Elsien's Traveblogue

After a wonderful week in Goa I felt that I wanted to do something a little more active than beach holidaying with a load of old and some younger hippies, lovely as they may have been. It was a choice between seriously getting into yoga with the old or getting stoned with the younger hippies. Instead I decided to find out more about the culture that Kerala is famous for: kathakali and other theatrical dance performances, most linked with Hindu temples and using Hindu gods and heroes as the subject matter.
First stop, by pure coincidence, happened to be the venue at that precise moment of the annual Kerala Youth Arts Festival, where I saw some great traditional dance as well as some kathakali. One of the dancers almost lost his heavy head gear during the performance. The dancing is accompanied by a sort of chanting, singing the text of stories from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, some of the Hindu 'bibles' and some terrific drumming.
More terrifying drumming during a "theyam" session in a village nearby, a voodoo-like experience where the chief priest dressed up as the god to whom the temple is devoted - some incarnation of Shiva - gets into the part and into a trance. His face painting, headgear and costume are pretty terrifying too, and the drumming is haunting and loud. I counted 7 or 8 drummers and a sort of trumpet. There's lots of oil lamps - the sessions are at dawn and at dusk - smoke, fire, throwing offerings about, mumbling and muffled roaring from the priest in trance - with all the preparations I watched spellbound for some 3 hours. Devotees, dressed in black, had spent all day at the temple, bathing in the probably filthy river. It was an incredible and unforgettable experience.
At the Theatre Festival I'd met a local journalist who interviewed me for his paper, the Calicut Express - keep your eyes out for it. He took me backstage to speak to the dancers and the make-up people and look at the costumes, fabulous. I also met some dancers from the Kalamandalam Academy who study kathakali there and who told me they'd be doing an all-night performance at a temple near Cochin where I was headed anyway. It was absolutely mind-blowing - I'll try and write a proper description one day, but for now I'll only tell you that it started at 9pm and finished at 6.30 am with a gigantic final battle between the Gods and the Demons which raged all around the temple auditorium, with earsplitting but genius drum background. I got invited to stay at the Academy itself by the vice-principal and one of the lecturers, one of the drummers.
In the meantime there is some more Indian music and a temple festival here - I'm getting absolutely stoned on culture at the moment. I'm off to an elephant temple festival near here soon, invited by a family I met at the kathakali temple. I'll write about it next week.

Apparently there aren't many tourists in Goa at the moment. Normally, at this time of year it should be packed, but it isn't. It's easy to find a room anywhere, Anjuna Beach is half empty, the junk sellers do not have nearly enough customers and some are even packing up or dropping their prices, desperate to sell anything at all.
Yet it's gorgeous and hot, the beaches are white, wide and sandy, the palmtrees swaying in the seabreeze, the sea, well, it's the sea, innit, and the cafe shacks are picturesque and playing peaceful music. Maybe that's it: the horrible techno trance music is hard to find nowthat there's a ban on electronically amplified music outside the approved venues as well as a ban on beach raves. Technoheads are staying away and even Indian drunks are thin on the ground. Many old and new hippies probably left the place already before, although some seem to be returning. There wasn't a proper yoga culture here, but my friend Rosalind aka Asema who used to run a yoga centre in Mauritius is doing her best to organise something starting with yoga sessions to greet the sunrise on the beach. There are some like-minded old hippies already: a 70-year-old Swedish one who calls himself Devdas (real name probably Erik), his silent friend Thomas who never takes off his hat, another Swedish yoga teacher with a weight problem, a young Iranian Hampstead dental assistant and an elderly Indian gentleman who used to live in Poona and who really does look like a swami. Tonight they all danced to say goodnight to the setting sun while Indian tourists took pictures.
They are a lot more fun than the Internet honeymoon couples although I do like the crazy pothead Israelis and Russians here, but no one else likes them. I met this very hard-boiled young Russian film-maker from Moscow who loves West Ham football club because he's an Iron Maiden fan (who also love West Ham).

The only Indians I meet are the lovely Catholic Goan family behind whose bungalow I'm staying, in their tropical garden, and people who run the local restaurants, lots of them from Nepal, Kashmir and Sikkim. I don't associate with the ones who come to ogle the bikini-clad Western women and to get drunk or the families who frolic fully dressed in the surf for a few minutes, take pictures of each other and then go away again. The only sensibly dressed Indian family I met turned out to be resident in Stockholm.
Still, Goa was beautiful, the beaches as well as inland - I made some little trips to have a look at the rest of the place as I am not much of a beach person. I left the land of the Lotus Eaters last night and am now in Kerala to find out about Kathakali theatre.

