My wife and I just got back from a trip to India! Specifically, we split the time about half half across Chennai and Kerala. India has been a country both of us have wanted to visit for a very long time. Part of the reason why I hadn’t gone before was the distance, but the truer reason is that I was always a bit intimidated in terms of both the scope and the place itself.

Regarding the scope: for many countries you can get a pretty decent sense of what they’re about in a week or two, but there are others where they’re so large and diverse that they’re essentially multiple little countries in one, and it seems like you’d need months if not longer to really feel like you’ve seen them in the same way. So I always thought that I’d travel to India and spend at least a month there, but of course that’s a pretty long time so it never ended up happening.

One of my wife’s friends from grad school was getting married, so it was the perfect excuse to go to a place we’d always wanted. The wedding was outside of Chennai, so in a sense the place was chosen for us, breaking us out of a kind of decision paralysis.

I’ve heard the south is a much kinder intro to the country than other parts, and it certainly seems true – everyone we encountered was kind, we never felt unsafe or out of our depths, and it was honestly just a ton of fun.

As usual, I’ll try to keep the yammer to a minimum and focus on the pics, but we all know how that often ends up 😉

Chennai

The first drive from the Chennai airport to the hotel, absolute chaos of course:

First meal in India, when we got to the hotel:

The restaurant porch was right on the water, and they had these lights just facing out into the darkness of the Indian ocean… very ominous. When big waves hit, the water would splash up onto the closer edge of the porch:

We had a couple days before the wedding started so we got to see a bit of Chennai. Marina beach is a place you’re supposed to go. It was pretty cute, tons of locals enjoying the water. There are little food stalls and restaurant shacks on the beach:

I love this deranged… seahorse?

Before going, I heard that in India, cows wander where they like, and people let them. And yep, it’s true!

It’s very strange to see a cow on a sandy beach.

🥺

🥺🥺🥺 illegally cute.

Another day we went to Kapaleeshwarar temple. You’re not allowed to take pics inside, so enjoy these pics as we approach it:

You can see that it’s very colorful, although the colors are faded. Apparently, they repaint it every 12 years as part of a ceremony. It was really cool to visit – at least at the time we went, it was almost entirely locals doing rituals. It had several internal parts that non-Hindus weren’t allowed to enter, but a few times locals told us “I know you can’t enter, if you stand in this spot you can get a good view of the inside”, which was really nice of them. The atmosphere there was really cool, and on the way out, they gave everyone little dishes (made of pressed banana leaves!) of sweet pongal, a South Indian kind of rice pudding/custard.

I’d heard Indian weddings are awesome, and this one did not disappoint. It was technically over the course of two days for us, although much longer for the bride and groom and their families. I genuinely think they may have only slept a combined 5 hours over those days. They were just shuffled from ritual, to dance, to ritual, to photo session, to dance, to event, etc etc. I think I might’ve died from exhaustion if I were them!

The American mind cannot comprehend such power:

Kochi

After the wedding, we flew to Kerala, which is the other big state in the south, but on the west coast. We flew into Kochi airport.

One of the first things we noticed was that it was WAY cleaner than Chennai. The other is that it was just a lot cuter and, well, nicer than Chennai. Maybe I just didn’t see the right parts of Chennai so I’m not being fair to it, but it wasn’t very nice to walk around.

Kochi has a really nice beachside area and boardwalk, inside an old fort area called Fort Kochi, where there’s tons of street food stalls, games, trinket sellers, and pretty views:

a samosa chaat on the beach! Again, the American mind cannot comprehend such wonders.

At sunset, locals and tourists alike were out on the beach, watching the sun go down. It was really pretty:

So many beach doggies…

A cute restaurant that just goes literally up to the water, where we ate one night:

The banyan trees are wild. This one has clearly been trimmed so as not to block traffic:

One night as we were out, we heard a big commotion. We looked towards the source of the noise, and it was some sort of… brass band parade? led by the jester guy in front. Very reminiscent of the “honk” type festivals we have around here:

Another day we went to Mattacherry Palace, which is a palace originally built by the Portuguese and given to the regional Indian king (as an appeasement for plundering a temple 😬), and then later renovated by the Dutch. It has some really cool murals of scenes from the Hindu epic, the Ramayana.

They have the feel of the Stations of the Cross/Passion of Jesus scenes you see repeated a million times in European art, but they’re just waaay more wild and full of action. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen the European ones too many times, but these ones are a lot more interesting to look at. Here’s an example:

We stayed at a sweet guest house for two days:

On one day we met the owner of the place. I asked if he knew where I could find a custard apple, because my wife had never tried one and I wanted her to. I knew they’re grown in the region, but I’d been checking every fruit stand we passed and still hadn’t seen one, hence my asking.

