Backwaters

John:  Our last major excursion out of Kochi was to an area known here as the backwaters--an enormous system of lakes, rivers, streams and canals that are a much-beloved natural feature of the Indian state of Kerala, where Kochi is located. Indian tourists, and some foreigners, flock here for the chance to spend a few days or even a week or two living on one of houseboats that cruise these waters, going from village to village and and eating fish fresh out of the water (the ships generally come with a cook/pilot):

A houseboat on the backwaters. These are now all for tourists; they get quite elaborate, with multiple bedrooms, kitchens, and air conditioning.

We went to Alleppy and got a mini-cruise of a couple of hours on a passenger boat; a longer trip that would go to more remote parts of the backwaters would get even more scenic and rural, we imagine. Even so, I can't say that this is a the kind of vacation that appeals all that much to us; I think we'd get bored quickly. But for people who live in a  crowded city like Mumbai or New Dehli, a week in a houseboat cruising the quiet backwaters of Kerala might be just the ticket.

On the way to Alleppy, our bus passed an elephant walking along the side of the road, about which Aidan has more to say:

Aidan's account of the elephant

Aidan: This is an elephant that I saw in India. I was scared but I touched the elephant. Wow! Elephants are fuzzy. The elephant was walking down the road to a temple.

Meeting the elephant, who was, we were told,
probably on the way to a temple

---

John: We have been told many times by both Americans and Indians themselves that the state of Kerala is very different from many other parts of India, particularly the crowded northern cities. Kerala is tropical, green and lush, and while hardly underpopulated, is less crowded and hectic than many other places in India. Kerala also has a strong social safety net, which has led to it's having near-first-world rates of literacy, life expectancy, and infant survival rates. There are a lot fewer beggars on the streets than in other places. Part of the explanation for this is that there has long been an active Communist party here that pushes the political system in the state to the left--we drove by an open-air meeting of the party, with hundreds of people in attendance, on our way back from Chendramangalam village on our first day, in fact. The Communist party undertook a land-reform movement here in the 1950s that redistributed land and wealth in a way that has prevented some of the incredible inequalities of means that characterize much of the rest of the country from taking hold. And the fact that they've had to alternate power with more conservative centrist parties ever since--and thus compete for votes--has kept them from turning authoritarian, as has been the way so often in Communist regimes. You see a fair number of Communist flags and posters--it's been a long time since I saw a heroic image of Lenin, but I saw one here. At the same time, Kerala's way of life is fairly traditional; most of the state's income comes from fishing, agriculture, and tourism, and about 80 percent of marriages here are still arranged--something that is no longer the case in many of the bigger cities. Kerala has not participated much in India's high-tech revolution, which has shielded it a bit from the swings of the global marketplace, but unemployment is apparently very high. So it's not a utopia, but it has been an excellent place to get a short glimpse of India for first-time visitors like ourselves, and we have come to like it well enough to muse on finding a way to spend more time here. Maybe a Fulbright someday….

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.

Kochi

John:  The area called Kochi is actually a lot of different smaller places on islands and peninsulas arranged around a large harbor--in that way, it's not all that unlike the New York area.  There's the town of Fort Cochin itself, which is really a small island, and has both a nice beachfront and the original church that the Portuguese built here in the early sixteenth century. Next to that is the peninsula of Mattanchery, which has a 400-year old synagogue, the oldest in India, and a palace built by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century for the maharaja. Across the bay on the mainland is Ernakalum, which is the commercial center, with shops of all kinds facing on to Gandhi Road and the streets radiating off it.  Finally, right in the middle is Willingdon Island, which is largely a port center developed on landfill by the British in the 1930s, the last years of the Raj. That is where our ship is docked. 

The comparisons between Kochi and New York more or less end there, of course--Kochi is tropical, and while it's built up and not uncrowded, there are only about a million and a half people here, so it's the rare place in India that is less densely populated than similar square mileage in the US.  We've spent our time here seeing the sights:

• Fort Cochin is where the Portuguese in the person of Vasco de Gama and his crew showed up in the late fifteenth century and decided that they owned the place, in spite of the fact that there were already a lot of people here. One thing we've been reminded of on this trip is that the Portuguese really did get around back then, and were often the advance party for the Europeans who followed and established more permanent colonial rule. Brazil, South Africa, Mauritius, and now India--the Portuguese showed up in all of these places, often in the form of Vasco de Gama himself, although of course now Brazil is the only one of these countries where the Portuguese relationship is inescapable. The Portuguese did dominate here in western India for about a hundred years, though, and there are still some ruins of the Fort Emmanuel that they built right at the tip of the island. The most prominent building from their time here is St Francis of Assisi church, where Vasco, who died in Cochin,was first  buried:

St Francis of Assisi Church, with its Portuguese facade intact

Vasco's body was moved back to Lisbon a few years later, but you can still see where they buried him in the church.  The outside is largely original, but the interior was remodeled in the eighteenth century by the British when they converted it to an Anglican church, which it still is today. An odd experience just after this picture was taken; a young Indian woman traveling with her boyfriend or husband came to us and said "picture, please," which we interpreted that she wanted us to take a picture of her and her companion in front of the church. But no, she quickly got next to Maeve and her partner took their picture together--then she moved on. Maeve gets a lot of attention here--with her blond hair and blue eyes, she stands out. A lot of people want to touch her, about which she feels ambivalent.

