Here begins the following 1.5 months where I wouldn’t meet a foreigner nor have any form of decent conversation.
An unexpected sight
In Kochi, I was mainly relaxing. The place was pretty interesting, being a big city, an island with an airport and another island called ‘Fort Kochi’, where I spent my time.
Didn’t quite know what to do from here, as this is where all the airline issues popped up – the outcome of this obviously would impact my further travel plans.
I headed up to Munnar, a beautiful hill station drenched in fields of tea bushes.
It was quite a unique sight, to see hilltops with these flat, dark green fields.
On the bus towards Munnar
It is here in Munnar that I had my first big stroke of homesickness.
The colder climat, grey clouds and rainy weather at that day, reminded me a lot of home sweet old Belgium.
That, combined with being tired and I don’t know what else, made me very mellow and longing for home, already I’d experienced more than enough to make this travel worthwhile.
I took a bus up the hill instead of the ‘tour rikshaw’, for about 90 rupees instead of 1000, and enjoyed a magnificent view.
This was not in line with my will
This must be one of the unique features of India, the incredible differences in landscape.
This country simply has it all, from huge rivers with coconut trees bending down on them, a dawning sun reflecting gloriously on the waters, to grand fields filled with trees, from beautiful flowers aside the road to the Himalayas.
Tea fields of Munnar
Truly amazing to experience. Even just taking a 10 hour train ride is an experience of which most people don’t realize it should be on their ‘must do before I die’ checklist.
Just 5-6 hours on a bus, and from a huge city with a beach side, I was up in a totally different climate, up in the mountains. Crazy huh?
The most epic church I’ve ever seen
Back to Kochi, had time to kill so stepped in a tuktuk that would drive me all around the place if I go and visit some shops, where he gains tokens and in return petrol for his tuktuk.
A normally terribly deal and extremely annoying hassle, but I had time, the sun was shining, and wanted to see a few more sides of this place.
To Goa!
Although that excitement might not be justified…
Undeservingly, randomly given this opportunity, to live in, experience and explore a true local village in India: Kuzhur.
Brought by an Indian poet -Kuzhur Wilson- that I had come to meet in Varkala;
Once I heard we were taking the same train to Kochi and requested him to travel together, I simply got invited to his house. In the West, this sort of invitation occurs once in a lifetime, so I gladly accepted the invitation in surprised fashion.
Wilson and a river. Stopped the car on a bridge.
The village
It was the house of his parents, and it -together with many things in the village- reminded me of my grandparents and a few memories I have from long ago – remnants of the life from a few generations before me.
How my parents grew up as a child must have been similar in many ways to this village.
The people knew each other. I could vividly see the roots of the Indian non-individual culture.
Here in India, so vastly different from the Western world, you can just start talking to someone (from our perspective ‘out of nowhere’) and they will reply.
Conversations do not have beginnings and endings, they just happen everywhere at random – ‘Streets alive’.
Talking to someone, asking someone something, is not a personal offense, will not be answered with a frustrated look, will not be regarded as privacy attack. More than that, it is possible, as people are not hiding themselves from existence in their houses or cars. Are humans really capable of this? Apparently so.
A lot of fish
Every day in Kuhzur, I got introduced to 10-20 people, and the usual Indian questions popped up every time: Where am I from, what do I do, what is my family status like?
Quite funny to explain this in the ‘Inglish’ (a very simplified form of English, lacking verb conjugations and mostly sentence subjects), and hearing it go around in Malayalam (the language of this province) while I am literally still standing there.
After a while in India I can understand the conversations from only the occasional words I need to understand (‘Bell-gee-um’).
I don’t know if it’s a good thing that I’ve got used to people having an obvious conversation about me while I am right next to them?
Me and Rameshbabu – an awesome guy ready to cheer anyone up
So I got to be a little bit of a local celebrity, as every time mr. Wilson took me to some place, we made at least 10 stops to make sure every single person that he knew in the village got to meet me.
Now, I got to experience the local village life, the life that very much still exists in a great part of India, though hidden from tourist eyes.
We even visited a sort of ‘tribe’, an even smaller village where people of a very old bloodline lived – sort of ‘aboriginals’ of India. The real ones.
A proud family of an old bloodline – ever so friendly
Wilson took me to some really amazing places.
The middle of nowhere, surrounded by nature, grass fields, coconut trees, big rivers, and orchestras of crickets every night.
Wilson’s daughter at an amazing scenery
People invited me without hesitation into their house, and presented me food and/or tea with great joy. Some ran to their garden to get me a fresh piece of fruit.
Their hospitality was out of this world.
Every single family was so generous and friendly, and pulled out their best Inglish to get to know me. It’s like I was some kind of mystery.
Coming to a shop of one of Wilson’s friends, he proudly presented me delicious samosa’s and a cup of chai, just like that! Try that at your local Starbucks…
He fought against the government and planted lots of trees.
I stayed in the village for 5 or 6 days, and could just stay in Wilson’s house free of charge.
“East & West”
The Western world can take a few lessons from this.