He told us a funny story. Apparently, there’s a Hindu tradition (I think Sraddha) where on the death anniversary of his relatives, he’s supposed to do some rituals to honor them. However, he was telling us that over time, you end up accumulating so many relatives’ death anniversaries that you’d be doing them for a large fraction of the days of the year. So, there’s a kind of “loophole” they can do, where they go to a specific religious site and do a special ritual, that “settles up permanently” (or maybe consolidates all of the death rituals to a single day? It wasn’t clear).

Part of the cost of that one-time settling up is that he had to choose one fruit and one vegetable to permanently give up. For the fruit, he apparently chose custard apple. I asked if that meant he didn’t like it, but he said it was actually one of his favorites (since it wouldn’t mean giving up much if you gave up a fruit you don’t care for).

So, I think my question about the custard apple was a little special to him, and he told me he’d find us some before we left, despite our protests that it wasn’t necessary. And lo and behold, when we came back he had managed to find some!

Later I searched and found that we were there at pretty much as off-season as you can get for this fruit, hence why it was so hard for me to find them. But I guess he had a source! A really sweet gesture.

Another day, we saw a performance of a classical Indian dance called Kathakali:

It was really interesting. The actual performance started an hour in (and was an hour long, just one scene from a much bigger play), but during the first hour you can watch them apply the traditional makeups, like above.

There would usually be no speaking in these performances – all the information would be conveyed by body language, but also by these very specific hand signs, and facial expressions. Since those would have no meaning to most of the tourist viewers, this sample performance had a bunch of explanation about the meaning of these, which I thought was pretty cool and useful, kind of like live annotations:

Kerala backwaters

One day we did the “Kerala backwaters”. This is basically a series of canals in an area ~2 hours drive outside Kochi, with many small villages on islands.

There are a few types of boats you can hire. We ended up getting one of the small ones, a “Shikara”. It’s really pretty, and mostly a thing where you hang out and look at interesting sights as they go around the canals. There’s lots to look at, and some colorful birds I’d never seen before.

This is one of the bigger boats, a house boat. It’s apparently a common touristy thing to spend a night or two on them. However, I heard mixed reviews about how (un)comfortable they can be, and we decided not to. I think I’m happy with our choice :P

One of the times our boat driver stopped at a cafe-shack thing, my wife nearly jumped out of her skin since she noticed this bird of prey just sitting there on the broken fridge:

OH GOD ITS LOOKING AT ME ISN’T IT

Just kidding. It’s apparently the guy’s pet or something. He casually grabbed it and plopped it on my shoulder! I’ll admit I was a bit fearful of those spiky claws. I looked it up later, and it’s probably a type of Brahminy Kite.

One kind of sad thing about the backwaters was the huge amount of garbage in them:

For most of it, the waters weren’t covered in this plant, so the trash wasn’t as apparent (because it would float away I think), but this section made it apparent how much there was. It’s obviously never a good thing to have trash in a natural place, but it’s especially sad because the water seems to be a core part of the villagers’ lives – as the sun was setting, nearly every house we passed had someone out in front, fishing or washing their clothes (and a bunch bathing or swimming).

The tour “ended” when we reached Vembanad Lake, what the boat man said is the largest lake in India. I just looked it up, and… google says he’s right, although it really seems like some of the lakes on google maps are bigger by eye 🤔

Munnar

One of the “you have to see” things in the region are the tea plantations, which are a few hours inland and higher elevation, so that’s what we did with our last few days.

There are wild elephants! (Spoiler alert)

Tea plantations

It was a little confusing, but apparently the British introduced tea to India, at least in its modern form. During their colonization, they set up a ton of tea plantations and hill stations for them. Munnar is a very famous one, which a bunch of tourist stuff is centered around.

As you drive around, you see the hills blanketed by the tea bushes, forming these really pleasing layers like a cake.

We did some tour, which turned out to be really interesting. Fact number 1 I didn’t know about is: white tea, green tea, and black tea… are all the same exact plant! They’re just different parts of it, and processed different. White tea is just the buds, green tea is the first two leaves, and black tea is the first 4 leaves. White tea is processed in a much more delicate way, while green tea and black tea are oxidized, black moreso.

There were some really sweet birds flying around the plantation when we were there, and our guide happened to be a birder, and knew a lot about them. Here’s what I think must be a Red whiskered Bulbul:

and here’s a picture of one that doesn’t suck (from wikipedia):

The last stop on the tour was the tea factory. I kind of assumed it would either be a defunct one, or a real one and we’d just see a few lame things behind glass, but… they let us in pretty much everywhere, and on the factory floor with machinery jiggling all over!

The “withering” section, where they suck air past the leaves to dehydrate them:

the chute where they pour the dried out leaves into…

…and where they end up!

Here’s where you can see some in the oxidation process:

you need to picture ALL these machines vibrating noisily and jiggling around:

Lastly, he gave us a little demonstration of all the types of tea (all from the factory), side by side.

