A Wonderful Weekend in Kerala

Hello everyone!

Thanks to all who have been reading along with my trip and offering comments. I'm happy you like it, and appreciate the feedback.
Well, as you can by now tell, this trip
to India has been all work work work, no rest for the weary and all that.
But seriously, folks.....So, Dinesh has a friend named Manish, who's family lives in the beautiful state of Kerala, located on the other side of the Indian peninsula. He generously offered to take us all out for a weekend to celebrate our successful matches, so with much arm-twisting, we all agreed. As the trains were all booked up already, we rented a private minibus for the trip with a driver. As we headed out, we saw what is the native water buffalo in an almost-native setting: the back of a truck at a tollbooth.

Long story short, it was a very very very long drive. The bus had a dvd player, and I borrowed some dvd's I'd seen sitting in the lounge of the hostel. Have you ever seen the episode of Seinfeld where he starts recording movies illegally in a theatre with a video camera, for sale on the black market. Well, apparently that same technique was used for our version of I Am Legend. It was hilarious. There are people's heads in the way, you hear the audience cough, only 2/3 of the actual screen is visible, and occasionally a person in the row in front will get up, presumable for curry-flavored popcorn. At the end, you hear the audience in the theatre applaud. Whahahahaha!! We also had a version of Transformers dubbed in Tamil. Its pretty funny at first to see these big robots speaking Tamil, but it gets old rather fast.

When we got there, though, our journey was rewarded. We were taken out on a houseboat. For those of you unfamiliar with this kind of thing, the "backwaters" of Kerala are loads and loads of canals and rice paddies, with the most commone form of transport being boat, and many villages are isloated. With the advent of heavy trucking, a lot of the big rice barges became somwhat unnecessary. A brilliant person years ago had the idea to turn these barges into floating houseboats and charge to take people on relaxing cruises through the backwaters. Today, it is an enourmous industry, and the town of Alleppey, where we embarked, is the center of it. I was excited to be here, but felt a little guilty, as I had already planned to make this trip separately with Felicia. I firmly resolved to have as little fun as possible, so as not to ruin it for our visit in about 2 weeks.


Here is the houseboat Manish set us up with. Three bedrooms, a/c in all of them, plasma screen TV with dvd player, running water, showers. Plus a crew of 3 to cook and supply cold beverages at our request.

So we set off. FYI, I think this backwater cruise thing is on that National Geographic list of "things to do before you die". Well, check this one off. So we headed out. We had an awesome lunch of fresh fish, vegetables, cold beer. I have to say thay the food up to this point in Vellore had been rather disappointing. Lots of carbs, lots of spice, but not many veggies, and unsafe to eat any raw ones you didn't prepare yourself. (by the way, the Ciprofloxacin + Immodium cocktail = success!!!) The food I ate in Kerala was amazing! All hail Keralan cuisine! Lots of fresh seafood, lots of veggies, yum yum! And all home-ccoked helped a lot too.

So we cruised around for a bit, and then stopped off at a local "boat-up quikie mart" to pick up dinner.

This is what a large prawn looks like in India.
Seriously. It looks like it could eat a lobster for dinner. And those crazy long blue front claws. Whats up with that? Well, I bet it tastes good!

Behind the prawn shop is a rice field. Here I am. I was careful to look for snakes, but they sent a local with me just to make sure. Probably always a good idea with me.

So, we cruised along some more.

Here is a guy herding ducks. Really! Hey paddled around and they all swam together into this little canal, there must have been 100 of them. That is something I have never seen. An aquatic duck herder.

As we continued our leisurely afternoon, I was struck by the beauty of the area. Here is a view out the front of our boat, over the driver's head. Pretty nice, eh?

Still, as I had foresworn, I was having absolutely no fun at all.

Later on in the evening, we wound up in a little canal behind a rice barge still being used for its original purpose. Here is the rice guy poling it along silently through the evening. This is incredibly serene.

A nice view of the sunset from the backwaters of Kerala.

As promised, I am miserable. No fun at all. The stress is crushing me.

As you can plainly see, my classmates decided to show solidarity with me, and also refused to have any fun dancing with the crew of the boat. We were lucky to meet some med students from Oklahoma in Vellore, and they came along too. Thats Kevin in the black shirt gettin' down with Vida, Jamie, Dinesh, and the rest.

Again, no fun at all. Here we see Jamie and Michael (Oklahoman #2) so unhappy at the pressures of the 4th year of medical school that they seem to be having some sort of breakdown. From the foreground, you can tell that in the Indian heat every effort was made to maintain adequate hydration.

In the morning we cruised over to another boat-up mart to get some fresh eggs for breakfast. We passed this guy washing his cow. I wonder if this is something he does every day? Maybe it is a show cow? Maybe it was just really dirty. Either way, it is clean now.

We also passed these guys loading up rice onto another barge. I tried to not look like the annoying tourist who takes pictures of other people working really hard, while I am not. But I kind of was anyways.









Just a close-up of a hard-working Keralan man. Actually, I have been using that wrong. The state is Kerala, but the ethnicity of the people there is Malayalam, and their language shares the same name.

After we got off the boat in the AM, we were taken to Manish's family's house. His family is usually out of town, so the house-staff was happy to have someone to care for. We also got to meet his grandmother. She though we were a very attractive group of people. So wise, she is, so wise. We rested, checked email, had lunch (more awesome home-cooked stuff), then were taken to see the local sights.

