From Backwaters to Palaces

Kollam (formerly Quillon) is a small town in Kerala. I blew my daily budget on an expensive place called Tamarind because no rooms were available -- off-season renovations again. Including traveling for a day, being foiled again by Lonely Planet's maps, and having my sandal break, I decided to take the rest of the day off to nurse my cold. Anyway, the place was really nice: air conditioning, room service, a really big bed, and a view of the lake.

The next morning I took the Kerala State Tourism backwaters tour. The backwaters are a series of lakes and canals linking communities and rural industry. The best part was the quiet; India is noisy! Our guide poled me and a man from New Zealand through the canals, pointing out sights and stopping regularly for chai, coconut water, and a closer look at the coir weaving, boat-making, prawn farming, fishing, and mussel farming industries.

We saw many fruits and spices growing, including pineapple, cashews, black pepper, chili pepper, ginger, tapioca, jackfruit, and nutmeg. We also saw snakes swimming twice.

Travelling when you can't breathe through your nose is a real chore, and arriving in a small town at one in the morning, after a 9.5 hour bus ride, is definitely not high on my travel list. But the room was decent, and I slept another half-day in Calicut before moving on. I was impressed with the roads in the state of Kerala, and the bus station washroom in Sultanbatheri was the nicest I have seen in India.

Mysore, in Karnataka, is known as the City of Palaces, and Mysore Palace, built during the Wodeyar dynasty, is the grandest one. Funniest moment: reading a quotation from an Englishwoman and travel writer, describing the palace as the ideal fantasy of an oriental palace. Actually, it is exactly that, because it was designed by an Englishman... is that life imitating art, or the other way around!

Madurai is also famous for its incense and essential oils industry, and I found myself buying 10 types of essential oils in the middle of the market. The market was filled with fruits (including a whole aisle of banana vendors), vegetables, spices, flowers, incense and oil, and general hardware. And people! Even nuns and hijra have to buy groceries sometimes.

Finally I visited the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, a museum highlighting tribal and rural cultural arts. Everything was fascinating, but I loved the fun terracotta roof tiles, with quirky beings sitting on them. Then, a 20-hour train ride back to Pune ended my journey to the south.