The World Is Phat

They say that no man is an island. I think that means that in lieu of being constantly surrounded by the ocean, every so often a man has to go to the beach. Because metaphorically speaking I am actually an island. A big, volcanic island with lots of parasitic lifeforms on it.

So I strolled into the beachside community of Varkala and noticed immediately that the beach itself wasn't terribly convenient, as it was at the bottom of a high, treacherous cliff. Along a narrow strip at the top of the bright red cliff runs an uninterrupted chain of cheapo hotels, reggae-playing restaurants, ramshackle "bars", ayurvedic massage centers, and trinket vendors' stalls. It was outside one such cafe that I heard my name being called, and turned to find a trio of chilled-out amigos I had met in Gokarna. I thought, OK, this could be pretty chill. Half an hour later I ran into another duo of acquaintances...my partners in crime from Gokarna and Hampi. Oh dear. History was doomed to repeat itself, with the addition of a dangerous cliff.

The high tourist season is over now. I can tell why. It's too fucking hot and sticky, and it's only going to be getting worse the longer I stay in the south. All the lodges were looking for business, and I ended up being invited to stay at an ayurvedic treatment center. This is the sort of place you go to have disciplinarian Indian people force you to vomit and shoot water up your butt before they subject you to weeks of dieting and herbal massages. I just took a room and declined the ayurvedic regimen, as I doubt even 4000-year old wisdom can rid my body of all the toxins that are coursing through it at this point. And indeed, the very first night I was there I ended up having to break into my own hotel's garden by climbing over a wall and hopping into a bush when all the gates were locked. Apparently, guests coming home stinking drunk at 2am is not usually a concern at ayurvedic health resorts.

Awaking the next morning, my first discovery, besides the location of my trousers, was that there is not a whole lot to do in Varkala. The stairs to the beach are a bit of a pain in the ass, and not the sort of commitment I am willing to make more than once a day while I am ostensibly at my leisure. Instead, you end up sitting at a succession of hilltop cafes, trying to devise ways to kill time in between eating unneccesarily large meals. Eating really does dominate the social scene at this time of year. For lack of alternative activities, you can end up eating four or five full meals a day, encouraged by the surprisingly good international cuisine available. I can't tell you how good it feels to gorge myself on an entire properly-cooked brick-oven pizza with honest-to-God bacon on it. A pizza which was preceded by a three-course English breakfast, and followed by a steaming plate of shrimp pasta.

The real culinary attraction of Varkala, however, is fish. At about sundown every restaurant along the cliff starts preparing their outdoor seafood presentation, unloading buckets of the day's prawns and squids onto chilled tables along the clifftop path. After that come the fish, the waiters emerging from the kitchens using both hands to wield each gargantuan sea-beast and flop it onto the table. Dear lord, the fish here are truly monstruous creatures. You can tell if a cafe isn't serious about its seafood if it doesn't have anything over three feet long with its head drooping slackjawed off the end of the table. If you're walking along the cliff, you pass an interminable gauntlet of dead aqua-demons that look large enough to eat just about any domestic animal. You don't see any cats in the Indian Ocean. Wonder why that is, hmmmmm? You ask the waiters which fish they have on offer today, and if you're lucky they won't shuffle off and return to thrust a 4,000 pound mutant snapper in your face. They'll tell you "Sir, tonight we have prawns, calamari, salmon, snapper, grouper, barracuda, butterfish, great white shark, deviltrout, Moby Dick, curry of man-eating seahorse, and Rhino of the Sea." Before making the crucial choice, the savvy customer ambles over to the fish display, pokes and prods a bit, and makes pensive faces before feigning an informed argument about the monetary value of roasting a fully-grown Elephant Trout.

After dinner, the cafes start shifting into booze mode, preparing to serve ice-cold domestic beers to shiftless, fish-gorged tourists. The remains of the catch are hauled back into the kitchen by the tail, many little more than a head with a five-foot patchwork of sliced-off fishsteak portions trailing behind. In go the fish, and out come the beers, typically served from faux-classy English teapots because looking stupid is much preferable to paying for a liquor license. Sensible travellers such as myself relax, enjoy the sea breezes, and head for bed. Less sensible travellers, most emphatically NOT including myself EVER, have several more drinks and have to be warned by their friends "That's a flowerpot. You're leaning on a flowerpot. And there's a cliff. Pot, cliff...just stand up."

