Sovereign Nations

I don’t know, but I had a ball yesterday.

James and I rode out to this big empty square. I remembered it being very quiet there one Sunday when we were looking for a beach, so it seemed like a good place to try my hand at riding the motorcycle myself.

James has been driving everywhere we go. He has a ton of experience riding motorcycles and he picked up the rhythm of Indian traffic very quickly. Since he doesn’t have to think about operating the motorcycle, he was able to focus on getting used to the much more dangerous part.

Me, I rode a 50cc motorcycle when I was around 10 years old. I remember enjoying it to a certain extent, but I was already too big for it and preferred the go-cart, the tractor, or – if Dad felt like giving me a lesson – the truck. I remembered the feeling of letting off the clutch and twisting the throttle. I remembered how the motorcycle seemed to want to jump out from under me. That was one of the things I had learned on the little bike – how to really sit on it and ride with it.

When I first tried riding the Bullet we have now, I felt the same thing. I was standing so firmly on the ground that I almost didn’t move when the bike started rolling. It came back to me suddenly, in that moment, how it felt to ride a motorcycle. Way fun!

But I didn’t really get any practice. I just got going, tried out the gears, and turned around in circles. This was in an empty festival yard – a big open area with some pitted spots, some gravel, and some grass. My newly-healed ankle whined at me with even that little bit of starting the bike and shifting, so I didn’t last long. All I really achieved was the feeling that, in an emergency, I could get James and myself to a hospital or hotel or something.

Yesterday, I more or less ran drills while James sat, bored but alert in case I ran into trouble. One side of the square has six little sleeping policemen, so I practiced remembering to clutch when I slowed way down for them. That side was lined with houses. One side was clear and wide without much traffic, so I could get up a little speed and practice running up and down through the gears. One side was pitted and I practiced weaving around the potholes. And the last side was in real traffic, so I practiced looking for an opening and getting out into the flow.

So there I was going around and around. On the first circle, the guys hanging out stared at me. On the second circle, I killed the engine and had a little trouble starting it. Those guys were all over me, advising me on how to make it start. I knew what they were trying to tell me – use the compression release and give it a little throttle – but just nodded and smiled while I got it going. They all cheered and waved me off.

On the third circle, they looked confused. A small gaggle of women had appeared in the walled enclosure fronting their house and they smiled at me with enormous eyes. Then a group of children gathered and sat as though I was better than TV.

Around I went, and each time I passed these people, they looked both confused and delighted. I had slowed way down for a kid – you know, a baby goat – and the guys yelled, where are you going?

Now I thought that was a pretty funny question. Here I was, going in circles, and they thought I was lost? I just laughed and kept moving. The next time around, the kids asked me and I answered without stopping, around in circles. I laughed again, but this time with a slight incredulity that added a sharp edge to the sound.

The ladies asked last. This time I stopped. I put the bike in neutral and leaned forward on the handlebars. “Practicing,” I said, and they looked confused. “Learning to ride the bike,” I said and made a circle with my finger. One lady said, “Ah!” and chattered at the others. Soon, they were all smiling and nodding. As I waved and started off again, one lady leaned over the wall and passed the word to the next-door neighbors.

I rode off, knowing that the word would spread. Maybe they’d stop staring! No such luck. A woman riding a bullet is a rather exciting sight. A white woman in a churidar riding a bullet in circles is just plain comedy. Or so it seemed to me. The whole neighborhood ended up coming out to see. I felt like I should be doing tricks – standing on my head on the seat, popping wheelies and jumping the rock piles.

Finally, I got tired of the circles and the staring. James still wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea of riding bitch, and I wasn’t enthusiastic about being responsible for his safety as well as my own and that of the others on the road. Too much to worry about.

I crossed the road with the major traffic and took off down a quiet stretch, straight and with few side roads. It was a perfect place to get up some speed and feel like I was really riding. There were sleeping policemen periodically along the road and I had to slow quickly once I saw them. I felt that was good practice as well, except when I didn’t see one coming and put the bike into a slight slide hitting the back break too hard. Okay, now I know how hard too hard is. I swung in a wide circle around a flag pole right next to the All-India Radio tower and zoomed on back down the road. This time, I was prepared for each bump, and I had a grand time.

