Boats, Buses, Bikes, and Bollywood

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Hello ,
I thought I would begin this blog by giving a tiny bit of background on Kerala State, the region of India where I am currently traveling. Kerala is one of the only places in the world to have had a democratically elected communist government in power for most of the past 60 years. Kerala also has the highest literacy and education rates, and the highest life expectancy in all of South Asia. Here there is little of the extreme poverty seen elsewhere in India, and there are also virtually no Western chains or franchises in the entire state. There are, however, hammer and sickle flags flying virtually everywhere, and murals of Che Guevara are commonplace.

So I've spent the past couple days traveling across Kerala from the beach town of Varkala to the hill station Munnar. During this time I've taken 3 buses, 2 rickshaws, 2 motorbikes, a train, and a boat. I left Varkala Tuesday morning and decided to take a boat north across the Backwaters, after a series of wild bus and rickshaw rides. The Backwaters are a series of inland lakes connected by channels that span much of the coastal region of the state. I spent the day floating down green swampy channels listening to the sounds of birds swooping down into the water to catch fish. The surrounding countryside was green and lush and filled with cows, coconuts, banana trees, rice paddies, and goats.

I arrived in the town of Alappuzha just after sundown, and took a cheap room in a Guesthouse that had just newly opened. After I checked in I started chatting with the owner's son who invited me to a Malayalam movie with his friends who were about my age. Malayalam is the language of Kerala, and India has a Malayalam language film industry that competes with Bollywood in this part of India for viewers.
I have never been to a movie quite like this one. The cinema was ancient and looked as if the roof would cave in at any minute. There were only males in the cinema and they chewed tobacco, spit, and screamed at the screen constantly throughout the movie. When one of the characters behaved regrettably, members of the audience would boo and throw things at the screen. When the characters triumphed everyone would shout and cheer and holler. The plot was as convoluted as you would expect for an Indian movie, but it ended with one main guy stabbing the other, regretting it, and giving the other guy his girlfriend as a consolation gift. Something tells me this movie would not go over quite as well back home as it did in Alappuzha. Nonetheless, there is nothing quite like being in a smoky theater full of Indian men spitting and shouting out at random intervals throughout the film. Sadly, I fell asleep midway through the movie, feeling worn out after sitting in the piercing sun all day long. Luckily though my hands have now changed to a deep shade of tan and I feel well adjusted to the hot climate.

I left Alappuzha by bus yesterday afternoon and arrived last night here in Munnar. This is some serious hill country here, and the temperature is much cooler given that I've gone up about 6-7000 feet in elevation. I'll write more about the hill country in my next blog.
Stay tuned

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Photos

Communist Kerala
Communist Party of India poster

Fishing Nets
on the Backwaters

Boat
Boat in the Backwaters

Lungi
Local man wearing a lungi

Mother
with children

Boatload
A whole boatload of people