Lunchtime

Everyone eats delicious thalis like this for lunch. Rice gets scooped into the centre once you've moved a few dishes around. You eat with your fingers: I haven't quite got the hang of it yet, but I'm getting there. Your left hand is usually considered unclean here, so I'm struggling even more...

Another day, another wedding

All of my companion's friends seem to be getting hitched at the moment... This was a more ceremonial affair. I'm not a mind-reader, but they look nervous, shy and apprehensive, a change from wedding photos back home.

Sleeper train

I've never been waved off on a train before - at least, certainly not such a long train (at least half a kilometre) going such a long way (Trivandrum to Chennai, 16 hours) and in, I suppose, romantic circumstances. Rexel drove me to the station, heaved my pack onto the train and gave me a brief, but importantly public, kiss on the lips. I waved until he was a tiny, waving blue and white speck and then burst into tears. I had to pretend to the guard I had something in my eye as he ushered me to my bunk looking a bit uncomfortable...
The great thing about travelling in AC 2 (the air conditioned carriage with two-tier bunk beds) is just that: cool and uncrowded. The worst thing is you are invariably at the front of afore-mentioned very long train, which means you sail past all the food stalls that line major station platforms and don't really have time to dash to them while the train stops. By the time we got to Ernakulum I was starving. I was standing in the open doorway as my carriage passed at least a dozen open kitchens with the most mouth-watering smells coming from within. I had to settle for a couple of dry, spicey fried doughnuts and a yoghurty dip from a roving wallah further up the platform.
My bunk buddy was a chap in his early 30s, originally from Kochi but now living in San Francisco, off to spend the night in Chennai with some friends while his wife, also from India, did boring family stuff. He was smart, educated, spoke excellent English and had a good job at Deloitte & Touche, but clearly you are forever a mummy's boy here: she had packed him a supper of rice wrapped in a banana leaf and more tiny bananas that anyone could possibly eat in one evening, even if you do share them with a ravenous English girl. He ate the rice reluctantly as he was trying to lose a bit of weight, he said, and at home in the US avoids carbs in the evening. We laughed, and both agreed that eating delicious, buttery, rich Keralan curries every evening wouldn't really make it onto the Atkins diet.
I was asleep as we arrived at Chennai in the morning, but was promptly woken up by the guard and sleep-walked onto the concourse to find a rickshaw to take me to the bus station.
R had warned me Tamil Nadu would be hot. I'd either not taken in that information, or thought he might be trying to put me off leaving Kerala. But even at 7am, Chennai was getting pretty scorching. By the time my rickety bus had driven the 40km or so down the coast to Mamallapurum, you could have fried an egg on the pavement. But it is dry heat, more like being in hot Europe, as opposed to rather humid, slightly cooler Kerala. And that's a blessing of some sort. It also means that, despite slathering on the Factor 50, I'm changing colour fast...

Camera-shy...

Getting a proper drenching while out visiting some elephants on a rusty, noisy Enfield.

Tea and Tony Blair

Roadside snacks in Munnar: pieces of potato, onion and mild green chillies, whole, dipped in fresh batter and sizzled in oil. Served with tea on a tray lined with newspaper and a dash of hot chili sauce, which just missed TB's head.

Munnar

Social Reformers

I was being nicely rocked into a lazy half-sleep yesterday on a busy, early evening passenger train from Trivandrum to Varkala, when I felt a soft thud next to me. A hawker had dropped a pile of thin booklets onto the seat. It was the first of these many wallahs I'd seen not selling nuts, coffee, tea and an infinite variety of tasty, greasy snacks. All the pamphlets were written in Malayalam, and judging by their front covers there were stories, puzzles, guides on learning English, astrology charts, you name it. People handed them out, I smiled at him, he disappeared, and moments later he had handed me 'Social Reformers': written in English, a serious little booklet with about 40 one-page profiles of Indian social revolutionaries, from Gandhi to Nehru to writer Arundhathi Roy, who wrote The God of Small Things and is from Kerala. Lesser known names include Sri Aurobindo, whose eponymous ashram I'm going to visit outside Pondicherry, and Kiran Bedi, the first Indian woman to join the police. Can you imagine that happening in England? It seems not just a peculiarly Indian thing to do, but particularly Keralan, the most literate, educated state in India - and run by communists/socialists to boot. I happily parted with 10 rupees.
Talking of trains, travelling local class for the short hop to Trivandrum, I attracted more interest than when I travel AC-2 (the air-conditioned class for tourists and professional Indians). Rex was late and the train was pulling into the platform when I saw him run into the station entrance. I assumed he missed the train, but he'd hopped across the tracks and jumped on the back and called me to tell me he had made it. I had barely squished onto a long window seat next to a lady and a chap, who immediately offered me some of their snacks, when the questions started. Was I travelling alone? (No, with a friend, in another carriage.) Rex appeared and stood by the carriage door and the questions intensified. Was that my friend? How do I know him? Was I staying with him in Varkala? (Absolutely not. With two friends in a guest house....). How long have I known him? Was he staying at the guest house too? Were we going to stay in Trivandrum together? All the questions came from the man, who translated immediately for the lady. She responded with nods and mouth curls that seemed to mean, 'hmmm, so she's that kind of Western girl, is she?'. I was quite glad to get off the train. Walking round Trivandrum, Rex told me that if any tourist touts talk to us, I was to say we were married. That way, I would get charged for anything at fair local rates. Otherwise, they would assume I was the tourist, he my guide, and would inflate everything. One way and another, quite a political afternoon.

