Day 117, Year 5: One of THOSE Days
Date: Saturday, February 20, 2010
Weather: Sunny, but Hazy; Temps Near 90 degrees F
Location: Bolgatty Hotel Anchorage, Cochin (Kochi), India
The good news today is that our compressor has arrived in India, but it arrived in Chennai which is on the east coast. It was shipped via DHL and when we got online this morning we saw that it had arrived in Chennai and but had a clearance delay. We called a number for DHL India and got a wonderful woman named Gracie took our phone number and email address and assured us someone would contact us. Mid-day, we were called and told that there was no invoice with the package. So we emailed the invoice that we had received as an email attachment and it now looks like either clearance will happen on Monday or Tuesday or we will receive it on Monday or Tuesday. That part was not clear. So we will just have to wait and see.
The real bummer of the day is that we realized that there is something wrong with my computer. My little IBM ThinkPad is like a best friend. It is small enough and has been tough enough that I can take it into the cockpit and write even when the weather is wicked. I have two batteries for it and between the two, in the past I have been able to work for four hours without recharging. Lately, the batteries hold no charge at all, so I have had to be plugged in constantly. And today we realized that my little computer is using more power than everything else on the boat combined. So I spent the afternoon backing up everything in the eventuality that it should fail completely. Mark thinks the fan is not working and that we might find someone here to fix it. We will certainly give that a try, but in the meantime I’m without my best friend.
In between working on backing up the computer, I baked bread, banana bread, and granola. Mark worked on finishing up the filling of screw holes on deck with Epoxy and he worked on the spinnaker pole. It is old and hard to use and he was trying to loosen up some of the connections. We also went over to Bolgatty Island to see if any of the packages that we are expecting have arrived, but they have not. We are expecting books from Amazon, a toilet repair kit from West Marine, and a package from our daughter Heather. All should be here by now, but Indian mail is notoriously slow and unreliable. I guess we’ll be lucky if we receive these things.
So I’m looking forward to a better day tomorrow. Maybe it’s time to just relax for a day and then start in again on Monday.
Day 116, Year 5: Waterway Explore Date: Friday, February 19, 2010 Weather: No Change–Still Hot, Hot, Hot Location: Bolgatty Hotel Anchorage, Cochin (Kochi), India Today we experienced the backwaters of central Kerala aboard a houseboat designed like a rice barge (kettavallam). The boat’s name was Jalarani. Our captain was named Jud and our guide was Shajas. We traveled with a couple from Austria, two couples from India, and seven students from Portland State University in Oregon. We ate authentic Keralan food, drank tea, visited villages to watch coir making (rope spun of coconut fiber), palm toddy tapping, rode through the manmade canal system in a country boat which is a large open canoe-style boat powered by a man who used a bamboo pole to push us through the water, and then we got to see how the boats are made. There is a 900 kilometer network of waterways in southern Kerala. We certainly didn’t see it all today, but we were fascinated by what we did see. And we are beginning to see why Kerala is referred to as God’s Own Country. This is the tourist slogan plastered everywhere, and our trips through the jungle, the tea plantations in the mountains, and today’s trip though the waterways help us to understand how this slogan developed. We spent the morning on the ketavallam or houseboat floating quietly down the river system through an area referred to as Poothotta. In Sanskrit, Poot means flower and hotta means garden. Three of the districts of Kerala can be seen at one time when out in the waterway-Alleppey, Cochin, and Kottayam. The rivers we traveled today begin in the mountains to the east and trickle their way here to the sea. The herbs used in Ayurvedic treatment grow in abundance in southern Kerala and today our guide showed us which plants are used to cure particular ailments. Ayurvedic medicine is widely practiced here. In Sanskrit, ayu means life and veda means knowledge. Well, the people here seem to have