Fort Cochin has a lot of old, quaint architecture; clearly a lot of British institutions were here at the time of the Raj--there are cricket grounds and hotels with a slightly mock-Tudor feel. There are also a lot of clothing stores catering to affluent Indians and Westerners, though they're not exactly in Western styles. People have been wearing them on the ship, and you'll start seeing some things in these blog posts. 

• The Portuguese were followed by the Dutch, who,among other things, renovated the Mattanchery Palace, also called,  the Dutch Palace n the seventeenth century. (It was actually built originally by the Portuguese as a form of compensation to the local maharaja for a raid they had undertaken.) This was where the local maharaja lived for the next couple of centuries; it's now divided between a temple, which is on the ground floor, and a museum on the second floor:

The Mattanchery or Dutch Palace--it's a little run down, but trust us, the inside is pretty spectacular.

The real treat here are murals on the second floor walls depicting scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabbarata, which are truly amazing. No pictures allowed, though, and as far as we can tell, you can't even get reproductions of them--we looked for books or postcards, but came up empty.

• But before the English, the Dutch, or the Portuguese, the area was home to a substantial Jewish population. Right near the Mattanchery Palace is an area called (alas) Jew Town, which has a beautiful synagogue built in 1568, the oldest synagogue in India. It's richly decorated with Belgian chandeliers and hand-painted Chinese floor tiles--clearly the congregation spared no expense in making this as lovely a place as they could. Again, there were no pictures allowed, and no reproductions available. 

Our own global citizens in front of the synagogue complex.

Unlike the European conquerors, whose arrival here can be dated precisely, no one really knows when the Jews arrived in Cochin, though it was surely centuries earlier than the synagogue was built--there's a gravestone in a nearby village with a headstone dated (incredibly) with the equivalent on the Jewish calendar of 1269 AD. And it's clear that this area of India was known for long before that because of the spice trade; this part of the world is mentioned in the Old Testament. Near the synagogue, there are a series of paintings depicting the history of the Jewish population here, starting with the purported arrival in 72 AD of a group who were exiled after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70. It's completely fanciful, but charming--a group is getting out of boats, and the maharaja and his court are cheerfully welcoming them. Also unlike the Europeans, the Jews never tried to rule, convert, or conquer here; they primarily worked as merchants and traders, which is probably how they developed the relationships that enabled them to import things like Belgian chandeliers. 

The last of the paintings is also charming and a little poignant; it shows the maharaja addressing the congregation in the synagogue in 1947, at the moment of India's independence. The event depicted there marks the end, both of his power, and in some sense of the congregation. The new state of India ended the rule of the maharajas. And of course the next year, 1948 was when the modern state of Israel was created, and much of the congregation emigrated there. Now, there are only nine members in the congregation, which is almost surely in its last generation, the end of at least half a millennium of a remarkable community of global citizens.

Kochi, Day One

John: We’re spending this entire week in India, yet another place we never realistically expected to be able to visit. The ship docked this morning in the port of Kochi—also known as Cochin—on the southwest coast. Many people on the ship have elaborate trips planned to explore more distant parts of India; from here; a good many are going north, to Agra, to see the Taj Majal, with some continuing on to the Ganges River, while others have been trying to figure out train schedules for trips to one place or another. (One component of figuring out train travel in India, clearly, is trusting your eyes when you see how cheap fares are—you can travel clear across the country for the equivalent of about four US dollars.) But we’ve never been to Kochi before, and there’s lots of stuff to do in the city and nearby in the rest of Karala, the Indian state in which Kochi is located, so we don’t feel a lot of wanderlust; we’ll use the ship as our base and make excursions from here.

Practically our first sight as the ship rounded into the harbor here this morning were the enormous fishing nets that are the virtual emblem of Kochi:

"Chinese" finish nets in Kochi Harbor

They’re elaborate spiderweb-type things that use a complicated system of counterweights to lower the nets into the water. They’re called “Chinese fishing nets” because they were introduced here when Kublai Khan invaded in the fifteenth century. That might be long enough to call them "Kochi fishing nets" in most other places, but that doesn't count for long enough in a culture like this, I guess.

