LET’S face it. India is really intimidating. The heartbreaking poverty, the heat, the crazy traffic, the begging. It’s an unpredictable place, in fact, there are few things you can count on when visiting — except, perhaps, a week-long bout of Delhi Belly. Of course, for every reason to stay home, there’s at least one to go. The food — you haven’t lived until you’ve eaten the real-deal curry slathered in homemade lime pickle; the history, from maharajahs to the British Raj; the swoony neon colors. (Legendary fashionista Diana Vreeland once noted that “Pink is the navy blue of India.”)
Just as not all of New York is Times Square, India is not some sort of never-ending Calcutta. For my first visit, I chose the soothing, southwestern state of Kerala. Kerala is India for Beginners, a chance to sample the culture stress-free before plunging into a full-scale tour of Delhi or Rajasthan. Less than two hours’ flight from seething, sprawling Mumbai, it’s a swoony intro, with none of the northern regions’ drawbacks. There’s an exotic, heady spiciness in the air everywhere, as if someone’s left the kitchen window ajar before dinner.
Set on the coast of the bathwater-warm Indian Ocean, Kerala is astonishingly clean and navigable (though the rush hour traffic everywhere makes the Holland Tunnel look breezy). The landscape is stunning, whether well-preserved colonial piles or the vast network of canals and lakes that form the state’s tourist-luring Backwaters, plied regularly by houseboat tours, ranging from low-end to luxe. The food is bright and basic, and I didn’t get sick once: fresh-caught beachfront fish fries, coconut-doused vegetable stir fries and even spiced beef (there are plenty of cow-eating Christians here) And though among the poorest of India’s states, Kerala is notoriously literate: one reason its largest city, Cochin, is riddled with closet-sized bookstores selling English-language paperbacks at half the price of Barnes & Noble.
Cochin (now officially Kochi, though no one calls it that) has long been the most important hub here, pinballing between colonial masters, from Portuguese to Dutch to English. This is a Christian bulwark – many stores still shut on Sundays and tiny, centuries-old churches tucked down the sidestreets – that is also famous for the so-called Malabar Jews. Cochin was a spice route stop-off, and so centuries ago lured trade-minded Jewish settlers to live and work here; their 16th Century synagogue is one of the city’s highlights – though the much-repeated fact that only 11 Jews remain in Cochin is dubious at best. (No one seemed able to say who keeps the official tally.) Their longtime influence is stamped on maps of Cochin, though: the shopping nabe is called JewTown, though it’s now a misnomer, as the place is largely populated with hustling Kashmiri shopkeepers selling fabrics and saris (Vreeland would be relieved that there’s still plenty of shocking pink). Only in stress-free Kerala, though, would the carnival barkers’ rhythmic mantra be ‘Hassle free shop! Hassle free shop!’ as if to distance themselves from a hard-selling Bombay bazaar.
The city divides roughly into three parts: Fort Cochin, the old colonial promontory; Willingdon Island, a commercial hub that the ever-practical British dredged from the Bay; and the throbbing new town of Ernakulam. That’s where playboy hotelier Vikram Chatwal just debuted a clone of his Manhattan-based Dream Hotel. It’s a major addition since Cochin’s biggest tourism bottleneck was its lack of rooms – local estimates put them around 500 in total before the 151-room Chatwal project opened a few weeks’ ago and so eased the shortage.
But if there’s no room on land, take to the Backwaters. This hyper-rural hideout is just 40 minutes’ drive from Cochin: rivers are dotted with punt-wielding longboatmen who hunt for fish in the clear water, while small houses peek out from the dense jungle that rims the waters. I spent a day lolling on a boat, book in hand, but I longed for an overnight, with pitch-black darkness and daybreak bird tweeting. The gateway to the backwaters is Aleppey, aka Alapuzzha – again, this post-colonial rechristening didn’t seem to stick except on signposts. Another old town, it’s crisscrossed with lily-filled canals and a livable, low-key Indian treasure: shady trees loom over the backstreets and waterways, making it lush and green despite the revving motorbikes and asthmatic cars (I stumbled on a Jain temple tucked on a sidestreet – the hyper-literate, pacifist Jains are more than at home in Kerala, though the mural of swastikas was a jarring reminder of its Nazi-free connotations).
Of course, this is still India; while the riotous disorganization I’d anticipated failed to materialize throughout my stay, my final night was like something out of a travel memoir. I arrived at Cochin airport 90 minutes before my domestic connection to Mumbai, which was to depart at 10pm. The place was humming with people, as busy as it was when I arrived a few days earlier at 4am (flights take off round the clock here). Trying to check in, though, proved tricky. My flight had closed, a crisp-shirted staffer trilled.
“It’s taking off an hour ahead of schedule,” he said brightly, “But we couldn’t tell you about the change earlier today, as there wasn’t a local mobile number in your reservation.”
That flight, which had left so early, was the last of the evening. Even Kerala wasn’t entirely free of India’s quirks. At least when I missed my flight, though, I was some place that I didn’t mind being stranded.
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