Indian Erotica

Yeah, that title should bring in folks from the search engines.

Now we come to the portion of my travels that the prurient among us have been waiting for. The R-rated section of historical India. No, I didn't visit Khajuraho which is famed for the erotic carvings on its temples. But I did take some photos of carvings in other places, mostly Hampi, that prove that in the past, India certainly was not as prim and proper as it may seem to be today. After all, this is the culture that gave us the Kama Sutra.

Those easily offended can pass on by, but for the rest of you, cover the children's eyes or close the bedroom door and click to your heart's content. OK, honestly I doubt anyone will be titillated by these photos of carvings, but I thought I should give fair warning. You never know who may surf to your web page.



Some of these carvings are a bit worn, so if you are having trouble making out what you see, (ladies only) send me your name, age, and measurements and maybe we can arrange for a private viewing of my etchings ... uh, photos. (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean.)

Belur and Halebid

If you are ever in the area of Hassan in Karnataka, India, do yourself a favor and stop long enough to take a day trip to Belur and Halebid. They are easy to get to get to and you can visit both of them in one day.

The temple at Halebid and ...

The temple at Belur.

If they are such a quick trip, you may be thinking to yourself, there must not be much to see. Well, technically there isn't. There is just one main temple in each city, but each of those temples can keep you enthralled for hours. The carvings on these temples are some of the most intricate and involved I have seen in India. You wander in and around the temples marveling at the handiwork you see.

This is actually only about as tall as your hand.

There are things done on the large scale, like giant bulls and large lathe turned pillars, and things done on the small scale like scroll work and frolicking monkeys. There are even parts of the temples where you can see how the work was done due to the unfinished nature of some of the carvings. After spending some time at these places, you can easily see why writers and historians say these temples were produced at the height of their particular period.

Another small detail.

Large scale work.

There are a lot of photos here, but I think you will enjoy many of them. It may be best to choose the 'album view' and then pick and choose at your leisure. Remember though, I am only taking photos of the art that is already there.

Elephant attack!

And no, I don't know why this bull has decapitated a man and is displaying his head for all to see.

Have a look at the photos.

Mangalore

I have complained several times about bus travel in India, but I could almost as easily complain about train travel here too. It is often a dilemma trying to decide on which mode of transportation to use.

There are almost always buses going wherever you might want to go if you can figure out what is going on, but buses can be dirty, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous. Trains have inconvenient schedules, offer fewer destinations, and are often crowded or fully booked; yet they can be more comfortable and offer a completely different view of the Indian landscape. Actually both trains and buses can be much more comfortable if you are willing to pay significantly more for you seat. Oddly enough, though, generally neither option seems to be that much quicker than the other when heading to the same destination.

Buses can be somewhat cheaper than a similar train journey, but often the bus stations are outside the city which means you have to figure the cost of a taxi or auto-rickshaw into the equation to get where you really want to go. This can bring the cost of the bus trip equal to or greater than the cost of a train trip.

Yes, there is a third way to travel, by plane. But for me, traveling by plane would mean losing part of what I go on journeys for in the first place, the experience of traveling itself. Even if the plane itself may not be quite so, to me, plane travel feels a bit sanitized.

I hate sounding like a whiner.

Mangalore was just a pause in the journey, but I did have time to get out and look around the city. And luckily there was something to see.

This trip wasn't planned as a religious excursion or pilgrimage, but it does certainly seem like I have visited a lot of churches and temples. I think there have been so many churches because much of my travel has been concentrated, relatively, near the coast. I expect that in the days of old the missionaries themselves didn't wander too far inland, at least until they had well established flocks and churches to keep the home fires burning.

Not So Nice

It was a seven hour ride from Ooty to Kozhikode (Calicut) and it cost me less than $2 US. No, don't congratulate me on my frugality. It certainly was not a bargain. It was dusty, dirty, noisy, and bone-jarringly bumpy at times. There was some nice scenery at times, but I don't think that quite made up for the negative aspects of the ride.

Calicut was certainly not much to write home about. The guide book mentions that it is an OK city. but I would even question that rating. The few "sights" were not really interesting compared to anything else in India, and the beach ...

Well let me tell you about the beach. The main beach area is a typical Indian beach, generally dirty. There is some "development" there in the form of carnival rides and such, but overall it is not very appealing. But perhaps my impression of the area has been colored by the rest of the beach.

I thought it would be nice to take a walk up the beach and get away from the developed area. As I started walking up the beach, I could not believe how much crap there was on the beach, and I don't mean trash. Human feces was practically rolling in the surf. Apparently the whole long stretch of beach is nothing more than a toilet. People drop their loads, wash them selves in the surf, and walk away. It was actually pretty disgusting, and I have seen some bad things in my travels around the world. Come on, even cats will bury their shit.

