The Rest of the Trip South

Green Coconut Juice with Aneesha (Seeds)

Apologies for not updating sooner.  I returned to Delhi at the beginning of February and started interning with the Society for Labour & Development, a relatively new Indian NGO focusing on labor issues and labor migration (more on that later).  After visiting Khajuraho, I went to Aurangabad to visit the Ajanta and Ellora caves, then on to Mumbai, Panjim in Goa, and Cochin in Kerala.  I ended up a bit sick and worn out in Mumbai, but had a wonderful welcome from some Seeds of Peace campers.  We went shopping along the Colaba causeway, hung out at Chowpatty beach, sampled lots of juice from Mumbai’s ubiquitous juice stands, and went to a Seeds meeting.

From Mumbai, I took the overnight train to Goa and spent the next three days in Panjim, an area of Goa that still has a lot of the old Portuguese architecture.  It was national day weekend, kind of similar to Memorial Day weekend in the US in terms of it being a long weekend, and most hotels were booked, so I ended splurging on a room at the Panjim Inn, a lovely old heritage hotel.  The Panjim Inn is located in the Fontainhas sector of Panjim and I spent a lot of time walking around looking at brightly colored houses.  The area felt a lot like areas of Mexico and Venezuela – brightly colored houses, tile work and mosaics, central plazas and catholic churches, fruit sellers, and kids running around, it’s just that the kids (and adults) happened to be Indian and didn’t speak Spanish.  I also spent a day in Goa Vehla, or Old Goa, which is the old Portugese capital, complete with large, deserted Catholic churches, and where I was also adopted for the 20 minutes bus ride by a Parsi gas merchant from Mumbai.  I also enjoyed some wonderful meals.  Being on the coast, Goa has some amazing seafood.  I ate my way through Chicken Xacuti, Prawn Curry, more prawn curry, prawns cooked a different way, dosas, and ‘caramel custard’ (which I also know as Flan or Quesillo… delicious).

Fishermen digging for Mussels

After Panjim, I took my last overnight train ride of the trip to Cochin in Kerala.  Cochin is more or less made up of two parts important to visitors.  The train station is in Ernakulam, the newer, bustling, market-filled modern part of the city, but most foreign tourists stay in Fort Cochin, the older part filled with the type of restaurants that serve museli, homestays, hotels, and daily Kathakali performances.  I was a little weirded out by the level or tourism in Fort Cochin.  It wasn’t unusual to eat in a restaurant entirely filled by foreign tourists in Cochin and to have your pick of Museli (something that only foreigners eat), waffles, and pancakes.  That said, I enjoyed the three days that I spent there.  Kerala has been lauded by development theorists for achieving an extremely high level of human development (mainly health care and education) at a low GDP, showing that it’s not always just about money, but also about organization and priorities.  Kerala also happens to be a communist run state and it was funny to walk around seeing red flags with hammers on them everywhere…not something you normally see at home.  One of the people I talked to insisted that Kerala’s high level of human development and relative wealth was due to the communist-led land redistribution after independence.  As a result, more people own their own land in Kerala than in other states.  I spent one day wandering around the Fort Cochin area, looking at the huge ‘Chinese nets’ the fishermen use and visiting the old synagogue in Jew town.

The second day, I went on a backwaters tour and spent the morning on a houseboat and the afternoon in a canoe.  The backwaters area subsists primarily on fishing, turning mussel shells into calcium, and dredging sand.  The area is beautiful, lush, hot, filled with coconuts, and everything seems to move by water.  If you’ve read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, this is the area where she grew up.  For the day tour, I was joined by a group of teachers from Northeast India, two Indian men, a bevy of French navy guys, and some young Brits.  I ate more prawn curry, tried some delicious mussels from one of the villages cooked with coconut and ginger, waffles, and had my fill of filter coffee.  South Indian filter coffee tastes a lot to me like the coffee I had in Venezuela, it’s that finely ground stuff with an almost bitter chocolate flavor mixed with milk and sugar.  Delicious.

On Sunday, I flew back to Delhi and was welcomed back to Sid’s house.  I’m hoping to take a weekend trip to Amritsar sometime in the next month or two, but I’ll be in Delhi for a while now.