The ship was greeted with drummers and dancers:

Drummers on the dock outside our ship. We have no idea who set this up.
We were then all anointed as we disembarked.

We all took a field trip today to a rural village; it was a trip organized in coordination with Vicki's class on women's fiction as well as another class, taught by Sandra Hinchman, on political and economic development. The goal was to see how the women in this village have worked together with NGOs over the past couple of decades to establish businesses of their own. As an exercise in learning about the politics and economics of micro-financing and women-led village cooperatives, the trip didn't work perhaps as well as we would have hoped.  It was only at the end of the visit, in the late afternoon, that we got to see one of the businesses, a small factory filled with hand looms, where weavers make beautiful cloth. And it's hard to figure out how anyone could make that a going concern--these looms were vintage 1750 technology, and they can't be competitive with machine looms, unless there's a guaranteed market for this kind of thing. Or there is some other angle that was never explained.

But, as a first-day introduction to village life in Karala, this was almost perfect. The villagers were almost unbelievably gracious and hospitable.  We were greeted, once again, with drummers, anointed, given necklaces made of jasmine flowers, and then served an extremely good lunch in the front courtyard of the home of the woman who seemed to be the group's leader. 

Lunch, served on a banana leaf

We toured the village. What was maybe most impressive were the houses, which were often architecturally impressive, and frequently painted in bright, cheerful colors:

One of many really nice houses in the village

These are family homes, often with large extended families living in them, and they're often quite beautiful. The last item on the program was a dance performance by some of the women in the village:

As I say, everyone was extraordinarily friendly, eager to get to know this group of college students, pretty well charmed by Aidan and Maeve, and hard to leave. They told us that they get a group like us about once a year, so this was kind of like a festival for them.  And for us, too.

So I actually couldn't tell you all that much about how micro-financing and collective decision making have made the lives of women in this village better. But we did have perhaps an ideal introduction to the people of Karela; it left an impression that the aggressive taxi drivers we're sure to encounter will not erase. 

There is, as often, something verging on the surreal about these experiences. At 8 am, we pull into a new country; by 1 pm or so we're sipping coconut in a country village, and chatting with people; in the evening, we're back on board in our rooms that look like they're in an American hotel. Weird. We'll make a sortie into town tomorrow.

On the MV Explorer

John:  Most of our blog posts have been about the exciting places we've been--Brazil! Ghana! South Africa!  And there will be more, much more of that to come, as we go to India, China, Vietnam, and Japan. But more than half our our days are spent in transit from place to place, on our ship, the MV Explorer. So, what's the ship like?

Maybe the first and obvious thing to say about the Explorer is that it's quite nice--we're not roughing it on any converted cargo ship or old navy scupper here. It was built as a cruise ship in 2002 for the Royal Olympia cruise line, which went bankrupt in 2004--apparently because they couldn't pay for this ship and its sister ship, the Voyager, which was built at about the same time. (I'm going by what I can figure out from some archived stories on the web. The whole thing is pretty murky, in part since Royal Olympia was a subsidiary of the still-ongoing Royal Olympic line, and in part because, as far as I can see, this whole ship-going business is filled with weird legal subsidiaries, shell companies, and tax shelters. There is still lots of Royal Olympia stationary, etc. on the ship, and a lot of the crew worked for them back in the day.) After Chapter 11 proceedings, the ship somehow ended up in the service of the Institute for Shipboard Education, the non-profit corporation that runs the logistical side of Semester at Sea, with the University of Virginia running the academic side.  

So it's a pretty swanky cruise ship--they were going for a smart set here, and the air of the place is reminiscent of a nice Marriott  hotel or the like. But it's not all that big--we were dwarfed by the enormous Carnival and Disney cruise ships that docked next to us in Nassau. Part of this may be that this ship, unlike those, was probably not intended for family cruises--there are no watersides or that kind of thing. The Explorer was clearly intended as a fast ship, designed for longer-distance voyages than the Caribbean, though i don't imagine that the shipbuilders imagined its use as a round-the-world cruiser, which is what it is now. Our rooms are actually pretty big--bigger than we expected, I think--and the common areas are nicely decorated in a kind of international corporate style. Most of all, the ship is always spotlessly clean; the crew works very hard scouring every inch of the place every day. Our room is cleaned, not once, but twice a day by our kind cabin steward Armando. 

One thing is certain:  this was never intended as a floating campus.  Classrooms have been in some cases jury-rigged by putting up room dividers. And you can still see the signs of the original purposes to which parts of the ship were intended. There's a space stilled identified in places as a "casino" that is now the computer lab and library. Smoking lounges and "card rooms" are now classrooms, and the shop that was surely designed to sell high-end duty free merchandise now sells a seemingly endless variety of Semester at Sea sweatshirts, tee-shirts, headbands, and other branded swag. Almost comically, there's a spa, offering all sorts of massages, facials, treatments, and so on. Surely this is not something that we need, but it's still kept going as a money-making venture. Aidan and I have both used the well-appointed beauty salon for haircuts.

