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Napier house in Trivandrum
Now a museum, but a good example of the architecture of the other Travancore palaces with their Chinese influences Our second field trip is to the beautiful state of Kerala, a fascinating place. Its tropical location (sandwiched between mountains and beautiful beaches with little else but coconut palms and rice paddies in between) makes it one of the most beautiful places we have ever visited. It was on a traditional houseboat in the backwaters here that Chas was possessed by the sun, palm trees and beautiful tropical background and hence proposed.
Kerala is has been almost exclusively a communist state since India’s independence which has resulted in an amazing array of social reforms. It claims to have 100% literacy but what is certainly true is that female literacy here is higher than male literacy. Women have their own queues and seats on the bus. The union movement has such a grip that every worker belongs to the union and its affiliated political party. In terms of torture, this has greatly protected the people. They are well educated regarding their rights and the politicians happily use their influence to rescue poor members from illegal detention.
What is sad is that Kerala has the highest suicide rate in India. In a country where the value of your own life
Protest in the streets
Apparently the union of the weavers before an important meeting is little compared to living in shame, many people find it hard to be so highly educated but with no employment. The foreign investment that happened in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh simply has not happened here despite the highly educated yet cheap workforce. Two reasons are that as the state is so small, land is incredibly expensive and as the workforce is so political there is a strike about once a week. Fortuitously, we saw a protest that blocked off the main city road for about an hour on the day we arrived. Hence, big corporations see Kerala as a bad investment. So Kerala is now the biggest exporter (alongside the Phillipines) of the world’s doctors, nurses, technicians, etc but have no domestic employment other than tourism.
We took the over night train to Trivandrum on the Friday night, where quite astonishingly we met another Peruvian woman on the train! She told us she has been living here in India for 5 years. Amazingly, she spoke almost no English or any of the local Indian languages! Just Spanish. We asked how she was able to get around, and she said with no problem, there are enough Spanish speakers around
Protest in the streets
And that's the main road in the state capital that they are blocking off for an hour. As I said, not uncommon either India for it not to be a big problem. She told us she was on her way to visit an ashram of a lady known as the Hugging Mamma.
Saturday morning, we were picked up by a wonderful man called Ranjit. We are very grateful that he met us at the train station, because as we found out later that night, we were given the wrong address of the office, which is where we were staying. This of course resulted in another incredibly expensive and frustrating battle with a rickshaw driver.
We also met Ajay, the state director of People’s Watch, who told us his history. He was (is) a dalit, from the lowest of the untouchable caste. After his degree, he inevitably fell into dalit politics and ended up doing an internship with People’s Watch. This lead to him becoming a human rights activist over a politician (a much more effective role) and allowed him to intervene in individual cases of abuse. He has married a woman from a higher caste (obviously a love-marriage as no arranged marriages can cross the caste barriers) and her family almost disowned her. He is one of the many examples of
the success of education in the dalit community but, as he was quick to remind us, there is a long way to go.
Sunday we set off to Varkala, a small beach town that Jordan had recommended to us. We were standing at the bus station, which was across from the train station, trying to work out what was leaving at what time, when we were approached by a rickshaw driver offering to take us there directly to our hotel. I was picturing what it would be like crammed in a bus, then negotiating another rickshaw driver to take us where we wanted to go, and just said to Chas, ‘Look, we’re here on our honeymoon. This guy will take us there directly. I think I would rather just pay the price and get there to enjoy our day’. So we took an hour-and-a-half long rickshaw trip!
(Chas: And so we stole the first day of our honeymoon! Even if I spent the first bit of it slightly grumpy about paying for the world’s most expensive rickshaw journey. But to put it in perspective, it was $11 for a 55km taxi-ride. Stop whinging Chas! Varkala is much more
Ana at the Funky Art Cafe!
In Varkala; no funky art but good food, cocktails and amazing sunsets chilled out than Goa or Kovalam and is just as beautiful. Spending even one night there was heavenly).
And it was worth it! It was wonderful to go for a swim in the sea, then climb back up the cliff, look out over the ocean, sip a piña colada and watch the sun go down. It’s low season right now in southern India, so the beach front was very quiet, many of the restaurants and shops closed. But I think that just made it a nicer place to be. The only down side was there wasn’t any ice cream available anywhere! Nooooooo…!
