[BOMBAY & down South- India]

Landing in Bombay, watching the slum 'houses' hug the airport perimeter fence reminded me that I am back in Asia. The smell, heat, humidity, poverty, pollution, its all here..... The bay of Bombay would have been a perfect setting to watch the setting sun if it didn't smell like a dirty toilet, like the ones that small boys use and miss the bowl.

Indian cities are not really to visit but to experience. I have never seen so beggars or people, families, sleep on the street. The market place at night is so crowded, blocking the roads with a single human body mass, yet cars and mopeds are still using them, blaring their horns. These horns, will they ever stop! I was always sticky, showering atleast twice a day.

Curious to India is the washing ghats. It is here that most of the Bombay's clothes are washed dried and pressed, ala Indian style. I.e.- they beat the proverbial out of the clothing. The ghats are a contrast of colours, brown concrete troughs filled with murky opaque water. Black tin sheet buildings surround the washing troughs. Yet white bed sheets, colourful saharis are hanging on the line to dry, can they really have emerged from that water?

After a few of days I was very over Bombay and headed south.

Into the highlands, the tea fields around Munnar. It really looked like an English garden, so well groomed. So much so I kept expecting an English butler to appear with a silver pot of tea with scones and jam. It was deliciously cool, green and quiet after Bombay.

Travelling further south by boat through canals, passing flooded rice fields and women washing clothes on the banks. I have reached a most gorgeous beach, Varkala in Kerala. Perched on the cliff are hotels and restaurants and below is a white beach with good surf. The beach faces west; warm orange and pink hues on every sunset. It's quiet. It's clean. Its so not India but I don't mind ;-)

As a vegetarian I am in heaven! Its so delicious; worked out the right hand eating, left-hand washing thing too. Curiously McDonalds don't serve any beef products in Bombay either, literally the land of the 'holy cow!'.

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