When I got back to the major road, there was a snarl in process. A bus was at the stop, a car had tried to turn behind it, the rickshaw blocking the car’s way was in the right, but trying to back away sideways to let the car through. A river of pedestrians was taking the opportunity to cross the road, the bright blues, reds, whites flowing around the red bus and mostly black and white cars, motorcycles, and rickshaws.

Well, it seems as though I was the last straw. When I pulled up, the bus pulled out. That should have cleared the way, but instead, the rickshaw drivers were staring at me, the car’s driver was grinning, the pedestrians were pausing to look, and a woman in the back of a rickshaw almost fell out trying to see me better. The rickshaw was making a right turn off the main road, so they were stuck at an angle just in front of me. She was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, and she was smiling at me as though I was the best thing in her life.

I think I’ve inadvertently been in the closet on this blog. I like women. I like them in, you know, that way. Though I put away the idea of flirting when we came to India (just what I need, another set of miscues to confuse me!), I’ve been getting these smiles. The smiles I get from the women here in India say to me “I am interested in you,” “I would like to know more about you,” and “how fascinating!” These are looks and smiles I’m used to interpreting as flirtatious. So, as a person who likes to flirt with other women, who is open to the idea of taking things beyond flirting…it’s quite the tease.

So yeah, there I was, the most beautiful woman in the world smiling at me as though she’d like to take me home and figure me out, as though she admired me and wanted to get to know me better. It knocked my socks off, and it took a couple of horns honking as the traffic mess sorted itself out before I remembered that she was probably not flirting. Sigh. Oh well.

They drove off, heading past me, and I nodded to her wave. When I turned my head back, there was a group of about ten women all staring at me in the same way! Three or four generations of women, all lovely in some way. I felt special, dangerous, and influential, just sitting on a motorcycle at that intersection. The men were amazed but the women – right at that moment, they all loved me.

I bounce back and forth like that whenever James and I wander out of our writing room. Sometimes, I feel like the funniest thing ever. When I’m trying to eat and I suspect I’m not doing it right. When my opinion of the hacking in the butcher shop shows in my face. When my dupatta won’t stay put no matter how firmly I hold it. And sometimes I feel like a rock star. Children point and laugh, they run to us to ask us how we’re doing. They smile with their whole bodies. Did I do that? Did I inspire that happiness and excitement? Women look at me as though my happiness is a compliment to them. Whew.

What will it feel like to go to another place, to go back to the US or to a place where I can pass as a local? Will I feel invisible? Will I be saddened and will my happiness fade? I am generally a happy person, but I never – never – walk down the street here for long with a frown on my face.

Our usual lunch guys did us an accidental favor.

When the flood happened, around the 20th, they closed down.  I assumed it had something to do with the unsanitary nature of serving food while ankle deep in ditch water, but I was wrong.  Turns out that they close down for a few weeks every year at this time.

Thrown on our own resources, we wouldn’t have starved, but we wouldn’t have been very happy either.  Rather than eat our own cooking for lunch and dinner, we rode the motorcycle into Thampanoor pretty much every day for lunch.  This sucked a bit for two reasons: 1) It’s a little ways off and poor James had to go from deep in the story he’s writing to ultra-aware of the traffic.  2) The places in Thampanoor are roughly twice as expensive as we’ve gotten used to paying.

So Saturday came and the power went out.  It went out at about 9:30 and was still out at 11:30 when we lost patience for waiting to be able to work.  To distract us, I suggested that we take action – do something that I’d been thinking about for a while.  We know our main street pretty well, but Trivandrum (like much of India) is busy everywhere, not just on the main drags.  So we thought we’d go exploring.

My ulterior motive in selecting a direction was simple.  I wanted to find a veg-only restaurant within walking distance of the house.

Six months ago, there were no vegetarian restaurants within an hour drive.  A year ago, the closest vegetarian restaurant was a raw food place that served tasty but heavy food.  And we just made our options work for us at any restaurant that sounded good.

In India, we’ve eaten at few restaurants that also serve meat.  It’s safer to look for “Veg Only” or “Pure Veg” on the building than to try to communicate in our non-existant Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi, etc, etc, etc.  When we have ended up in meat-serving restaurants (like the one we’d been eating lunch at), veg was one word the server usually understood.  But we have also been tossed out on our ears.  Okay – we left, but it kind of felt like tossed out when they informed us that there were no veg options.  Mutton biriyani.  No thanks.

