Rough Riders indeed! The particular ride in question was supposed to be a breezy affair involving a nice little overnight train trip to the Kerala Coast for Onam, a particularly Keralan celebration. Our train was to depart at 9:40 on a rainy Friday night from Bangalore’s City Junction Station just north-west of downtown. We set 8 o’clock as our departure time figuring we could be on the road after the peak of Friday rush hour, and still get to the station with a half hour or so to spare for figuring out the station and finding our train.  By the time we actually set bum to rickshaw it was 8:30 or so, but we were still feeling reasonably relaxed and looking forward to a fun trip. From here, however, things started to get dicey.

Within minutes, it became clear that our very young driver had no idea where the right train station was despite having quoted a fixed price for the 13km ride (when we agreed to his price I noted mentally how unusually fair it seemed to be, considering tuktuk rates are generally adversely affected by rain). After stopping to check with a few other tuktuk drivers we were off at quite a clip. Directions are always impressionistic in Bangalore, but this guy knew he had some ground to cover to get us to the train on time and limit his losses on the un-inflated fare he had locked himself into. Our little vehicle weaved and lurched, tearing off on any available straightaway and then periodically skidding to a halt sending our stomachs hurtling forward toward our throats before they jerked back down into the seat.

After a number of near misses, and in a moment of inattention, our driver finally did make contact with a rickshaw ahead of us – not too hard, but hard enough that he got out to inspect any damage that might have been done. Of course the other driver did the same, yelling all the while at the guilty party – our guy. When our driver’s psychological defense mechanisms kicked in and he started yelling back it was only seconds before whacks and swats at the opponents heads were being exchanged by both sides. Then, before anyone knew what was happening, the other driver had run around the back of our tuk tuk and a full out fisticuffs ensued in the middle of this main artery, in the rain, in a giant mess of traffic. Eventually one of the male passengers of the other auto got out to break things up before anyone got hurt. As a foreigner, there was no way in hell I was getting even close to a physical altercation between a couple of Indian nationals. Happily the two were not that hard to separate in the end. I guess the furious honking of the traffic all around was enough to convince both men that they would have to postpone satisfaction to a future meeting.

The bad news is that if our young driver was stressed out and driving erratically before the fight, now he gave us a real sample of what a distressed mind is capable of at the helm of a two-stroke engine. At one point he had us hurtling forward through water-filled potholes on two of the auto’s three wheels. Next he ignored one of my directions, which set us disastrously off course and cost us a further ten minutes of travel through dark little back streets to find another main road to the station, but not before he needed to drive a hundred yards or so the wrong way up a major thoroughfare and cross eight lanes of oncoming traffic to get us there. Finally, in the home stretch of the last 1.5 km all the traffic came to a complete standstill. After hemming and hawing for five minutes or so, and at 9:35 we decided that although we probably wouldn’t make the train the only slim shot we did have at it involved making a run for it on foot.

Eliza drew out two hundred Rupee notes from her wallet, and we both agreed that in the interest of time and sympathy for our very stupid driver we would just give him the whole thing and be off. Eliza set off at a trot as I gave him the money and turned to follow. But in the instant it took him to take the two bills he was out of his tuktuk and blocking my way demanding 300 Rupee because it had taken him so long to get us this far! I don’t want to say that I lost my cool at this point, but sufficed to say that after demanding what he mistakenly believed to be an inflated fare for the ride to the station (150 Rupee), scaring the crap out of Eliza for a full hour, needlessly risking our lives, and wasting valuable time by refusing to follow the directions I was giving him off of Google maps despite having no clue where the station was himself…. Well let’s just say he’d spent all of his goodwill credits from the bank of Bevan. Without risking any legal complications I managed to convey this fact succinctly, and he stepped aside, 200 Rupee in hand, leaving me to run like an idiot in slimy flip flops over the uneven and muddy sidewalks of Bangalore to a train that would surely, by now, be gone.

