Day 60: Cekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdansiniz

Turkish is an agglutinative language. It works like building blocks, so you add suffixes to shorter, base words to give them meaning.

Cekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdansiniz means 'You're one of those guys we were unable to turn into a Czech.' Aside from not knowing what this means, I think words like this can put people off Turkish even though I'm told the grammar is logical and phonetic.

Turkce bilmiyorum. This means: 'I don't speak Turkish.' Yeah, I don't think there's hope of picking it up in the next few days.

Day 60: first impressions of Istanbul

We've only been here for a few hours, but holy... Istanbul is gorgeous! Starving after our marathon trip, I took a little stroll to get a kebab from the shop across the street, and check out the neighborhood. Our hotel is wedged into a little lane filled with businesses selling car parts. While I was eating my kebab, a man wheeled up his pedal powered knife sharpener, and the kebab guy have him 2 knives to work on. Our hotel faces the Topkapi Palace wall, and on the other side, there's a beautiful little park.

The air is clear and crisp, like New England in fall. It's a little slice of heaven.

Day 60: Istanbul

Anyone notice an itinerary change?

We've given up recalcitrant Mumbai for the European/Asian gateway city of Istanbul. Improvised travel in India was slow going. We bumped up against a lack of information and tools, expense, distances, and time.

So we're trading in the maharaja for the sultan.

Day 59: Kathakali performance

Kathakali is an artform that emerged around the time of Shakespearean plays but it ties back to temple ritual from the 2nd century. Literally it translates to "story play." The stories are dramatized Hindu epics accompanied by drummers and singers. The script is vocalized but the actors tell the story with hand gestures, or mudras, and facial expressions.

The tales are meant to portray the complexity of human nature - the good, the bad, and the half green (half good) and the half red (half bad). The white knobs on the noses are indications of an evil nature.

The face paint alone takes 1 1/2 hours to apply and the training for all the performers amounts to a mere six years! Certain characters require that the actor place seeds in the eyes to redden the whites and accentuate eye expression. In the play we saw, the green-faced villain had blood red eyes.

The chase...


This is the death scene where one of the princes slays the villain Kichaka.

Day 59: Fort Cochin, Kerala

The architecture hails back to the fort's Portuguese and Dutch oversight but the culture also has been influenced by other visitors, homesteaders, and merchants - Arab, Jewish, Syrian Christian, and the British since the flood of 1341 when the river delta was formed.a reminder of Cochin's tea trade; a little shop where we had mornıng tea

The pastel shuttered buildings are an aesthetic departure from the more typical Indian structure seen in cities and country villages alike - cement block, corrugated tin roof, solely utilitarian.

There is the Mattancherry Palace, built in 1555 by the Portuguese as a gift to the raja of Cochin and later restored in 1663 by the Dutch, where you can view its deeply coffered ceilings and ancient Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranic murals. The palace is adjacent to the spice market and an area of the city called Jew Town near the Pardesi Synagogue, built in 1662. Jewish settlers are recorded as having emigrated to Cochin in 1514 to escape persecution. There are still store fronts and restaurants with Jewish proprietors noted out front. This is where you now find a surprising collection of Indian craft and antiques for sale. Oil lamps, salvaged pillars and heavy adorned wooden doors, tobacco tubs, painted cow heads, replicas of London-made pocket watches and compasses, printing blocks, carved religious panels, ayurvedic massage tables, life-sized statuary of ox and lion, and this grand paean to Ganesh. You can get thigh-deep in stacks of wares.

These are cantilevered Chinese fishing nets along the waterfront, called cheena vala, that are drawn by four men at high tide. The nets were introduced by traders from the court of Kubla Khan.
Even our hotel is a 300 year-old house that was old Cochin's first hotel and a residence to English tea brokers.

Day 58: Ooty to Kerala, raga

Down the mountain for the coast to Kerala. Eight hours in a silver Maruti Udyog (that's a car) with a kindly Ooty native with the requisite Nascar stylings who delivered us threadbare but whole in Fort Cochin, Kerala.

Recovery came by way of a step back into colonial India for dinner at one of the fort's old houses. The residence dates back to 1755 and was home to tea and spice traders and bankers. Now a boutique hotel and restaurant, you can sample Kerala specialties while listening to a classical Indian raga performance.

Carrot/gooseberry juice, anyone?

Day 57: hiking through the Nilgiri hills

We awoke at the crack of dawn today (before, actually) to head out on a Jeep safari through Mudumalai National Park, followed by a long tramp through the jungle that covers these hills. It's ordinarily important to start early in order to catch the wild elephants out on the roadside before they retire back to the forest for their mid-morning naps. Today started out cool and cloudy in the valleys though, so the elephants skipped their morning constitutional. While it kept the elephants away, the weather afforded some dramatic views of the clouds from the top side as we drove down the mountain. By mid morning, India's bright sun had burned through, and it was clear for the rest of the day. We saw a huge herd of spotted deer, some bison, and a number of wild pigs.

Mike, our guide, was like old Ooty personified. The son of an Indian father and a British mother, he spoke immaculate English, and in fact, I initially figured him for an ex-pat. But he was raised in Bangalore, and spent his summers in Ooty as a child. Mixed with the British sensibilities, he carried a healthy dose of Indian mysticism, telling us stories of clairvoyance, snake charming and black magic.

On our tramp through the jungle, Mike gave us a quick briefing on what to do if you get charged by a wild elephant-the first charge is usually a feint, and you should hide. If the elephant charges a second time, it's for real, and you should run like hell. Trekking in elephant country has become more perilous in recent years because resort development has increasingly cut the elephants off from the streams and pools they use to bathe and drink. Elephants are intelligent creatures, and they are starting to get annoyed. One of them is said to have been seen hanging out on a particularly steep section of the mountain road, waiting for mopeds to pass so that he could charge them and give them a good scare. We entered the jungle armed with big firecrackers, but a bazooka would have been a much better comfort... Needless to say, we made it back out without getting trampled. The biggest animal we spotted on foot was a giant squirrel, about the size of a medium cat.elephant bones we found in the jungle

After returning from our tramp we drove over to one of the tribal villages. Mike tells us that in these places, the men all work as mahouts, working the elephants for the forest service, and the women do pretty much everything else, sometimes supplementing the family's meager income by picking eucalyptus leaves for the oil distilleries in the area.We lunched on takeaway biryani on some rocks down in the river, and by the time we were through, the little village was bustling. Women were beating clothes on the rocks, while others stood in the river wrapped in sheets, discretely bathing themselves. Meanwhile, the elephants were all heading back in with their mahouts for an afternoon bath and scrubdown-reward for a hard morning's work. On the other bank we spotted a big wild peacock, strutting around and looking fine.This way of life will probably not exist in another 30 years or so. Already, they have started to make extra money taking tourists out on basket rides. Eventually the tourist economy will supplant what little industry they have here. I feel fortunate to have seen it here before it gets replaced by the Disney version of itself.