Career. Last year, I decided I wanted to change careers.  Although I enjoyed some aspects of my job, there were others I didn’t like as much and after doing it for 10 years, I felt like it was time for a change.   I want to feel I am making a more direct contribution – that I am helping to actually create things that it some tiny way, make people’s lives a little bit easier.  And I also wanted to travel.  So my intention was to head to the UK and get a development job.  Right now, I’ve achieved the first, but not the second.   I have a 6 month part-time contract as a Web Developer.  In the other two days a week, I would like to pick up some freelance development & design work.

Love. As you can see in the last dozen posts on this blog, I spent a month in India with Gopal.  I not only had the most amazing time there, but I had a wonderful time with him.  Despite the fact that we have grown up in completely different cultures and surroundings, we have many things in common and have similar values and outlooks.  I used to be pretty sure what I was looking for in an ideal partner was too diverse, too complex to ever find in just one person, but I’m glad to find out I was wrong.  We are planning to get married at the end of the year.

Location.  Although I’m currently still in the same place in Auckland, once Gopal and I are married, our plan is to live in India for a while, before eventually heading on to the UK and Europe.  During the next 6 months, I need to eventually get rid of almost all of my possessions here and be ready to travel.  The timelines for getting to the UK are longer than I had originally planned, but when I left my lecturer job and decided to travel, I wanted to have some adventures, and I’m pretty sure that’s what I’m going to get

There are traffic laws, but nobody seems to pay them much mind. The rules of the road are don’t stop, don’t hit anything, and use your horn liberally to let everyone else know you are there. There is also a general guideline to drive on the left (unless it is more convenient to drive on the right at the time). It seems like this would lead to chaos, and it does. But somehow, it is chaos that works. Everyone gets where they need to go, people don’t have many accidents (and those they do are minor scrapes, not major wrecks) and nobody gets road rage. If someone or something is blocking the road, everything just sort of flows around it.

There are people and bikes and cars everywhere.  Simple things like walking along the roadside are not always simple. You have to actually walk on the road, along with all the other people, scooters, cars, trucks, buses and bullock carts. Not only will they not hit you, but nobody is bothered. If you walk beside the road, you are not only walking in the dirt and dust but you have to avoid litter, piles of dumped rubbish and the excrement of the cows and dogs that are scavenging amongst it. And all of this can exist right next to the most beautifully-decorated intricate temple, or next to a gorgeous white sand beach, or next to a breath-taking mountain view.

Crossing streets is even more challenging because the traffic just comes en masse.  If you waited for both sides of the the road to be empty, you would never go anywhere.  If you even waited for a break in one direction of traffic, you would never move.  You just step into whatever gaps you can find, and if necessary, you hold your hand out to ask the oncoming traffic to let you go.  And mostly, it does.  Everything just adjusts around you to accommodate.

There’s a lot of that sort of accommodation in a country as populous and diverse as India.  People can do pretty much anything and nobody pays it much mind.  Want to drive down the road carting a door longways across your scooter? No problem.  Want to sit cross legged 1m out on the road on the inside of a blind curve at 9pm?  No problem.  Want to carry your baby in your arms while riding side-saddle on the back of a scooter? With your other toddler between you and the driver and the third child standing in front of the driver?  With not a helmet in sight?  No problem.  Want to prostrate yourself in the middle of the road outside an event at 3am?  No problem.  Want to take your freshly-poured cocktail from one club to another that’s 10 minute drive away?  No problem.  This is India, they tell me, it’s a free country, you can do anything you want.

As well as being incredibly tolerant of all kinds of different behaviour, everywhere we went, everyone was unfailingly friendly and helpful.   We had no problems getting directions or restaurant recommendations.  When we had car problems, lots of people stopped and asked what the problem was, and many people at different times helped push the car to a different location or helped shine light on the engine while Gopal diagnosed the problem.  Gopal’s brother-in-law’s cousin gave up many hours and travelled many kilometres helping to procure parts for the car to get us back on the road again.  We had no problem flagging down a lift into town, and the driver insisted on taking us to decent accommodation in the city centre, and accompanying us inside to make sure we were looked after. 

Although my previous posts show a lot more of the food and the scenery, I don’t think you can really know what India is like until you actually experience it yourself.  Just go there!

The place we stayed was lovely and peaceful and quiet:

And had a gorgeous view from the room across some tea field and out to the hills:

It wasn’t actually until the next day as we drove back to town for some food that I realised how big and busy the town actually was.  This is only a tiny fraction of it.  I loved the bright colours used for the houses:

We also stopped to try some of the many different kinds of bananas you can get here.  I always thought there was just one kind of banana cultivated in the world nowadays, but I was wrong:

We spent a few very peaceful days here, enjoying the coolness and quiet.  As we left, we actually climbed a bit higher in the mountains, up to about 2200m.  Some of the views were spectacular:

The valley through which we descended was also gorgeous, although filled with terrifying hairpin bends all the way down.  This was taken from much lower down in the valley where we stopped for tea, looking back up the road we’d come down:

And in the hills past Ooty I got this, one of my favourite pictures of India.  Random cow, temple, power lines and gorgeous scenery.  The only thing missing is a motorbike (or a hundred).

