Vacation Pictures at Camp Noel

India Pictures (Finally)!!

Vacation pt. 2

      I’ll leave Camp Noel in about three hours to head back to the airport outside Kochi. I’ll spend the night in a hotel there and then catch a morning flight back to Chennai. This vacation has definitely been what I needed. It’s been the right mix of activities, rest, good food, and time to catch up with people and the rest of the world. The experience definitely would have been very different if I hadn’t had internet access here, which allowed me to get back in touch with a lot of people. I feel ready now to get back to the group and carry on with the rest of the trip.

            Here’s a day-by-day of vacation:

Friday:

Travel and sleep.

Saturday:

Wake up, eat breakfast, go back to sleep, and then explore the camp grounds   looking at neat birds.

Sunday:

 Six hour, fifteen kilometer trek through the area around the camp. First we climbed the mountain behind the hotel, which gave a really spectacular view of the valley and mountain range. At the summit I met a nice British-Indian couple who were staying at the camp for two nights. After the mountain we walked through two of the nearby farming villages. To get there, though, we took the forest route that involved making our own trail through the underbrush and sliding now part of a hillside. Along the way we saw a troupe of monkeys in the forest!

            The villages were a really memorable experience. These are isolated, rural villages that don’t see many white people. I got a lot of stares, a few people asked my name, and a few villagers were very impressed that I knew a bit of Tamil. My favorite part was when a group of small children ran behind me giggling. We visited a rural village on our group rural visit, but this was a completely different experience than being with a group and going as part of a program.

            On the way back, we walked along a new road under construction that was still just dirt. In the mud we found wild buffalo tracks and leopard prints from the night before! It felt so good to use my body again for exercise and just plain moving around after being in Chennai for that long. I was still really tired, though. I went to bed at 9:30 that night.

            My guide for the whole day was an employee at the hotel named Salam. It was really nice to get a chance to talk to him and get to know him outside of the hotel.

Monday:

 A seven hour, sixteen or seventeen kilometer trek over a mountain and through the tea estate to the Namkola Dam and then back. The hike over and through the mountain was amazing! It was pretty rough going at times, a lot of pulling myself up with grass, sliding down parts of the hill, and just following narrow buffalo and boar trails, but great views.

            At one point, we were on larger, man-made trails that led through a small clearing to the forest. On the trails and in the clearing there were a lot of elephant droppings from the night before and I found a fresh elephant footprint in the mud. It seemed to be a pretty sizeable group. My guide got really nervous around these signs of elephants and made sure that we kept walking quickly until we were safely back in the thick forest. He kept looking around nervously in case we actually did see an elephant. I’m very glad that we didn’t actually see one there, they can be extremely dangerous and could have charged us.

            After the mountain, the rest of the journey was through the tea plantation. The plantation itself is very pretty, but massive! Apparently it covers some 150 km. It was really interesting to see the daily workings of the plantation, from the women picking the tea to the men transporting the bags of leaves on tractors. Entire villages in the plantation are centered around working there. My guide’s brother lives in one of these villages and we stopped at his house and I had some really delicious tea there. This also brings me to my guide, Nama. He works at the camp as a driver and groundskeeper, but also does treks because he knows the area very well. He lives in one the villages I walked through on Sunday and I had a hard time understanding him because of his thick accent, but knew a good amount of English. It was really great to get to spend the day with a local and see his side of things. He has friends all over the area and it seemed like each village has strong connections to the other villages. I was impressed by him, he was half my size, much older than me, and carried my pack, but I had a hard time keeping up with him.

            When we got to the dam, I couldn’t help but laugh. It was a pretty view of the lake and mountains, but mobbed with Indian tourists and a couple of other white people. I got a lot of looks because I’m white, but also because I looked like a complete mess. I was in the same clothes I’d been hiking in on Sunday and was covered in sweat and dirt after the mountains, not mention my hair is kind of long now. And then all of the Indian tourists were pouring out of vans, taking pictures with huge cameras, dressed in nice Western clothes, some of the teenagers wearing nice sunglasses like aviators, and it all just seemed like a really strange reversal. My guide and I felt more accomplished than the others for having walked there and had a laugh together at all of the tourists.

