Village life, wildlife and beach life

Posted by Janine & Mikkel

We had the privilege to begin 2008 on a beautiful beach in Kerala for 5 days of pure relaxation -and some tough decision making. The two weeks before we toured South India visiting palaces, huge temples, a tiny village and a wild life park with a traffic jam.

The journey started with a chilly night train ride and a couple of rainy days, but luckily there were some impressive palaces and temples to visit which didn’t need too much sunshine. After a few days we moved on to one of the highlights of our trip: Dhana, Janine’s ‘local supervisor’ who became our best friend in Chennai, invited us to come and stay in her (parents) village, located between green hills, palmtrees and small rivers. The sister, uncle, grandparents, daughter, cousin plus all their neighbours made us feel like part of the family –even if they didn’t speak English. We didn’t do much besides sitting, chatting, drinking tea, going for walks, being served snacks -and drinking more tea. Women would sit and chat with each other in the small kitchen, while the men would sit in the back and watch tv. We would all sleep together on the floor in the two rooms. Whenever we got served food, they would tear off a fresh leaf of their bananatree: guests are supposed to eat from a banana leaf as a gesture of hospitality. They only have one banana tree so I guess it was good that we only stayed two days.

After a stop-over in Madurai, South India’s beautiful temple city, and a quite uninspiring Christmas in a chilly hill station (a movie on tv and a bad stomach for Janine), we took a long busride to a renown wildlife sanctuary, which is supposed to host 49 tigers. We didn’t get to spot any of these, but we did see some unexpected ‘wild life’: people literally fighting at the ticket office in the park at 6 in the morning, to buy tickets for a boat ride! Because of the Christmas holiday, the park was visited by thousands of Indian tourists, creating a Chennai-like traffic jam of stinking noisy busses and cars at the entrance of the park…This slightly degraded our ‘nature experience’ but the boatride was quite nice, and we took a walk where we spotted some black monkeys and even a snake.

After all this action, and a quite awful encounter with some street children at a bus station who decided not to let go of our arms and legs (we were forced to flee the station) we needed a real holiday. Luckily this had already been planned. At Varkala beach we had arranged to meet up for New years with a nice group of people: a funny Scandinavian mix of two PhD-students, a Swedish teenager who's helplessness brought the best "mothering" out in Janine, and an Indian who’d studied in Denmark. The beach was situated between two cliffs, there were palm trees as far as you could see and the small beaches were equally shared between tourists and fishermen. We had at least three important decisions to make every day: where to eat breakfast, where to eat lunch and where to eat dinner!

Easy life? Well, we actually had to use our brains for more than the menu. First of all, we were challenged by the Indian guy to play the Dutch game Koeienhandel (Cow Trade), which turned out to be a major hit and kept us talking for days in deep sincerity about the deals on cows, pigs and chicken that we had made. Another, more serious challenge was presented to us on newyear’s eve: the Swedish girl found out the hard way that India unfortunately also has creeps who put drugs in your drink. We had to carry the poor lifeless girl home at five in the morning and get her back to this world again - luckily she was fine the next day.

At the moment we are entering the second stage of our trip: we just arrived in Pushkar after surviving a 30hour train ride and two days in Delhi. Our major concern for now is if Mother Nature will donate some serious packs of snow to the Himalaya SOON, so that we can actually make our skiing dream come true next week… while Janine wrote this I (Mikkel) checked the weather reports: 60-70 cm of fresh snow and still going!

Rests us to say happy New Years to all of you!

Lots of love and hopefully see you in three weeks time,
Janine and Mikkel