Kerala

May 2017, Chennai

 

CHECKLISTS

Readers, almost all of us have attended college and all of us have our own group of like-minded people who we categorize into hierarchy of friendship ranging from mutual friend to best friend. Simply, we all belong to a gang in college. The most common tradition of a gang is to keep a checklist of things that needs to be accomplished by them together before the end of their college life.

And the most important of all the things in the checklist is to go on a trip with your friends. The friends’ trip is the perfect way to get to know your friends better, to have absolute fun and to be yourself.

It is the rarest of occasions if all the stars align to give you the perfect plan for a trip with your friends at the right time, to the right place, that suits your budget and your friends are all available. This is when you should seize your opportunity.

In May 2017, I was able to seize the opportunity to go on a tour to Kerala with my friends. Kerala was the destination because most of my friends are from different parts of Kerala who had come to Chennai for under-graduation. There are a few reasons why this turned out to be useful: -

1.    When you visit your friends’ hometown, they will guide you through the tourist places and off-beat spots which a regular tourist might not get to see. And you will also be able to get a personalized experience as it is your friend who is showing you around.

2.    You get to stay at your friends’ place which is very convenient and cost effective.

3.    You get to eat home-made authentic food of Kerala (or the place you are visiting), in addition to trying out places your friends suggest.

4.    Getting an opportunity to understand the culture in which your friends were brought up in the process of getting to know them better.

We finalized the decision of executing the Kerala trip by creating a WhatsApp group. We were six people in total. One from Nagercoil, one from Trivandrum, one from Kollam living in Kochi and one from Pathanamthitta. My name twin and I live in Chennai, so we had to travel the most. I took the responsibility of planning the tour for us.

I studied the geographical locations of places we were planning to visit and put them in the order of proximity. I researched through the internet and found if May was a good time to visit Kerala and noted down the famous tourist spots that must be visited in addition to the locations where my friends might take us to. I set a minimum tour expense limit. Since we were visiting our friends’ places, I did not plan too much to intrude on what my friends had in their minds for our tour, which led to great surprises that eventually made our tour an unforgettable one.

After planning meticulously for more than a week, I made a fair draft of our tour plan for five nights and six days. We booked tickets, finished packing and were all set to go on the Kerala trip.

Tour commences:

It was during the semester break in May, we scheduled our Kerala trip. So, all my Keralite friends were already in their respective hometowns. We planned to meet in Nagercoil (Serena’s hometown) and begin the tour from there.   

Sasha came over to my home the night before the Kerala trip as we had decided to leave together to the railway station. The next morning Sasha and I took a cab to the railway station with my mom’s delicious Upma hot packed in eat and throw tiffin boxes. I clicked a mind picture of Sasha and the cab as I told her “It’s happening…My first tour with friends” gleefully.

The train journey to Nagercoil was one of the longest journeys of my life. Our arrival was scheduled at 9:30 pm that night but there was a problem in continuing through the usual route and so the train had to divert and take an alternate route to reach our destination. It turned out to be the longest route that can be taken to reach Nagercoil.

The route to Nagercoil has one of the most beautiful landscapes. One should go on a road trip or take a train to savor every bit of it. The highlight of that route is the windmills that are set up here and there throughout the way to Nagercoil. We enjoyed the view through our window until we came to know that the train would reach only by midnight. We tried to talk away the time. We were supposed to reach Nagercoil by 9:30pm that night, but we reached only by 3am. Serena’s father came to pick us up with Serena and Ella (my friend who lives in Pathanamthitta). We felt grateful. We reached Serena’s place at around 3:45am and I couldn’t sleep even though I felt tired. I came to the living room to watch TV. Serena and Ella followed suit. We decided to go hang out in the terrace. It was dawning. I felt blissful when I saw hills all around, bordering the place with mist ensconced in them.

Nagercoil is located an hour away from Kanyakumari, the southern most town of India where you can see Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean merging into one. Nagercoil belongs to Tamil Nadu but it also borders Kerala as a result of which the beautiful Nagercoil Tamil accent was born. South India is hot during the month of May. But the greenery in Nagercoil and the whole of Kerala made it bearable in addition to the occasional downpour.