Now some of you may be saying, give them a break, it is the ocean after all. If they were taking a dump in the ocean, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. But it was on the beach. Piles between the water's edge and high tide, and logs rolling in the waves.

Makes you think twice about wanting to swim at the beaches in India, doesn't it? But don't worry too much. I didn't seen anything quite like this at any of the other beaches I visited in India. So my advice to you is to avoid Calicut if you can, and if you can't, just get in and out as quick as possible.

There are only three photos from Calicut in this set and they don't even show the city. One is a list of all the possible discounts available for train tickets, the next is a political poster for one of the parties in Kerala (In the north they seem to prefer Che over the communist trinity.) and the third is of the guy who fixed my sandals.

The other photos are of the Wayanad area back up in the hill country a bit. Supposedly there is wildlife in the park area there, but I only saw some monkeys, deer, and the side of an elephant. And the elephant wasn't even actually within the park. (It was just his side because he was off in the distance in the forest and I couldn't quite see his head for the trees.)

Have a look at the photos if you want.

Udhagamandalam

To get away from the dust and the heat (well, the heat anyway) my next stop was Ooty. Yes, the name given to it by the British is much easier to pronounce. It is located up in the hill country, the Nilgiri range of the Southern (Western and Eastern) Ghats. The British of colonial days turned it into a retreat, their own respite from the heat of the plains.

The Nilgiri are sometimes called the 'Blue Hills'.

It was nice to be in a different environment. It was cooler; there were different trees, I was hoping for more pine but they were mostly eucalyptus; and things just took on a different air.

Before arriving in Ooty, something kept nagging at me from the back of my mind. The name sounded awfully familiar and not just because I read about about it in the guide book. Then the second day when I went to the botanical gardens and saw the entrance, it hit me. I had been here before, 13 years ago. On my last trip to India, I believe this was as far south as I had gotten. I had gone to Ooty before and completely forgotten about it until right then.

The more I walked around the city, the more I began to remember things. I think the reason I didn't remember the first day was because the town has changed, a lot. I remembered a lot more tea plantations. Most of the tea plantations seemed to have moved further away from the town. Now the plots are lying empty or a lot of vegetables, mostly carrots, are being grown in former tea plots. The town has more buildings, too, but nothing really looks very new.

One of the tea plantations still in the valley.

It is OK that I was visiting the town again. I was actually rediscovering it all over again. And I did a few things I didn't do on my first visit. On Christmas eve day I climbed up the highest mountain in southern India, Doddabetta peak at 2634 meters (8640 ft), and hiked back down a roundabout trail into the valley of Ooty.

A pond along the trail down.

And on Christmas day I took a bus to Kalhatti falls, ate my lunch (yes, peanut butter and crackers) in the presence of some beautiful nature, and then walked the 11 km back to town. It was a Christmas celebration of a different kind.

The falls from the bottom. I have a view from the top, too.

Thrissur

Thrissur (Trichur) was not much to write home about, but I do have some pictures of a couple of churches there.


And an elephant.


I guess the people in Thrissur must be pretty special (or pretty evil) if they have to bring in holy water by the tanker truck.








Note: Just for the sake of clarity, I am actually traveling in Turkey now, but I still have some photos of India yet to post.

Kochi

Kochi (Fort Cochin) is another place you can visit to get away from the hectic rush of India. Of course it is still India, but because it is an island, very close to and connected to the mainland, it retains some of its colonial feel. You don't feel quite as pushed along with the crowd as you do in other Indian cities.

Along part of the coast, they still use the large square nets on frames, that are dipped into the water, to fish. While I was watching, they didn't seem to catch much; so I have to wonder how much of this effort is for actual fishing, and how much is for the tourist's benefit. It certainly does make for nice photos, though.

There are a couple of interesting churches on the island and inside one of them is the actual grave where Vasco da Gama was buried. Before they dug him up and took his body back to Portugal, that is.

On the coastal side of the island is the old town, the area that still, to a small degree, resembles what the town used to look like (before the antique shops came in anyway).

Also in that area is an old palace (Kerala style- meaning made of wood and probably not as grandiose as you might imagine) that has been turned into a museum. There are several wall paintings in the palace that are quite impressive. But I have to wonder about the king or maharajah who lived there. A wall painting in one room with a forest scene has all manner of forest creatures in the act of fornication. The human characters in the scene aren't actually doing it, so I have to assume that the painter used the animals to imply what he couldn't paint. Sorry, no pictures.

But I do have some pictures from the rest of my time in Kochi, so enjoy.