Long Time, No Blog

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Samirs article. It's been a while since I've written, so there should be a lot. About a week or 2 ago, we went on a cruise through the backwaters on a house boat. The water was calm, the wind was cool and the nights were buggy. It turned out that the guides wanted to stay at shore for the night, to get free electricity from the village. Can you say "cheapskate"? Being so close to shore, with the light on, attracted bugs. And with that package came geckos. Three of them. But come morning all was well. When we got back to Allepey, we had planned to rent a car, but the rentee decided not to let us have the car, so he got us a place to stay for the night while we waited called Pagoda Resort. It had a swimming pool and a tennis court and it's own restaurant. After all we did need a break from bugs. The restaurant was pretty exspensive so we walked to town to eat dinner there. On the way back we saw two bats almost as long as two desks, fly above us. When we got back to Pagoda, we noticed that inside the hotel, surrounding each light, was a swarm of 300 gnats. There was cloud of them of them on our floor, so we had to run through them and into our room. Thankfully only a few got in. The next morning, when we stepped out of our room, there were millions of dead gnats, their bodies littered on the floor and three staff members attempting to hide the evidence. My dad went to pick up the car later, and walked for 3 minutes to town. An hour later he came back with a car straight from the 1950s. We were planning to take this car up the mountains, on steep ground and down again to a beach house. It was crazy, but we did it. The first day we drove to Thekkady and the Periyar Tiger Reserve. At the reserve, we saw monkeys, elephants and squirrels (oh my) a mangoose and lots of birds. We didn't see any snakes, but Jain, our guide says in summer there are lots of cobras crawling around. Our hotel was cozy and cheap (with no catch). Our plans were changing though, so we stayed two nights. After the second night, we continued driving to Munnar, were there were acres and acres and acres of tea plantations. We stayed in another fancy hotel that night, this one had a restaurant too. But the restaurant had weird rules. When we went there for dinner they gave us one of two menus. There was one for the inside and one for the outside. The problem was, we wanted to order off both menus but the waiter wouldn't let us sit inside if we did that so we had to sit outdside in the (suprisingly) freezing cold, where we could order off both menus. The next day we finally realized how crazy our plan was, so we drove back down to were we started in India, Cochin. We stayed at the same hotel too. The people who rented us the car came and picked up the car (good old junky) so we took the train (again) to the beach house called Costa Mallabari in Kannur where we are staying now. Won't be writing until we get to Goa, so don't excpect anything.

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Photos

A Launguar monkey
We saw this monkey at the reserve.

Two Houseboats Docked at a Snack Booth
One of them is ours.

A Gecko Waiting for the Chance to Catch Dinner
This is one of the geckos on our boat.

Just Part of the Many Tea Plantations
Yeah, it's green.