It was the first day of our trip. We packed our lunch cooked by Serena’s mom and started to cover all the planned spots in Serena’s father’s car.

The highlight of the first day was visiting Padmanabhapuram palace in Thuckalay, which was a forty-five-minute drive from Nagercoil. Built in Travancore era, it looked majestic. Whilst we were admiring the beauty of the palace, I met a stranger who was a history enthusiast. He elaborated on the history and architectural style of the palace to me.

Padmanabhapuram was the capital city of the erstwhile Hindu Kingdom of Travancore, he explained. He spoke on several structures of the palace like Mantra Sala- the king’s council chamber, Nataksala-the performance hall and the four-storeyed mansion at the center of the complex. What caught my attention was the dining halls built only with stones which can accommodate more than two hundred people at a time and the Nataksala where the famous Malayalam movie Manichitrathazhu was shot.

After spending some time for photo sessions, we left to a fort nearby and had our lunch there and spent some time loitering around. We scheduled to complete touring Nagercoil before evening after which we had planned to go to Kanyakumari to watch the sunset.

When we reached Kanyakumari sunset point, we were exhausted, but we wouldn’t miss the indescribable scenic beauty. The sunset happened and we became quiet, each of us choosing a rock to sit on, we watched the sun drowning into the mighty ocean.

 When we came back home that night, we were so tired that we fell asleep as soon as we came back. Next morning, we caught the bus and were off to Trivandrum.

Entering god’s own country

Trivandrum is the capital of Kerala. Yet, you will not witness the simplicity that Trivandrum possesses in any state capital of India. It looked like an omniscient yet humble man who wouldn’t flaunt his wisdom. This place is where my friend Aretha hails from. We reached Trivandrum an hour or two after sunrise as it was only a few hours of travel by bus from Nagercoil. After we reached Aretha’s place, we took some time to refresh and changed into our traditional clothes as our first stop in Trivandrum was the famous Padmanabhaswamy temple. In the temple, women can only wear either saree, or a skirt and men cannot wear anything but Dhoti. We reached the temple at around 11:30am. I was eager to get a glimpse of Padmanabha swami. Before they could close the gates for lunch, I ran in and joined the queue, while others waited for me outside, and I got to see the resting Padmanabha Swami.

We had lunch in a famous restaurant called Thakkaram where we met with Sasha’s school friend and came back home to change into casuals to go to Perumadura beach. Perumadura beach is one of the cleanest beaches I have come across in India. We played water games in the beach until it was dark, and we called it a day. Aretha’s mom made us Puttu, the dish of Kerala. After relishing every bite of it, I borrowed ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho from Aretha’s bibliophilic brother and went upstairs to lie down in the bed and read until others would join me. Before I could finish ten pages, my brain shut my body and when Aretha woke me up, it was 7:30 in the morning. All that I remember is falling asleep and then directly waking up to morning. It was the best sleep ever. This is one of the reasons why Trivandrum will be my favorite part of this trip.

Since I let my friends decide where to take us in their respective hometowns, each day was a surprise to me as I was visiting places I did not expect to visit. The third day of the trip was one of such surprises. Aretha’s brother told us that he was taking us to Ponmudi hills that day in his car. When I was making plans for the trip, I told my friends that we were only using public transport to visit places throughout the trip. Never once did they follow that, my friends! I had no choice but to get into the car and we were off to Ponmudi hills. We reached halfway through the hills where we found a waterfall. We pulled over and spent few hours in the waterfall, playing with the water and teaching swimming to each other in the stone filled water. 

When we were done, we went ahead to the hill top. By the time we reached the top it was evening, and mist started to occupy its space. We chose our rocks as usual and sat on it silently. Rarely am I tempted to sing when I witness a serene landscape. But it was an exception that time as I hummed in harmony with nature. Dusk set in and we came back home with smiles on our faces.