As it happens, on this particular occasion, the general disorganization and chaos of India played to our favor. After Eliza had figured out the track number for our train in a feat of superhuman cognition, we ran up an over the passageways to find our train pulling out of the station about 6 minutes late. But being that this is India, we were able to sprint along side it and actually do that really cool jumping on to a moving train thing that you only see in old movies. All was well…

Or was it? For starters we were not in the right section of the train, which wouldn’t have been a problem except that our 2AC (second class – Air Conditioning) coaches was not accessible from the economy section of the train we were currently in. Not a problem, a half hour later at the next stop we rushed along side the train to the other end and got to do the jumpy-on-the-movie-train thing again (just as fun the second time by the way). After another half hour or so, and over an hour outside of Bangalore we finally gave up on being able to find out which was our berth and enlisted the help of a nice young IT type in our plight. From what he could tell from the printout Eliza had made before we left, we did not actually have tickets for that train…   Shock.   All of the trains that week were packed to overflowing because any and every Keralan with the Rupees to spare was headed home to celebrate Onam with their families. The tickets Eliza had attempted to purchase were waitlisted tickets, the status of which had changed online the day before from waitlisted to “booked”. Unfortunately, in Indian English “booked” refers to some status between waitlisted and confirmed. As an interesting aside, the guy also noted that the date on the “booked” tickets was for the following day, Saturday…. Shock + Panic.  Breath, breath, breath. From her lowest moment realizing and accepting her human fallibility, Lilee was off like a bullet down the train to her highest moment in which, armed with her full arsenal of New England, school girl charms, she sweet-talked the surly train conductor into finding us not seats, but beds, side by each, in the upper-class AC compartment!!! Victory + sleep!

The following morning our friend Rehka picked us up from the train station in her parent’s little town at the foothills of the Western Ghats, and brought us home for what would be a charming couple of days. Meals were lovingly and laboriously prepared by her mom in the finest South Indian tradition, and both her father and brother shared in the entertaining in various capacities without, apparently, interrupting the flow of their days. When we left both Eliza and I had noted separately that we had just felt like part of the family.

On the first day there Rehka, Eliza and I set off to the town of Trissur to take in its two main attractions. The first of these we visited against fair warning from Rehka’s brother that it would be depressing, and it was. Just outside of Trissur there is an elephant stables where the elephants for the many surrounding temples are kept and trained. I’m not sure how many of them there are, but it’s a lot, and as you can imagine it is necessarily a very large operation. Each of these creatures is chained on a very short tether (maybe 2 ft) to a tall concrete post sticking out of the ground. Around them is basically a beaten down pit of earth and mud with a big pile of brush in front of them that they varyingly pick through for the tastier bits, or use to swat the flies off of their flanks. Many of them were shifting back and forth from foot to foot either from boredom or just to move their legs – it was hard to tell which. One particularly tortured soul was a large bull who Rehka (she is a wildlife biologist) informed us was in rut. She pointed out the dripping liquid secretions from glands on either side of his head just behind the eyes. Anyway, this fellow was in quite a state, spraying himself incessantly with water to relieve his hot flashes, grunting, snorting, and generally putting on quite a show. What really did us in emotionally was Rehka’s explanation of what is involved in the domestication of elephants who are naturally very smart, wild and averse to humans in pretty equal measures. I’ll spare you the lurid details but sufficed to say we humans come out looking like the real beasts yet again. The one bright side we observed is that they get lovingly washed and scrubbed down by hand with brushes by their trainers, and this, we observed in two cases, they seem to absolutely adore.

From the elephant farm we went to Trissur’s big Hindu temple right in the middle of town. It’s worth mentioning at this point that Kerala has an extremely pious culture regardless of people’s individual religious affiliations. There is a huge Christian population there dating back to the earliest European contact. It’s mostly Catholic from what we could tell and apparently a very Hindu-ized version with Jesus, the Virgin Mother and all the saints taking the places of the indigenous deities in what are superficially churches and chapels but seem to function more like temples. We witnessed the faithful draping the statues in flowers, burning incense and asking for favours I supposed in dealing with problematic neighbours or unyielding bureaucrats. Back at Trissur’s big temple, unlike in other states, none but Hindus are allowed to enter. Out front there was a line-up of hundreds of people in white sarees and dotis with gold trim waiting to gain access for a moment or two to the deities housed in the inner sanctum. It was explained to us that many thousands of people travel there each day from far and wide to take advantage of these deities abilities to grant wishes and protect from harm. It seems that the actual statues themselves come to possess varying degrees of power so that some temples are more successful/important than others. Outside the outer walls of this particular one, and facing the front door, was a line of brand new cars with their respective owners waiting to be at the front of the line where an arrangement of flowers was made on the ground and coconut oil burned in a husk with incense burning all around and the owner would prostrate himself repeatedly until he was satisfied that the relevant Gods would protect his car and family in it. It was really quite beautiful to see. Another interesting feature of Keralan religiosity is it’s cross-over to Pop culture. Apparently certain South Indian movie stars (as opposed to their Bollywood counterparts in the North) are so revered by some Keralans that they are also believed to have supernatural powers, and so have entire temples dedicated to them along with shrines, statues and the whole kit. Naturally, on our next visit we will be searching out a couple of those!

