Kerala

After another 3 day ferry ride marked by days of lounging in my hammock, reading and smashing open coconuts, I made it back to the mainland where i spent a couple days with a local family through couchsurfing.com. They were incredibly nice and gracious hosts. I got to meet allot of their family and hang out at their office where they run a technology company that is very family-like. All the employees are close to one another and spend time hanging out and they all go to movies together and eat lunch together and what not. It was a really neat thing to see. wish I had more time to spend with them because i left the next day after meeting them. They offered to have their restaurant's chef give me north Indian cooking lessons and i just may take them up on their offer when i come back to Chennai to see them.

And then another night train for about 14 ours through beautiful rice fields and villages (of which i could only see the next morning) to South-Western India and the state of Kerala. I went to a beach-town called Varkala where I wound up staying way longer than I though I would because I, as always, met alot of great people. The beach was a nice whitesand beach with a big cliff behind it where springs ran down the sides and washed over the pristine sand, staining it like green halva (a sweet that looks like swirled marble). It was very easy to just stay at Varkala and never leave. We would keep saying, okay I am leaving tomorrow, but that tomorrow wound up being 4 days later.

Now A few of us are all meeting up 4 hours north of Varkala where we will hopefully take a "backwater tour" which is a houseboat, rented for 22 hours. You cruise down the canals and you have a chef on board making you meals and drinks. If it doesn't work out; oh well. I'm sure i will be back to do it again sometime.

Andaman Islands

After Madeleine and I returned to Pondicherry, we spent the remaining few days of our two week term at Sadhana and then left. i went to Chennai to get us tickets for the Andaman Islands and she stayed in Pondi for a few days. I used www.CouchSurfing.com for the first time in Chennai and stayed with these two really interesting and cool Indian brothers and had a great time. I had some issues getting our cheap ferry tickets and wound up getting tickets that cost as much as a one way flight, but instead of it taking 2 hours, the trip was 3 days. We got the expensive tickets and had a great time in a nice cabin on the ship for 3 days.

We are now in the Andamans and are hanging out with a bunch of people from the boat and camping on beaches in our hammocks. We explore during the day and swim in the clear turquoise tropical waters and at night we sit around the fire and sing and dance while I play guitar and we swim under the moonlight and howl at the moon. Its been great here so far. Tomorrow, Madeleine and i and a bunch of people are possibly going to another island.














So I did go to another island; an island call Havelock where there is currently a film in production called Shantaram, based on a non-fictional book about an australian prisoner that broke out and escaped to india being filmed there. There is a beach on havelock that is dubbed "Asia's most beautiful beach" and I have to agree that its beauty is astounding; rolling white sand beaches with giant jungle trees overhanging from the tree line to make perfect places for your hammock all along the beach. But back to the movie. it starts Russell Crowe and Johnny Depp and a few other big names and is being directed by Weir. I dont think the actors have shown up yet but theres a lot of hoopla about it on the island.

I left the island to come back and spend time with Madeleine after she cut her foot and it got really infected, swelling her leg so that she was in too much pain to walk hardly at all and had to go to the hospital. She bought a plane ticket for the 11th because she felt like she needed to get going and get to the north of india even though she hasn't been to many places here in the Andamans. She has been having a great time here at a hotel where she met some cool locals as well as other travelers. She got some antibiotics and is walking just fine now, so don't worry :)

We took a day trip to a nearby island called "ross island" which was at one time a British administration island, but after an earthquake it was abandoned and is now being devoured by the jungle trees here. It was incredible to see how these trees had shredded these buildings. We'd see remnants of roofs and metal stuck in the trees as gently reminders that nothing here is permanent. The trees in India are definitely one of my favorite things about this country. There was one giant tree on the island that had two over-sized swings that entertained us for quite a while swinging around and jumping from one swing to the other.

There has been one bad thing thus far. Some of you may have noticed that my site has been suspended multiple times over the last coupe of weeks due to some disputes with my website service provider about my storing file (mainly pictures) on my site of which i have 10 gigs designated for "storage" use. Anyways, they wound up deleting ALL of my stored pictures without notifying me. So I have lost most of my pictures from India as well as allot of other things. It sucks and i don't think that there is any way of retrieving them. So In the next few months there may be more disruptions in the websites up-time since I will most likely be changing service providers.

I have now decided to leave the Islands earlier than expected and I will be leaving on the 10th. Madeleine is flying out on the 11th and continuing her trip up north while i am heading south and then north.