i thought you might like to see.

It has taken me now forty five minutes to get this far into this post. I'm not yet even sure what this post is going to be about, but I had better decide quickly because those forty five minutes have cost me half the battery life on this very "quaint" computer. 

We are in the Keralan jungle, where we sleep in a hut made of bamboo, bathe outside in a shower we built ourselves in two days and get covered in mud daily as we try to work in monsoonal rains. As I write this the light in our hut is flickering on and off in a valiant struggle against the ridiculously low voltage it has been granted this evening. So is it really surprisingly that the internet speed here is less than desirable? No Jordan, no it is not. Anyway, as we live in the jungle and the jungle is notoriously empty of things like teabags and chocolate biscuits, sometimes we have to venture into the nearest big town which is called Kalpetta and which takes about forty minutes to drive to.

We don't like Kalpetta, even though there is a bakery there with coconut cookies and syrup cake and caramel nut tarts, and we sigh and moan and groan in our unwillingness to put ourselves at the mercy of its mad dusty, beepy, stressful streets. Tempers run high. Snapped outbursts are common. But go we do, as we need our tea and biscuits. And last time we went I took the opportunity to use the marginally faster internet that is also an attraction of Kalpetta to upload some pictures I thought you may like to see. 

A few shots from our few days in Fort Kochi. The above was painted on a wall near the sea, in front of several street-side breakfast stands which sold chai and idli and deep-fried triangles to hungry Indian men (and us). 

These are some scenes from our walk to "Jew Town". Since this was our second visit here we felt none of the usual tourist "obligation stress" and could happily wander the streets aimlessly, safe in the knowledge that we had seen all the "sights" already. And so we saw these things instead.  

And then I got artistic with the beedies. Because we had 500 of them and there is only so much aimless wandering a girl can take. 

A walk along the seafront in Fort Kochi means dodging men who are trying to sell tourists everything from paintings to sour mango chutney to fresh fish which you can have cooked up for you in a nearby restaurant. But it also means watching fancy vacationing Indians and making anthropologically themed conversation, looking at huge huge cargo ships coming into port, and seeing the ancient Chinese fishing nets in action.

And then we waited for the bus that would take us somewhere else. Four Indian film stars, one Australian boy and too many bags.

bed bugs and bus stations.

Bed bugs and bus stations. Not a phrase that conjures quite the same image as the Disney film with which it shares its illiteration, but a very big part of budget travel in India. And it being so, I usually wouldn't complain. I make my own decisions and I deal with the consequences; I'm a big girl after all.

This time, though, the decision to sleep 'budget style' was made for us (and it being so, I feel compelled to whinge about it).

Off to Fort Kochi we were. Down from the cool breeze of the hills to the humid coast, where the air is heavy with the promise of rain. By late afternoon- by our third bus ride in a day of travel- we realised we would probably need to stopover for the night; it didn't matter where, a bed in a room was all we wanted. First town: not possible. We sweated from lodge to lodge in the loud evening streets to find that every single one in the bus station cluster- and there were many- was full. This we found perplexing but decided it didn't matter, there would definitely be space for us in the next town. So on to another bus we heaved. And we arrived at a station and it was eleven pm and we were definitely not getting to Fort Kochi that night. Will went on a hunt. He came back 15 minutes later, elation absent from his face...how could they all be full?!!

They weren't. After several portly managers grunted 'full' from under their moustaches and impatiently waved him on, one man took pity and explained that these lodges couldn't afford the expensive licences required to allow foreigners to stay and, therefore, they were "all full".

Well done Indian bureaucracy, you thwarted us yet again. After a consolitary almost-midnight snack in a brightly lit bus station cafe, we searched for the most comfortable corner to call our own in amongst the all-night snack shops advertising their open-ness with techno music, the rubbish and the encroaching rain, and the Indians waiting for late buses or waiting for nothing, with nowhere to go. Amongst this we lay down on our sheets for a night of unrest. And we un-woke at four am to discover that you don't even need to be in a bed to suffer the wrath of bed bugs.

Grrrrr.

But we slept it off and then we swanned around Fort Kochi, looking at fancy things and pretending we were richer than we are. Until we got hungry. In our battered old clothes, scratching our bites as we sat on a roadside drinking chai and eating deep-fried triangles, were we fooling anyone?

getting caught in the rain.

