hellooooo! i've found a computer, with a fan in the roof and the arabic sea outside the window. wohoooo!! so, i continue my diary :)

friday 25/1-08
went by bus up in the "cardamom mountains". they're called that because the trees are protected and cannot be cut down in order to make room for plantations, but the people living here are allowed to grow cardamom between the trees.

we made a short stop at a school, and borrowed toilets in nedumkandam. i love the names :)

oh, a good advice: if you ever get hold of tapioka (or maybe kapioka??) chips you are lucky. they are great.

stopped by the road overlooking the aneyrokaidam (????). some part of the name means "elephants", because the elephants go there to drink at night. beeeeautiful! i won't even try to describe it. but i promise it is definitely worth the risk of going on those dreadful roads to see it. when we were leaving i was almost convinced we'd fall down the slope and die. one of the back tyres of the bus was at the edge of the road when we stopped, and starting again the bus jumped a few times, but then we were on our way again. the roads in the cardamom mountains are narrow, steep and winding like snakes along the mountain sides. (just a note> the power just went. fortunately this place has a backup thing that gives power for an extra five minutes. nice of them :) the view is fantastic, but it's really really scary. we met schoolbuses now and then, and according to my standards the road was much too narrow even for one bus.

when we arrived in munnar we went for a walk to a little village close to the hotel. we walked through tea plantations to get there. i wonder how they manage to harvest the tea... it grows up and down really steep mountains, and the bushes are planted really close with only narrow paths here and there.

it's much cooler here in the mountains. apparently it was 3 degrees below freezing the other night. there are not as many different plants growing everywhere either. either cardamom or tea with silver oaks here and there. the houses seem to be in better shape too, as the air is not as damp as down in the backwaters.

i'm starting to get used to the fun way they wobble their heads. at first i thought it looked weird, but it's getting more and more natural.

oh, an observation: it's not only at former jamtteknik that moustaches are popular. almost every indian man i've seen has a nice big black moustach. even boys that look about 12 years old have them.

saturday 26/1-08
republic day today, so we watched the hotel staff hoist the flag and sing a song before we went down to munnar city and visited a hindu temple. before we went in ajith told us a brief history of islam and the story of some of the millions of gods. a cool thing: first you should worship your mother, second your father, third your teacher, and the gods come on fourth place. teachers seem to be very respected here, and people get very interested when the husband says he is one.

in the temple we look at a man wrapped up in a white sheet performing some kind of ritual. we got holy water in our right hands. didn't know what to do with it. some of the indians drank it, and others put in in their hair. i chose the hair version, as i'm a germofobiac and my hands were dirty. whe also got dots on our foreheads mad of ashes and oil. after that there were different golden gods to choose between. we chose ganesh. i have no idea what we were supposed to do there, but ganesh looked nice.

went up to erivakulam national park, which is supposed to host animals with such exotic names as gaur, sambar and nilgiri tahr (which is some kind of goat, and half the world's population lives in the erivakulam park). anamundi, the highest mountain top south of the himalayas is also in the park (2695 m above sea level). we were not allowed to go all the way to the top, though. apparently the anamundi used to be a popular place to commit suicide, so guards were now stopping people at a safe (?) distance. as almost every spot along the road up the mountains had a steep on one side i guess the reason the anamundi was so popular for suicude was not so much because it was the only place you could do it. apparentlykerala has the highest suicide rate of india. they also hae the highest education level and the lowers number of analphabets. i guess there's a relation to be found there.

we didn't see a single animal. not even a bird. but we did meet a group of nurse students who were on a leave because of the republic day. i felt like an exotic goat myself, because they flocked around me to take photos :) so far we've almost only met indian tourists. we've only seen a few white people in the big cities. we stayed for a long time and talked to the students. the girls i talked to were shocked to hear i don't belong to any religion, and that i was allowed to marry a christian man. these people didn't seem to be as traditional as people seem to be in the smaller villages. boys and girls talked and joked with each other, and anish (the class clown i guess) made up stories of the girls being very old and having 12 children, and the girls replied by telling me he was not really a student but a mental patient they were taking care of. a young man we talked to in thekkady said that it would not be possible for him to even talk to a girl if he wasn't married to her. i would have loved to stay and talk longer, but we all had buses to catch.

had lunch "down" in munnar (1600 m above sea level), and then went to the market. we found the most wonderful little book store, and bought half their stock :) we got 10 beautiful posters of animals, plants, fruit and the malayalam and hindi alphabets, note books, the sweetest malayalam school books and a wonderful book with patterns for a certain kind of art the tamils (especially) have in their gardens. for all this we payed 50 sekr, which was more than it actually costed. the girl in the shop was the sweetest and very helpful, and invited us to stay with her family if we wanted to stay longer in munnar. i don't remember her name, but ir rhymed with erika.

back at the hotel we met tourists from hydrabad and someplace else in ahndra pradesh. they are also going on a roundtrip, visiting the same places as us. some of them were teachers, and one was a principal, so we were examined about indian cities and had to repeat impossible names 10 times :)

had dinner together with a retired fisherman from the ahndra pradehs group. his wife and sister didn't eat at night once a week (but i didn't understand why), and the others in the group didn't eat meat, so they couldn't eat at the hotel restaurant. we had a really nice and interesting talk, and he told us about hinduish, fishing, arriage and exercise, amont lots of things.

DONE! that was all in the paper i had with me. the rest of the story will come another day :) i'm now in kovalam, where we're going to stay the rest of the vacation.

see you!! now i'm going to take a swim in the sea :P  ¶ 10:14 AM