Rickshaw tour in Kerala
Well, having been in this city for going on seven weeks now I figured it was time to do all the touristy stuff I had been putting off until later. I wanted to pace myself and now find that I am a little pushed for time. When I am running late for class I take a rickshaw instead of walking the 2 miles. The same drivers usually hang around the front of my hotel (on a street of tourist hotels and restaurants) and I take the same two or three when they are available. They know where I want to go and I know that they are not going to take me then demand a high rate for their services. So, the day before yesterday as I walked to my usual breakfast place one of these drivers asked me ‘what is your program today, sir?’ I decided right then and there I would go to the ‘nearby’ beach and check it out. At only 23 kilometers (roughly 12 miles) I thought it would be a short ride, so I arraigned for him to pick me up at my hotel in an hour’s time. The ride took almost 45 minutes and upon arrival my driver settled in and indicated that he would just sit and wait for me. OK. The beach itself was not very large or remarkable, but it was indeed sand, sea and sun. Great. I swam in the ocean and read under one of the palm leave pavilions set up on the beach. After an hour or so I was joined by a large group of gregarious Indian graduate students, philosophers mostly. We chatted and I learned a little about epistemology and Indian culture. It was fun to see them all play in the sea together, holding hands and splashing. Most of them wore all of their clothes in the water; pants and shirt for the men and full saris and scarves for the women. Male/female relations are fairly proscribed here and there was a sort of innocence to their play that you would not see among Westerners in their mid to late twenties at the beach. On my ride back to the hotel my driver suggested that since I was leaving he should take me around to more tourist sights on the island where the colonial British set up shop and then take me to his village for a little taste of rural life. I have done this sort of thing before with varying degrees of success. When I asked him how much though, he replied that money comes and goes. He said he offers good service and at the end of the day I should pay him what I thought it was worth. A pretty good stance to take really; most tourists don’t know the going rate and will generally pay more on a soft sell anyway. So, I agreed and the following day he picked me up at 9:30. Interspersed with the sights were the universally ubiquitous government approved ‘craft and jewelry’ shops. These things have cropped up just about 75% of the tours I have been on starting in China all the way to now. They all sell the same overpriced crap and the tour operator/rickshaw driver gets a small commission if you buy something. A driver in Thailand confided that he got a small fee for us just walking in the door, so if we would please just go look it would help him out. I figured this was the same deal so I played along. After the third shop though, I was getting tired at looking at $600 rugs and $30 shawls so just plainly asked him if he got a commission for bringing me, no ‘only 2% for buying.’ Fine. On our way out he stopped at yet another gov’t shop and I told him ‘look if you get a commission then I will go in to help you out, but I have no interest in anything they are selling. If they aren’t paying you we should leave.’ OK he says. This is when the sad story of his wife, the heart patient, came out and all the hardships that he, his wife, and his mother suffer because of the d it was indeed very small. Maybe 140 square feet altogether, but sort of cozy and quiet too. Then we went to meet his friends who were much livelier. I met a man that was recently unemployed from the Indian stock market and he spoke very good English. He talked all about what it was like to live in the village. From his point of view, yes the people did not have much but the people also didn’t need much. They worked little, made little, and lived a good life. He said that apart from rent a family of three only needed about 100 rupees a day ($2.5) to get by. They brought me cashew nuts straight from the tree and showed me how the nut was harvested. We drank fermented coconut juice and took a ride on the river on a very unstable dugout boat. By trade most of the men farmed tiger prawns and tilapia which were frozen in nearby processing plants and sold to Europe and the US. There are seasons for that sort of thing and this is the off season, so they mainly sit around drinking chai and smoking bebes. I had a good time and an ‘authentic rural experience.’ On the way back it started to rain and all the chai and cheap beer they fed me started to fill my bladder. By the time was arrived at the hotel I was soaking wet and fit to pop. I paid the man generously, more than twice the rate suggested by my hotel clerk, and grabbed my stuff to dash inside. The driver stopped me. ‘My friend, ‘he said, ‘It is just a problem I have. I have many hardships and my wife needs to go to the hospital on Tuesday and rent is due soon too. Can you give me just a little bit more? 300 rupees ($7.40) more would cover her medical bills.’ In the last 11 months I have refused toothless old ladies, snot nosed kids, men with no hands, and women with no legs sums which could not even buy a cup of coffee in the states. I have forcibly removed persistent beggar children from my side and yelled at obnoxiously persistent vendors to go away. It is not that I am not sympathetic to their plight. Many of these people really are just plain screwed and your money really does help. It is just that I have disconnected my heart strings from my purse strings. It is taxing to been seen as a great white walking ATM with everyone you meet trying to guess the PIN. It took about a heart beat for me to say ‘I think I have paid you fairly. Don’t you?’ He got about to ‘Yes, but…’ when I stepped out of the rickshaw and hurried up the stairs to my bathroom.
