Tea for Two
We’ve been offline for a while, so I’ll just take a few lines to catch up. During our long layover in Mumbai, we caught a movie. Bollywood makes more films than Hollywood, so the cinema is serious business here. We opted for Slumdog Millionaire in English, but it was also showing in Hindi as Slumdog Chorapati (think I got the spelling right). It was strange to be watching the scenes of Mumbai on the screen while actually being surrounded by it. It’s a very clever story, so I hope it picks up a Oscar or two…
After the chaos of north India, we arrived in Kerala with, as the Lonely Planet guide aptly puts it “a sigh of relief.” The south is very different – less crowded, more organized, slower paced, more friendly. There’s a lot to see in Cochin/Kochi, including quite a few churches that set up when the Portuguese, Dutch, and finally English traders came here starting in the 1500s.
Kerala elected a communist government in the 1950s and has kept it since then. There is also a mix of Christian, Muslim, and Hindu religions here, along with quite a bit of healthy capitalism, which creates a very unique brand of what our local guide called “Tata” Communism. After an intense conversation with him about how it all works (and it does seem to working well here), he left us with a great quote, “Philosophy doesn’t bake bread.”
From there we headed to Munnar, famous for the tea plantations high in the mountains. The scenery is beautiful and the tea and cardamom plants make the whole place look like it was landscaped. This might be my favorite place in India so far. Here’s the view:
halftime