On our way back through town we also lucked out totally and witnessed, slightly ahead of schedule, on of the lead up parades for Onam. So if I understood correctly, this festival celebrates a Keralan king of prehistory who was said to have been so good to the people of Kerala that he aroused the anger and jealously of the Gods by all the love and respect he earned from his subjects. One of the cleverer and nastier young gods decided to take care of this situation by paying a personal visit to the king. There he asked the king to grant him a small favour – either this guy failed in the omnipotence category of being a God, or he was just really polite, but so the story goes. Anyway the favour was that he be allowed to take three steps in the kings realm and it was of course granted by the very amiable monarch. Unfortunately for the latter, the third of these steps landed on the king’s head crushing him into the ground under the colossal weight of this divine bastard. So every year since, during the five-day festival of Onam, it is said that the king comes back in spirit to see how his kingdom and subjects are doing. To celebrate this and welcome him, people make beautiful mandalas out of flowers outside of their front doors and burn lanterns there throughout the nights. Then these parades, of which we saw just the one, have one guy dressed up in a costume as this king with others dressed as his attendants, a small army of topless guys with elaborate tigers painted on their torsos and tiger masks dancing around in the street ahead of the king, and elephants and drums and basically anything festive that anyone can think of and haul out into the street. Think Hindu Christmas parade meets Carnaval. It’s a friggin’ blast!

Day two with the Warriers saw the three of us, this time accompanied by Rehka’s very cool brother, headed up into the mountains to see a huge waterfall, and further up behind it a massive series of connected lakes behind a big hydro-electric dam. On our way down from the road to the dam we were shepherded into the little mountain home of some guys who worked on the dam. They were so happy to meet foreigners and they fed us bananas from their garden explaining that if they were nice to us then people would be nice to them if they came to visit North America. What a lovely thought. When we left them I realized from a whiff that I caught that the two men had clearly been spending their day off exploring the effects of distilled fruits of some variety or another -all good, and very funny. Down at the dam we hired a motorized pontoon boat to take us out into the lakes and waterfalls that feed them. We caught our first sight of a king fisher with its brilliant blue and yellow plumage. The biggest treat of all, though, was seeing a guy on a weird sort of canoe made of four big bamboo trunks about 20 ft long and lashed together every few feet. This guys boat was cool enough, but it was explained to us that he was one of the tribal people still living secluded out there in the hills, and then we were brought by the shore close enough to see a couple of their tiny lean-tos that they build and live in right along the shore. It made me imagine a life-long fishing trip in Algonquin Park. Pretty sweet. Anyway, I guess they’ve made peace with the presence of the dam and the two powered boats that ply their waters with occasional tourists, but beyond that, I guess they’re really not interested in contact with outsiders of any description.

On the third day we packed up our belongings, had a nice goodbye with the Warriers and headed off with some of Mama’s sweet rice treats to find the famous Kerala Coast and its backwaters. This journey taught us something with brutal clarity, which is that moving from place to place in India is always and everywhere a deeply draining adventure. By the time we’d taken an auto to the train, the train to the coast, walked through the city to the ferry, ferried first to the wrong island and then to the right one, taken the bus to the other end of Vypeen Island, and caught an auto through the backwaters to the beach house, all we could manage was that most basic act of human abandon. We fell helplessly into the first available bed and slept away most of the afternoon. When we finally came to, we found that we had landed on a perfect little spit of unpopulated beach between the pastoral backwaters and tiny fishing huts behind us, and the vast expanse of the Arabian Sea out front. Our cook made us a delicious dinner that we preceded with a nice walk and a dip in the water for me.

As the main purpose of this leg of our trip was scouting possible locations to come with visitors, the next day we made a bee line for Fort Cochin on one of the neighboring islands. This is the main tourist destination of the area and has many claims to fame, some of them historic – for instance Vasco da Gama was buried there for a decade or so before his remains were brought back to Portugal, and others contemporary – the little town boasts a peerless array of amenities from ayurvedic spas to craft shops and cafes. I’m pretty sure anyone reading this blog would be sweet on it, so we reckon we found a winner.

On our last day we made further inroads on Vypeen and then spent the afternoon in Thiruvankulam, the closest big town on the coast before catching the overnight train back to Bangalore. Now back to work for both of us, and there’s more to tell on that front, but not just now. This blogger’s all blogged out.

But before I go a word about the second part of the title of this entry – The Texas Rangers are what I call my new footwear. Lilee will have appended a picture of them here, and all I can say is that if you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.