Travel UN!imited

To read another article

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

Kerala: God's Own Country

By Anamika Mukherjee


The train pulls away punctually and silently, almost unnoticeably. I am seated one seat away from the window, in a sleeper compartment crowded with eight others. In my limited travels till date, circumstances always have permitted me to travel by luxury trains, when not by air. This is my first journey in a non-airconditioned three-tier sleeper coach, and it is evident that I have much to learn when I try to pull up the shutter on the window and it promptly falls back down. My long suffering huzband, Amit, who has not been as fortunate, and is consequently well-versed in the ways of non-airconditioned public transport points out the bolts that will keep the shutter in place.

KeralaWe are aboard the Island Express, now less picturesquely but more informatively known as the Kanyakumari Express, from Bangalore to Kanyakumari. But the scenic splendours of the southernmost tip of India are not our destination. Not yet. We go first to Palghat, a little known town just after Coimbatore, which will be the jumping off point for Silent Valley - one of the last remaining virgin tropical forests akin to the Amazon basin, and, the Web informs, receiving less than 1,000 visitors per year. Next we head for Cochin, where we spend the night and plan to take a backwater cruise to Kottayam the next day. Then by road we will reach Thekkady, inside the Periyar Tiger reserve. The next few days will see more backwater cruises - to Alleppey, Quilon, Kovalam, Thiruvananthapuram and Kanyakumari, though not necessarily in that order. We have been assured by travel brochures as well as by those people in Bangalore originally from Kerala, that backwater transport in the shape of ferries are a slow but economical mode of transport, and that ferries ply frequently on our intended routes. All we have to tie us down is hotel bookings, and we have been informed that those are fairly easy to cancel by the simple expedient of not showing up (while new bookings are fairly easy to get, by simply showing up). So apart from maybe reaching particular towns maybe on particular nights we are free birds.

The Arrival!

The night on the train passes in peaceful slumber broken only by the raucous squalling of sundry babies. The morning finds the train -- which had last night departed so punctually -- running two hours late. Which doesn't prevent me from awaking at six and keeping a watchful eye on the stations we pass. This is the only time Amit sleeps - he has been awake all night awaiting our station (not to mention the discomforts attendant trying to fit his 7'x2' frame into the 6'x1' bunk for any length of time).

We reach Palghat at eight, after having passed the stage of alert watchfulness and drifted towards sleepiness once again. Since we are carrying sandwiches for breakfast and Amit is wary about pavement food vendors, I reluctantly pass up the appetizing looking dosas and vadas on the platform and gobble a quick breakfast in the station waiting room. Then we find our way to the taxi stand to haggle with the drivers. In terms of language, I don't see any difference between this place and Finland, says Amit. While this is true of the local dialect, there are enough people around who understand English - in fact, further south we find a surprising number of people who speak fluent Hindi - so communication is never really a problem. As we discover when we negotiate with the cabbies, one of whom agrees to take us to Manakkad, also known as Mannarghat, where the entry to Silent Valley is.

[Here a longish parenthesis is required. Mannarghat and Palghat as pronounced by the locals somehow contrive to sound just the same as Manakkad and Palakkad. After spending the rest of the day practising, we too have acquired this trick of the tongue. The t sounds a bit like a d, while the sounds of gh and kk somehow meet at an in-between point which is impossible to faithfully represent in English. (A further parenthesis. The d sometimes sounds like an r, as in the case of Ednakulam, otherwise known as Ernakulam.) If you think that is complicate, consider this: Kochi for Cochin is simple enough to guess at, but why doesn't anyone every think to mention that it is virtually the same town as Ernakulam / Ednakulam? Again, Tiruchirapally may be Trichy and Thiruvananthapuram is commonly shortened to Trivandrum, but who'd ever imagine that Quilon is Kollam and Kozhikode is Calicut?? Which reminds me - zh, whenever it occurs, sounds more like dh (but not like rh), so that it is Kodhikode and Alapudha for Calicut and Alleppey respectively.]

Next page >>

Comments and information welcome. Write to poupee97 at yahoo dot com
Copyright © 2006 Amit and Anamika Mukherjee. All rights reserved.
Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1