The next day, we were due leave and so we went down the cliff for our last swim. Unfortunately, due to the strong but not too big waves, I managed to jar my back. I went to turn as a wave hit me, and it wasn’t until I was out of the water that I realised I couldn’t bend down or over without having a sharp pain shoot up my back. It slowly started to recover by the end of the day, but Chas had to carry both our backpacks on and off trains because I
Honeymoon sunset
Did I mention the good sunsets over the ocean in Varkala? And the cocktails? Battling torture can be so hard... couldn’t lift or carry much.
Oh, that was also the day I got slapped on my arm by a beggar at the Varkala train station for not giving him money!
(Chas again: It’s a bit hard to know what to do with beggars. It is a profession here where members of begging syndicates own their own houses and do well for themselves. When they are offered food they often refuse or, once in Bangalore, we were taken on a hike to a shop that sold biryani. Like I said, it’s a problem).
We had two days in Kochi, the first we spent researching and interviewing. The work remained very interesting but we were much more efficient this time around and only needed a few hours with the law reports instead of three days.
Hence we were free on the second day to steal another day of honeymoon! We took a ferry across the harbour to Fort Cochin, the old part of town where the spice traders are. Culturally Kochi is amazing. Cochin was a main port on the spice route from China to the Middle East and so
Our dining guests
The residents of the Funky Art Cafe boasts Chinese architecture in its palaces and Chinese fishing techniques (beautiful boats and nets). Then, due to the trade, it has a very large Muslim and Christian community and has been successively colonised by the Portuguese, the Dutch and finally the British. This has resulted in so much beautiful colonial architecture. Also it had the only Jewish kingdom outside of Israel; at the time of Israel’s creation, there were 40,000 Jewish people living in peace in Fort Cochin. If you ever come to India, you must come to Kerala!
At the ferry terminal, we bumped into an English couple, Beth and Aiden, who are here in India for 3 months. It was so nice to have lunch with them, and explore the market area (where you can pick up dodge copies of books, where the store vendor has literally photocopied the original book, and put his own together. Sometimes you can’t even read the photocopied page), the Mattencherry palace and Jew Town (the main attraction was the synagogue, but this was closed because it was a Jewish holiday!). Exploring can feel exhausting, by the end of the day, we found a pub, sat, had beers and watched another glorious
sunset in Kerala.
On our last day in Kerala we attended a victims of torture meeting. I was very excited about this because, due to being white and only here for two months, we have been kept away from the grassroots and the only vicitms we have met are working at People's Watch. So we both jumped at the opportunity to meet some victims in their own district. Unfortunately, that district was 3 hours away from Trivandrum and 2 hours away from where we had to catch our train in Kollam. The meeting was not as inspiring as I had hoped, but this was simply due to the language barrier. What was amazing was seeing the empowerment that standing up among people with similar experiences and having the courage to talk about how you were beaten, abused, stripped and held illegally. Scarily, not one of these people had committed a crime in their lives nor did the police suspect them of anything. They simply picked these people off the street! Also it was great to see People's Watch doing followup with the victims, informing them of their case status and that of others. After the meeting, there was a
protest but we were not allowed to attend.
Trying to wrap this up as this blog is enormous but we finally experienced a pubilc bus in India. We had to drive 40km to a town where a bus actually went to Kollam and by the time we got on we would only have 15 mins to get to our train (and that is only if the bus ran on time). I resigned myself to missing our train and being basically stuck while trying not to feel claustrophobic about the 150 people on the bus. By the way, on our last blog I suggested Jordan was exaggerating about the 300 people on the bus and he informs us that he wasn't, he counted. But it was something we had to experience and we made it to the train on time!
Lots of love
Ana and Chas
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Zac
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Stupid Signs
Hmmm, perhaps India and China could have an international competition of stupid signs. For my liking, "Climb Great Wall by boat" takes the cake here. Or perhaps the numerous "437 Days to go" signs around BJ at time of writing. You can buy 2008 Olympic Souvenirs everywhere already...