Deep South

A fresh panther track on the trek. The only hint of wildlife

These elephants swam in front of our boat across the stream

Tumeric left as an offering inside Periyar National Park

The Communist party struts its stuff




The Christians strut their stuff

Cutting the tea

Dinner the first night with the Dutch and French families

My hike along the ridge overlooking the tea plantations.

Soon we are overtaken by clouds

A tea picker hikes along the road

It all (the tea plantations) looked like a Japanese garden

Cooking demonstration before dinner with Larry (blue) and

Judi (purple)

While Dick napped, these birds made quick work of his banana


It's true, what we heard. Southern India is easier than northern India. It's warm and green and fragrantly ripe. The roads are generally better and the driving a little less lunatic than in the North. The people are more easy-going. That's probably because tropical people in most places tend not to push themselves or others too hard. The region is also better governed than in the North---state governments in India have a lot of autonomy. And better schools, health services and working conditions mean that even the poor aren't living quite so close to the edge.

Delhi Airport was a tumultuous mess when we left---far worse than Newark even---but Kochi (formerly Cochin) International Airport was capacious and efficient. It was like landing in a kind of tropical Amsterdam. Nearly all Indian-government-owned and -run institutions are essentially instruments of political patronage and graft. So they work poorly, when at all. Kochi Airport's exception is explained in Edward Luce's masterly overview of today's India, "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (Doubleday, 2007).

When V.J. Kurian, the highway chief of Kerala state, was offered a $200,000 bribe to award the construction contract for a new Kochi airport to the second-lowest bidder, he refused and was swiftly reassigned to an obscure post. (Nobody in the Indian administrative services is ever fired.) Kurian was brought back, however, when his successor botched everything and the airport atrophied into a dysfunctional ruin. Under the "eccentric" Kurian, the Kochi Airport has been well run since 1992 and even turns a profit.

One of the services Luce performs with his book, a best-seller in India, is highlighting the good efforts of Kurian and other honest politicians and public servants across the country. With its 7 percent growth rate, India may, in fact, succeed in spite of itself. A colleague of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Luce, "I think we should all be studying the history of how corrupt American politics was in the early twentieth century. It proves you can still rise to become a great power."

Long-ago history is another reason Kerala and its neighboring state to the east, Tamil Nadu, are in relatively good shape. The spice trade---manna for the deprived European palate---regularly exposed southern India to outside ideas from the late 15th century on, and there was occasional contact much earlier. Keralans were visited by Chinese, Arabs, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British trader and missionaries. Vasco da Gama died in Cochin in 1524. We peered down at his former crypt in the Fort Cochin Franciscan church (da Gama's remains were later moved to Lisbon).

Kerala has the highest literacy rate in India, 90 percent, and the most Christians. It aso has the oldest synagogue, established in 1555, and rebuilt in 1664. Only 16 Jews remain in "Jew Town." The rest have drifted away to Mumbai, Europe and Israel.

The local maharajahs were mostly tolerant, perhaps because stability increased their spice-trade wealth. They spread the riches around, too---a trend accelerated by the communist party, which was elected to run the state for a period in the 1950s and still has clout here. Kumily, where I'm posting this, may be the last town on earth with a big billboard on the main street heroically picturing Marx, Engels and Lenin. Be assured tht capitalism is under no threat in Kerala. The privately owned hotels, restaurants and shops catering to visitors to nearby Periyar National Park appear to be thriving, and revolution does not loom, just decent public services.

Our own pleasure in Kerala has been great. In Fort Cochin, a serene enclave on a peninsula by the Arabian Sea, we ambled by the waterfront and watched fishermen operate their clever cantilevered "Chinese" fishing nets, ate dosas (pancakes with spicy stuffing), enjoyed an evening of Kathakali theater (see photos), rode tuk-tuks over to Jew Town, and looked in at a nearby 16th-century palace that had a mural of a multi-limbed Krishna pleasuring six milkmaids simultaneously. Best of all, on each aromatic night we strolled along lanes sheltered by rain trees and under a big friendly moon that was sometimes buttery and other nights almost papaya-colored.

