Week Five - When Kerala Gives You Rain…

This week started with my birthday.

Monday was a banking holiday in Canada, so Jason didn’t have much reason to work and we got to spend most of the day together. I still made it to yoga at 7am, because apparently this is who I am now.

Vishal came over later to stay with Jack and Jason and I went to Akina for dinner. We sat outside on the rooftop, had some fun cocktails and really good Asian food, including blackened cod and green beans in a creamy silken tofu and miso sauce that were amazing.

A very nice birthday.

The next couple of days were pretty normal. More yoga, more squash, and Jack went on a field trip with his class to the forest park.

Then, the night before we were supposed to leave for Kerala, I got sick.

Coughing, headache, feverish, aching everywhere, and my ribs were so sore from coughing that I eventually gave up on packing and went to bed.

By Thursday morning I was feeling just well enough to travel, so somehow the bags got packed, Momi came over to stay with Leo and Harriet, and we flew to Kerala.

There has been a huge amount of rain here. Parts of Kerala have been under red and yellow rain alerts, and there has been some terrible flooding farther north. We checked before coming that Kumarakom was still safe, but when we arrived we found out that most of the tourist sites had been closed as a precaution.

So we changed plans and have basically spent the last few days staying very local.

It has actually worked out pretty well.

On Friday we decided to try Ayurvedic treatments. I booked one called Nirvana, which included a full-body oil massage and then Elakkizhy, where warm bundles of herbs and leaves are dipped in oil and pressed over your body.

It did not cure my cold.

The last part was Shirodhara, where you lie on your back and someone pours a slow stream of warm oil onto the middle of your forehead.

It is very weird.

But after a few minutes it becomes strangely hypnotic. I went into it with a horrible headache and came out without one. Jason had booked a stretching massage, so afterwards I convinced him to add Shirodhara to his treatment too.

We both loved it. Getting all the oil out of our hair afterwards was less enjoyable.

I also managed to slam my hand in the hotel door. It went black and blue almost immediately. It is fine, but it looked awful and Jason felt terrible for me.

The hotel itself has been lovely. The pool is amazing and Jack has spent loads of time in it. He has also made lots of friends there, which seems to happen wherever we go.

He has developed a lunch routine too. French fries and Sprite.

At first we were ordering for him, but after a couple of days he started going into the restaurant himself, ordering his own lunch and signing his name to the bill.

He is very proud of this.

So are we.

Food and drink have had their own challenges.

We went looking for gin and eventually found a liquor store that was definitely not the LCBO experience.

Everything was behind metal bars, the building was very gritty, and everyone waiting to buy something looked extremely focused. It honestly felt a little bit like we were doing something illegal.

We got the gin.

Tonic was harder, so Jason has been making his own version of a Bee’s Knees from whatever we can find.

The hotel menu also had something called snakehead.

We both assumed they meant the head of a snake.

An actual snake’s head.

Neither of us ordered it.

For the next couple of days it kept coming up in conversation because we could not get over the idea that this was apparently just something you could order for dinner.

Saturday we took a tuk-tuk to a little local place where we could rent kayaks and went out with a guide for about an hour and twenty minutes.

We paddled through the backwaters past little villages, houses and rice paddies. There is so much water everywhere right now. Some houses were flooded right up around them, which was hard to see. It is incredibly beautiful, but obviously very different when it is your home sitting in all that water.

At some point we got talking to our guide about food and mentioned the snake head on our hotel menu.

He said, “Snakehead is a fish.”

Oh.

That made considerably more sense.

We had spent two days imagining a severed snake head when it was just a fish with a branding problem.

We still haven’t ordered it.

The kayak trip was great and Jack did really well. An hour and twenty minutes is a long time for him to sit in a kayak and keep paddling.

For most of the trip we stayed fairly dry, and then near the end the rain absolutely came down. Biblically.

The last stretch back was against a cross current, everyone was tired and the dock seemed to be taking a long time to get any closer.

Jack just kept going.

When we finally got back our guide was completely soaked and told us his mother was going to be angry with him because he was so wet.

The next day we hired the same tuk-tuk driver again and asked him to take us around locally and show us whatever he thought was interesting.

That turned out to be a great idea.

He took us for lunch at a local restaurant where we had fish cooked in banana leaf, tapioca and toddy, the local fermented palm drink.

Toddy is an acquired taste.

It tastes a bit like an effervescent vitamin C tablet.

We drank it anyway.

After lunch we drove through little villages and rice paddies, watched a toddy tapper high up in a palm tree collecting sap, and saw the long narrow rowing boats used in Kerala’s famous boat races.

Then our driver took us to a house where a wealthy local man keeps an elephant in his backyard.

An actual elephant.

It was just standing there behind the house.

Apparently he owns it and rents it out during festival season.

Back home somebody might have a dog in the yard. This guy had an elephant.

That one is going to be hard to top.

We also stopped at a little shop and bought our first piece of art since moving to India, a small painting done on an old book page. We have looked at lots of things since we arrived but hadn’t actually bought anything yet. We both liked this one straight away.

Another thing we have ended up doing here is learning photography.

We both have new cameras and have been using ChatGPT to make up little photography lessons for us. We tell it where we are, what the weather is doing and what we want to practise, then go out for a while and try it.

Afterwards we come back, edit the pictures and compare them.

We have now started asking ChatGPT to decide who took the better picture.

I am currently winning.

Jason may have a different view.

We have also been reading a lot, which has been really nice.

This is Jason’s first real vacation since March, and the last few months have been a lot. Getting ready for India, moving, getting everyone settled, work, and what has often felt like doing two jobs at the same time.

I think we both came to Kerala expecting to be out doing things all day.

Instead, because of the rain and the closures, we have slowed right down.

We have read books, taken pictures, sat by the pool, gone kayaking, driven around little villages, had a few drinks and generally not rushed very much.

It has been really nice.

It is definitely not the Kerala trip we planned, but I think that is okay. It’s the one we needed.

Tomorrow we are heading out on a houseboat through the backwaters.

We will see what happens.

Spice houseboats….

Reading + Beesknees…