the knowledge and I am particularly fascinated by this. Mark was more fascinated today by the way the boats are made. They are double-ended, made of wood planks “sewn” together with coconut fiber twine and caulked with coconut fibers bound to each seam by the same coconut fiber twine that holds the planks together. There are ribs to which the planks are riveted with crude home-made rivets. The shear or top edge of the boat is finished by sandwiching the planks between two other boards and seats are riveted to those top planks. The result is a water-tight, seaworthy construction that is easily poled, paddled, or driven by an outboard motor. Watching the coconut fiber rope making was also fascinating. There are two motor-driven metal spinning wheels about 10 meters or 30 feet apart. A woman carrying a load of raw coconut fiber bundled in her sari walks backwards from one of the wheels where the beginnings of rope are attached and then spins a fiber line out of each hand. She ends up with a fiber line in each hand. When she reaches the other wheel, she connects the two lines of spun fiber and walks back to the other end assisting the two lines in twisting into a rope. This is one you have to see to believe, so we promise to get photos and video posted this weekend. It was a full and interesting day. When we got back to Ernakulam, we had our driver drop us off on Market Road. We stopped at the Current Book Store that Deepali (student we met in Kumily) had recommended, went to the food market to buy more onions, and then went to the dinghy dock to meet Nazar. He brought us in this morning so we didn’t have to leave a dinghy at the dock all day and picked us up tonight. We met a most interesting Indian man with two of his students on the dock. I won’t go into great detail here, but I would categorize this gentleman as a born-again Beatnik from the 1950’s, although he was born in 1959. He could quote the lyrics to more songs than I could even name, has seen more American films than I have ever heard of, thinks of John Lennon, Janice Joplin, and Jack Kerouac as heroes, and believes that all humans must watch the video from Woodstock to become whole. This is a country of extremes!
Day 115, Year 5: A Little of This and A Little of That
Date: Thursday, February 18, 2010
Weather: No Change–Still Hot, Hot, Hot
Location: Bolgatty Hotel Anchorage, Cochin (Kochi), India
Today was one of those days when we did just a little of this and a little of that. We did a lot of things, but nothing major. We booked our all-day waterway tour tomorrow. I did a laundry and washed all the cushion covers in the cockpit. Mark stripped out chalk and removed screws on the teak deck when it appeared that they might be leaking. He then filled those areas with epoxy. We went to town and bought six kilos of red onions (the only type available here), four kilos of basmati rice, and a couple of pumpkins. That was it for provisioning today. We also went to the main ferry terminal and paid for our waterway trip tomorrow. So as I said, our day was spent just doing little bits of things.
Early this morning, I talked to my sister-in-law Conda and her two sons, Tommy and Todd. I got a full report on my brother’s funeral. It was wonderful to talk with them, but it made me more than a little homesick but it was still wonderful to talk with them. Last night we talked to Heather and Jonah and that also made me homesick. But it is still wonderful to be able to talk with them and see them. So we will continue to make these Skype video calls while we are here, because after leaving here, there will be a very long period of time when our only communication will be via email. We will have internet in the Maldives, but we will be there only a short time before going to the Chagos. And there is nothing in the Chagos but beauty. I know we will enjoy our time there, but it will be long stretch with no Skype video of grandchildren.
So tomorrow we go on our waterway tour and get a glimpse of the traditional villages that still exist here. We are looking forward to that trip, but we have decided to stay close to home this weekend and most of next week. We are hoping that our compressor will arrive early in the week and will be installed and running soon after. Then the next weekend, we are traveling north to experience an Indian festival. And after that, we will be leaving here and heading south to the Maldives. Time does fly when you are having fun.