Our best look at Kerala fruits and spices came on a thee-day, two-night houseboat trip---just us and our crew of four!---through the rivers, canals and lakes that make up the Kerala "backwaters." We had a little mat-and-rattan cabin with a tiny bathroom. Mostly we stayed on deck and watched the villages, coconut palms and banana groves glide by. Men on boats made of wild jackfruit, coconut fiber and fish oil raked mussels or dredged sand to sell, pan by pan. Women on shore wshed clothes and cooked. Some spun rope out of coir---coconut fiber. Kids played and yelled "hullo!" When we yelled hello back, they laughed and hopped around.

Our cook, Sambin, was a middle-aged, good-natured man who spoke incomprehensible English with great elan. The food, prepared in a tiny galley behind the cabin, was superb. The snack on our first day out was tapioca root cooked in coconut oil with tumeric, small onion, curry leaves, mustard seed, garlic, green chilis (not native---chilis arrived in India from the Caribbean), shredded coconut and fresh ginger. Lunch consisted of three chutneys (the one with pineapple and cashews was the best), banana-flower salad, mixed-vegatable curry, grilled fish, rice and chapatis. All this was served atop a banana leaf. Sambin urged us to eat with our hands, Indian-style. We did, and looked like a couple of one-year-olds in high chairs. (more often we have eaten daintily with utensils, which are available to foreign tourists in most venues.)

The first night we tied up at Sambin's village. He and Ragesh, an earnest young electrical engineering student who was our guide, led us to the Hindu temple, where a holiday service was underway. As a loudspeaker blasted what sounded to us like a bugle, a kazoo and a set of bongo drums in fervent search for a path to God, worshippers moved from altar to altar in the open-air concrete and metal structure. They prayed to an image of Ganesh, then to Lakshmi, and then to another god whose name we didn't catch, with each image lit by many candles. Others villagers stood aside in the shadows, like us, and perhaps considered their lives, past present and future.

At noon the next day we stopped at the former spice plantation of N.M. Thaha, a retired planter and official of the Congress Party in Kerala. He greeted us carrying a young grandchild and showed us around in the genial manner that has been typical of the (non-tout) Indians we have met. We saw nutmeg, an apricot-like fruit that grows on a small tree. Clove blossoms were scattered on the ground nearby, still green. Sprigs of black pepper grew on vines climbing up another tree. A tamarind tree was heavy with pods. We peeled some bark---the flavorsome part---off a cinnamon tree. We picked a bay leaf. Mr. Thaha also showed us jackfruit, bananas, teak and rosewood. It was a culinary-cultural-economic history of Kerala in one acre.

Up in Munnar, in the Western Ghats, we spent three days on a cardamom plantation. The Olive Brook Guest House served excellent food---some of the best we've had---and a cooking demonstration preceded dinner each night. Joe asked the young chef which cookbooks he used, and he seemed puzzled. He said he had about 200 recipes of Kerala dishes---all in his head.

In Munnar, we visited a tea museum and hiked around the hills above the town. Joe went on a guided trek and watched the tea-leaf collectors in the valley far below flee when an alarm went up. Wild elephants were reported to be on the rampage, though they never materialized. (We're now near Periyar National Park. Joe is off on an all-day trek. Yesterday, riding a tour boat on Periyar Lake, we watched six elephants swim across the lake in front of us. Thrilling.)

Part of the fun of Munnar was meeting Larry Brown and Judi Garfinkel, who were also staying at Olive Brook. They lived near Boston for many years and now have a farm in northern New Hampshire. As soon as I spotted them, I thought Peace Corps. He was---India, 1966-68---and she was honorary Peace Corps, like Joe. He was also assistant director of the Peace Corps in the late '70s, under Carter, and has worked for Oxfam and taught at the Harvard School of Public Health. Judi has done fabric marketing for Chinese woman and PR for a variety of good causes.

With Judi, Larry had gone back to visit his village in Maharashtra for the first time in 40 years. Back then he worked in family planning, and he joked that "apparently it didn't work." Larry was pleased that some villagers remembered him. Last week, he said, "Word spread all around---the guy who wiped his ass with paper is back!"

That's a great Peace Corps story. My son Zack likes to refer to "Dad's twelve stories." Now there's another one.