River Deep, Mountain High

I have an innate sense for measuring how terrible places are, which I have honed to such acuity that I can perceive crappiness through both space and time. I recently announced that Hassan, Karnataka is one of the worst shitholes in India and recent events have vindicated me. In Hassan and its neighboring city there have recently been riots leaving two people dead. Aside from deaths in riots being pretty unappealing under any circumstances, the event that instigated the disorder reveals what an utter cancer of geography Hassan truly is. What sparked the riots? The publishing in a local newspaper of a translated article by a Bangladeshi Muslim woman critical of wearing the burkha. Someone has suggested that the burkha is not a progressive garment, and has even come out in favor of...*gasp*...women's liberation! THERE MUST BE BLOOD. Fucking Hassan. Way to go, way to be special. So many Indian cities are trying to be London, it's bold of you to aim for being Kandahar. Do you need someone to carpet bomb you for the sake of realism? Because I volunteer.

Fortunately I read of these events in a Keralan newspaper rather than experiencing them firsthand. It's not just that I wouldn't want to be in the midst of the chaos, it's more a matter of being glad that I'm 500 kilometers from Hassan in any circumstances. Seriously, if cities had faces, Hassan would constantly be drooling. I haven't the slightest bit of nostalgia for that hot, dusty chicken trap when I am having a much better time on a hot, sandy cliff dominated by dead fish.

I rumbled on up into the mountains to escape the soupy cauldron of perspiration and dried chillies that is Kochi. The mountains I rode into are called the High Range, formerly known by the much more grand title of the High Range of Travancore. These aptly-named peaks are the highest points in India south of the Himalayas, a wonderland of lush, green peaks, bare cliffs, tea, tea, and tea. A third of India's tea is grown up here, and the brightly verdant bushes tumble down the haphazard slopes as far as the eye can see. Best of all, the climate is reasonably mild. I settled down at a lodge on the road two miles south of Munnar, the main town of the region. Munnar gets a bad reputation for extreme ugliness, but I thought it was actually quite nice as far as little Indian towns go. It's no Hassan, that's for sure. Admittedly, the only interesting thing to do in Munnar proper are to go and visit Tata Tea's tea museum, where you can learn more than you ever really need to about the 15-odd different ways in which High Range tea is processed. You can also poke about local curiosities, and try not to laugh at the morbid humor of a memorial to 14 drowned children who tragically died when running across a hanging bridge to greet the arrival of the first helicopter in Munnar, when the helicopter blew the bridge upside down. This happened in 1985. I was on a hike with a group of earnest French people when I learned this and they were quite appalled I had a smirk on my face. First of all, for some reason I've always met tragic news by grinning like an idiot, I can't help it. Also in this case I was innocently wishing that the accident had merely gotten the children wet, in which case it would have been completely hilarious, and it brought a bit of a smile to my face. I spent the next seven hours going up and down hills with people who thought I was the devil.

The day before this hike I went on an excursion of my own to a place called Top Station, which is high up way on the other side of the range. A local bus slowly chugged its way along the semi-paved, one-lane "highway" through the winding folds of the tea estates until I got off and walked a short distance to a truly spectacular viewpoint from where I could see massive cliffs through the haze and a distant opening in the valley below to the far-away Tamil plains. Having spent a satisfactory amount of time soaking it all in, I was faced with the problem of getting back. Since there was only one road, I resolved to take a pleasant stroll admiring tea field after rolling tea field until I crossed the path of a bus going in the right direction. The bus never came, but I had a truly lovely walk, feeling very much on top of the world, or at least on top of South India, at least partly because I had stopped in one tea field to...well, let's just say I put the 'high' in High Range.

Later that evening, quite wobbly-legged and exhausted from my hike, I finally hitched with a van and got driven the last twenty kilometers back to Munnar town. I was still in a bit of an enhanced perceptive state while I covered the two kilometers from town to my lodge on foot. I was walking alone through the blackness, trying to speed my pace as the first raindrops of the season were beginning to fall on me, when I was suddenly blinded by a brilliant light. It was two lights in fact; two eye-searingly bright yellow lights shone, forcing me to stop and turn away in the middle of the road. All I could see was the lights, seemingly floating disembodied from whatever source had cast them. I shielded my eyes with my arm and turned towards their source. There, between the two blazing suns, was a ring of dancing blue and red flights forming a hyperactive halo around the glowing face of Vishnu himself. Vishnu smiled gently and held his hand raised in gesture as a serpent coiled through the locks of his hair. The blue-red halo was blinking maniacally and it took all my concentration to focus my vision between the brilliant yellow balls of illumination to look at Vishnu's face directly. I stood there in center of the road like Saul of Tarsus himself on the way to Damascus, blinded before God. I heard a voice, and He spoke to me.

"You want reeeeckshaw?" He said.