It was recently Holi in India, a marvelous holiday you've probably seen pictures of, on which everybody in India throws paint and dyed water on their friends and complete strangers. At the time I was up in majority-Christian Munnar, so I hustled to get down to a Hindu town as fast as possible, only to be told that they don't celebrate Holi in Kerala and Tamil Nadu at all. THIS IS BULLSHIT. This being India though, Varkala happened to be having another festival at the Durga temple around the corner from my hotel/ayurvedic enema wonderland. Fireworks, bells, and megaphone chants and seeing could be heard 24 hours a day, unless you happened to be drunk enough to sleep through it. Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I walked around to the temple to find it completely covered in flashing lights, with fireworks flying about in impressive displays, and crowds of Indian people buying custom-made stenciled doodads. I ran into my friends there and they told me that earlier in the day there had been costumed elephants as well. DAMN IT.

I went back to a hotel with one group of friends and began having socio-political insights about globalization. In particular, I was thinking about Thomas Friedman's book The World Is Flat, which was inspired by a visit to India. I almost always disagree with Mr. Friedman because most of what he says is utterly obvious or spectacularly wrong, but I found myself this night shaking my head in agreement. The whole world is connected, man. It's a level playing field. The world is flat. You can go anywhere in the world, anywhere, and still do Aquafina-bottle bong rips.

I was sitting over breakfast this morning (if you can call a giant pile of garlic-buttered calamari "breakfast") and realized that in two days at Varkala I hadn't actually done anything. It was time to move on, so I hopped on a train and a few hours later disembarked at the very tip of India.

I'm straddling the tip right now. Just the tip, to see how it feels.

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.

Communists, Jews, and Heat: A Measured Discussion

It is time once again for me to move on to a new Indian state.I crossed the border from Karnataka into Kerala high in the Western Ghat mountains. The word 'ghat' means stairs, and sure enough descending from the southern tip of the Deccan Plateau to the Malabar Coast is pretty much the same feeling one recalls from being a small child who still falls down the stairs. One minute you're leisurely winding about on the road through the highlands, then all of a sudden the tree cover opens up and you see a drop of several thousand feet in what looks like spitting distance. You could probably jump from the top of the road to the bottom, though I opted to remain in the bus, clutching my seat as it swerved around one hairpin turn after another, narrowly avoiding striking smaller vehicles full force and launching them on an unexpected shortcut to the lowlands. It was absolutely beautiful though.

Kerala in general is a stunning place. It is also a strange place, exotic and enticing, seemingly created by a smug god to give American political conservatives nightmares. It is a lush, humid strip of tropical land - the most densely populated state in India - and it is chock-full dark-skinned multireligious Communists with tight financial ties to the Persian gulf. A land desperately crying for Our Freedoms.

I'm not exaggerating about them being multireligous. There are at least four major religious communities in Kerala; the Hindus, the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Muslims, and the Catholics. The Syrian Orthodox Christians are quite the curiosity. They trace their lineage here all the way back St. Thomas himself, while the historical record places them here at least as early as 400AD. More noticeable than Hindu temples in this state are the number of churches, and the odd, narrow tower-shrines that dot the countryside. These are slender towers topped by a cross, with a little shrine at the bottom, typically to Jesus, St. Thomas, or St. George. Seeing an Indian man in full Orthodox vestments is a very weird sight. You won't believe how many paintings of St. George slaying the dragon you see around here. I'm not that surprised they like him, though; Indians love a good slayer. But not Slayer. This land is incorrigible.

I'm also not exaggerating their ties to the Persian Gulf. They've been trading with that area since at least Greek times, and now a huge chunk of the state economy is based on money sent home from laborers in the Gulf. All those crazy buildings in Dubai? Built by Keralans and Pakistanis. Half the banks, tailoring chains, and jewellers here seem to have a branch in Oman or the UAE. I'm telling you, it's only a matter of time before the next idiot president we get sends Predator drones to Kerala.

And I am definitely not joking about them being communists. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has been in power here more or less constantly since 1957. You cross the state border and immediately you see little red hammer-and-sickle flags fluttering everywhere every street corner seems to have a union office affiliated with the Communist Party. In other states, political posters tend to be heavy on the national colors, lotus flowers, and frumpy-looking men with stupid mustaches being watched over by the subtly-haloed spirits of their political forebears. Here they have a row of frumpy men in little red stars next to a giant portrait of Che Guevara. It is at the very least an aesthetic improvement.

