Tim and Patrices Travel Blog
Tims amazing weblog, so you can see what he’s up to.Archive for October, 2008
The Backwaters and Munnar
We caught an eight hour ferry/cruise through the backwaters of Kerela and it was everything we had hoped it would be. We took many photos.
We chugged into Allephey at about 7pm, an hour after sunset. After a brief overnight stay we hit the waterways again with a 32km long water bus ride to the town of Kottayam.
Here we may have been conned into getting a taxi ride. No great deal as the taxi was fairly good value and brought us directly to Munnar.
We learnt a valuable lesson. Don’t believe anything a tuc-tuc driver tells you (obviously) and neither any ‘independent’ source he shows you. Find your own sources.
We arrived in Munnar (1500m) last night. Is is much cooler up here and we have put away our flip flops and sandels for the first time during 6 weeks.
Today we did a tourist trip which included a brief elephant ride and a visit to the top of the Ghats at 1955m. Here we could have seen down into Tamil Nadu but the cloud cover was low.
I’m having an early night as the thinner air and activity makes a middle aged man like me want his bed early. Hopefully the weather will continue to sunshine tomorrw.
Despite looking, all ‘High Speed Internet’ signs lead to a 100k modem around here and having spent a number of hours already waiting for slow up-loads I am going to wait till I get a proper connection to do some photos.
Speak soon.
Moving North
As you can see from the satellite photo Kerela may not be the best place to be. The weather changes minute by minute, blistering heat, 50mph vertical rain. Luckily I am from Yorkshire and its a bit like Scarborough on a good day. Tomorrow we move north, through the backwaters and onto a 2600m tea plantation.
Yoga and Massage
Patrice is in pamper heaven. Yesterday she went for a two hour massage with two masseurs. This morning we got up at the crack of dawn for our first meeting with our personal Yogi instructor. He is more bendy than your average Yogi, Booboo.
I feel better for having done this so we have decided to have a few extra sessions each day.
We have decided to stay for 5 days after which we will move on again.
The train from hell
Well we have arrived in Karalla, in a village called Varkala to be precise. The trip was momentous.
We set off on Monday at 1900 from Ponducherry and caught a train to a nearby rail junction to await our sleeper train to the other side of India. We had a two hour wait but it arrived on time, right destination, right time. We got on and made ourselves comfy. Wrong train. We thought this was just a technical naming problem as all the train services have numbers. The conductor pointed this out to us but assured us there would be no problem.
The sleepers were much more basic than we had expected. Nothing a bucket of hot flash liquid and a scrubber wouldn’t sort out. However we didn’t have either.
The train was crowded but there was one carriage set aside for people who did not know the system and had booked less than three days in advance. As a result their tickets cost an additional Rs. 300. This was us. As a result we nearly had the carriage to ourselves.
The sleepers consisted of rows of PVC covered foam mattresses three high. We had been advised to book the top ones.
We tried to sleep. Chai sellers awoke us at every station trying sell their wares. At 0130 we had noisy company in the form of a small group of young lads who alighted at the next station.
Dawn broke. I think I got about two hours sleep. Patrice faired better.
At ten in the morning I fell asleep again to be awoken by Patrice informing me she had a nasty feeling that the train had terminated. It had, 150 km short of our destination.
We caught a tuc-tuc to the nearest bus stand and then two buses (3 and a half hours) to Trivandrum. From here we caught another train.
As we were buying the tickets we were advised a number of times that the train was ‘a passenger train.’ Good, we thought, we are passengers. ‘Passenger train’ is a euphemism for crowded stinky hell hole. An hour and ten minutes of standing room only brought us, at last, to Varkela.
A short tuc-tuc ride and we were at the recommended Bamboo Village. This is a group of six Bamboo huts set back off the edge of a cliff. Hugging the cliff line is a series of book shops, restaurants and hippie shops selling ‘ethnic’ ware only worn by tourists.
We had been advised that this is a backpackers haven and isn’t the real India. We don’t care. The bamboo hut costs three pounds a night (with bathroom), the restaurants are similarly priced and we like it.
On to Kerrala
We have now left Auroville and are staying in Pondicherry for 24 hours. We have booked at overnight train to the southern most tip of India which we catch tomorrow night. It was 12 pounds for the both of us. Pricy but one of only a few long distance trips involved.
Finally I am able to upload some photos.
Goodbye Auroville
Well, we have spent a few days in Auroville and are lentiled out. Today we are in Pondacherry which is as French as a Frenchman singing Chansons with a baguette in a stripy shirt. Well almost. They left a few years after independence so the place has a unique tax status, apparently. The police have French hats and everything, and yes I can smell baguettes above the usual sewerage smell. We will probably leave on Monday, by train, which should be an experience.
Auroville, paradise or fantasy ?
We finally made it off the island, is was nice there a bit too nice and there was a waiting list to get off the island. This kind of helped to complete the Robinson Crusoe experience. We caught the plane back rather than the boat. 1400km in two hours rather than 60. After landing in Chennai (again) we caught the bus for 3 and a half hours to Pondicherry. Just north of this is the famous Auroville. It was recommended by some friends we met in the Andamans. Their site is here. After all we are here to experience new things. We aim to stay here until Sunday and plan to leave on Monday. Auroville was started in 1968 and after an big international inauguration ceremony most people left. Slowly the international hippies came in their vans, overlanding from far away. They stayed on the barren plains. We had a talk about the eco-renovation of the area by a local ecologist. It was very interesting. In 40 years the inhabitants have stopped the soil erosion and planted and grown a ‘holding forest’. In the past 15 years ecologists have discovered what type of forest would have been there hundreds of years ago and systematically re-introduced it.