It is only 30km from the nearest town of Mettupalayam to Coonoor, but in that 30km, we go up 1500m into the mountains.  It was around 7pm, just after dark when we left Mettupalayam (after stopping for a toilet break and a drinking coconut) and we expected to be at Coonoor within an hour.  However, a few minutes into climbing the hills, while overtaking, the engine died.  We rolled back down to somewhere a bit safer but it still wouldn’t start.  With a bit of pushing, we managed to get turned around and leveled out on a shoulder a little further down, but still no luck.  Then we rolled all the way back down the hill with the engine still refusing to turn over, hearing an elephant trumpet in the trees just beside the road as we did so.  We came to a stop just before the bridge that was the divider between civilisation and the wild forest.

This photo was taken the next day from the civilisation side:

A passing motorcyclist stopped to help, positioning his bike so that the light illuminated the engine, and Gopal tried various things to try and get the engine started again, without success.  Despite being well-intentioned, he really didn’t know what he was doing and was probably making things worse rather than better so eventually he left.  Gopal’s phone has an LED torch in it which was our only source of light.  I held that as he tried various diagnostics to figure out what was wrong.   All this would have been quite interesting except that as I mentioned in the previous post, I was still suffering the after effects of food poisoning.  And after a couple of hours (by now it was nearly 10pm), I really needed to go to the toilet.

I begged Gopal to let me have the torch so I could go off into the bushes, but he insisted it wasn’t safe.  He wanted us to walk back up the road to where we’d passed a police checkpoint and see if there was a toilet there.  I was not too happy at this – I really needed to go quite urgently at this point, but he insisted.  We’d barely walked a few steps when someone stopped and told us that even the road wasn’t safe and we should go the other way across the bridge to the nearest village.  So we turned around and went across the bridge.  Some women were standing outside a house and told Gopal that the area over the other side of a side road was safe, but while we were figuring out how to get into that area, someone took pity on me and let me use their toilet.  So I have now unlocked the ‘Successfully used a squat toilet in the dark’ achievement.

With that out of the way, we resumed the diagnostics, eventually ruling out issues with the fuel pump and fuel lines among other things.  When I say we, I of course mean Gopal   I held the torch and occasionally supplied my swiss army knife – he’s the only one who knows how an engine works.    After a while, and various people stopping to tell us it wasn’t safe on this side of the bridge,  we decided to push the car across the bridge and stop where it was safer and where there was some light.  Two guys on a scooter helped me push the car across – thankfully this time we only had to push it on a level surface.   After about half an hour under the other side, we had an audience of half a dozen people.  That came in handy when the power went off – one of them also had an LED on his cellphone and so we had a little bit more light.   They were a bit drunk though and not particularly helpful.   By this time though Gopal had narrowed the problem down to a crankshaft position sensor or its cable.  But without a multimeter or tools, it was really impossible to either fix or diagnose further. 

So we packed a few things into a backpack, locked up the car and hitched a ride back to Mettupalayam.  The first accommodation place we went to had neither hot water nor towels, but the place across the road was a little bit more well equipped.  Access to a toilet, shower and bed never felt so good

Getting the parts necessary to fix the car wasn’t going to be easy in a small town like Mettupalayam on a Sunday. After breakfast, Gopal went out to meet up with a relative of his brother-in-law to go down to Coimbatore (the nearest city) to find the part. 

I’d considered going out to get some water and for a walk around while I waited, but as soon as I stepped outside I knew that was a bad idea – it was about 38 degrees outside. I went back to my room, lay on the bed under the fan and called room service to bring me up some tea and water instead Two 1L bottles of chilled water and a cup of masala tea cost me $2.30.

I didn’t have to wait very long – the part was in stock at the first big store they went to, so Gopal came back and got it installed fairly quickly and was back at the hotel to pick me up in the early afternoon.  We decided not to stick around in Mettupalayam, but to head for the quietness and coolness of the hills of Coonoor.

Sadly, almost all the area between Beach Road and the actual beach was so densely packed with housing that you couldn’t even see there was a beach at all.  And the few breaks in the housing revealed that the beach wasn’t really that nice at all.  The accommodation was too expensive to be worth it and so we decided to keep heading south and find somewhere out of the city.  By then we’d been up for well over 24 hours (with just an hour or so nap around 6am) and driving all night and were dead tired so we decided to stop at a hotel, sleep, shower and then decide where to go from there.  

