Today’s journey took us from Madurai in the
Indian state of Tamil Nadu, west into the mountains, to Periyar in the state of
Kerala. Actually, we are barely across the state line, but the are some
differences I’ll note below.
Along the way we had several adventures. The
first was stopping to see some women in a field picking jasmine buds. These are
primarily for local use as garlands for women’s hair, but they can also be used
in perfumes. The women were happy to see us and anxious to have their pictures
taken. They wanted to show us how they did their work, but I did not have a
good eye for selecting exactly the right sized buds.
It was only a matter of minutes before every
kid in the village was gathered around us, wanting their photos taken and to
see the result on our screens. One young man about 15 insisted on a selfie with
me.
The day after the big Shiva festival is still
a holiday for some, and we passed several small, rural temples where activities
were still in full swing. We saw a couple kids getting heads shaved and
sandalwood cream getting pasted to their heads. In one village traffic came to
a halt for a procession that must have included nearly everyone in town (and
their cow).
At another spot a goat had been ritually
sacrificed and was being butchered for a big family bar-b-que. (Technically
animal sacrifices are against the law, but they can’t really ban family
cookouts.)
We stopped in a town that used tuk-tuks for
public transportation. Rather than running buses on regular routes from one end
of town to the other, the auto-rickshaws ran on schedules and people simply
packed in. Seven members of our group managed to squeeze into one, along with
the driver and one other Indian man.
Another vehicle took eight members of our
group, plus the driver. Fortunately, it was a pretty small town, so the ride
from one end to the other didn’t take very long. Also fortunate, the road here
was smoother than most, so we didn’t have a bumpy ride.
The mountains here are not exactly Himalayas —
more like Appalachians — nevertheless, they rose quite abruptly from a very
flat valley. The valley immediately prior to our ascent featured some of the
most agriculturally diverse areas we’ve seen. It wasn’t always so.
One of the few things the British did right in
India was building a dam in the mountains a bit over a hundred years ago. They
created a reservoir and a hydroelectric generating plant. They also diverted
water from the wet, windward side of the mountains to the arid leeward side. In
other words, they stole water from Kerala to irrigate the western part of Tamil
Nadu. The result was pretty spectacular, because Kerala gets plenty of rain and
didn’t need the water, and Tamil Nadu did.
At the state line, there is much more of a
division than crossing a state line in the U.S. There is a crossbar that can be
closed (though it wasn’t), and police on each side (who were sitting and just
watching the traffic go by). But all public transportation stops at the line.
If riding a public bus, one has to get off at one bus station, walk a block
down the street to another bus station, and get on a different bus to continue
one’s journey.
Kerala has funny liquor laws. We couldn’t get
beer in the hotel restaurant, but at the state store it was about a quarter of
the price we had been paying in Tamil Nadu. Also, in Tamil Nadu the
auto-rickshaws for hire are all yellow. In Kerala they are yellow and black.
In the late afternoon we got on the bus and
drove out of town. First stop was a cardamom warehouse. Growers bring their
cardamom here, where it is weighed and graded, and a price is fixed through a
sort of auction transaction. Then machines sort it by size. But separating the top-quality
cardamom for export from that which will be used industrially here in India, is
still a manual process.
A room full of women sorts through every seed
— a tedious task. We were a welcome diversion for them.
Next, we went to a cardamom plantation. Along
the rough, narrow country road we noticed large, beautiful, modern houses. The
spice business is good!
Cardamom only grows in shade, so few cardamom
plantations grow only that plant. There are many trees of different varieties
planted for shade. Black pepper, which is a vine, grows nicely around the
trunks of trees. So pepper and cardamom are often grown together.
We were led into dense jungle and shown the
cardamom bushes. Women harvest by hand every 45 days, approximately seven times
a year. We notice that women here get all the glamor jobs. Men harvest pepper,
however, as it involves manly things like climbing ladders.
In the variety of trees we saw coconut palms, jackfruit, other spice trees, and even a frankincense tree, which doesn’t
actually belong in this climate, but seems to be doing OK as a 300-year-old
tree.
Before dinner, back at the hotel, we had
another traditional folk dancing exhibition. This one was put on by the hotel,
and not specifically for our group. In this instance there was a male and a
female dancer, rather than two females. The dances were similar, but not
entirely the same. I didn’t think these were quite as good as the previous
group.
The meal was good, then we climbed our 115
stairs to our room. We have an early morning tomorrow, so time for some sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment