Moo's Mid Life Crisis: India

I arrived in India (Kochin/Cochi) after dark, and the hours drive to my hotel was lit by incessant lightning. I'm here in May, which classes as part of the 2 month Indian summer. Heavy rain and thunderstorms in the late afternoon/evening have been a regular occurrence which Sanna, our guide, calls 'summer rain'.

Street art from Kochi

The hotel was on what seemed like a back street, and whilst it had lovely wood paneling downstairs, the room itself was basic but functional, with decent AC when it was working at all. Over the few days there I think there were two or three power outages, and several more instances of the AC circuit breaker going.

It was incredibly hot and humid in Kochi, and I was sweating buckets just sitting in the shade outside, so I spent a fair amount of time in the room writing up the blog.

I did have 2 days before the tour was due to start, so I checked out TripAdvisor for the local points of interest and went for a walk. Turns out that most of the things I saw I would end up seeing 3 times, as my two travelling companions turned up just after lunch on day 2 and we went together to see them again, and we got a proper local guide to show us round them on the first day of the tour! Needless to say, the local guide added a lot of depth and information to our previous wanderings and lookings.

The massive Chinese Fishing Nets line the water on the border between India's longest freshwater lake and the sea. They have been there since the Chinese introduced them in the 14th century, and are operated by a crew of around 6 people. While they look very picturesque, they don't actually seem to catch that many fish, and the ones they do catch are rather small. It seems that they have over-fished themselves out of good catches, but now they seem to primarily be a tourist attraction.

The nets are also an attraction to a variety of bird life, including egrets, Indian pond herons and Black and Bhraminy kites

As well as the massive Chinese nets, we also saw individual people throwing nets. These people again didn't seem to me to be catching terribly much, but maybe that's just the way it works.

Along with the picturesque, there was also the trashy. The quantity of rubbish on the beach was surprising. For a touristy area I would have expected there to be some attempt made to clean the beaches, but it doesn't seem that way. We were disturbed to see people casually discarding plastic bottles on the beach - it seems that a significant proportion of the population just hasn't been 'properly educated' on littering. Perhaps that's one of the signs of a developing county.

Along the beach a ways are the remains of two boilers, taken from the dredgers used by the British to deepen the channel and incidentally create a new island with the dredgings!

We also visited one of the oldest European churches in India, St Francis (1503). In it's time it has been catholic, protestant and (currently) anglican. It was the original burial place of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, but he was later transferred back to Portugal by his children. The church has some interesting fans that were operated by punkawallas standing outside the church. The tiles are original as well, and so we had to take our shoes off before going in!

Next we visited a 'traditional' laundry. 80 families were imported from other state to do the washing, and their descendants are still here doing it, watched over by the ever-present kites.

We had a brief visit to a Museum in Kochi's old Portuguese Palace (1568). Some interesting paintings and costumes.

Next was the 'oldest active synagogue' in the Commonwealth. Seems like a bit of a tenuous claim to fame to me, but everywhere likes to be the biggest, best, oldest or something. It's also not actually that 'active' as the congregation now consists of about 3 people and apparently 10 are needed for a prayer meeting, but the ever-burning flame is still going. No photos allowed inside, and the outside wasn't very photogenic.

That evening we headed to the local theater/arts center for a Kathakali demonstration and short show. Kathakali is a traditional entertainment in the area, noted for it's exotic make-up, precise movements, and facial contortions. We were treated to a demonstration of how the makeup is applied (mostly with fingers and sticks rather than brushes), a lesson on some of the standard facial exercises and expressions used, and then just half an hour of show (which is usually performed from dusk till dawn)!