Goa to Kanyakumari

---

Only a few hours after our arrival in Goa it became clear that I was going to have to modify my boorish behaviour. Travel in India toughens you up, and after several months of it the words "please" and "thank you" had disappeared from my vocabulary almost entirely and I thought nothing of shoving old ladies to the ground in order to secure a bus seat. But in Goa things are different. People queue in an orderly fashion, there are pedestrian pavements, observed traffic laws, and littering is a punishable offence rather than an encouraged civic duty.
Goa remained a Portuguese colony until 1961, and walking around Panaji (the state capital) and Old Goa, amongst quaint colonial buildings, imposing churches and well-kept tropical gardens, you do get the feeling that you have left India behind. A relaxed atmosphere permeates the air and you see more images of Jesus than of Ganesh. But say the word "Goa" and most people think of beaches, parties and unlistenable trance music. We headed to the coast to find out more, stopping first at Palolem beach. This beach is popular with young travellers and is lined with bamboo shacks providing food, drink and lodgings to tourists. But it's quite a mellow place, nice for a day or two, and with a distinct lack of thumping bass - Bob Marley being the artiste of choice. Next we went up the coast to Anjuna beach, which was a popular hippy hangout in the sixties. We were met with a degenerate freakshow, a filthy, seedy scene. Beachfront bars were blaring out the offensive goa trance while obliging Russian girls in bikinis got on down in a desperately transparent display of exhibitionism. Their male counterparts stood around wearing g-strings, sipping beers and leering. Back off the beach the scene was no better. MDMA-addled tourists trying to teach themselves how to drive mopeds caused a hazard to anyone in the vicinity. We witnessed four accidents and a dozen near-misses in just a few hours. These incidents were met with idiotic laughter or just vacant, gurning stares.
We hightailed it inland to the state of Karnataka where we spent the next few weeks visiting a series of medium-sized cities to look at temples, mosques, palaces and various other buildings, some ruined some functional. The Hoysala temples at Belur and Halebid were highlights of the state, as was the Islamic architecture of Bijapur. Apart from at Hampi we saw very few foreigners in Karnataka. Only occaisionally we would arrive at some temple to find a small group of middle-aged French tourists taking great interest in the artistry and the details being disclosed to them by their guide.
Although they cannot be described as beautiful cities, we really enjoyed spending time in the towns of Bijapur, Badami, Hospet and Hassan. People were congenial and didn't seem to feel the need to constantly highlight the fact that we are foreigners. We found good quality, cheap food and lodgings, things which become increasingly important to the traveller the longer he is on the road. Restaurants tended to be clean and efficient. We developed a taste for idli and dosa, rice-flour based snacks served with coconut chutney and sambar (lentil sauce). At lunchtime all restaurants serve "meals", a medley of rice, curries and chutneys served up on a banana leaf. You rarely see any cutlery in south Indian restaurants and are usually left with no choice but to dig in with your fingers, a practice which grows on you over time to the point where you reject cutlery when it is offered.
We found ourselves staying in hotel rooms with private bathrooms and satellite TV. We easily took to this new found level of comfort and found ourselves looking forward to evenings in with "Friends", "Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter" and "According to Jim". In our travels I used to find a lot of inspiration in the works of fellow Scot William Dalrymple. His insatiable thirst for knowledge and his intrepid and ceaseless quest to deepen his understanding of Indian culture and history are admirable qualities. But in "According to Jim" I had found a new role model. Now whenever faced with an unfamiliar and potentially difficult situation I ask myself "What would Jim Belushi do?"