Gopal told the guys at the hotel that we’d been looking for nice beaches but Kerala didn’t seem to have any, and they all pretty much agreed that Kerala’s beaches aren’t very good.  So after some lunch (best room service ever – the food was delicious) and a sleep, we decided to head inland the next day instead of down the coast.  

Those plans had to be put on hold though because the dinner we had that evening (also room service at the hotel) gave me food poisoning.  I assume it was the chicken as that’s the only thing I had that Gopal didn’t, but in any case, I woke up at 1am and vomited.  And at 2am, and 3am.  By 4am I had diarrhoea as well.   The vomiting stopped around 8am but the diarhoea would continue for the next couple of days.   I spent most of the day in bed feeling awful.  Gopal was wonderful, going out and fetching me water in the middle of the night, getting some unflavoured electrolyte stuff, since the sachets I had were sweet orange and not very nice. He went out and bought all the things I’d enjoyed over the past two weeks: guava juice, mango shrikhand, 5 grain biscuits as well as some other yummy coconut ones, and some bananas and water.  I really couldn’t eat much that day though – I could eat the bananas, and I forced down some biscuits, but I couldn’t stomach much guava juice or the shrikhand – it was too sweet for me.

I felt a bit better the next day, so we hit the road, heading inland to a place called Silent Valley up in the hills in Kerala.   It was a beautiful drive up on a twisty ribbon of road through gorgeous rainforest.  Actually going deeper into Silent Valley National Park was a major production involving securing permits in advance, renting a jeep and hiring a guide, so we decided to continue on.  We had the idea to take the Nilgiri Mountain Railway from Mettupalayam to Ooty in two days time, so we were looking for somewhere convenient to stay.  Gopal called his brother-in-law who is from this area and he suggested the hill resort of Coonoor, so we decided to drive through and spend the next couple of nights there.

We’d stopped for breakfast that morning, but the only thing I could manage to eat was some omelet.  I still couldn’t really face much in the way of food but I tried to force down what I could.  If I’d known at the time that we wouldn’t make it to Coonoor and that brunch would be the only meal I’d eat that day, I might have made more of an effort.

Not only did we get a lovely hut right on the beach, but we also got this lovely Royal Enfield Bullet bike to ride around on while we were there.  Goa is pretty much the only place in India where you can easily rent a bike.

You can’t see it too well in this photo, but on this side there is a sari guard over the rear wheel and a little foot platform, designed so that Indian women wearing saris can ride sidesaddle.

We went for a little walk along the beach and came across this little beach hut where some kids were playing:

That night we headed out on the bike to Khola Beach, which is a few km north of Agonda and quite difficult to get to.  You have to find the turnoff to a 4km stretch of very bumpy dirt road that leads you to the top of the cliff where you can walk down to the beach.  There was a lovely bar and restaurant there where we sat and had some beers and some snacks while we watched the sunset.

The next day we headed down the coast 100km to a place called Gokarna, over the border in Karnataka.  We were planning to stay there after Goa but we thought we’d make a day trip to scope out the beaches and see where we wanted to go.   We passed some lovely spots along the way:

We first arrived at Gokarna beach itself which was crowded with cars and people padding in the water.  There are 4 other nearby beaches which are harder to get to, so we thought we might get a little bit more peace and quiet at one of those.  Om Beach was also very very crowded so we didn’t stay long.  Two other beaches were only accessible by walking all the way around Om Beach’s three bays and then a few km around the headlands – not something I wanted to do in the blazing afternoon sun, so we turned around and headed back to find Kudle beach, which is pretty much only accessible by bike to the headland and then on foot down a path to the beach.  It was worth it though:

We had a beer at one of the restaurants and watched another lovely sunset:

I should mention at this point that Goa is one state where alcohol is easily available.  Here is a liquor store where we stopped to buy some vodka.

The sprite bottle in the left of frame is the cocktail of fruit juice and vodka that Gopal is mixing up for us.  Beer was also easily available wherever we went.  Here is part of one night’s dinner: beer and delicious tender golden fried calamari:

The third day we were there we headed north from Agonda and checked out an old Portuguese fort.  We could see a beach from there with no obvious access so we decided to head there for sunset that night.  But first we needed some petrol, so we had a lovely drive through some small towns and villages out to the main road.  It was obvious from the colours on the ground that they were still celebrating Holi in this area, which was further confirmed when we saw this guy at the petrol station:

We basically pulled up next to this guy just so I could take his picture, which feels incredibly rude to me, but Gopal assures me is perfectly fine and normal in India.  The guys didn’t seem at all disturbed by it – he just calmly posed for the picture as if was the most normal thing in the world. 

We made it back to the beach:

And found the path down the cliff to the beach just in time for one more spectacular sunset:

I was going to get Gopal to tell me all the names for everything I’ve eaten, but we never seem to have time for that, so I’m just going to post pictures.