So where does one find vegetarian food in a mostly Muslim neighborhood?  Well, I was hoping we’d find it near a temple.

I’d read about one called the Attukal Bhagavathy Temple.  It’s in the Guiness Book of World Records.  No really.

It’s dedicated to the goddess Bhagavathy, who is the Supreme Mother.  She is an incarnation of Vishnu who annihilates evil and protects the good in the world.  Refreshing for a person raise with soft females gods like Mary, she is depicted with four arms, each of which holds a weapon.  There’s another story about a woman named Kannaki.  I can’t figure out how that one fits in.  Can anyone enlighten me?

We walked first to the grocery store, being as though I thought I remembered it being near there (and we needed groceries).  Sure enough, they pointed us up the side street right next to them, saying, “Go straight!”

This being India, that meant go straight until the road curves left, then right, then ends in a brick wall.  Then you go straight on the nearest road to the right.  Then go right.  Um.  I think that was it.

We found the temple, no problem.  Well, first we found a smaller temple and I was surprised that it hosted such festivals as I’d read about.  Then some young boys got us turned back around and we made it to this one.

Sure enough, there are two vegetarian restaurants right there in front of the gate.  Yippee!

We’ve been back there every day since then.  (Four days now.)  They’ve gotten used to us already, sort of.  And our server has asked us to come to his home and visit.  Since he lives about 3km from Neyyar Dam, which we still haven’t found, we thought that sounded lovely.

So we get some of the best food we’ve had in India and we get to finally see Neyyar Dam!

Also, the restaurant we like – called Hotel Abhirami, though they have no rooms – is full of really great people.  They are pleasant and interesting and helpful and enthusiastic, which is a welcome change from the somewhat endearing, crotchety, grumpy, taciturn guys at Hotel Medina right here.  It’s worth the walk, for sure.

Besides, did I mention how good the food is?  We get a ridiculous pile of rice, dal, sambar, rasam, theeyal, aviyal, and something that the server called buttersauce but seems like coconut and pineapple with mad spices.  Yum.

And while we eat, there’s music from the temple.  We could barely hear it today, but yesterday it was broadcast to the whole neighborhood.  On Saturday, when we first visited, we had the amazing luck of showing up as they were playing and we recorded almost four minutes.

Click here for the Temple Music.

If this is a regular day, what are the festivals like?

The big festival is the Pongala Mahotsavam.  This is what their website says about this festival: “The entire area of about 5 kilometre radius around temple with premises of houses of people of all caste, creed and religion, open fields, roads, commercial institutions, premises of Government offices etc. emerges as a consecrated ground for observing Pongala rituals for lakhs of women devotees assembling from different parts of Kerala and outside. The ceremony is exclusively confined to women folk and the enormous crowd, which gathers in Thiruvananthapuram on this auspicious day is reminiscent of the Kumbhamela Festival of North India. ”

Wondering about that world record?

Here it is:

So, on Monday the 27 of October in 2008 in Trivandrum, Kerala, India the rain just stopped, kaput! It was like someone just turned the faucet off. On Tuesday the 28th the sun came out and Dena and I hit the road on our Royal Enfield Bullet headed for the confluence of the Arabian Sea to the west, the Indian Ocean to the south and the Bay of Bengal to the east, the sangam of the three great bodies of water that feed the Indian Subcontinent.

The two of us will use pretty much any reason to just up-n-travel but this time, being our tenth wedding anniversary, the official end of the North East Monsoon and of course the Indian Festival of Light, Diwali, we had our reasons stacked up like a Dravidian temple so off to Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, India we went!

We packed light because Dena has to carry the bulk of our load alone on her back while I drive. Two changes of light clothes each, our swimming gear, some water, our travel logs, books and that’s about it. I carried my camera bag around my neck and shoulder and rested it on the gas tank as I drove comfortably enough. Although the roads are riddled with treacherous pot holes the Bullet with two people weighing it down is a pretty stable and slow ride so we took our sweet time and stopped where ever we saw fit to shake off the road and shoot a photo or two. It was a beautiful 80km drive through some breathtaking country side.

Unlike most of the U.S. when you go from state to state in India you are going into another culture and language altogether. Tamil Nadu is no exception to that rule and we quickly found that out when we stopped for our first meal in Kuzhittura just across the border from Kerala. We ordered (what we thought was) our standard fare, two veg-thali meals but the guy taking our order either didn’t believe that’s what we wanted or just misunderstood because what we got was a kind of fried rice thing with some stuff glopped on top of it, it was bad, really bad so we ate what we could, smiled the best we could, said our namaste’s and got the hell out of that place and hit the road again. We stopped a few more times before reaching Kanyakumari because Tamil Nadu has some truly amazing mountains and some of the most unbelievable flowing landscape one could ever lay eyes on, it was an incredible drive!

We got to lands-end at Kanyakumari (or as the English called it, Cape Comorin) at about 4:00 in the afternoon and wasted no time getting a room and setting out on foot for that blue oceans sangam and of course it was everything we were hoping it would be. The rocks leading away from the beautiful white sandy beach were littered with people jockeying for the perfect sunset position and although Kanyakumari is obviously a tourist city every one seemed to be in high spirits in anticipation of the coming dusk.

We walked ourselves raw, found a fantastic old observation tower, watched the show and headed back to our room for some photo editing and some good old fashioned R&R…

Now, Dena and I really do like to park the bike and set out on foot as much as we can so the next morning after an Idly, Sambar, and Chai Breakfast we went on a short bike ride to a little town on a perfectly crescent beach called Culachal. We stripped down to our swim gear and bathed our bodies in the warm Arabian Sea then took off out the jetty for some photos and some drying time.

It is very important to note that if you have white skin and go to a little town in India you have to expect to be heavily stared at, at all times and approached by at least three or four people wanting to know your bees-wax. Most people are very polite for the most part but being the object of inquisition is always a bit disconcerting but a part of traveling non-the-less. As a matter of fact we believe this aspect of our travels to be one of the most important. We believe that we are American diplomats, therefore exchanging information, smiles, handshakes and stories whenever possible is essential to our adventures and will ultimately bring us closer to our global community.

We left the beach at Culachal and went back to the city of Kanyakumari for a huge thali meal at a local hotel and found out that we weren’t in that different of a place, we were just in the wrong restaurant back in Kuzhittura is all. A 14 inch stainless steel plate piled high with as much rice and curries as you can put down for 40 rupees , now that’s more like it!

We took the ferry to the Vivekananda Rock Memorial (the farthest point south in India), shot the obligatory pictures of the tourist stuff but discovered while out there a huge wind power generating plant to the East of the rock and dedicated ourselves to finding out more about it and getting as close as we could get to some of the generators! So we got back to our room showered, jumped on the Bullet and headed East…

What we discovered was a huge wind farm consisting of about 200 generators spread out over about 100 square kilometers in a very rural part of Tamil Nadu. We shot a bunch of pictures of the generators that most people that approached us didn’t even see anymore and ended up going to a beautiful little fishing town of about 1000 people called Chettikulam that we just fell in love with. We drove into town, parked the bike and were of course immediately surrounded by the about 20 kids all trying out their English on us. When we told them that we were interested in the wind-power generators they just shrugged it off as being kind of weird and went on playing around us as if we were a new aspect of a very old game. One of the older fishers of the town guided us around showing us all the good things he thought we should take pictures of, the old-timer, his boat, his kids, his friends et-cet… When we were done we made our way back to the Bullet and discovered upon our arrival a faction of the town’s matriarchy, about ten ornately sari-clad women surrounded by children. They asked us as many questions about us and what we were doing in their town as they could, mainly speaking directly to Dena. One woman wanted to see my camera as if to make sure it was what I said it was. Once the business of grilling us was over and they were all satisfied that we were harmless it was all smiles and happy goodbyes. We took off out of Chettikulam feeling an incredible high, a civilized feeling that we had just made actual contact with real people in a real place, it was wonderful, it was civilization.

We then went to a random deserted beach to watch the sun go down on the festival of light, Diwali, had another incredible meal and made our way back to our hotel.

On the way back home to Trivandrum we tried to stay on the coast as much as possible and because of that it took us all day to make a trip that could have been 80 km’s but that was really ok with us, we were traveling, together, seeing things we’d never seen before and for us that was somehow enough.