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The World According to me! (Easter 2002)

It's almost a year since Nick and I returned from our first trip to India, since then a lot of things have happened in the world, and also the lives of us both. We are both a year older to start with and for once I can say we are truly a little wiser, mainly, I would like to think, due to our experiences in India.
I would also like to think that I personally have changed my outlook on life, if only slightly after years of taking so many things for granted. I think about the wasted time I have spent worrying about things that I felt were really important, things, that I realise now seem so trivial.

Going to India and seeing first hand what living on the edge is really all about, has definitely put a different perspective on things for me.

The events in New York City on September the eleventh have gone a long way to underline just how fragile a life we all lead. A life that can be taken away on the whim of some crazed fanatical leader, and carried out by their even more fanatical followers.
Enough people already die each day from affects of starvation and hardship, caused in the main, by uncaring attitudes in the name of one regime, or another; madmen striving for ultimate goal of power drive all of these regimes. These lunatics not knowing, understanding or really caring how their actions will devastate the lives of ordinary people.

You only have to switch on the television and watch the news, where some of the more in your face satellite stations even go so far as to bring you 24-hour coverage from the war torn front lines. These TV stations seem to think in sone perverse kind of way that is is entertainment, they allow you to see the latest atrocity unfolding before your very eyes, in far off places like the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia, Africa, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, the list goes on and on. The daily newspapers are always full of the latest atrocity stories, and to be honest we don't even give most of these headlines a second glance, as they are nowhere near us. Yet somehow, these images we see don't appear to be real, so we look at them as though they are not really happening. No, we are more concerned with the latest who's shagging who revelation that sells the tabloid daily papers, the good looking girl on page three, the football results or the latest numbers in the lottery.

You just have to look around and you'll see the ordinary man in the street really does not care who is running the country, the price of oil, or, what the affects of global warming are having on the ice fields in the Antarctic. Just so long as they get enough to get by on, most people adopt the couldn't care less attitude of "I'm all right Jack", and are generally happy with their lot.

So what has all of the above got to do with a travel journal you must by now be asking yourself? Well how I see it, is like this.

I believe this conflict will in turn have an affect on the tourist industry of these countries, and the homelands of those around them, so in turn depriving those who would benefit most in terms of import, export and tourism the income this generates. Many people will be stopped from earning a living of sorts.
With no income, and no other means of support these people will slip back below the poverty line, in what is already a deprived society living just barely above the poverty line. Yet a lot of these countries are still spending a great deal of their National income on weapons of mass destruction, if only they spent some more on the people and the infrastructure, maybe things would be a little different.
Good standards of living for everyone in this world will only be achieved through peace and prosperity, not war and destruction.

Trying to put into words what I experienced in North India the first time was a hard thing to do, especially without getting downbeat about the whole poverty thing. Yet the place is a great country, full of good honest hard working people, all trying as hard as they can to survive.
But the system that prevails is the kind of one, which keeps the lowest at the bottom and those with the money and power at the top. There is no in between, you have either got it, or you haven't, and 99.9% haven't. People need to help the needy, not the greedy, who always find a way to help themselves anyway!

All that said and done, I think it's now time for me to get off my high horse and write a little about our second trip to India.

Both Nick and I really enjoyed our first experience of India and wanted to return to see more of this fascinating country. Everyone we know must be bored stiff with our tales from this far of land, but we never seem to tire of talking about it, and for that reason alone we decided to go again.

It was to be virtually a year to the day that we planned to return, this time though, we were heading to the South of India to see more of the rural life. We planned to fly to Chennai (Madras) and then work our way East to West along the coast of the state of Tamil Nadu, then onto the area known as the Backwaters in the state of Kerala.

We're not flying with Aeroflot this year, nothing to do with the menu on offer, but simply because they don't fly this route, if they did fly to the South of India we would have used them, cheapskates that we are. We originally wanted to fly to Trivandrum, which is ideally situated for Kerala and the backwaters. But getting a flight proved to be a bit of a nightmare, with only certain Gulf state carriers operating services this far south into India.
Most of the agents we phoned could not accommodate our requests, or could not provide tickets at a realistic price, or route. In the end we opted to fly with Emirates Airlines via Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and then onto India.

Trying to make the most of what we could get we decided that we would make our entry into India via Chennai, the major city, which was formerly known as Madras.
This would mean having to make our way across country to our planned final destination of Cochin, situated along the South West Coast. Having used every form of transport we could on our previous trip to the North, we felt this would not present a problem, more of a challenge, and hopefully, some further adventures along the way.

As I wrote this opening piece it was a holiday weekend, Easter Good Friday in fact, the sun was shining, the sky was a rich azure blue with not a cloud to be seen, the birds were singing, and people were out and about enjoying themselves on this holiday weekend, yet here I was, bloody stuck at work!
Still the good news was that it was now only 13 days until we departed, and I was getting into a different holiday mood. I just hoped this trip would turn out to be half as good as the first one.

Read on to find out what happened! (Words highlighted in Blue when clicked will open a picture)