My favourite place in Malvan was Hotel Ruchira.  Hotel means a place where you can get food, not a place where you can stay.

Here is one of our dinners, the vegetarian thali with a side of fried prawns.

Bottom left is my half finished plate of kolambi fry (fried prawns).  I’m a terrible food blogger, most of the time I’d finished eating before it occurred to me to take a photo.  This time we had started eating, but we (mostly) reconstructed the plate for the photo.  

All meals came with roti (flatbread).  While there are sometimes spoons, the common way of eating is to use your fingers, right hand only. You break off a bit of roti and use it scoop up the other things and eat them.  We also often had bhakri, which is a softer, puffier flatbread usually not made from wheat flour.

The little white dish is yoghurt.  The yellow is , and the pinky purple liquid on the left is sol kadhi, which is a drink based on coconut milk soured with kokum (a local fruit) and garlic.  Some places where we ordered glasses of these it came with coriander leaves in it also.

The vegetarian dishes on the plate include a lovely one made of coconut and fennugreek leaves, which is delicious.  The others are delicious but I don’t know exactly what they are.  These sometimes bordered on too hot for me. 

Meals generally come with rice too, so that you can mop up any remaining sauces after you’ve finished the roti.  To avoid the rice getting cold, they’ll sometimes bring it at the end of the meal.  Often we skipped it altogether.

Here is a close up photo of another batch of kolambi fry:

We also had quite a lot of fish dishes.  Generally they just crumb and fry the entire fish:

We also had these absolutely divine things for dessert.

And for all of that, here is the bill:

185 rupees is about $4.47.  The bill usually comes with a bowl of fennel seeds which serve basically like breath mints and most restaurants.

Also, every restaurant (sorry, hotel) has a washbasin where you go and wash your hands before and after your meal (since you do eat with your fingers, after all).

Being right on the coast and having access to so much fresh seafood, we also had crab a couple of times:

It was incredibly tender and utterly delicious, but very difficult to eat.  It requires a LOT of effort to get the meat out of the crab with one hand, and is virtually impossible to do without making a mess.  I confess I wimped out and mostly left the difficult parts to Gopal, content to let him feed me little bits he’d extracted every now and again.

We had pohe for breakfast a few times.  It is very tasty, made from beaten rice and flavoured with onions, cumin seeds and curry leaves.

Below is another thali from a different place, with a side of bhurji – beautifully flavoured scrambled eggs.  The little white dish in front is shrikhand, a delicious dessert made from thickened yoghurt whipped with sugar.

I also tried some sugar cane juice.  They take a bunch of sugar cane ( looks like bamboo sticks) and feed it through a shredder and collect the juice.

The result is as delicious as you’d expect pure sugar juice to be .  These juicers are quite a common sight on the side of the road.

The other delicious thing we had was this wonderful coconut and sugar confection.  It is kind of like coconut ice, but more delicious, flavoured with a bit of cardamom.   We bought lots of this, but sadly, we eventually lost some of it to ants in Goa.

Flower seller:

Lentils at the market:

Street view.  Scooters, people and a cow:

Traffic:

Fishing boats in the harbour:

Leisure boats at the wharf:

Train at the Rock Garden:

The lane leading to the beach where we stayed:

Flowers along the lane:

Family walking on the beach:

Gopal taking pictures on the beach at sunset:

We’re in the leftmost unit – behind the car.  Here is the view standing in the doorway of the unit looking back towards the beach:

Here is a picture of the inside of the room, with the bathroom behind the wall:

Here’s Gopal in the doorway:

And here are a couple of pictures of the beach.  This is taken from just outside the entrance to where we are staying:

Sunset:

Panorama:

As we walked down the road, groups of kids were squirting each other with liquid colour, or throwing coloured powder at each other.  One of the kids warned Gopal: ‘uncle, don’t go there, those guys will throw colour on you’.  They didn’t intentionally, but we did catch some splatter when they got some of the other kids.  As we walked further down the road, a guy leapt out from behind a wall and dumped a bucket of water over a passing scooter – perfectly timed.  The kids were very respectful though – although they were squirting each other with dye, they weren’t squirting anyone else unless they were already covered.   We just had to be careful to stay out of range.

A little further on we came to a group of guys taking a rest from playing Holi:

One of the men came up to us and gave us our own Holi colours:

Later, when we went and got some breakfast, there were groups of kids outside dousing each other  with buckets of colour.  One kid was even refilling his bottle by scooping up the blackish brown water in the puddles in the street.    They were threatening to douse many passers by, but again, they were well behaved and only got people who were already covered in dye.

Later on, when we were walking through the market, someone painted Gopal with a silver stripe, and shook his hand to get him covered in silver.  Unlike the other colours which wash out easily in water, the silver stuff is oil based and hard to remove once dry so it had to come off straight away.

When we got back to our place, the boys there had been playing Holi too: