A Colorful Journey through Kerala’s Countryside: Chengannur to Kochi

On Saturday July 2 we said our goodbyes to the school in Chengannur where we’d been teaching for the past month, including to the caretaker couple and their little boy living next to us. Since we were leaving before lunchtime, the young woman prepared us a lunch to go – including about a dozen fresh homemade chapatis – that we packed into our plastic food containers we purchased way back in Antigua, Guatemala and have used every day since.

The school arranged a ride for us in the school bus to the train station, and as we were waiting on the platform, avoiding a sudden downpour, who should come along but our old buddy Saja, who loped across the tracks to meet us on the platform and say goodbye. We let him know how much we were loving the clothes we bought at his shop.

The train was only 90 minutes late, which is actually quite early in India. Our car was not air-conditioned this time, but it was only a 3-hour ride ahead of us. Ultimately we were on our way to our next gig, but it was in the state of Uttar Pradesh, way up in the extreme north of the country, whereas we’d been on the southern tip in Kerala – a distance of some 2500 miles. Getting there would require three trains and a plane. And our first stop was the place where we’d first set foot in India a month earlier: the coastal city of Kochi.

Arriving Kochi Train Station

And so, after our ride through the Kerala countryside (We’re tempted to call it “colorful” but dang it, that word’s overused, but still it’s hard to find a more appropriate one — prismatic? polychromatic? vibrant? quaint? picturesque? National Geopraphicesque? scintillating? arresting? striking? groovy?) we arrived in Kochi, where we caught a tuk-tuk to our hotel. And after settling in, we went out for an afternoon stroll to pick up supplies and get an eyeful of more new terrain that begged for descriptive adjectives.