Views from the Train

Kerala

Going from place to place in India has so far involved traveling by train, which has both its rewards and its challenges. Buying a ticket can be an ordeal; sleeping in a second-class sleeper berth requires a certain imperviousness both to grime and to noise (a lot of noise); and the timetable always seems to get you to your destination in the middle of the night.

Still, it's incredibly cheap, and the views by day can be lovely.

Boys playing cricket, Karnataka

Kerala schoolgirls

Karnataka countryside

More views from the trains here - we'll add to the category as the trip goes on.

Another Palolem Pic

I liked Palolem; it was as though the Beach God decided to demonstrate what he could do to design a perfect beach without the blazing white sand or turquoise/crystal water of the travel agency cliches, and the overall effect, I think, was gorgeous. It still had the coconut-tree-lined crescent of sand and the water temperature pitched somewhere between heated swimming pool and bathwater, but it also came with a little island you could climb around at low tide, and a backwater filled with wildlife - kingfishers, herons, monkeys, fish - which made for a nice little cruise.

We'll get more pictures up of Palolem and Varkala, as well as the Kerala backwaters, in the next few days.

Beaches: Palolem and Varkala

We've spent most of the past week and a half lying on beaches, first Palolem Beach in Goa, which was calm and idyllic, and then Varkala Beach in southern Kerala, which had big dramatic waves and the tourist strip perched precariously on a cliff above it. We overheard someone saying Varkala was like "Europe in the sky," referring to the number of tourists, but I'm not convinced that any European eats that many banana pancakes or listens to Hotel California that incessantly when they're actually in Europe!

We didn't really mean to do both beaches consecutively but it ended up that way due to another quirk of the Indian transportation system: We tried to buy a ticket from Goa to Kochi, planning to work our way down the Kerala coast to Varkala gradually, but were only able to buy a ticket that took us all the way to the south of Kerala, so we figured we'd just work our way back up the coast slowly instead! That meant a fourteen hour train ride from Mangalore which arrived at Varkala at 4 in the morning, so we ended up sitting around on the platform for three hours until the sun came up and we were able to head to the beach to find a place to stay.

Chowpatty Beach

photo by Paul

Rachel and I lived in Bangkok for a while a few years back. Like Bangkok, Mumbai is huge, noisy, and traffic-choked. Unlike Bangkok, Mumbai has the sea - at its most charming at Chowpatty beach, where families and tourists come to play and watch the sunset.

Above three photos by Rachel

Chowpatty beach is also home of Mumbai's famous street food, bhelpuri, which is like one of those wild, crazy parties you sometimes hear about but never seem to get invited to, if that party were a salad:

Photo by Rachel, eaten by Paul

Again, click on any picture for higher-resolution version.

Cricket on the Oval Maidan

There was a little snafu with some of the photo uploads, so I'm still only getting to some of the Mumbai pictures now. Anyway, click on the picture for a larger size.

More Mumbai photos here.

Transportation curiosities, and what we were doing in Sangli

I was expecting to find the traffic in Mumbai terrifying. I don't know if I've just gotten braver over the past few years or if the pace of traffic in Mumbai is nothing compared to Bangkok and Managua but riding around in taxis turned out to be the most thrilling and fascinating part of our three short days in the city. Catching fleeting glimpses of temples, slums, luxury apartment complexes, and street markets all unceremoniously crowded together on the same streets left me constantly straining my neck to see what was going on and wishing we had more time to explore the city. A few extra days probably wouldn't have made much of a difference though--Mumbai seems like the kind of city you have to live in to even start to understand.

It's not just a stereotype that everything in India is colorful, nor is it an exaggeration that the bureaucracy here is insane. We managed to spend practically a whole day booking our train ticket from Mumbai to Sangli, although this was partly because we took a taxi all the way to the station before realizing we needed our ATM cards and had to go all the way back to where we were staying to get them. The reason we needed our ATM cards, despite having enough cash on us to buy the tickets, was that in order to buy tickets as a foreigner you have to prove your foreigner status by showing an ATM receipt for the cash you're using to pay (in addition to showing your passport)! We then had to find the special foreigner ticket window and wait with the other foreigners on a bench marked "foreign tourist only"! We eventually got our tickets, but they were only provisional tickets, meaning we were second and third in line to get seats if people canceled, so we had to go back the next day to confirm that we could actually get on the train. We then had to come back one hour later to find out what seats we had been allocated!

Anyway, it all worked out and we finally got on the sleeper to Sangli, where we had been invited to visit the offices of SANGRAM, an organization that provides outreach, support, community, and services to sex workers in certain regions of Maharastra and Karnataka. I hadn't been on a sleeper since I was a kid and I was so excited that I didn't sleep at all. Every time we stopped at a station the noises coming from outside made it sound like we were at an amusement park instead of a train station. We arrived in Sangli at 5:20am, where we were met by one of SANGRAM's staff members and taken in a rickshaw cab to the SANGRAM office, where we managed to sleep for a couple of hours before being woken at 9:30 for breakfast.

That day, after hearing a brief history of SANGRAM and its sister and brother organizations, VAMP (serving female sex workers) and MUSKAN (serving male sex workers), we talked with some of the women from VAMP and sat in on one of their weekly organizational meetings, where delegates from different regions reported back on outreach they had done that week, issues in each region, and plans for the next few weeks. Some topics of discussion included finding housing for the children of a sex worker who wasn't able to take care of them and reaching out to home-based sex workers who are reluctant to visit drop in centers. I had heard all about how huge and wide-reaching Indian sex worker organizations are but you have to see them in action to really understand what that means. I've never seen such a practical, focused and well-organized meeting and I was left wondering why it's so difficult to organize sex workers in the US (and other Western countries). I was also inspired to start thinking a lot more about plans for organizing after we get back home.


After the meeting we visited the offices of MUSKAN, where some of the boys from the group performed in drag, carrying out a traditional fertility ritual which involved handing out vegetables and putting tumeric on our foreheads (see picture!). The entertainment continued with dancing and acting out various well-known (apparently) scenes from Bollywood movies.

We then repaid SANGRAM for all their hospitality by running off to Goa with their only set of office keys, which then had to be couriered back to Sangli (at least eight hours by road I think) at top speed before they could get back into their offices for work. Yeah, we're still feeling pretty guilty about that.

Mumbai Taxi

Traffic in Mumbai, like baseball, is a game of inches. If you don't like baseball, the metaphor still works - as it seems to go on forever and the rules are bewildering.

My first impression of Mumbai taxi drivers was that they were trying to kill me. Then I decided that the safest place around a Bombay taxi was actually inside it. But as we realized - I think Rachel was the first to point it out - the rules of the road, to abuse a phrase, actually seem to work. What would seem in many other places - even New York - like psychopathic road behavior seems to work perfectly well in Mumbai; everyone slows down or veers out of the way at the last possible moment with no ill will on either side, and nobody's actually getting killed (I'm sure the statistics disagree, but the point is they can't be as bad as the situation looks at first glance).

Rachel and I both felt as though we spent half our time in the city seeing it from the back of a cab - but it was actually sort of enjoyable. Mumbai's taxis are 40 year old Fiats stripped of nonessentials like seatbelts and often painted up and decaled with pictures of Ganesh or tigers or whatever else. Watching the city go by from the back seat is pretty fascinating, offering glimpses of a place you begin to understand has many more layers than you can even start to peel back in a few days' time.