In the High Range you can only expect to see two things: mountains and tea. I had seen those, and had also seen the face of God, so I figured there wasn't much more I could get out of the region. I reluctantly rose the next morning and boarded a gut-sloshingly wild bus down the hairpin roads of the Western Ghats one last time. I willed myself unconscious to pass away the time while the bus churned my innards like a tub of butter, and woke up quite irritated to find myself in the precise climatic conditions I had gone up the same road to avoid several days before. Like a High Range tea leaf altered by steaming water, my leaf-green shirt had turned a fluid black with the mixture of my near-bubbling sweat. I raised myself out of slumber and peeled myself from the faux-leather chair-back with an audibly wet unsticking sound. I stewed until we got to the edge of the backwaters.

The backwaters are a part of Kerala that is famous for having tons of water and boats. It is essentially a 100km-long strip of coast completely riddled with lakes, rivers, stream, paddy-fields, and canals, where people live in little villages on small islands between the waterways and go about in quaint little canoes and ferries. Whether I liked it or not, the most efficient way to get where I was going was to take a two-hour ferry through the canals to get to the city of Alappuzha. And, by God, was it boring. We slogged on through boring linear canals lined with a single row of palm trees in front of endless paddies for what seemed like generations. I thought to myself again, this must be one of those places for people who are just automatically entranced by fucking boats. Go back to Iowa and look at corn; boats aren't that great. I was perhaps the only of the several tourists aboard the vessel who was happy to get off in Alappuzha, a humid, rank ditch of a city full of tour-boat hustlers that refers to itself rather generously as "the Veneece of the East" because it has not one, but two mossy, tepid canals running through the center of town.

I am not that easily deterred, however, especially not when spending another day wasting away on boats would haul me a tidy commission. Overnight I was also marveling at how anyone could enjoy boats so much, when it suddenly clicked and I remembered the two primary draws of boating: scantily-clad women and booze. A plan was beginning to coalesce.

The next day I woke up bright and early, pushed my way past the legions of houseboat and canoe renters to the dirt-cheap local ferry pier, had a brief conversation with a gap-toothed man with a limited command of any language, and boarded the ferry he recommended to some island village I had never heard of. And it was fabulous. We chugged along through winding rivulets and squeezed under low footbridges across the canals, stopping every so often to let ferry passengers disembark at a riverside shrine or carry their groceries back to their village homes. Everywhere we went we saw children splashing in the streams, men and women doing their laundry at the river's edge, and dozens of people just sitting there with a little string hoping to catch some fish. The more industrious fishers poised themselves over the water's edge with a strung bow, pointing their arrows straight down into the waters ready to ruin the day of any fish swimming by. Canoes paddled hither and thither as people went about their errands, visited their neighbors, and carried tools off to work. It was nearly silent except for the chugging of the ferry engine and the dingalinging of the pilot's bell telling the engineer when to hurry or slow the plodding boat.

On the larger rivers we passed by flotillas of houseboats, the floating private hotels of the Kerala coast, where tourists pay hundreds of dollars a night to cruise down the waterways in style. Over the course of some five ferries that day, I spent about 68 cents. I was revelling in a somewhat "authentic" backwater experience, getting quite a kick out of the fact that my ferries were rustic enough that tourists on their boats were taking pictures of me as I floated by. Some of them may be sifting through their photos now and wondering why a palefaced Indian on a boat was giving them the bird. I hopped off at the reccommended vilage, much to the confusion of the conductor, and soon discovered why he didn't expect me to be getting off. The island was about the size of a football field and had absolutely nothing to offer the visitor except about five houses and a large elementary school which was just letting out classes. I was trapped on a tiny island with a hundred inquisitive children. When I arrived back in Alappuzha I had quite a word with the jetty staff, accusing them of having played a cruel and depraved joke at my expense.

Fortunately, my plan was not completely foiled, for a small group of canoe-punting boatmen had arrived to shuttle the kids across the river to the larger, better-connected island on the other side. I joined one boatload, got off on the riverside footpath, and passed over a series of inter-island footbridges, making a beeline for the toddy bar upstream. Toddy is the local form of alcohol, and is quite tasty. Despite all of Kerala's social progress, it has the country's highest alcoholism rate, and let me tell you, the combination of toddy with small islands where there's nothing to do isn't helping matters. Of course, it isn't alcoholism if you only have one drink...at a time. When the next ferry pulled up to the jetty an hour and a half later I joined the international fraternity of boat enthusiasts who have a rollicking good time on aquatic transport.

But really, I'm done with boats. It's time for the beach.

Hours later in Alappuzha I was sitting in a restaurant sloppily devouring fried chicken when someone asked me how the backwaters were, and I told them that they were just fabdulous. Really fabdulous. Fantas...fantastatic.

India: it's fabdulous.