A fantastic break

Posted by Mikkel & Janine
After many weeks of hard work (see for instance the pictures from previous posting of which the text unfortunately went missing due to dehydration of our bodies in a very hot and musty internet cafe as well as a nearby beach calling us :-)) we really felt we deserved a holiday. Besides, we had a highly distinguished delegation of 6 Danes to attend to! Two of them, Kenneth and Sarah, were even brave enough to come to Chennai. So we had the honour of showing them all the beautiful sights of our present home town. That is unfortunately done pretty fast so the second day we went to a quiet (and clean) beach just south of Chennai.

After the weekend here with Sarah and Kenneth, we took the night train to Kerala on the west coast where we would meet the rest of the Danish delegation. Kerala, “a stunning region of coconut groves, astonishing rivers, paddy-fields and idyllic palmfringed beaches” according to our companion “the Lonely” [Planet], proved to be a great choice. The 8 man strong delegation now existed of Sarah, Morten, Oskar (their 2-year old son, hereafter referred to as “the baby”), Brian and of course Sarah and Kenneth and the two of us. In our first week we floated along palmtrees while eating delicious masala style tiger prawns on our deluxe houseboat; we rubbed down elephants in a river; saw a traditional (but also rather boring) Indian dance performance, got a traditional rather intimate Indian massage (could have been more boring), got sunburned on ‘secret beaches’ (some more burned than others) and walked through cute villages where cute people always wanted to touch the cute cheeks of ‘our’ cute baby.

The second week started a bit more “off the beaten track” as the Lonely would probably call it. Mikkel had read about the small village where people were crazy about football; quite a rare case in this cricket-focused country. After almost endless questioning about this rare phenomenon of Indian football maniacs we finally found someone who knew the place. It turned out to be a very poor village. They were indeed crazy about the sport, although their only place to play was an old slaughterhouse or the beach. They didn’t really have enough footballs or clothes but they did have 12 clubs and knew (better than Janine) when the dutchies won the world cup! Our visit didn’t stay unnoticed: we were accompanied by a whole crew of reporters including a cameraman, two journalists and a photographer as well as somewhere between 50-100 local people. At the end the tv-crew wanted to finish off with a couple of questions for us in front of a running camera and a crowd of 50 people: “What are you going to do to help this village?” … You should have been there to hear Mikkel’s and Morten's mumbling replies!

We never got to see our 15 minutes of fame, because we were taking the night train to Goa that evening. This train ride in itself turned out to be quite adventurous, since the “5-minute stop” at the station 6 o’clock in the morning suddenly turned out to be a 1 minute stop instead. And you can’t get 5 people, 5 backpacks, a number of smaller rucksacks, a baby trolley and a baby out of a coupe through two narrow train doors in such a short time. Or…can you? (We leave this part up to anyone’s imagination, but we like to give some hints: only one person (and no luggage whatsoever) remained in the train although this was mostly due to the train personnel holding him back, one person learned the hard way how you are not supposed to jump out of a moving train, and the baby got out safe and sound due to the responsible and spectacular moves of a white superman who must have watched too many action movies set aboard running trains!)

After all this hard work of performing on tv and jumping out of trains at 6 in the morning, we opted for the “do-nothing-on-a-beach-for-five-days-plan”. Goan style: sun bathing (the only place in India where you can swim in bikini without Indian male audience), a bit of yoga on a rock, a book, some cocktails, playing in the sand with the baby, seafood, seafood, food… Did we mention it was a wonderful holiday?

We are now back in a rain drenched Chennai. The real rainy season started off this weekend with 24 hours of constant rain leaving 7 people killed from collapsing walls, large areas also in the center of Chennai flooded with up to half a meter of water in the streets and an unknown number of people homeless…and this is maybe just the beginning of a so far normal rainy season! So far our biggest problem has been to get our washing dry…