What stands out perhaps most of all here are the crew, who are unfailingly helpful and hard working.  There are also lots of them--cabin stewards, waitstaff, engineers, deckhands. It's a multicultural group--the captain is Croatian, the staff captain is Greek, the chief engineer is Russian; many of the cabin stewards and cooks are Filipino, many in the waitstaff are from the Caribbean.  The sommelier (yes, there is one) is Indian, and this is actually his last day on the ship for now; he's from Mumbai, and is going home for a few months. They're an impressive bunch, really--they work long hours, seem incredibly efficient, and make our lives very easy in so many ways.  

Next time, first reflections on India.

Mauritius!

John: It turns out that we did get to disembark in Mauritius after all; after what must have been fraught and complicated calculations, the Captain managed to get us into port in time for everyone to disembark for half a day.  Less than originally planned, but more than we had come to expect after our delay due to rough seas, the half day was a welcome opportunity to get off the ship and explore Port Louis.

We got off and walked around. Port Louis has a lot of contrasts, with decaying colonial buildings and modern waterfront shopping centers reminiscent of the Victoria and Albert waterfront in Cape Town. It's also an incredibly diverse place; you see women dressed in Indian-style saris, others in Muslim hajibs and still others in Western office wear. You hear English, French, and the local creole, a mix of both. Statues of French and British colonial administrators abound in squares on the main streets. Lovely mosques are close to Hindu temples--and also close to a large Chinatown.

Interior of the mosque in Port Louis, with an enormous tree in the central courtyard.

We explored a beautiful mosque with trees in the central courtyard, the gardens planted by the French East India Company, and the market. Then, with time running out, we made it back to the ship via water-taxi across the harbor--a slightly risky experience in loading the children onto a small boat from the pier.

Visual proof that we were allowed off the boat in Mauritius!

Refreshed by getting on to dry land, we're on to India, where we arrive on Monday. Pictures of Mauritius to come if we can get the balky internet connection to work.

Inverdoorn game reserve

February 28: Still catching up on South Africa...

Aidan: At a game reserve, I saw many animals. I saw cheetahs, lions, zebras, springboks, a rhino, buffalos, a giraffe, ostriches, and wildebeests. It was pretty much like a safari that some other people took. The springbok is South Africa's national mammal. We rode around the three reserves in big, unsafe, loud, Jeep-like vehicles. The whole game reserve experience was great!

John: Today's adventure was a kind of safari-lite--a day trip to a game reserve called Inverdoorn, a three-hour bus trip away. This seemed to be about all we could do with a two-year-old in the party; others on the ship went on more ambitious overnights to much larger and more distant reserves. But as Aidan says, the experience was still pretty great; we saw all the animals he mentions, with the best pictures perhaps being of a cheetah:

and a giraffe:

The giraffe was peeved to see us, since she was protecting a week-old calf (which we didn't get to see; hidden too well in the bushes). 

Maeve had a great time, too.

"Look, everybody, I see animals!"

Inverdoorn actually has three reserves, as Aidan says--a large central reserve, and smaller ones, each for lions and cheetahs. The lions that they have have been rescued from places that raise lions for the purpose of releasing them into very small areas so that they can be hunted and killed by foreigners who want to pretend to be big game hunters circa 1895. Since the lions were not raised by other lions, they don't know how to track or hunt (though they are still very much able to kill--we kept our distance), and therefore can't live in the wild or the large preserve, where they would likely be killed by buffalo or rhinos. The cheetahs are also being rehabilitated, though some of them will eventually be released into the larger reserve. Inverdoorn also has begun a program of poisoning and coloring rhino horns, which are frequently poached in South Africa (killing the animal) since rhino horns are believed in some places to have medicinal qualities; poisoning the horn--which doesn't hurt the animal--makes them valueless.

Aidan drew this picture of the animals he saw:

On the long bus ride to the reserve, we got a look at what our bus driver called "informal housing"--the kind of shacks around a central town that most black South Africans live in:

"Informal" is one word for, I guess. Since the mid-1990s, the government has been building small houses to replace these kinds of shanties. They look like this:

Very basic, and not much bigger than a shanty, these buildings have running water, electricity, and sewage, so they're an enormous improvement in the direction of sanitation and public health. The government has built 1.6 million of these since 1994, as a first step toward raising the standard of living for the majority of the population. Cape Town feels like a prosperous western city, but when you pass by these townships, you realize that South Africa is still a developing country.