            Along the way back we saw more monkeys! This time a different species than the ones I saw on Sunday. Two on them were just sitting in trees by the side of the dirt road we were walking on.

            People here are also just really nice. Towards the end of the trek we stopped at a small bridge to rest and between us accidentally left my binoculars and a pen on the bridge. A couple of minutes later, a guy on a motorcycle stopped us and handed the binoculars and my pen. Honestly, I wouldn’t have expected that to happen.

Tuesday:

            I was tired and sore from the two hikes. Tuesday was another day just to rest. I read, wrote, ate, and was able to reflect on everything I’ve seen so far.  I also used the internet to call people and Skype, it was the first time my girlfriend and I saw each other in some form in six weeks.

            I was also planning to do a night safari on Tuesday night, and really looking forward to it, but there were elephants on the road and it wasn’t safe to go out. One the night safari I probably would have seen buffalo, deer, rabbits, and maybe a leopard if I was lucky. Apparently in the past six months, only two people have seen a leopard. I still saw the prints, though, which I thought was pretty cool.

Wednesday:

            Wednesday was my day to be a tourist. I did a sightseeing tour of the area with a driver from the hotel. We went to another dam, a lake, a small botanical garden, and a couple of lookouts with really great views. I also went to the museum of the KDHP tea plantation in Munnar and had a chance to see how tea is made from the fresh leaves to what you put in hot water. The museum had a lot of pictures and relics from the days of colonialism in the early-twentieth century.

            I also rode an elephant. I hate myself a little for it, but I couldn’t resist. It was a short walk through a trail in the forest, but it was cool, really cool. You do feel how big and powerful they are.

            I was also planning to do a night safari to make up for Tuesday night, but again there were elephants near the road. I was really bummed, I had been looking forward to the night safari since I read about the camp.

Thursday:

            Rest, eat, and then time to leave. I’ve had a good stay at Camp Noel. The room has been really clean and comfortable and the service here is outstanding. The staff is very small and I’ve enjoyed being here long enough to get a peek into how the camp works. I’ve tried to get to know the staff and think I’ve made connections with a couple of them, but there’s some formality on their part I don’t think I’ll be able to get past. I’m not sure they quite know what to make of me, either. Most guests are honeymoon couples and even the solo travelers don’t stay for six nights. I’m almost positive they’ve never had someone like me before.

            I also find it pretty ironic that by going to a very nice hotel that I’ve been given the best exposure to rural India and village life so far on the trip.

The Group So Far

      The group is all right so far. We men, the few and proud, have banded together very tightly and do most things together. We’re all very different from each other, but it works out in the end. Tom and I are generally considered to be the two rational guys, while the other three have a different sort of reputation. I don’t mean to offend anybody by this, but Tom is the pretty typical perfect Asian stereotype. He’s good at a lot of things, disciplined, hardworking, and smart. Mateo is very smart and isn’t at all afraid to share his opinion, but at the same time isn’t very devoted to the books and is willing to go for a drink or two any time, any day. Jeff and Mateo get along really well and he’s pretty similar to Mateo, just quieter. Arian can be a hard worker when he wants to be, however he’s lost interest in a lot of the classes so far and now likes to goof off when he can.

And then there are the girls, and there are a lot of them. By and large the girls are cool, but there are a couple that we guys try to avoid. The hard part about girls is that they usually like to stick together, so sometimes that means that if you bring one girl along, then you bring a bunch of them. We really try to travel and explore in small groups, but sometimes it’s unavoidable, or there are a lot of girls, and we form this big, intrusive IHP mess. Within the girls, there’s some considerable variety of personalities, interests, and backgrounds, but they’re all very devoted academically, definitely more so than some of the guys.

I like the group, but it’s been wonderful to get some time away these past few days.