Kerala State Beverages Corporation

You don't just nip out for a bottle of wine here in Kerala. You scooter into town (I'm back in Varkala), turn down a dark alley next to a shoe shop, at the end of which is a strip-lit counter with mesh wiring and a small crowd permanently gathered outside. The Kerala State Beverages Corporation: the only place you can buy alcohol here (although I and two new friends did drink beer out of a teapot in Cochin, just in case the polizei walked past).
The first time I and my companion Rex visited, it was to buy filthy dark rum. This time, I suggested wine. He came back 250 rupees poorer, clutching a half bottle wrapped in newspaper like it was contraband. I slung it in my shoulder bag and off we went.
It was the first time I'd had Indian wine, naturally. And it was DELICIOUS. Rex very sweetly asked if it was ok to drink wine every night, you know, health wise, and I said yes, absolutely. He says he's going to switch to red wine from rum from now on, as it's 150R cheaper. I am staying at his house, and he made me banana pancakes for breakfast today and is making me vegetable curry with chappati and pappads (poppadams) for dinner....

Backwaters

The backwaters: view from the front of the small canoe I was in, paddling at the front with my canoe host paddling at the back, with a small umbrella strapped to his head for shelter.
Coconut stop off: this man hacked a green coconut open with a machete, jabbed a hole in the top and stuck a straw in for me. Yum.

Allepey beach

Allepey is a busy little town where people stop off to visit Kerala's backwaters. It is criss-crossed with dark green canals - backwaters in town. The beach is actually 2km from the centre, so I jumped on a bike and navigated there by stopping every two minutes and asking someone the way. It's a strolling, kite-flying (see photograph), running-around kind of beach, with a fabulously crumbling, very English pier and one of the many branches of the Government-run Indian Coffee House. Just behind the front was a large dusty cricket pitch with at least a dozen games going on.
Before sunset, hundreds of well-dressed families arrived (it was Sunday), and the peaceful babble of sleepy afternoon chat turned into a lively buzz. Malayalam is the language in Kerala (Hindi is India's national language, but each state has its own language). It's soft and lyrical, with similar inflections to Swedish and Welsh. I was telling my travel companion later how to spell Hannah, and said it's the same backward as forward. And he said, just like Malayalam...

Allepey beach at sunset

Monsoon... and wedding

I'm so glad to have seen Monsoon rain, although this is the tail end of it. I can't imagine what the summer onslaught is like. It started with a few drops, then, a couple of hours later when it was nearly dark, thunder rumbles. An hour after that, and the rain was falling so fast and loud that the little patch of gravel outside my bamboo hut was about four inches deep in water, my flip flops floating, and advancing on my step.. The power had cut, of course - the sky was turning bright blue with lightening every few seconds. I saw a flashlight across the little garden, and suddenly someone appeared out of the pitch black, sheltering, unnecessarily as it was soaked, under a towel. And moments later, I had sprinted across to join him, Rex, and his best friend Vinod, who were drinking rum and coke.

Imagine what you expect a Hindu wedding to be. And then scrap any of those preconceptions and picture instead a concrete cinema with semi open sides, red plastic seats, 30 degree heat at least and about 500 people crammed in. People were turned round in their seats, talking and laughing - and the groom and bride were at the front apparently being shunted around by busy bodies having their photograph taken. Then my friend, one of the rum and cokers, whose mate was getting married, turned to me and said, 'now we eat'.

With no sense of ceremony, the couple - he, 34, she 22 (they were introduced and engaged on the same day a few months ago) were married. And then it was off to a giant agricultural barn next door, at least 40 degrees inside, laid out with long tressle tables to eat the most fabulous Thali food off a giant banana leaf, with our hands. Sweat was running in twin rivers down my front and back. This was a traditional, simple village wedding.

The only problem with being taller than 90 per cent of a 500-strong crowd, and of course, the only Westerner, is that I got more attention than the bride....

My Indian friend has inadvertently turned into a travel companion. We are the same age, and he lives up the coast in Allepey, where tourists gather to invade the Keralan backwaters. His older and younger brothers are both married with children, but he is determinedly single and anti-religious. I think he might like me.... So Allepey is where we are heading on the train tonight.

Apocalypse Orange...

This is what I've christened a strange orange glow that appears shortly after sunset, which today was at 6.10 on the nose. The sun sets, the sky - or rather, the light - darkens briefly and then takes on a vivid, hyper-real orangeness for about ten minutes. It's like a film director has lit the street, beach, wherever, ready for a dusk shoot. It was the same in Bombay as it is here in Kerala.
I'm in Varkala, a small temple town with a gorgeous enclave perched on a green cliff overlooking the Arabian sea, which seems to attract both Western and Indian tourists. I've been invited to a Hindu wedding tomorrow. It's not often that happens so I'm going to put my best - only - dress on, wash the salt, sun cream, Deet and dirt from my hair, and generally try to scrub up. I've only been in India since Saturday but already I feel nicely sweaty, grimy, a bit sunburned (ouch!).
And a bit stiff. I had a yoga lesson this afternoon on the roof of a guest house next door, one-on-one it turned out, with a spectacularly cool cucumber called Ani. He marched me up to the roof in his normal clothes: smart slacks (that really is the only word for them. They are like old school Farrahs and every Indian guy wears them) and a smart shirt, and proceeded to do the most impressive yogic feats. I clapped when he did a headstand, and he clapped back when I, embarrassingly, managed a feeble standing pose. I think he was trying to be encouraging. And he made me giggle when he told me to close my eyes, and relax my arms, my abdomen, my tits. Actually, it was more like 'tist' - and he was saying chest.
It reminds me of lady on the phone yesterday, who said 'oh yes, it was a bit shady'. That in turn reminded me of an Indian guy I met in Rishikesh who said we shouldn't walk over that bridge as it looks a bit dicey... People here tend to speak this wonderful Colonial English, lest I should forget we ever Lorded over this fascinating country.