Day 97 - Alleppey, Kerala, India

Day 97 – His.

 

Today’s big adventure was a cruise around the canals, rivers and lakes around Alleppey on a big old house boat built from bamboo and palm wood. One of the girls in the group organised it and to be honest she did a superb job. We had originally been quoted 17,000 rupees for the boat and she got it for 11,000 rupees – good job.

Included in the trip was a 5 hour cruise, snacks and lunch. Drinks weren’t included. Patti and I stocked up on two litres of Fanta and two litres of water. Most other people bought a couple of beers. One of the group – the British girl I have mentioned before saw fit to bring four litres of vodka.

The trip was pretty good and we sailed around in a leisurely way enjoying the scenery and the lunch time curry. It was only marred by the Brit getting pissed – again! She thought she was being great fun – actually she was being a royal pain. She stuffed a bit of curried food up the nose of a guy who was supposed to be her buddy – he was most upset – as i would be. I know I am going on a bit about this girl but she depresses me. I don’t mind her getting drunk, nor do i mind her flashing her boobs at passersby, nor hanging her bare arse off the boat. What I do mind is the sheer cultural insensitivity of it all. We are in quite a religious country where the showing of shoulders and knees are frowned upon yet this girl thinks it’s okay to behave the way she is behaving – my own thought is that if she wants to behave like this maybe she should be on an 18-30 holiday not a cultural tour of India.

I have taken to ignoring her – unfortunately it’s a little difficult to do that here as we have been forced to spend four days in close company with her. Ah well, only two days to go and we are rid if her.

Fortunately we are being housed in three separate houses and the aforementioned girl is in another house so we don’t have to suffer her for the evening. The upshot of that is that the evening was actually very pleasant. We had dinner with the family, toured the rice fields and the gardens – the family grows their own coffee, bananas, chillies, coconuts, rice, and just about every type of spice you can find in the spice shelves of any supermarket but here they are growing in their back yard. It is truly fantastic. I could quite happily live in any country where you can grow your own coffee and where you don’t have to look at fat drunken British girls’ boobs – and we played some kind of table top pool game with counters from a draughts set and a big piece of formica. The girl of the house taught us and it was huge fun. As we did that Patti and the other two girls we are staying with dressed up in our house mother’s saris and giggled a lot as we oohed and aaahed and took photos – all in all a lot of fun.