Getting around

John


None of the cities we have visited--Manaus, Accra, Cape Town or Kochi--have much in the way of a public transportation system, except in some places for busses, which are usually in my experience inscrutable except to people who have lived their entire lives in a place. (And I have rarely managed to figure out much of a bus system even in places where I have lived). Anyway, this puts us at the mercy of cab drivers to get around, and we've had a crash course in the mores of cabs and local transportation. Except for Brazil, cab drivers in these places basically refuse to run the meter for foreigners like us, even if they have one. So you haggle before you get in, as you tend to haggle over everything. We have gotten fairly good at this, I think, from experience.

In Kochi, there are some cabs. But by far the most common form of ground transportation is the auto-rickshaw, known as the "tuk-tuk."

An auto-rickshaw, or tuk-tuk, in Mattanchery.

Getting anywhere in Kochi costs on the order of 20 to 40 rupees--40 to 80 cents. In such a context, it seems almost comical to haggle over, literally, pennies. The other day, we were part of a large group that divided itself between a couple of tuk-tuks to go to a restaurant that was only a few blocks away, and we were waiting for one to come along, when Vicki approached a cab driver who was taking a rest in the shade. She asked him how much it would cost to get there in the cab, and he asked, how much do you want to pay? 20 rupees, she replied (an opening gambit). Surprisingly, he immediately said sure, and we hopped in. A couple of minutes later, he handed us a 100-rupee note, and asked us to give him this, folded around the 20 rupee fee, in such a way that the tuk-tuk drivers could see it and think that this is what we were paying. He didn't want them to get mad at him for undercutting their rates. Vicki made a big show of paying him an exorbitant 100 rupees--$2.

Tuk-tuks are not exactly the safest form of transportation, and we're conscious of the fact that while, at home, we don't dare go down the block without putting on seat belts and getting the kids into their car seats, here we're tossing them into these rattling contraptions that have no safety equipment whatsoever.  But walking down the crowded streets is not particularly safe, either--there is no such thing as a sidewalk here. And it's fun!  Fingers crossed.