So I left it on my seat, thinking that some fresh set of tourists would come by in due course and pick it up, and of course tourists have free access to the internet and I’d hear fresh tales of exciting literary travels, even if it were no more than a stream of “Didn’t like it. Left it at the WI” journal entries.
We identified our bus and found our seats. They generally pass out bottles of water to the passengers, and these buses have drink holders fixed to the seatbacks, so our seats were more or less identifiable by two untouched bottles of water. Call me picky, but I don’t drink the local water on these trips, even if it comes in a bottle with a name resonant of crystal springs. It’s filtered tap water, generally.
I take the position that all tap water has bugs in it, and I’m used to the bugs we have at home, but not necessarily the bugs they have in drinking water elsewhere. Not unless I boil it first.
Instead we have our own bottles of filtered tap water, taken from the ship. I might be able to avoid local water for the few hours we spend in each port, but it’s a solid month on Aurora, and I’ve got to trust the onboard supply. So far this trust has been justified.
“You left this book on the boat.” It’s a fellow passenger, returning my lost property to me. Drat.
“Oh, it’s not my book.” The usual line. And it’s not my book if I set it free, is it?
He gives the book to the crew member supervising the tour, who promises to give it to the tour guide.
The bus starts off again for an hour ride back to the ship. The traffic isn’t as heavy, which means more opportunities for hair-raising overtaking action. Sometimes I just close my eyes, trusting in the driver. The sight of a pair of crashed vehicles on the road side – one of them a local bus – doesn’t help soothe me.
Luckily we make it back to the docks. A look through the stalls that have sprung up alongside – the usual tourist stuff of carvings and trinkets and t-shirts at outrageous prices – and we’re back aboard.
Shower and change of clothes. A day outside the airconditioning, even if it involves no actual effort, is usually pretty draining. Kerri and I head up to the Crows Nest for a drink before dinner.
The view of Cochin harbour is spectacular from up here. A fuel lighter chugs by and ferries busy themselves on their runs. A grey-painted helicopter from the nearby naval airfield passes overhead, followed by a utility aircraft which circles us as we edge away from the dock to make a 180 across the channel.
The buildings, inlets and islands of Cochin swing by our table, moving past the panoramic sweep of windows. A fuel installation on the other side of the channel comes close, but our skilful captain, aided by any number of underwater hull thrusters, turns us safely.
We swing fully around, and when the bow points up the channel, the captain steps on the accelerator, or whatever it is that great ships use to go faster. We go outside to see the sun sinking ahead and the final points of land slipping away.
A line of passengers on the rails, nine floors up, waving to the locals ashore. It’s fun all round, and some stunning sights as we head off into the growing dusk, the velvet air sparkling with early lights.
Goodbye India! For now. We’ve got a sea day as we head up the coast, and then another run ashore at Mumbai.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-16 04:26 pm (UTC)I’m almost certain that these birds, resembling half-pint crows, are the same birds I’ve seen in Texas called “grackles” by the locals and regarded as pests.
I saw them in Puerto Rico last year. The ones there were "Greater-Antillean Grackles":
no subject
Date: 2008-03-16 04:28 pm (UTC)Pete, I am loving these entries. It's great to travel vicariously with you. :-)
no subject
Date: 2008-03-17 08:22 am (UTC)congratulations!
Date: 2008-03-17 08:39 am (UTC)Am loving these entries. Thanks for making me smile!!
Re: congratulations!
Date: 2008-03-18 08:31 am (UTC)Looking forward to reading about the travels of you and Kev, and Lytteltonwitch and Futurecat and Teotakuu - it will take me the rest of the year to recover!
no subject
Date: 2008-03-17 10:22 am (UTC)No sounds of brakes or crumpling metal, but everywhere, every vehicle is sounding their horn. Never silent. It is a signal that a heavier or faster vehicle is behind, and the drivers, if at all possible, move to one side to let the other pass. Our bus would come up behind a slow-moving truck, blow the horn and move over into the oncoming traffic. “He’ll never get past in time!” I’d say to myself, and then glance down to where a car or motorcycle crowded with people was overtaking us at the same time.
I don’t know how, but it all worked."
LOL, welcome to my world!
And YES, pens work in Egypt, too....
no subject
Date: 2008-03-17 11:18 am (UTC)Great vivid descriptions. Did you avoid insect bites?
Keep it up - please.
*Hugs*
no subject
Date: 2008-03-18 08:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-18 09:06 am (UTC)