Hungry in the evening at Yangon airport, we each bought a crustless cheese sandwich for $4.50 each, which is extortionate considering it was worse than a £1 red Leicester cheese and tomato sandwich from Tesco’s. On the Tesco variety you get tomatoes and mayonnaise, with real cheese. On the $4.50 variety you get a kraft cheese slice and no butter, no crust, and sweet bread. They didn’t even try to pepper it up with a sprig of parsley garnish! The cheek of it all! After mildly satisfying our hunger, we caught the plane to Bangkok.
At Bangkok we took a taxi at 1am from Don Muang airport to Suvannaburi. The taxi driver drove an average of 120kmph. This i’m not exaggerating. From there we stayed a couple of hours in a hotel, and woke at 6am to catch our flight to Kochi, India, via Colombo, Sri Lanka.
At Bangkok our breakfast in the airport cost us £20 for coffee and croissants. Then, our over priced food day was topped off when we caved and went to Burger King in Colombo airport, which cost us at whopping (pun intended) $27 for 2 meals, and not even ‘going large’. Just to add – Burger King in Sri Lanka do veggie options, and in England, they don’t offer a single thing. Becki plans to write a snooty letter to Burger King UK.
We then went to Boots to top up on home comforts and spent around $30. Needless to say that we spent a small fortune on our journey from Myanmar to India. Neverthess, we accepted the blow (except for the ridiculous cheese sandwich), and remained optimistic for our change of scenery to India. And it really was a change of scenery.
Our ride through the city of Kochi was thrilling, just like the India you would imagine, complete with cows and all, however, the relative calm of our destination, Fort Kochi, was a nice cushion to sit on for a few days to adjust. Even having visited Hanoi or Yangon, we were expecting India to be a step up in our expectations of surreal madness.
We stayed with a family at their home, The Lazar Residency, where they served us delicious Indian breakfast every day, and just generally helped us out with activities.
We met some friendly guests there – a Californian, Brent, who was a lawyer and a surfer. His disposition matched the latter occupation; he had given up his agency work, held on to one client, and now worked for them remotely whilst surfing in Sri Lanka. He was recovering from a broken shoulder after what sounded like a terrible motorbike accident, and so was taking it easy. Nic and Nolan, a British couple, were travelling India for 10 weeks, during their down period from work. A few years ago they had given up their previous lives and moved to Snowdonia to manage a campsite there. It was very interesting to hear both the respective stories of change in lifestyle. Neither party seemed “in search of a spiritual better life”, just, it seems, fancied a change.
We took a day trip around the famous Keralan backwaters, which met all expectations in terms of beauty. It was peaceful. We spent the morning in a large wooden boat with a canopy, being punted slowly through the larger waters, and visited a rope making factory. Then, after lunch, we travelled on smaller boats through the thinner waterways, made our way to a spice plantation, then back again.
We also went to see a tourists introduction to the traditional performance of Kathakahli. We watched the men applying the natural facepaints to begin with, then they went off stage to get into costume. Then we were explained how to interpret the Kathakahli, which is the most impressive, and confusing, part of the whole show. Impressive because, for every word expressed in a regular theatre preformance, the actor uses a mime symbol, like a dance, to express it. They also use mezmerizing and hilarious eye movements to express it further. Pretty soon we were completely lost as to what was going on. The actors then acted out one page’s worth of script in about an hour. I found it funny to begin with, and then tedious. Becki enjoyed it. I never want to see one again.
I also got myself an Indian haircut and shave in a local barbers. It was an amazingly efficient service, and had an audience the entire time, the locals curious to see a white man in their shop. It all cost me 100 rupees – around £1!
We spent a few days in and around Fort Kochi, seeking out the best food. Actually the best we had was probably our family’s home cooked food. Never found a really great fish curry that Kochi is famous for though, disappointingly.
CHRIS & BECKI...ANYWHERE 