Nearby was an old Malayalam palace which we checked out. It had some old artifacts, paintings, and neat woodwork.

Here I am in front of the palace. Keralan architecture looks a little more like Chinese/Japanese, with pagoda-like roofs.

An upper-level walkway in the palace, with slatted windows which look out on the garden.

Fun with black and white at the same place.

Detail from a very old frescoe inside the palace. Very vivid colors.

One of the other places we were taken was local ashram apparently very well known around the worls. Like our guy near Vellore, it was run by someone named Amma. This Amma is a smiling middle-aged woman known for spreading love and happiness by hugging everybody she meets. see www.amma.org Apparently she's been doing this for a long long time, and her ahsram is really huge. There is a 17-story apartment block just to house the people who come for stays. There were lots of Westerners there. Unfortunately, she had just completed her hugging for that afternoon when we got there, so we were too late to meet her. We were given a tour, no cameras unfortunately, and supposed to go with the PR guy to meditate up on the stage where Amma meditates. As she was not avaialble, there was just a giant picture of her, and strangely enough, a second one below that just of her feet. Hmm. Anyways, he told us that the energy in that spot is amazing, So we sit there quietly.....and some lady come over and pulls a bag of silk flowers out and starts dumping them in front of the picture. That seems like nothing much, except her plastic bag of flowers went "CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE" every time she moved. CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE....pause.....CRINKLE....thump.......CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE...etc. This occupied almost the entire time spent "meditating". When we were done he asked us "Wasn't that wonderful? Didn't you feel the peace and energy?'. As we all tried not to snicker, Vida did her best and said "It was amazing!" I guess this made him happy. We all found it pretty funny.

Amma's ashram is right on the coast, and was hit hard by the tsunami. Apparently she paused that day, said "something is not right with the sea my children", and ushered everyone in her big hall to the 2nd floor just before the wave hit. She worked very hard to help rebuild the area, and got lots of great photo-ops with local, national, and international leaders. Even donated about $1million to the Katrina relief fund. Still, as a living god, you'd think one would have more notice about pending natural disasters. Thats not really my field, though, so draw your own conclusions.

"Wait" you might be saying. "The tsunami came at India from the southeast, and Kerala is on the west coast, how could it be affected?" Yes, you are paying attention. A very good question indeed. Now, we have all seen how the wave hit the east coast of India (i.e. Mamallapuram) since it origninated off the coast of Indonesia (also to the southeast of India), but it actually wrapped around the bottom tip of the landmass like a whip and smacked the lower west coast as well. Wierd, but I remember seeing a NOVA special on PBC that discussed this phenomenon.

Here is the coast near the ashram in Kerala. There were many homes here. Apparently several hundred people died in this area when the wave hit. The homes were not rebuilt. The palms bear many scars on their trunks, up to about waist-high, from all the debris carried with the water.

The people built a stone sea wall at the water's edge to try to prevent further occurances. I had a pic and then just deleted it by accident. Anyways, just imagine a big pile of rocks at the water's edge, running up and down the shore.

Manish lived right down the road from and Ayurvedic spa/hospital. This is traditional Indian hebal medicine. It was pretty swanky. He paid for us to all get massages. Well, it wasn't the typical; swedish massage I was hoping for. I had to strip naked and put on the skimpiest of loincloths (please please, please I hope they autoclave these things in between uses) and get on a very oily table (apparenty the same one Dinesh had just gotten off of....we all shared each other's oils...ugh) and then a swarthy Indian man proceeded to rub oil all over my body. No reall muscle work at all, no loosening up of tension, nope. Apparently this was medicated oil being appliend through the skin. A lot of oil. The whoke thing lasted 1 hour. I was not relaxed at the end, just oily. So, if you're looking into Ayurvedic massage, just bear my experience in mind. It could have been worse, though. One of the treatments their involved all of the following: herbal enema, oil enema, oil emesis (I think you drink oil and then vomit it back out), purging (what it this if not vomiting, I'm not sure and don't want to know). amd some other thing. No Thank You. I walked back to Manish's house and tried to get all the oil off. Not very successful, despite several showers.

Well, the fun was over after a very entertaining weekend.

We had a wonderful time in Kerala, ate amazing food, saw great stuff. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Manish and his family for their generousity and hospitality. They threated us very very well, and we all truly appreciated it. This is where I put in my plug for the new medical school in St Lucia in the Carribean that his dad runs (UTHSCSA is, of course, the best ever in the US, but if you are going to go Carribean, think about St Lucia).

I was so miserable the whole time that I can barely think about how I have to come back to this paradise, just me and my beautiful girlfriend Felcia. Somehow we'll make it through. (acutally, I got to see where I'll be staying, and it looks great!)

Stay tuned for my next post. Not as happy as this, but bear in mind that it all turned out relatively OK in the end. Lets just say that I got to experience Indian emergent care from the 1st-person viewpoint. And listen to me now. I will repeat it again for any readers who may be headed to India later. DO NOT DRIVE ON THE ROADS IN INDIA AT NIGHT IF YOU CAN AT ALL HELP IT. It is all dangerous. Sometimes, unfortunately, unavoidable, It is also very dangerous in the day, too, make no mistake. But avoid it if you can.

OK. I'll have all the gory details soon.