The following morning, we left for Kollam, the backwaters town where Anita ’s ancestral home is located. Readers, as I told you earlier, there are a few perks in visiting your friends’ hometowns. You can visit off-beat spots which a normal tourist won’t be able to experience. In Kollam, Anita took us to her “spot”, which was a tree leaning over the backwaters. It was bizarre and fun. The Kollam trip was about lazing around the streets and visiting such spots as there was not much of tourist places to visit. It was perfect for us as we had just travelled for three tiresome days, we needed to rest before we could go on. Anita ’s mother was an affable woman with whom I was talking about my kitchen-garden in my hometown. She offered me dried jackfruit to eat as I told her how much I love jackfruit. We had a sumptuous Sadya, the traditional Keralite feast, in banana leaf.

After the relaxing break in Kollam, we left for Pathanamthitta that afternoon by bus.

We reached Pathanamthitta that evening and we went straight to Ella’s home not knowing the other big surprise of the trip was ahead. We freshened up in Ella’s house when her grandmother offered us the delicious Unniappam, a round shaped sweet. I remember taking few balls of Unniappam before leaving the house to stay in a bamboo tree house in Adavi which was half an hour away from Ella’s place. We did not know we were staying in bamboo tree house until Ella revealed the surprise.

The bamboo tree house was concealed behind thick woods in Adavi, which was electric-fenced to prevent wild elephants from passing through. Below the tree house was water flowing on its way to become a waterfall later. When I woke up next morning and went to the balcony to get some view, I was enthralled to see a huge river flowing below the tree house. Later we were told that we were taking a bath in that river before we go for a Kuttavanji ride. Kuttavanji is a small, round-shaped boat made of bamboo.

All the days of our Kerala trip involved a water activity. Waterfalls in Nagercoil, Beach in Kanyakumari, both beach and waterfalls in Trivandrum, Backwaters in Kollam, the river below the tree house in Pathanamthitta and beach along with rain in Kochi, our next stop.

We booked tickets in a low-floor bus to Kochi from Pathanamthitta. As we lazily dozed off in the crowded bus, we reached Kochi.

When we reached Kochi, the weather was not helping us. It started drizzling and it kept raining the whole day we were there in Kochi. We had breakfast in a restaurant nearby and boarded a bus to Fort Kochi.

Fort Kochi has the tendency to teleport you to Europe. Portuguese, Dutch and British have ruled this part of Kerala and hence you get to see a multi-cultural product. The famous wall arts of Fort Kochi, Dutch cemetery, Jewish synagogues, Santa Cruz Cathedral Basilica, the Chinese fishing nets are the greatest of the attractions. It was raining heavily and yet there was no stopping us. We had one umbrella for six people, so we decided to get drenched in rain. We stopped in a bistro for lunch when I got a call from the caretaker of the place where we were staying that night. He informed me that there was a hartal happening the next day and so it will not be possible for us to travel all the way to the guest house we had booked. We decided to break ourselves into two groups, as we managed to arrange two places to stay put until the hartal is over. Three of us stayed in Ella’s relatives’ place while the other three put up at Anitha ’s friend’s place.

Those who know Kerala well would know about Kerala’s Hartal as well. It happens so frequently in Kerala that school kids pray for hartal to happen so that they can escape from writing their exams.

Even though we were stranded in a stranger’s house due to hartal, we consoled ourselves saying we got to see all the faces of Kerala. It was the last day of our tour which we gave to hartal, doing nothing but sleeping and watching movies.

When the situation settled down, we packed and left for the railway station. All the malayalis were back in their homes. Sasha and I, off to Chennai. I was reading ‘The Alchemist’, that Aretha’s brother had graciously lent me, throughout the journey back home.

The tour left a deep impression in me. I realized how important it was for one to withdraw oneself, every so often, from the mundane routine of life and engage in pleasurable pursuits. I felt more confident and optimistic about my life. It felt as if I had imparted tremendous energy and optimism from this tour which would keep me fueled to go through the routine, for a while.

I fall in love yet again, with the God’s own country. This trip with my friends made my relationship with Kerala, more intimate than it had ever been.