In God's own country - 3

[Read http://lifeasiknowit-nik.blogspot.com/2009/01/in-gods-own-country-2.html first before this]

After the visit to the wooden palace, we made our way to the beaches. The beaches are really beautiful, blue sea, white sand, and several foreigners was the sight at the beach. We just hung around a while at the first beach, and spent quite a lot of time at the other beach. I initially decided to only wet my feet. But the wave made my shirt a little wet. I thought, oh what the heck, and before I knew it, I was wet upto my head. I played along with my friends in water. It was after a long time that I was actually having so much fun. Crocin periodically was doing its job faithfully, and sporadic coughing sprees was the only thing I had to look out for.

The only major problems in Kerala, like I have mentioned before, are langauge and food. In Karnataka, you can survive in any corner using Hindi or English if you don't follow the local Kannada. However, the same cannot be told about Tamil Nadu and Kerala mostly. If you don't know the local langauges, you are in for a lot of trouble. And food? Tamil Nadu has really good food to offer. Kerala - well, if you are not a vegetarian you are a goner. There are some people who don't eat at restaurants that serve both vegetarian and non vegetarian food at the same place. Such people are in for even more trouble. The food that I was getting was bad. I am a person who can practically eat almost anything, and I was facing so much of trouble perhaps I can attribute it to my being unwell.

The next day we went to some resort in the middle of nowhere. The location was simply amazing. It was right next to a river, and the scenery was simply beautiful. We had to stay in a cottage. we dumped our luggage in the cottage, and went to a restaurant, had some food there, and drove to the waterfalls there, in a hired car. The water falls are really beautiful. I think the place is called Adirapalli... We took several photos by the falls, walking all the way down the bottom of the falls. The falls looked absolutely beautiful, and I could actually sit on the rocks at the bottom and meditate :P Not really, but you could if you wanted to.

Just remember one thing, folks. Water is everything. If not for any food, make sure you have plenty of fluid in your body. Water is very good for your metabolism. And solves several potential problems, and existing problems as well. After the falls, we went back to the resort, and decided to have a camp fire. So, some of my friends start chopping wood, while three of us were sitting on a swing, and discussing mushy stuff :P Hmmm... Anyway, so the lumberjacks realise that the wood is not all that dry, and the smart (ass) resort guy decides to help us by giving us fuel to ignite the wood. Now normally people give fast burning kerosene oil. But Einstein decided to help us by giving slow burning lamp oil. Then we decided to burn newspapers (Come on, we are engineers for crying out loud) and found some here and there. And pretty soon, we had a pile of wooden sticks, with newspaper interspersed, with some oil all over.

And as we were beginning to get the fire on, a bunch of men appeared. Two in the beginning, and gradually three and finally five. They were all laughing a high pitched laugh, and speaking rapid malayalam. Apparently, they wanted all of us to be talking Malayalam. Subsequently, they try their hand at getting the camp fire started. Well, they were actually successful. Turns out they were all high. And they chopped, and added anything flammable into the fire. While most of my friends were tired from the trip and retired, three of us who were not really sleepy were sitting on the swing and watching the high pitched men singing and cheerfully carrying the trunk of a tree to put into the fire. I was a little taken aback when one of them started carrying plastic chairs also close to the fire. They were anyway stoned, and it didn't look like they were going to stop at the tree in the fire. I asked if my friend knew that they were taking active part in sustaining the fire, because I didn't want to be behind bars in a land where people don't follow any other language other than Malayalam which I don't follow. He assured me that they were quite aware about the stoned revellers. Then we turned in for the day.