There is apparently a technical glitch with the blog - we posted Sri Lanka after Maldives, even though it's showing up as a preceding post. So feel free to read Sri Lanka before moving on to the following...
Luckily, I was only ill for one day, as many people get sick in India for up to a week, and we got a chance to explore the old fort area of Kochi. The coast is lined with Chinese fishing nets, made of bamboo and rocks for weights dipping in and out of the Indian Ocean, selling and serving fresh catch off the dock.
We had our first, yet short, India train experience on our way to Alleppey where we rented a houseboat to explore the famous backwaters. To our pleasant surprise, our boat was equipped with a private A/C one bedroom, complete with kitchen, living room, roof top patio and a 3-man crew waiting on us. Village life along the 900km of canals that make up the backwaters - the Venice of India - is fascinating. Boats sank so deep they were an inch from sinking, villagers bathing and brushing their teeth in the water, rice farms entwined between coconut palms and gas stations, fishermen catching the evening dinner and a boat rush hour compared to the Queen E 2 (for the Americans, a very busy interstate in Canada) on Friday long weekend. A great and relaxing experience as we venture further into India.
Mumbai, also known as Bombay and home to Bollywood, is a thriving and diverse city of over 20 million people. That is more than half of Canada's entire population in a relatively small city. The filthy streets are packed at night with homeless people. There are over 2,000 slums in the city - home to 55% of the population, Dhararvi slum being the largest in Asia and the most famous courteous to the movie Slumdog Millionaire. We took a tour through Dharavi's 1.75 sq kms - population of over 1 million people - including the commercial area and residential districts (divided into Muslims, Hindus, and Christians) all literally living on top of each other. The average 'house' is 60-100 sq feet with 5-10 people living in it. Contrary to popular belief, the slums are peaceful, organized, have a strong sense of community and crime is almost nonexistent.
We rented the movie Slumdog since we had been to a lot of the places in the movie and it actually paints a fairly accurate picture of life in India - except for the Mafia child scam that we obviously didn't experience.
Off to the North - I have been well warned and I'm a little scared!
Thanks Movember - John's mustache is in full force. Humorously, the moushtache is very, very popular in India - to the point that the nice fellow seating us for our Thanksgiving dinner commented - 'nice mustache Mister'. Fueling the fire.
JG: I don't even know where to begin or how to go about describing our three-week jaunt through India, but these postings will undoubtedly be longer than most. Going in, other travelers said 'you'll either hate it, or love it'. The fact is that much of it is overcrowded, impoverished, and difficult to manage as a casual tourist. The risk of sickness from food is rampant, and simple things like logistics from place to place requires planning and a ton of patience. I can't say my reaction to it was as binary as others warned - parts of the trip were perplexing, others captivating, and still others beyond what we could have even imagined. I'll reserve my conclusions on this leg for the end of the following posting.
The convention wisdom follows that the farther north you go, the more difficult the travel experience is. We began in the south in Kochi, a small fishing village. The town gets a fair number of tourists, and it's a good jump-off point for other areas in the south. After Sandy left the infirmary of our hotel room, we did a tuk-tuk tour of the city, saw a bunch of churches and temples, and also went to a Kathakali show - one of the strangest performance art displays we've ever seen (think pantomime mixed with classic theater).
The convention wisdom follows that the farther north you go, the more difficult the travel experience is. We began in the south in Kochi, a small fishing village. The town gets a fair number of tourists, and it's a good jump-off point for other areas in the south. After Sandy left the infirmary of our hotel room, we did a tuk-tuk tour of the city, saw a bunch of churches and temples, and also went to a Kathakali show - one of the strangest performance art displays we've ever seen (think pantomime mixed with classic theater).
Quick train ride to Alleppey to partake in a houseboat tour of the backwaters, and it was worth every penny. Even the nighttime monsoon we experienced couldn't have tarnished the serenity of feeling like you were smack in the middle of nowhere.
On to Mumbai - what a dichotomy of economic standards and realities. The wealthy are very wealthy, and the remaining 90% appear to live a very different life. We visited the Gateway of India monument and the CST train station (think Slumdog movie), but really spent much of our time wandering the streets and seeing the variation in architecture and culture. You name it, it's here: a melting pot of political and religious history, tour guides, merchandise hustlers, endless traffic, horns blaring, lavish shopping outlets and the poorest of toddlers pleading for your spare change. As Sandy mentioned, we visited one notable slum that counts about a million people as residents, and seeing how they operate was eye-opening: school systems, medical assistance, commercial area....and next to zero crime. The slums in Mumbai are not a cry for help, or a landscape of photogenic poverty - it's simply life for more than 10 million people, and they were some of the most courteous we met in the city.
We were lucky enough to score an American Thanksgiving dinner, marking the end of Movember (and the beard/mustache). We mixed in some good times with a group of Belgians and locals we met at a now famous restaurant unfortunately known as one of the sites of a recent terrorist attack on the city, and we trekked north to Delhi, where the culture shock and education continued.
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