The thing is, the Marxists here have actually done a good job for once. Kerala, despite being the most densely populated state, has some of the lowest levels of poverty and is the only state in India to have achieved full literacy of its citizens. Perhaps having a higher democratic body to answer to has helped by restraining the party from committing the excesses so common to the governments of Communist countries. In any case, it's really a stunning achievement. And before you go thinking I'm just blindly cheering on the commies our of my childish affection for radical politics, I will point you to the example of the Communist Party in Bengal, where the same party's record in governance has been...less than entirely satisfactory. But hey, look at Kerala! You can enact land reforms, empower labor, and carry out a social revolution without killing 20 million people and throwing the rest in jail! Who'da thunk it?

Another great thing about Kerala is that they speak Malayalam, yet another incomprehensible babble with a beautiful script. Just look at this

കേരള എറണാകുളം കൊച്ചി മുന്

I just can't get enough.

On the other hand, certain things about Kerala could use a little improvement. For instance, if you are going to temporarily close your central bus station (*cough* Kozhikode), you should find a solution other than dispersing all out-of-town bus services to eight different roadside pull-overs scattered around the city, mmmkay? I've had yet another wearying travel experience that's left me a bit testy. The bus I finally caught was harrowing enough to put me on edge, driven by a man who had clearly spent his entire youth trying to master the shortcut on Koopa Troopa Beach and was still practicing this art using a lime green bus with an animated Ganesh pasted to the windscreen. Then I got stuck on this $%*#@! train which traversed a whopping 100km in 4 hours. I'm accustomed to things being slow here, but there were aggravating factors that contributing to a twitching, neurotic expression of my inner fury. For starters, it was ungodly hot. The weather in Kerala is sweltering. It was late February here yet my whole body felt like a nutsack after an entire night of slow, grinding sex waist-deep in a vat of unwashed laundry. Insects were crawling all over me, my skin was black with sweat-glued train filth, and it was late at night and everyone else on the train was either snoring or wheezing to death. Even reading the usually-captivating volume Philosophical Foundations of India couldn't keep me from noticing that this so-called "express service" had been stopped in the shithole town of Aluva for over an hour. Let me make one thing clear: if the town doesn't have a population exceeding 100,000 people or a Wikipedia subheading for "Culture", there is no reason for an express train to even brake for errant children playing on the tracks, let alone stop for an hour in the middle of the night.

I finally got to Kochi, the major city of Kerala, and I'm not sure it was really worth the trouble. Kochi gets rave reviews for its relaxed colonial heart and its setting on a number of islands and peninsulas that one traverses by allegedly endearing ferries. I actually thought the historical center was a tourist trap piece of crap and much preferred the greatly maligned modern quarter on the mainland. Probably the best part of Kochi is its Jewish quarter, not because it has a unique history of a now-vanished Jewish merchant community, but because it's full of cranky spice merchants and because they call the neighborhood "Jew Town". Jew Town is, predictably, full of Jew tourists. Jew tourists, and actually Western tourists in general, suffer from the impression that their own ethno-cultural group is the single most fascinating one on the face of the globe, and love stopping by heroic outposts of their culture in the teeming lands of the heathen masses. So the British traipse through Victorian Mumbai and cottage-filled hill stations, the Portuguese amble about Goa and Diu, and the Jews flock to Jew Town. Aside from Jews, Kochi (or Cochin as you may know it) apparently appeals to three types of people: rich Europeans who love going around the world to spend time in vaguely European-style towns with better weather, people who marvel at goats walking loose in the street, and people who find the idea of traveling across town by boat an inherently magical experience. Ghostface Buddha possesses none of these traits. If I found all these things in one convenient place I would drown the goat by dragging it behind the boat, give it an exotic name like "Maharaja Mutton Roast", and sell it at four times its worth to a rich European.

The boat ride wasn't even interesting, let alone magical. Oh look, we're in a bay. And what have we over here? Quick, honey, get out the guidebook! Do you think that's coal or bauxite? My word! Everything is so fabulous when you see it from a boat! And is that....is that the fabled mosque of the mighty Al-aud-Shah-al-Fazah Shahjah Shah kings?!?

No, it's a grain pier. Get me the fuck out of here. I feel like a scrotum.