Atrocious indeed!

Unforeseen...

So! Once we finished with the mountainous area we went down to western coast, heading towards Kotchi. Our final destination for the next few days was about to be Alleppey though (45km's away). But things went differently, totally not the way we wanted... 30 km away from K. we crashed-up on the street after some lunatic guy had driven into us turning up out of nowhere from behind a bus... It's what J. says, because I just recorded the moment we were sneaking through the rows of cars and then....when I was already on the floor, jumping up on my feet to save the GPS that landed some meters away (almost smashed over by an approaching bike..).. So yeah, so much fun in India! ;/
FORTUNATELY, none of us got hurt, it's just the bike that suffered all the pains of that accident. One of the side boxes got ripped off almost completely (it was useless so we left it behind), front lamp shattered while the bike heavily landed on the road and the rear indicator was smashed up as well. Anyways, the price of the whole event costed us 5 days in Kotchi and about 5000 rupees for new parts.. Brilliant.

our smashed side box

working hard to fix everything up

brand new silver box!

memory picture!

master of our bike's recovery :)

But after the rain comes the sun and Kotchi turned out to be very nice city, after all, and there was this Biennale Festival, so we enjoyed a few free exhibitions and some awkward, Indian movie with an African topic ;)

so colonial!

Traditional Chinese nets that Kotchi is famous for

We experienced an incredible heat and the most effluent-beaches ever. They had a few canals running across the city, all full of rubbish and strong, rotten egg smell coming out of them. Lovely isn't it? I honestly don't know how people can live in such a mess and pollution just on their doorstep, without noticing it and, what's even more atrocious, adding up to it without any common sense whatsoever. Chucking out the rest of what they've eaten just under their feet, to the ocean, to the canal, on the street, as it goes, easy. And I'm not talking just about the organic waste, to be clear. It's getting harder and harder for me to try keep myself focused on something else, pretending not to see anything and enjoy the rest... My green side of the inner-me screams out loud every time (all fine, the other part “stays dark” unceasingly ;P).

This is what happened with this country under westernization's wave that came all of a sudden, turning people and the land into its victims... The story I've heard lately, that actually presents problem pretty straightforwardly, is that ppl used to make compost pits where they were putting kitchen waste and mixed it with cow dung obtaining rich in nutritional value soil out of it. What happens now? They do the same thing, but mixing it with plastic bags that overflow at each corner and every food store... The habit remained, but no new approach or solution came up afterwards with the change blown from the West. Here we are then.

India challenges one's intake capacity of certain behaviors, curiosities and hollow devotion too often, at least for my taste.
Anyways, we got it all sorted out with help of a few unconditionally kind people, meanwhile popping out to Allpeppey (not to skip our previous plan), went for a few ours canoe 'cruise' on the crowded backwaters, and set off down South again.

very common on backwaters: houseboats

fishing with a stick?

the small one is an equal one that we had :)

Our next stop: Varkala – sea baths again

They were saying it's like Bali island, much different from any other coast in India, but I didn't notice any extraordinary difference in particular. It was nice though. We stayed in a hut, close to the rocky Black Beach, full of uninvited friends: enormous cockroaches, spiders (lurking behind the loo's flush-handle) and, ugliest ever, centipedes. That's what I like most, creepy creatures await me at every nook and corner... Ha ha. Nevertheless we ate well, had some hectic baths in the rough sea (fighting against it not to be sucked in with the powerful waves) and I had my first head and face massage (a little treat ;)).

one of those lovely littered slopes...

Then, eventually, came the time for Kanyakumari, the furthest tip of India to the South!

Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin)

This place was virtually just to tick it off on the map, to fill up nicely the lap around the whole subcontinent ;) Except that it's a pilgrims site with its weird poet's statue in the ocean and painted tiny island just next to it (literally, they painted rocks dark green, perhaps to make it more attractive? who knows...). It's where 3 big waters – Arabian Sea, Bengal Bay and Indian Ocean, meet together. Amazing it is, when one realizes somewhere there is Australia, Antarctica and Madagascar, even if one's sight doesn't reach that far due to its obvious, natural confinement.

So well, we went across almost the whole country, not from the far North though, but Delhi (still very rewarding feeling and quite an impressive distance, isn't it?^^), covering over 8000 km's, getting through all possible landscapes, I guess, from the Tar desert, shrubs of semi-desert, arid lands of plains, Deccan Plateau, green, deciduous forests, western Ghats mountains, hilly Goan area going all the way down to the Arabian sea, coastal part: sandy, rocky, crowded, secluded and beautiful higher mountains (Nilgiri) and the equatorial jungle!