3000 people live around Auroville. It has a mystical ball structure at the centre, which while harmless has an air of 1960s about it and is reminiscent of the Logan’s Run film. I’ve checked my palm, no colours, just as well really since I am 40 it would be Timmys limp. Anyway I digress.
So the hippies came and started to build this international town thingy. There are a few 1968 town plan models showing an impressive galaxy type town plan. Where is it? I suspect that there are too many people re-aligning their chukra’s and saying Om a lot for anything to get done in a hurry. The re-afforestation is impressive as is the introducton of re-newable energy projects into the area.
I get the impression that Auroville is not a dictatorship nor a democracy but rather a piece love and don’t upset anyone-ocracy. As such I do not expect the spiral galaxy town to be built any time this side of 2200, I may be wrong.
We are told that Auroville does not have a particular religion. In our guest house there are a number of photographs of ‘The Mother’. They appear in the dining room to gaze down on you while you eat in almost monastic silence. Auroville does not attract extroverted loud people. So in place of the omnipresent Pope or Dali Lama or Elephant-God thing (I know his name but he is just too silly) pictures we have ‘The Mother’ looking like an octogenarian Mystic Meg and frankly freaking me out a bit.
I hear they are building a shrine to her – but hey this isn’t a religion….. is it?
Over the next few days I hope to learn a bit more about sustainable technology and growing my own veg. The food here is great. We will then leave, I think I may have a negative aura or something and my Chukras are probably out of alignment (I’ll check in bed tonight).
The other thing is no-one hardly ever smiles, except the local Tamils who on the international hippie gravy train have a much nicer life thank you. Surly if this is utopia ???? Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Night Dive
The advanced open water course allows you to go on five ’speciality dives.’ One of these was a night dive. We met at 16:30, myself Ilan and the instructor Dixon. Patrice came along for the ride. We had to paddle out to the boat due to a low tide. After dodging the reef we made our way on to the “Hammerhead”, an adapted Burmese fishing boat. Tonight we were diving on the Wall a corral reef a short distance north east of Havelock Island and within sight of the jetty. En route Dixon gave me a safety briefing that included never to turn off your torch, as if…
It sounded simple.
Patrice took some sunset photos and within thirty minutes we were at the site. The boat was tied to the marked buoys. All fell silent. A few exploratory throws of a nylon rope showed only a slight current. We waited for the orange glow of the day to darken. Within ten minutes we began to don out wetsuits. In the distance we could see rain showers over the Island of North Andaman. At this point I was apprehensive.
I sat on the edge of the boat, checked my air supply held my facemask in place and lent back.
With a swoosh and gurgle I felt the usual sensations of a backwards entry but now without the familiar cyan sky and blanket of white foamy bubbles, I saw only shades of grey. I surfaced and instinctively changed the regulator mouthpiece for the snorkel to save air. I swan to the anchor line for our decent. I found the orange drift line and pulled myself forward to save energy. Dixon was waiting at the anchor line. “Ok,ready?”, “Ok” I replied and we began to descend. Almost immediately my mouth was full of seawater. I quickly ascended muttered something under my breath about my stupidity and again changed the snorkel for the regulator. A basic error, clearly there was much to think about.
Again I began to dive and was Dixon and Ilan patiently waiting for the rookie. “OK ?’, “OK,” I replied. I pressed the black button on the buoyancy control device and began to sink.
Instead of the anchor line slowly fading into a royal blue haze ten to fifteen metres below me it quickly ran to black no more than five metres below. I was entering the abyss.
Scuba diving is a journey into a foreign world, a world to which you are a visitor and don’t belong. At night this is increased. ‘I really don’t belong here,’ I thought to myself. The five metre visibility pushed on ahead of me as I readjusted for the increasing pressure. My childhood days of walking to school in the Yorkshire fog told me I didn’t have to look back to realise the visibility was chasing me from behind…
Touchdown ! It was colder than usual, clearly the sun’s warmth usually penetrated a good 20 metres during the day. We then began our 45 minute journey exploring the reef. Never more than 5 metres from Dixon and his slightly stronger torch. Many of the corrals seemed to be more open at night and some of the fan varieties could be examined by shining a torth through them from behind.
Many fish swam close to the reef and I noticed it radiated a heat from the previous day. In a crevice Dixon highlighted the ominous jaws of a giant Moral Eel. The going was harder than I had expected and the flow of illuminated plankton past my facemask and slow progress told me I was swimming in a current.
All too quickly my air pressure reduced from its initial 180 bar to 70 bar. I indicated this to Dixon and we continued. After 45 minutes and now on 50 bar I looked over my right shoulder and saw the anchor line. We had done a circuit around the reef, time to ascend. Slowly we rose for a minute. Dixon’s depth gauge showed 4.5m, I looked up expecting to see the surface, we could have been at 50m – nothing…. We waited for 3 minutes at our safety stop to enable some of the excess nitrogen squeezed into our bodies under pressure to be released. When you open a bottle of coke you do it slowly to stop the bubbles expanding too quickly, the same thing except rather than sticky fingers you die.
Ilan wiggled the anchor line and placed his torch onto his chest to extinguish the light. We were surrounded by thousands of tiny phosphorescent plankton that danced briefly and faded away on the current. The sensation transcended description.
We continued our slow assent and without warning my hearing jumped back into life. I hit the blue button on the buoyancy control to keep me above water, the reassuring tightening around my lower back told me I needed to swim no longer. Above me a blanket of stars lit the clear moonless night. I kicked out towards the silhouette of the Hammerhead. I had completed my first night dive.