We left Our Home some time ago and following a day of amazingly easy travel (and there was a lot of travel- bus, train, boat and tuk-tuk) we arrived at Fort Cochin in the evening. We jumped off the ferry and, ignoring all the tuk-tuk sharks, we made our way up the street to find a nice place to sleep. Which was also surprisingly easy...as it is the low season in the south of India now (the weather alternates between boiling hot and muggy to torrential downpours) everyone is desperate for business and we had hardly walked for 5 minutes before a lady ran out of a building and offered us a very nice room for only $10 a night.

We stayed in Fort Cochin for about 3 days; it's a nice place to wander about but as I said, it's the low season, so there wasn't a lot happening. We also arrived on a Thursday evening and it turned out that Friday and Saturday are kind of holidays so almost everything was closed. So we walked around a lot...along the riverfront we saw the old Chinese fishing nets, which are huge and take four men to lever in and out of the water. Very impractical in the modern world but quaint and a perfectly picturesque photo-op for tourists. We also found an old tree, bare of leaves but painted in bright colours so each gnarl or limb became an animal. We bought a snack of unripe mangoes in some kind of chilli sauce which is exactly as gross as it sounds and which, after 3 bites, we threw surreptitiously onto the ground. We ate a lot of delicious things too though, don't worry. Like dosas, which are basically thin pancakes made with lentil flour and served with coconut chutney...we also spent the best part of a day arguing about the similarities between dosas and pancakes, which I think are enormous because they are essentially the same thing but this was an opinion with which Will was unwilling to acquiesce because he said pancakes are made with wheat flour so that means they are completely different. Flimsy argument, I know; needless to say, I won that one.

Fort Cochin is like a picturesque 'old town', sitting on a peninsula separated from the main city by either a long drive around or a short ferry ride across. We needed to buy a new memory card so one day we went to Ernakulam (the city) to see what our chances were. Turns out it was easy. You need never worry in India if what you are after is some kind of electrical goody- they are completely obssessed with electronics. We bought our memory card from a mini-mall of 3 stories in which every single shop was devoted to technology, mostly mobile phone related. And on a strip of road lined with mini-malls this was the only one which was thriving. When Indians find something they like, they go all out.

On Sunday, when everything opened up again, we walked to the old Jewish quarter (kind of hilariously called 'Jew Town') to visit the old Dutch Palace which was in fact gifted in 1555 from the Portuguese to the Raj of Kochi, but renovated by the Dutch in 1663. It is small, but worth visiting for the amazing Hindu murals which are incredibly detailed and cover at least 6 entire walls. They tell the stories of old Hindu legends (apparently...we could really only admire the intricacy of detail and beautiful colours). The rain which was bucketing down had stopped by the time we had wandered around the palace so we decided to have a meander through Jew Town where the air is lightly scented with cinnamon and cardamom, which are for sale at vastly inflated tourist prices at every second shop. I did give in and buy some overpriced leather thongs though. Now I have cuts on my feet- I just do not have the savvy to buy shoes, this is why I always go barefoot everyone!

We left Fort Cochin the nex day and headed to Varkala, a beach town a little further south. This is not a beach for swimming though, especially in the rainy season. The shoreline is a mess of rips and currents and crazy tides with waves crashing in continuously- if you got swept out even a little you'd have to be fairly lucky to make it back to shore. And there is no way the "life guards" could help; they are all rather portly and clumsy looking and have no equipment save army hats and whistles which they blast whenever anyone gets too near the water.

It is nice here though. So nice that a week has slipped by and we've hardly noticed. There are clifftops to be strolled along, a beach to be sat on, delicious espresso coffee to be drunk and lots of different types of food begging to be eaten. There are storms to watch (and, more times than I think is prudent, be caught in) and the occasional, very clandestine beer to be drunk- I think none of the cafes are licensed but they do, of course, want to make money selling beer to foreigners so they pour it out the back and bring it to customers in giant "coffee mugs". Sneaky.

So that has been our last week...if you remember my post about Goa, well, we've been doing pretty much the same thing only with less swimming and more getting caught in the rain. No pina coladas though...haha. You don't have to tell me, I know I'm a comic genius.