in the indian jungle, still.

We are in the Indian jungle still, only a different Indian jungle from before. We have spent so much time in Indian jungles lately that the other night, when Germany kicked the goal and the boys at Our Home set off celebratory fireworks, I woke up at 3am and thought 'oh yeah, that's just the crackers to scare away elephants'. True jungle girl.

So yes. We are back at Our Home (this was our visit last year) and back spending time with some amazing children. And learning how to do some new things- like build an outside shower (see below). I would have shown you a picture of the finished thing but as I may have mentioned, jungle internet is about as fast as it is a jelly bean. After 45 minutes of waiting for the picture to load I decided that you will have to use your imaginations...so imagine this brilliant bamboo floor enclosed in bamboo mat walls and no roof, banana plants on a terrace behind (a terrace we de-rocked last year!) and a view of the many greens of the jungle in front. Our shower. It is especially good when nobody walks past unexpectedly while you are bathing, the wall being just that little bit low. 

Right now I am sitting, gazing at that sea of green and listening to the rustle of bamboo. It is rest time, the children are dozing or finding ways to entertain themselves and it is so peaceful I can hardly comprehend the busyness with which you are met in Kalpetta (nearest town and baaaad place). How can it be, when here all we hear is the jungle, occasionally pierced with the yells of the boys playing soccer or the call to prayer echoing around us? It is though, and here are some pictures to prove it...

Kalpetta, where truck drivers have no foresight and movie posters are too good to be true. And in case that wasn't enough, the other day when we were battling its mean streets, we found a plastic birthday candle shaped like a lotus flower that plays 'Happy Birthday" when lit. No, I'm not joking, and yes, we did buy it. And then we went back to the jungle, where building sites look like this:

and the sky looks like this:

We love the jungle. Later I am going to make juggling balls out of balloons and rice with the boys and teach the girls to origami cranes (after I have practiced myself, so they will all be so impressed with what a paper wizard I am). And then I'm going to learn how to make egg puffs, the best boiled egg and pastry combination that ever there was. Perhaps I'll even pass on the recipe.

p.s. in case you want to check it out and don't already know, this is what Our Home is all about. And a very big thankyou to everyone who supported us on our weekend fundraiser this week. You are all brilliant.

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.

of red cliffs and black sand.

From my journal, on the twenty eighth of June...

As all of you at home plunge deeper into the dark days of winter (which, from what I hear, can only be described as Arctic), we are sitting on the grass of our hotel, under a frangipani tree, the monsoonal waves of the Arabian sea crashing onto the sand 10 metres away from us. We are lolling, relaxing off a huge morning beach walk and subsequent feast of a lunch. We are listening to the waves, the urgent whistle of the lifeguard in the background. It actually doesn't sound so urgent anymore. It is so frequent- sounding as soon as anyone gets their shins wet- that after a few days it becomes merely irritatingly insistent. 

We have made friends with a dog. She sleeps on our balcony and we feed her our leftovers. She is with us now but she won't sit on the grass because it is too prickly. Her favourite time- apart from leftover o'clock- is when the cleaners leave the cushions and sheets to air on the grass. Her name is Ana.

The ladies who work here have just, in a sudden burst of activity, gathered all the coconut halves that have been baking in the afternoon sun into baskets on their heads. It smells faintly of sewage, but only faintly and we are too relaxed to move. The breeze above our heads is tickling the palm fronds but failing to reach us We are waiting for a skype call. There's that whistle again. 

We are at Varkala, of the red cliffs, black sands and strong waves, and we leave to tonight on a train.

So it seems I wanted to paint a picture for you all, as I sat with my journal and reminisced on our week that was Varkala.

We walked, sometimes, past fishermen and grazing buffalo and boys collecting coconuts. We ate breakfast with our hands to the sound of fire crackers exploding respectfully at the temple across the road. We tried to sneak past the lifeguards who weren't letting anybody swim.

We enjoyed the quiet heavy stillness that is Varkala in the monsoon season- shops boarded, restaurants dismantled and people who would rather have a midday nap than harrass tourists- as we wandered those red clifftops and looked out to the rough Arabian Sea.

At Varkala time is different...you spend your days doing nothing (or maybe you intersperse the nothing with a little walk, a bit of reading, a game of cards and a beer) but you don't get bored. Time seems to stand still but then you look up from your beer/book/nap and realise that a week has gone by and you really don't mind. 

 

 

 

the train post.

The trains. Oh the trains.

I feel about train travel in India the same way I feel about going into a fancy cheese shop at home. The thought of both experiences inspires happiness tinged with apprehension, for very different reasons. I love cheese- and therefore cheese shops- but I do not love how light my wallet feels whenever I am going back through those doors with a bag of cheese in my hungry little hands. I love travelling by train in India- it is ever so much more comfortable than buses, and there are roaming snack men for goodness sake!- but I do not love the hassle that appears to be an inevitable part of train travel in India.

So both experiences are bittersweet. No, not bittersweet...happily frustrating.

We have now done a fair bit of train travel in this baffling country, and we have also travelled almost the entire spectrum of classes (except first class...prohibitively expensive as it is), so we have experienced a fair few different hassles. Like ticket men refusing to sell us tickets because we are tourists and that means having to hit a few extra buttons on their ticket machines and they have already hit so many buttons today, they really just don't feel like it; or being charged white man tax and paying two hundred percent too much for tickets that allow us to cram into a booth with sixteen other people; or being so unorganised we are only able to buy general class tickets and spending five hours sitting on a luggage rack with all of our bags and some other people's bags and a really old lady who I feel should have been at home with a blanket over her knees, not shoved on top of slatted metal 6 feet above the floor on an Indian train.

It's always an experience, I really am not complaining.

But last week, with mounds of luggage and my mum and an intense desire to be strolling the red clifftops of beachside Varkala (our much-anticipated destination), we had a whole new Indian train experience. We got to play 'Darjeeling Limited'.

Who has seen that film? Who remembers the part where every single time the three brothers got off the train for a smoke or some shopping or some bizarre convoluted spiritual ritual, they were always on the brink of missing it as it took off once again and had to run and run and run and jump?

That is what we had to do. And it was really fun(ny). And I love the feeling of running through a train station- you feel so...entitled. To step on feet accidently, or push past errant elbows in your haste...to look hopeful and desperate and important all at once.

So this is what happened...
There we were, sitting at the platform we were told to sit at and waiting waiting, very patiently (ok, I wasn't waiting patiently), for our train which was becoming more delayed with every passing moment. We played cards, we took selfies, we made faces at small staring Indian children. And after we almost boarded the wrong train because we were so sick of waiting and we were at the right platform and surely this is our train , it's been ages!, Mum and I went illuminate ourselves at the information booth. Where we found a crowd ten deep and an incredibly harried informer. Indian style, we elbowed our way to the front of the swarm, shoved our ticket at the man behind the desk and yelled "platform! Varkala!" to which he yelled "one! platform one! go go now! go!", his eyes wide with disbelief that we were not settled in our seats on our train that was apparently minutes from departing.

And so we ran. We ran back to Will on platform four (who was sitting on his bag knitting, the picture of serenity), garbled something like "train leaving now go quick leaving hurry!", grabbed our bags and tried to strap them up as we pushed and dragged and puffed our way back to platform one.

As we collapsed, red-faced and sweating, into the coach of some unimpressed looking Indian men, the train pulled out of the station.

Train travel in India. I love it.