The Road to Kochi
We were told that India was, "everything, everywhere, all at once." This turned out to be both a cheap nod to a great movie, and an apt description of a country of 1.4 BILLION people, 780 different languages, the birthplace of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, home to almost two hundred million Muslims and tens of millions of Christians. But we'll get to India in a minute.
The voyage through the Indian Ocean was also eventful for our personal and social lives as voyagers. If you're only interested in the off-ship experiences, you're going to want to skip the next few paragraphs.
Clubs started meeting during this leg, which meant our social lives were about to take off. While many of the clubs were student-run, quite a few were being headed up by faculty, staff, or Live Long Learners (still students, but older) and even ship kids. All clubs are open to all.
Jacob and Ender had signed up for Dungeons and Dragons club which really got rolling during this sea leg. Ender attended a "dungeon masters" training which experienced D&D players were offering. He had never done it before, but had wanted too since he was a child who couldn't get enough friends together to play (and also he didn't know how). Luckily for him, we all played D&D during the pandemic, lead by Ender's nephew in-law 3 campaigns which lasted 3 years. Having this much exposure, Ender hoped he might be ready to try leading his own campaign, with a little guidance from the more experienced players on board. He was really clear that he was open to leading ONLY if so many people signed up that he was NEEDED.
The "training" was interestingly less about how to play the game, and much more focused on how to make the game fun for players by being flexible and cool. What it did not cover was, how to come up with a campaign, how to play, or really anything about how to run one's own campaign.
The following day the club members all met together to hear about the campaigns that were being offered and figuring out who would play in each. Despite Ender's emphasis on an "IF NEEDED" campaign, he was asked to present his idea: He called it Therapy&D - "where the biggest enemy each player will face...is yourself."
Ender and Jacob joined one campaign together, and one each separately. Eight people joined Ender's Therapy&D, and Jacob even eventually started hosting his own game with the rest of the ship kids. So if you're counting, that's a total of 5 games between them.
Then, we arrived in India!
Alright, if you skipped the first section, welcome back.
Our port in India is the city of Cochin or "Kochi" in the state of Kerala in south eastern India. The port was on a man-made island called Willingdon Island between Fort Kochi to the west, and the mainland Ernakulam area to the east. The thing about Willingdon island is that there's nothing on it except some abandoned cement factories and the ship port. So from the ship, to do ANYTHING, we had to leave the island via taxi or ferry. So day 1 we went west, day 2 we went east.
Okay, I hate to complain about any culture or experience, I'm aware that any discomfort I feel is subjective due to my own cultural values, but the most prominent feature of India that confronted us from the moment we stepped foot off the ship was that we were the focus of a HUGE competition among taxi drivers to be the one to give us a ride. Silly phrases like, "no," "no thank you," "we'll just walk," or "please stop following us," were rarely useful in changing anything about their persistent solicitations. Walking into each cultural experience with "humility, curiosity, and grace" was an ideal that was challenged by this style of salesmanship. On the first day we decided to take one of the offered tours. We eventually chose a tuk-tuk driver who offered to give us a 4 hour tour (we talked him down to 2 hours) for 40 dollars (we talked him down to 10). It's tricky being part of a group of clearly wealthy U.S. Americans, while also being on a strict, frugal budget compared to most of our fellow voyagers. Striking the balance between generosity and being fleeced took its toll; so, exhausted from driving a hard bargain, we settled into our tour.
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| Exhausted from haggling. |
While the style of sales being to offer us was not our favorite, our driver ended up being really fun and showed us a great time. Some of the most prominent sites around the island of Fort Kochi were the many Christian churches. The driver (and later, other guides and locals) seemed to take pride in examples of religious harmony that existed in the town. He explained that he was Hindu, but his wife was Catholic, and they got along great.
See that last church? That's the Church of Saint Francis, one of the oldest European churches in India, built in 1503. Infamous Portuguese explorer, Vasco de Gamma, died in Kochi India in 1524 and was buried in this church.
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| What I thought was the final resting place of Vasco de Gamma |
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| Until I was writing this blog and read the plaque carefully. He ain't even here anymore! I guess we'll have to look for him in Lisbon! |
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| Old stuff. Indiana Jones is interested. |
A very odd, voyeuristic part of the tour, but apparently a perfectly normal and acceptable stop, was to visit a local laundromat. This is a place where you can either drop of your laundry to be done, or a place you can bring your laundry to do it yourself.
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| Burning Charcoal for the Iron |
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| Iron running on burning charcoal |
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| A row of washing stalls |
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| There was a donation box we could contribute to, to make our ogling feel less like gawking tourists. |
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| At the insistence of our guide, Kim posed in an empty washing stall. You know, because she's a woman. |
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| No Clothes Pins Necessary |
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| Everything gets washed |
Another prominent feature of the tour that is hard to capture with photos or words was that the driver stopped several times along the way in many random places to pull a leaf off of a tree or two; lime, cardamom, mint, and on and on and on. It was pretty cool. He also stopped at a number of trees that were hundreds of years old.
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| The "grandmother" tree of Kochi, the Banyan Tree |
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| The "grandfather" tree of Kochi. |
The next point of interest were the Chinese fishing nets along the river here in Kochi, apparently introduced in the 1500's by a Chinese explorer named Zheng He. The nets are counterbalanced and lure fish with a light in the center. They can then be dropped into the water to catch fish.
One last stop at s spice and tea market was actually pretty cool. We aren't allowed to bring unsealed perishables on board or we would have been sorely tempted to scoop up some tea and spices.
Jacob even got to feed a goat.
Of course the problem with feeding goats happens when you run out.
We were exhausted from the heat so after the tour we spent the rest of the day relaxing on the ship, mentally preparing for the next day's adventures.
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