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.