Festivals

I have happened into the good fortune of going to two huge festivals in the past two weeks- one in Varkala, India and one in Chaing Mai, Thailand.  Festivals are a wonderful (and also very efficient) glimpse into a culture- plus they tend to be a unique way to interact with locals.  The thai teenagers attacking my "Farang" self with super soakers during Songkran might not have spoken english but that kind of interaction doesn't really require any language.

 The festival in India was, I think, for a Hindu god who was a reincarnation of Shiva and the god of the local temple.  I tried to learn about Hinduism a bit more while in India, and although I think I have a slightly better handle on it, there are so many gods and demi-gods and reincarnations of the gods (I think like 10,000) that I never quite got a complete understanding of what the festival was really about.  Regardless, the last night there was a massive parade that involved people on fire, crossdressers, elephants, firecrackers, and several floats that looked like they would have fit in well at Mardi Gras.  One of the floats had a giant TRex on it.  Not sure what that had to do with the Shiva reincarnate.  

Songkran in Chaing Mai was a bit more wild- basically its a city wide water fight where you can't walk outside without someone dumping a bucket of water on you or drenching you with super soakers.  Its a bit like a combination of Seafair and Bay to Breakers, but with more families and slightly less blacking-out.  The highlight of the 2 days was when we invited ourselves onto a pickup truck holding a bunch of Thai guys, one of whom was dressed up like a sexy (female) cupid and was dancing on top of the cab most of the time. 

Sadly I have no photos since my camera would have gotten soaked if I had taken it out.

The rest of my time in Chiang Mai included visits to Buddhist temples, wonderful meals with Julia and a trip to the farm where she has worked for the last year.  Her Burmese family there were great hosts- they made the most delicious BBQ short ribs I have ever had and showed us some sweet Burmese dance moves.  The temples I have visited have been ornately impressive and beautiful, but I've been surprised how organized and institutionalized buddhism is here. The temples are full of people praying to Buddha figures, and although I had always thought of Buddhism as more of a philosophy than a dogmatic religion, it looks just like every other religion I've seen, and even has rights-of-passages similar to Judaism and Christianity.

I'm now in Bangkok for 2 days where I am checking out more temples, etc. before heading to Krabi with Hilary and then Koh Samui and Koh Tao with Leigh.  If I blog for the next 2 weeks, it will probably be pretty boring- I doubt you'll want to read about me chillin on a beach. I have also changed my plans a bit and decided to go to Bali for a week- I don't know anything about it other than that I will get to surf more there, so if anyone has been there and has any advice, let me know!

Disclaimer for photos: the computer I am using right now won't let me upload photos from my camera so for this blog I am working from my Iphone camera and photos friends have emailed me- credit to Ieva for a few of these!

Drummers at Varkala Festival

Firewoman at Varkala festival

Buddha and I at Wat Doi Suthep

Monks on the Ferry

Hello from Varkala!  As I write this I'm sipping on an apple-beet-carrot juice (Lizzy you would love the fresh juice selection here), eating some lunchtime momos (great tibetan dumpling things), and looking out the window of this internet cafe at the Varkala cliffs and beaches.  So basically, life is great here.

I ended my time in Mumbai with some great food and tourist activities, and headed south for a few days in Kovalum (beach town #1) before coming to Varkala (beach town #2).  My days have been filled with clear morning surf sessions at palm-forest-lined beaches, giant group brunches in the Soul and Surf garden that are definitely superior to Rex's (sorry Tim), afternoons of lounging and reading, amazing curries and tandooris, frequent power outages, elephants and firecrackers, yoga, dramatic thunderstorms, and finally attempts to get cool enough to fall asleep in the 85+ nights.  Though all of these things add up to a happy Deb, what has really made my time so special this last week has been the people that I have met.

The Soul and Surf crew (Soul and Surf is the surf /yoga retreat in Varkala) has a wonderful cast of characters.There's the british couple, Ed and Sofie, who run Soul and Surf, plus two british couples and a Singaporean couple staying there as well.  All wonderfully witty and fun and incredibly welcoming and friendly even though I'm here by myself and about 8 years younger than most of them.  Out at the surf beach we met Richard, an Australian about my age who is traveling with his Mom, who is in her late 60s and has platinum blond hair and is generally awesome.  Richard is the best surfer I've ever seen in person and yesterday he taught this little Indian boy to swim which was incredible, partly because it was so adorable but mostly because this boy was about 7, from a small fishing village, and somehow had never been swimming before.  It seems that most Indians who are not active fisherman, even people from beach towns and fishing villages, don't swim.  Women wade in in their Sari's, if at all, and most everyone watches us surfing as if we're a freak show, except for the one fisherman who has learned how to surf in his fishing kayak, which he frequently capsizes in bigger waves.  Other than our surfing fisherman friend, the waves are wonderfully empty.

Richard introduced us to Joy and Casey, an enigmatic couple from Malibu who live in Mumbai and spent an entire dinner semi-lecturing on the concepts of duality, Dharma, and reincarnation among other topics. Casey said things like "So everything is polar right? For every yes there is a no, for every up there's a down, for every positive pole on a molecule there a negative one. So we're the same way.  Your 7th chakra is negative and your first is positive, and so if you can move your energy towards your head, your positive pole, then you will be closer to Dharma.  It's very simple but by sitting at a computer all day we're pushing all of our energy down and moving further away".  Normally this sort of monolouge would make me either laugh or gag, but the way that Casey spoke about these ideas seemed a little too humble and honest to be contrived.

Another colorful dou here is Laurie and Varghees; they are our surf guides with all of the style and mannerisms you would expect from SoCal surfer dudes, except that Laurie is from the UK and Vargees is from a town near Kovalum.  There is a small surf school there where I guess a Danish guy is helping kids stay in school and also learn to surf- Varghees came from that program and is now also helping to run it.  Ieva is a surfing, yoga-teaching American who is a sommelier on Nantucket in the summer and travels in the winter- she is like a cool older sister and I trust her enough that I actually agreed to ride around town on the back of her scooter, which turned out to be much more fun and breezy, and less terrifying, than anticipated.  Mom, please do not have a heart attack, I promise I am being safe!

Kumari is the last person that I can't leave out-she has a one-table restaurant in her backyard in the jungle (you can't get there by car you have to walk the last bit on a dirt path) that serves the best food I've had in India, and probably some of the best vegetation food I've ever had period.  I can say I enjoyed it immensely despite the cow shed about 10 yards away that frequently emitted urination sounds.  Kumari makes 13 different curry-based dishes for her guests and because I heard she hates having photos taken, I was only able to capture the food itself- the picture below gives you an idea, although it really doesn't do her, or the food, real justice.

I will be sad to leave Varkala when I take off for Thailand in a few days, and I highly recommend this place to anyone traveling around Asia.  In addition to the surfing and beaching there are many other things to do here (temples, festivals, backwater tours, safaris etc) that I haven't even gone into in this post.  Sorry for being so long-winded on this one, and if you have made it to this point in the post, thank you for reading!  I'll report back after the craziness of Songkran in Chaing Mai has ended and I'm back on some beach in southern Thailand.

The Jeep.  We fit 9-13 people+surfboards in this lovely little blue coach every morning.

View from the Kovalum Lighthouse

An elephant getting his morning bath at Neyer Dam Elephant Sanctuary.  This young elephant was not being well behaved- his trainer is attempting to get him to sit down in this photo.

Kumari's curry magnificence



Laurie, Ieva and me at J-Bay.  San Franciscans, please note the baywatch swim suit from Bay-to-Breakers; never thought I would use it again but it turns out to be much better than a rash guard for surfing!