Vacation

     I'm writing this post from the middle of the mountains in Kerala, India. Our week-long vacation started on Thursday evening and I've been here for the past two nights. I'm staying at a hotel called Camp Noel (http://campnoel.com/) that's extremely isolated in the Western Ghat mountains and I'll be here for the next four nights. I'm also here by myself. I decided that after six weeks of constant time with the group, I need some space alone in  a quiet, natural setting. I really haven't had the time I need on the program to rest and reflect about everything that has happened, and also to prepare myself for the next nine weeks of the program. I also desperately needed to get out of the city, especially a place like Chennai, and breathe some clean air. I'm very lucky to be a guy because it means I can travel on my own here. I know some of the girls would have liked to do their own thing, but it just isn't an option for them.
     I'm also the only student on the trip really traveling alone for vacation. One student went on her own to visit family in Delhi, but it isn't quite the same thing. Other students are traveling with boyfriends and girlfriends or moving in groups that range from two to seven. Two groups went north to Delhi to see the city, the Taj Mahal, and large temples, but most students are going to Goa for a couple of days and then south to different parts of Kerala.
     So far I've had a great time here. It was very strange to be alone at first, but traveling alone feels wonderful after so much time with groups of different sizes. I realized that Friday night was the first time I've slept in a room alone without someone from the group in six weeks. To get here, I flew across the peninsula from Chennai to Kochi and then a car from the hotel picked me up at the airport and drove me five and a half hours to the hotel. The last hour or so of the drive is very difficult and slow going along a dirt road that runs through a tea plantation, hence the isolation. After I first got to the hotel, I slept for about sixteen hours with a couple of breaks for meals. I really felt the wear and tear of the trip.
      I'm very isolated physically, but ironically, the hotel lobby has the fastest and most consistent internet I've had in all of India.

India vs. Switzerland

        India seems like almost the complete opposite from Switzerland. The contrasts between the countries have been striking for us and there have been some tough adjustments from the comforts we’re used to, such as the toilet situation, showering, dirt, smells, etc. Switzerland runs like a well-oiled machine. It seems like most people know where they fit into Swiss society and live fairly well-off. There are also programs and services for those less fortunate. I can’t remember seeing a single homeless person the entire time we were in the country. At night in Chennai, you have to watch where you step so you don’t step on the many people sleeping on the street and there are many, many beggars.

            Switzerland is also almost impossibly clean. Any trash on the streets is cleaned up soon and people just don’t litter. In India, however, it’s very hard to find a trash can. People don’t even seem to want them, they just throw trash on the ground wherever they are or dump it somewhere. There are mountains of trash around the city and you can see lots of it on the edges of waterways and floating down rivers. We were here for over a week before I saw a garbage truck for the first time.     

            I don’t understand how Chennai functions. It seems like buildings just pop up whenever someone wants them to and small businesses just come and go. The city is a lot of small roads and completely unorganized urban sprawl, at least to my eyes. It’s no wonder Indians don’t really use an addresses to get places, they just keep asking people on the street how to get somewhere. Switzerland is very decentralized in terms of the cantons (the Swiss equivalent of states), but at the same time each canton is very centralized around the government. For instance, everybody is required to pay the government for a basic health insurance policy and one of our faculty members, who lived in Geneva for several years, described the country as a police state. Apparently, every apartment building has a concierge who reports basic information about the residents to the government. Thus, it’s very difficult to be an illegal immigrant in Switzerland.

            Somewhat strangely, though, some of us feel freer in India than we did in Switzerland. Everybody follows the rules in Switzerland and there are steep fines for those who break them. You have a lot more flexibility in that respect in India. The Swiss also appear to have a clear definition of who is Swiss and who is not. There are a lot of Turkish and some African immigrants in Switzerland, but the Swiss seem to put them outside of Swiss society and they’re a very hot topic in politics. A couple of years ago, there was a law passed in Switzerland to ban the construction of new minarets for the Muslim population. Chennai seems more like a mix of Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, and some immigrants here and there.