Other

For our last day my wife signed us up for a tour online where we’d supposedly get to go to the nearby national park and see some wildlife. Well, the national park was closed for… some random reason, but we’d signed up anyway so we figured we might as well see what we saw.

It turned out to be one of those days where you do a bunch of random stuff, but it all ends up being interesting and fun and memorable still. A funny thing that happened almost immediately was, we got picked up at the hotel by a guy who spoke barely any English (fine, common enough), and he drove us to the side of some random tea field. Our understanding (based on a few texts before) was that he was driving us to meet our guide, where we’d start the day tour. After a little while of hanging out at this field and him offering to take a pic of us for ourselves, we managed to ask, “so, when are we meeting the guide?”

After several confused minutes, it became clear that he was our guide, which was pretty funny – he was clearly just some dude who lived in the area and was winging it. Several times while we were at some sight, he went off to have a 10 minute yelling whatsapp call 😭😭 he was very friendly but was clearly thinking “oh man, the park is closed, what the hell am I gonna show these people?”

That said, he scrounged up some good stuff. We stopped by a jaggery factory:

the huge pit where they use the sugarcane pulp as fuel:

The sugar cane liquid pouring into a huuuuuge pan:

They “clean” it by skimming off the impurities from the second huge pan:

you can see the fires raging below:

the last stage is where they scrape this thick sugar paste as it cools…

…and then form it by hand into balls:

I was curious what it was like at this point so I asked, and they pinched off a little piece for us to try. I’ll never forget it, it was warm and so molasses-y and delicious. It was so good, I bought a couple jars from the factory to take home.

Lastly, our guide managed to get us kind of into another nature park, that was also technically closed. At one point we were inside the station cafe having some tea, and he was outside sleeping in his car (like I said, kind of phoning it in…). We suddenly heard him yelling, and looked outside to see that he was yelling at some monkeys that were running away from his car. I’m pretty sure I saw one monkey holding something, but couldn’t make out what.

He seemed pretty mad though, and starting throwing small rocks at one of the monkeys. I didn’t get why he was so mad at some random monkey, so we went out to ask him. At this point he revealed that while he was sleeping, one of the monkeys opened up the car door (!!) and… stole one of the jars of jaggery! And indeed you can see in this pic I took that it’s inspecting it, trying to figure out how to open it, while dodging rocks:

Well, now I was invested! I grabbed a handful of pebbles and started throwing too. I think I have a better arm than him, cause after a couple close shots, I think the monkey was distracted enough to drop the jaggery.

Unfortunately, since that branch you see was ~30 feet high, the jar fell and hit the stone wall you can see below, and absolutely exploded everywhere. Suddenly, rather than one monkey having his fill, there were about a dozen swarming it. At this point I was laughing so hard I was nearly crying, while he was still angrily cursing at the monkeys.

They were just swarming it, grabbing fistfuls of the sugar and running away on three paws:

It was a hilarious end to the overall silly day. My wife and I were speculating that we probably singlehandedly caused a diabetes epidemic among the park monkeys, since I doubt they’re used to pounding fistfuls of pure sugar 😭

Misc

Religion and shrines

There are little shrines and religious icons everywhere:

In Kerala, there’s a much higher population of Christians than in other parts of India. One cool thing we noticed is that while their churches have many of the symbols/etc you’d expect, they also have a really different aesthetic than western churches:

This setup (a couple icons stacked on multiple floors, behind windows) was really common:

Plants

Beautiful plants everywhere, many I had never seen before!

Just look at this grotesque beauty:

Never actually looked under a banana flower petal before!

Look at this spiky monstrosity from Solanaceae:

We have Bougainvilleas here, but they’re so lush there:

Other

Amazing names and design:

A tomato flail. Incredible

My wife and I enjoyed coming up with new flavors, like TIKKA TORTURE and VIOLENT VINDALOO.

The buses have some insane designs:

I’m not sure I want to see “I MAY BE KILLED BUT I WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED” on the front of a bus I’m about to get on:

laughingnervouslywhatthefuck.jpg

Did I read that correctly? A nice motivational quote on the side, plus “HITLER” on the front??

Yep, I sure did. Huh. I… don’t know if that name has the same valence there?

Check out the hair on these fashion monkeys:

The dogs are so accustomed to the chaos that they can sleep on the road with a motorcycle roaring by them and not even wake:

Check out this sweet lensing effect I saw:

Inverted of course:

We found a porcupine quill! Two, actually. I didn’t know they had them there!

hehehe:

You’re telling me Hotel Pee Pee has a rating of only 3.7?? noooo wayyyy

aaaand that’s all

India was super cool. I’m excited to go back and see what the other parts of the country are like. I’m not sure when I go, but I’ll definitely learn more about where I go before getting there this time :P either way, we had a great time and I highly recommend.