This is the kind of thing we lost a long time ago, and India is also losing, in pursuit of the Western materialism.
It’s like the rich culture of India, thousands of years old, just can’t go together with the modern material world.
Young people in the big Indian cities wearing jeans and making business calls with iPhones rushing by, and here I am, away from that place they desire, in a hand made cotton shirt doing ancient yoga practices, fleeing from that mentally cracked material individualistic world.
My face at an amazing river
It was a great opportunity to experience the village life. A chance not given to most foreigners or tourists.
I got to look into these people’s lives, I got to see their aspirations, their thoughts, their problems.
I got to look back in time, to compare two worlds of a different era.
What one had, the other was missing. Where one thrived, the other faltered.
The reader has heard the story, but he hasn’t seen it.
We’ve heard it from far away, but it remains a story that happens to have the ‘is real’ checkmark attached to it. But what do we care?
We would not go back to this.
But we could learn from it. There is much that we have forgotten.
Not to condemn the Western world though.
If anything is to be condemned it is our carelessness and how we take it for granted and even suffer it.
People getting so lost in their own madness, living in the greatest comfort anyone in the history of human kind has ever known, and yet suffering it.
We made great sacrifices to shape the world around us like this, basically killing the planet, how disrespectful can we be by not even enjoying it!
That river again – but how could you get enough of it?
A lot of people
Now, for my intuitions on understanding the different culture:
In general, the basis of India is its massive population, things are quite optimized around that.
Personal space, physically and mentally, as well as privacy of your thoughts and emotions, these things are just not so vibrant here, it’s basically not possible to have them to the extent that we have in the West.
For most people that makes India a tough country to visit, and I won’t deny I haven’t had a few tough moments myself.
However, being forced out of my physical comfort zone, back to basics, being forced out of my mental comfort zone, will definitely have its impact, and if I may guess it will be for the better. Most people in the West actually just suffer this anyway.
Here, if you have a need, we will look how to fix it. Anyone around you will help you fix it, and if it’s fixed it’s fixed. No need to make a drama out of it.
Also, there’s no point in wanting things that are way out of reach. People take their responsibility and seem to have a much more clear perspective on their lives.
Things like the caste system and the importance of family are simply logical if you look at the context.
The person in the position to (only) sell mango’s for all is life, will gladly do so and take his responsibility for it.
A taste of a different world.
An insight to the roots of today.
People taking the time to sit and speak, offering fruits and tea or whatever they can, praying for their loved ones, living in touch with nature, working hard, knowing each other, being proud of their accomplishments, humble and inviting, yet exuberant in the games, some enjoying it while it lasts, some feeling stuck and longing for advancement, some have seen enough, some are hungry for more, this experience was something else, another book of wisdom shoved in my face, another checkmarked story that became a reality, that cannot be unseen or unexperienced, another memory and rewiring of things that I thought I knew: Kuzhur.
Unfortunately, I got to be the pet toy of a big company called British Airways, which royally and effortlessly screwed me over with joy from their mighty big company throne.
The incompetence and greed of this company cost me over 600 euros, 6+ hours of call time, and an optimism that those big companies were ‘not that bad’.
After all, they should have plenty of money for courses to train their people, and they should have plenty of research done how to optimize their service, one would think.
Being able to change the date of my ticket -after specifically having requested so on purchase (from the British Airways desk at the airport, mind you)- should be a possibility within one of the possible future worlds, I hoped.
Whether changing the ticket was possible or not seemed to fluctuate by the day, if not by the hour. One employee said it was possible, the next one said it was not.
Canceling the ticket, even worse. Not only was it possible and impossible depending on the employee I got on the phone, the way in which I would cancel was even more random.
I kept coming up with new ideas, new plans, my mind was peaking to explore and think about any good solution. I wanted to go home earlier, and more importantly, could save 600 euros.
To their great sadism, for every theoretically perfect plan I came up with, they jokingly threw new problems at me. I could have never imagined how many things they made up to obstruct me from simply changing or canceling my ticket.
I persisted and kept thinking and planning and trying and calling and trying and calling and calling and calling …
If you let people wait for that long, make your waiting tune of better quality, and a bit longer, please. I know it by heart now.
The joke? All failed.
All of the 10-20 different things I could come up with for all the various problems they threw at me, were not possible. I could not gain the 600 euros, I could not change the date of my ticket, I could not cancel, and I could not change the place of it.
I would have raged if I wasn’t doing yoga
At one point I was talking to a random person, who was willing to help me out, to make the payment since my card didn’t work and the card I could use from my mother wasn’t allowed because it was on her name (so? I can pay ..), getting back with them on the phone after a 4 hour call earlier where they confirmed that I could change the flight – with date, airplane number, exact fee amount and all, ensuring me that multiple seats were still available – simple to laugh at me those 30 minutes later that it would now cost me 400 euros instead of 50 to change.
Just to give an idea of the mess it was! And that was just one thing.
But I’m sure I’ll laugh about it at some point.
In the meantime, please don’t fly with British Airways if you can – You would do me and the world a great favor.
