kerala

Tristan and I are nearing the end of our second day in Kerala.  In about 15 minutes, we are both scheduled for 45 minute long Ayurvedic massages at our hotel, the Fort House.  We are staying here for two nights.  Its a really lovely place, right on the waterside and adorned with tropical gardens and funny terra cotta sculptures.  Its off season, and we think we may be the only people staying here.  The staff are very attentive.  Yesterday, when we got here, we had private lunch of authentic Kerala cuisine (spicy shrimp curry and nutty biryani) on some tables facing the sea. 

 

And then one of the staff members sent us off to see a Kathakali performace.  The word means "story dance" and its a type of dance that is native to Kerala.  Its characterized by very specific and elaborate hand positions and facial expressions to signify different actions and emotions, and the performers use them to enact stories from the Mahabharata.  We got there about an hour before the performance and watched the dancers put on their makeup.


Today we planned to spend the day walking around Fort Cochin.  Its a very small district of the much larger city of Cochin (population about 1.6 million), and as our tour book suggested, we were just going to walk around and take in the colonial Portugese architecture and profusion of antique stores.  But we had been out for about 20 minutes when a rickshaw driver asked us to hire him for a three hour tour of town.  We agreed, and it was really great.  We saw lots of things that we otherwise might have been a little shy to go observe up close.  Like we hung out at the fish market close to the waters edge and watched as someone auctioned off his catch. 

The rickshaw guy had a really good sense of humor, and told us a lot about Cochin.  He also showed us places that he was personally fond of.. like the church where he got married and where his daughter was baptized (in a large, pink lotus-shaped basin).  He spoke English really well, and was very proud that Kerala has a literacy rate of about 95%.  Its a very educated and fairly developed place, although also quite poor.   That, as I know through studying migration, is due to the very high remittances that migrants from Kerala send back home from abroad.

Ok, off to get a massage.  Tomorrow we begin our two days on a houseboat, cruising the Kerala backwaters :)