After a rather "different" Christmas, my New Year's Eve was really quiet: I was in Aurangabad to see the caves of Ellora and Ajanta - absolutely beautiful, but so exhausting that on New Year's Eve I actually fell asleep at around 9.30pm and did not wake up for midnight as I had intended, but slept until 12.09 when I was woken by firecrackers going off outside and I was still too tired and sleepy to move, so I went back to sleep.I am now in gorgeous Goa, on the coast in a village called Anjuna, with a lovely sandy beach. The village is nice too, small, in a palmtree grove, with sandy paths. There are souvenir shops but not many and the tourist restaurants are very low key as well. The houses are low and local - I am staying in a simple local guesthouse, clean, with a nice family of Catholics and am enjoying real Goan coffee and seafood as well as the odd beer at sunset, overlooking the Arabian Sea. I booked a flight from Mumbai to Hong Kong this morning for 5th February, so I have another fortnight until Chinese New Year to sort out my Visa for China and registration at Yunnan University. As soon as that's done, I'll move on to Kunming in China via Guangzhou. This gives me another month in India and I will decide in the next few days where I will spend those last four weeks - I am thinking of moving as far south as Cochin where I want to have a look at Keralan theatre, one of my passions in life (theatre, I mean, I know little about kathakali, the Keralan speciality).
I'll have to get back up to Mumbai, but that shouldn't be a problem - public transport in India is as good as that in China (some irony in this sentence - the two have many things in common, good and bad! I've been on another awful boneshaking busride and I've done an unreserved class overnight trainjurney now as well - interesting, but hardly comfortable!)

Diu: I really liked this little place, even if the Portuguese failed to leave proper coffee and delicious pastries behind. They did leave the grubby, dilapidated grandeur of their architecture and Port 99, a quite drinkable and extremely cheap Goan port wine. Diu does look like a tropical Portuguese small town and I loved its slightly squalid charm. It's a bit like one of the little islands off Macao, but more Portuguese and more off it - and full of Indians rather than Chinese, of course. The beaches weren't superb, no Ko Samui, but they were nice, and quiet.The guesthouse wasn't anything to write home about - see previous e-mail - but it was conveniently situated less than 50 metres from a little beach and within a few minutes from the little town.On Christmas Eve all the stars in heaven were out in force. I went to Midnight Mass, in English, but packed with Indians and the service reminded me why I never go to church, but I guess the Portuguese didn't leave behind a very Protestant-friendly form of Catholicism, or if they did, it's gone like the coffee and the pastries. I listened to the Messiah instead under the stars which made me feel pretty Christmassy.I had Christmas luch with some other travellers, a huge plate of vegetable pakora and a couple of beers, finished on the beach. We were joined by two nuns all in white when the sun went down - I had them listen to the Hallelujah Chorus, one ear each and they agreed it was 'very nice'.Christmas Dinner was a barbecue on the roof of one of the white churches, under the stars again: barbecued fish, caught that morning, salad, rice, a bottle of red wine (Indian, 2005 vintage), then back to the beach with a pistacchio icecream and a bottle of aforementioned Port 99.Modest, no doubt, compared to yours?On the road again, place called Bhavnagar, climbing up to a temple on a mountain

How was your Christmas? Hope it was a good one. I spent it on the island of Diu, as I wrote before. I really liked this little place, even if the Portuguese failed to leave proper coffee and delicious pastries behind. They did leave the grubby, dilapidated grandeur of their architecture and Port 99, a quite drinkable and extremely cheap Goan port wine. Diu does look like a tropical Portuguese small town and I loved its slightly squalid charm. It's a bit like one of the little islands off Macao, but more Portuguese and more off it - and full of Indians rather than Chinese, of course. The beaches weren't superb, no Ko Samui, but they were nice, and quiet.The guesthouse wasn't anything to write home about - see previous e-mail - but it was conveniently situated less than 50 metres from a little beach and within a few minutes from the little town.On Christmas Eve all the stars in heaven were out in force. I went to Midnight Mass, in English, but packed with Indians and the service reminded me why I never go to church, but I guess the Portuguese didn't leave behind a very Protestant-friendly form of Catholicism, or if they did, it's gone like the coffee and the pastries. I listened to the Messiah instead under the stars which made me feel pretty Christmassy.I had Christmas luch with some other travellers, a huge plate of vegetable pakora and a couple of beers, finished on the beach. We were joined by two nuns all in white when the sun went down - I had them listen to the Hallelujah Chorus, one ear each and they agreed it was 'very nice'.Christmas Dinner was a barbecue on the roof of one of the white churches, under the stars again: barbecued fish, caught that morning, salad, rice, a bottle of red wine (Indian, 2005 vintage), then back to the beach with a pistacchio icecream and a bottle of aforementioned Port 99.Modest, no doubt, compared to yours?On the road again, place called Bhavnagar, climbing up to a temple on a mountain