Ever since our arrival in India we had been looking forward to visiting the state of Kerala. The very word carries so much prestige and conjures up exotic and magnificent images in the mind of the aspiring traveller. People talk in hushed and reverent tones of this near utopian society brought about by the reforms of the on-and-off communist government over the last thirty years. Despite having one of the lowest per capita incomes in India, Kerala boasts the highest literacy rates, longest life expectancy, best state healthcare, a well-nourished population due to the state rationing system ... the list goes on. But in our short visit we saw little evidence of these remarkable achievements and instead found one of the biggest disappointments of our travel history. There are very few sights of interest for the tourist and we couldn't help noticing a regression in hygiene standards, punctuated by the ubiquitous stench of human waste. Gone was the relaxed but organised atmosphere of Goa and Karnataka. The quality of the food took a nosedive and the bus stations were chaotic. The people are ornery in general and we crowned them as the most unresponsive group we have ever encountered (soon to be dethroned by the people of Tamil Nadu, but that's another story). On the occaisions where you do manage to elicit more than a grunt from people you usually end up wishing you hadn't bothered.
But it wasn't a wasted trip. Our arrival in Ernakulam coincided with the start of a 6 day festival taking place at a local Shiva temple. Every night we went along to the temple to see some wonderful music and dance perfomances, elephant parades, and just to soak in the festival atmosphere. Most evenings the festival would culminate in an all night Kathakali performance. Kathakali is a traditional Keralan dance form where dancers dress up in spooky costumes and act out stories from the Ramayana and Mahabarata to the beat of an ensemble of drummers. The stories are narrated in the Malayalam language by singers who have remarkably memorized large tracts of these texts and are able to recite them for long periods without even glancing at any notes. The intense and rhythmic drumming, enchanting vocals and bizaar and bewildering visual display would induce us into a trance-like state, in which we would sit mesmerised, almost hypnotised for hours on end. Eventually the trance-like state would begin to give way to a sleep-like state and with a heroic effort we would haul ourselves to our feet and plod back to the hotel.
A highlight of any visit to Kerala is a trip along the backwaters which occupy large areas of the state. A series of lakes and canals (some natural, some manmade) act as the major highways for many of the state's inhabitants. Floating along these backwaters looking out across coconut groves and flooded rice paddies, watching cormorants, egrets and kingfishers go about their lives is a nice experience. Many tourists opt to visit the backwaters on a hired houseboat, an act which seemed to us unimaginably extravagant. The main passageways and lakes around Allepy are choked with these luxury vessels. Typically it looked like one couple would hire a houseboat with a crew of four or five people for about $100 a day. They did look very fancy but the passengers looked foolish and didn't seem to be enjoying themselves any more than the people on our boat, which was the public ferry and cost 10 rupees for a four hour cruise. It actually turned out to be a good way to visit the backwaters. It travelled along narrow canals, with settlements appearing on the banks periodically. Local people would get on and off the boat as we sat enjoying the scenery. As we neared Allepy the canals got wider and we began to see the house boats and canoes taking tourist trips. We decided not to take a tour as planned, since it seemed as though we'd already travelled along most of the waterways it looked like the tour boats were going on. On the tours you do get to stop in villages and look at people making rope and doing various other tasks, but we'd seen people making ropes before so it didn't create enough of a draw for us.
So onwards we travelled, spending far less time in Kerala than we'd originally planned. Almost every time we arrived in a town we just wanted to leave the next day, the general unpleasantness deterring us from lingering. We continued south down the coast until we left the state and arrived at Kanyakumari, the southern most point of India. It is here that three seas meet - the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. It's a fairly typical and pleasant seaside town, Indian style of course. But we were over-tired from the pace of our recent travels. Only seven weeks before we had been in the Himalayas and now we could not go any further south on this subcontinent. We certainly felt like we'd hit bottom. As we turned around to face northwards again we agreed that this would be a good opportunity to do so mentally as well (yes what a clever metaphor!). These travels have exposed us to many experiences, most of them good but not by any means all of them. But they are all valuable and we are fortunate to be here. When you are tired it is easy to forget that - we needed to rest. We decided to head to Kodaikanal, an American founded hill-station in the Western Ghat mountains for some recovery and with any luck, some words of wisdom from Jim Belushi.

---

Photos

Travelling in style
a houseboat on the backwaters