kerala

kerala deserves better than this hasty description, and even that is damning it with faint praise.  it is a stunning place -- definitely it's the most chilled-out place that i've been in india (gokarna excepted, of course, but then again everyone appears to be high in gokarna); lushly green; with insanely delicious, mostly coconut-based food, quite a bit different from karnataka or tamil nadu food; and man, keralans can extract the maximum amount of usefulness from a coconut palm.  it is impressive.  we spent a few days in the keralan backwaters by alleppey, where folk get from place to place mostly by rickety canoe and/or bicycle and, until the rice harvest starts, there's not too much to do except watch the river slip by.

a hyacinth-choked canal in the keralan backwaters.  the hyacinths are gorgeous, and the british thought so too, which is why they brought the plants over from africa.  except, shocker, the non-native plants have taken over the place, changing the oxygen content of the water and hurting native wildlife.  the backwaters are all under sea level -- they were created, i think i recall, several hundred years ago, by hand, by a caste of people called, appropriately enough, mud-diggers, on the suggestion of some smart syrian christians who realized that riverbed silt is wonderfully fertile -- so once a year the ocean is allowed in, and the salt water kills the hyacinths, while the hardier fish have learned to migrate upstream and spawn until the salinity returns to normal levels.  a good way to wait out a bad situation. 

what you (hopefully) can't see here is that i am soaking wet because its about 34 degrees and 93% humidity, and i'm on the tail end of an accidental 9-mile walk around the island.  in about an hour, i'm going to sit down to one of the best lunches of my life: cabbage and coconut curry with mustard seeds, coconut chapattis, and a simply gorgeous cardamom and banana lassi made with fresh homemade yogurt, fresher and sharper and more saliva-inducing than lesser yogurts.  i am salivating now just writing about it.   

after the backwaters, we moved up north to kochi, a set of islands and peninsulas with two cities facing each other across the bay: fort cochin and ernakulam, sort of like san francisco and oakland.  ernakulam is way more hectic, fort cochin is mellow, just a jumble of sleepy walking streets with crumbling old dutch and syrian and portuguese houses leaning against each other like drunk old friends. here's tom in front of the chinese fishing nets of fort cochin, poised like enormous spiders over the waterfront.  you can buy fish right here, and have the guys grill 'em up for you if you like.

and this is kathakali, or at least the tourist version of it.  kathakali translates into "story-play" in malayalam, and in its natural form it's a 6-8 hour storytelling extravaganza by elaborately made-up and extensively trained men, told exclusively through music, facial expressions, and gestures.  the make-up is all natural, plants and minerals blended with coconut oil, like indigo for blue, and special keralan rocks rubbed together for yellow and red and black.  it was so, so so cool.