didn't get a chance to finish this post before i left chennai to travel again: about a week ago i got back from traveling for about a week through kerala and tamil nadu with a friend from chennai: quite wonderful! hills and trees and clean air hooray!! rice patties, palm trees, rolling hills of tea bushes, cardamom coffee pepper plantations, eucalyptus and rubber tree groves,
fields of sugar cane. so much green!
started out in fort cochin, beautiful chinese fishing nets, much more impressive than i was expecting. huge spider-web-like nets draped from long wooden arms, rocks hanging from ropes used as counterweights to help the fishermen heave the nets out of the water.
women sifting piles of ginger at a spice factory in jew town (yes, they actually call it that), cochin and the view towards ernakulam. i had no idea the depth of jewish history in kerala: most of the population arrived to cranganore around 70 CE as exiles from israel and a jewish kingdom was created around 370 CE. suppression began in the 1520s by the muslims then portuguese then dutch, and today most of the population has emigrated to israel (according to wikipedia...).
after cochi, we headed for alleppey, a main gateway town to the keralan backwaters, a system of something like 900km of canals, lined with forest and palm trees, village houses, footpaths and bridges, inland revealing fields of the most saturating green rice patties. took a town ferry to a smaller village, happy school kids all piling into the ferry to make the commute home. we got off in a village about 10km away, wandered inland to the rice patties where the landscape opens up and you feel as you look out, you're looking back in time.
from alleppey, we moved on to munnar, arriving at 9pm on new years eve to find the only place that had room was actually under renovation but was renting two rooms in the un-renovated part... at 300Rs for a double (about $6), it was probably over-priced by indian standards. but the view the next morning was lovely: dappled green hill sides shimmering with tea bushes, we wandered into the hills to get some sights: beautiful!
there's a nice tea museum (actually, the history of tea in the region seems to be relatively short, developed mainly by the british in the mid 1800s), and apparently the company that runs it is a 70% worker owned coop. though sadly when we asked what kind of tea they used to make the (delicious) tea they serve at the museum, the guy pulled out a bag of instant tea-from-a-machine. hilarious.we then headed down into the valley that evening to stay at a spice plantation 20km away from munnar (yes, the most expensive place i've stayed in india, but a relaxing break).
the guy at the hotel told us there were cardamom, pepper, and coffee plants in the plantation, but i was a little embarrassed that i had no idea what the plants looked like. once we finally identified them, suddenly they were everywhere we looked (annie dillard yes).
we encountered these women on the road through the plantation as they were eating an early lunch (with maybe half a bottle of some kind of brandy-colored liquid poured into a big pan?). they were really friendly and showed me how to pick cardamom, pretty back-breaking work.
this post is getting long, so i'll write about tamil nadu in the next one.