Day 114, Year 5: Beginning the Provisioning . . . Again
Date: Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Weather: Still Hot, Hot, Hot
Location: Bolgatty Hotel Anchorage, Cochin (Kochi), India
Now that we are back in hot and polluted Cochin, we are starting to think about getting ready to leave here. Even though we still have two and a half weeks here, but it is time to start the provisioning process. We are enjoying our time here, but the air is always hazy with pollution and the boat literally turns a little gray after about a week. The canvas is absolutely filthy and there seems to be no hope of rain. It should rain at least two to three times while we are in the Chagos for two months, but it will have to be a deluge to clean the sail covers. So for now I use any clothes washing water I have and wash the boat down the best I can. We can get all the water for washing that we want on shore for about $2 US per week and we use that for showers, dish washing, clothes washing, and boat washing. But carrying the heavy water jugs is no fun, so I still try to conserve the best I can. There is no way we would run the water maker in this dirty water, so we are using the water in our tanks for drinking and cooking only. We are still on our first tank of two of drinking and cooking water, so that should last us until we leave here. Our friends on Constance are really getting tired of the dirt and I think they are going to head south sooner than we do. We liked traveling with another boat, but there are still things here I want to see and experience. So if they travel on, we’ll meet up with them again in the Chagos.
This afternoon we headed into town to start buying food for the next leg of our trip. We started our trip to town by walking to the main ferry terminal to talk to the woman at the Tourist Information Office. She was very helpful. She gave us a brochure outlining the waterway trip sponsored by the state tourist office and gave us all sorts of information about traveling to other locations for festivals. After leaving the ferry terminal, we took an auto rickshaw out to the train station area where I bought a backpack on my walkabout day. Mark needed a backpack as well, so we found one for him this afternoon. Good quality packs cost about $30 US, but they are really good quality, so we are hoping they will last longer that our last packs that we bought in Borneo. We then took another auto rickshaw back to the Varney’s Supermarket on Mahatma Gandhi Road. We were looking for liquid Tide laundry detergent that Mark swears he saw there the other day, but it was not there today. We then hiked down Jew Street which has a store dedicated to almost anything you can think of. I bought mailer envelopes from a stationary store, little rag rugs from a rag rug store to put on the cockpit seats where we enter and exit. Then we went to the big produce and fish market to look for garlic, onions, and tomatoes. We have found a grocery store with frozen chicken breast and pork roast, so if we get our freezer fixed, we can buy some meat to replenish. And we can surely buy all the fruits and vegetables that we will need in the market place. We have learned since being here that rice is not just rice, bananas are not just bananas, and that a whole sundry of other things are just not what they seem. When you go to buy rice in a US supermarket, you have a few choices. Here there are shelves of choices. I know that I like long-grain Basmati rice and that is very expensive here in terms of Indian prices. I have to pay 72 Rupees per kilo for this which is about $0.75 per pound. In the scheme of things, that is not expensive, but it is much more expensive than other types of rice. There must be more than a hundred different kinds of bananas here and more vegetables than I can describe for which I have no names. So shopping is interesting, but most anything in the world that you might want is either on Market Road, Jew Street, or in one of the three major supermarkets. So that at least defines the limits, and none is too far from the waterfront where we come to shore with our dinghy.
Our good friends Robert and Tina of Shirena are probably leaving Oman for Yemen about now. Because Yemen in nearly in civil war, their stop in Aden will be very short. They have had a mixed time in Oman. People are friendly but dealing with officials can evidently be very “interesting.” Here’s what Robert reported about their experience in trying to rent a car to do inland travel. “In Salalah we have fun with authorities and other matters. Yesterday we needed six rental cars and… none arrived. The agent did not order them! He had to take the drivers to the rental company to collect the cars. It was quite an experience! The agent walked trough the yard with some nice as well as crushed cars. Some cars had flat batteries thus he jumped started them. Later people forgot about that and turned the engines off – well, they had to jump start them again. Our car had a flat tire and… no spare one. We were promised we would get the spare but that never happened. Nevertheless we traveled to Mirbat, a town about 70 kms from the port. This was where we anchored on the way to Salalah. The town still has ruins from the war forty years ago but it is a good place to visit. We went to a restaurant that overlooks the bay. The food was good and we enjoyed watching fishermen pulling out fish traps with plenty of fish, some very big. In the evening we went with others to have dinner in Lebanese restaurant. It was again great food. Fatty will soon have the name that fits him!”
Robert is referring to Fatty Goodlander. And here he has a story about Carolyn Goodlander, “Today, we went to do last shopping before the departure. On return to the harbour we were stopped by the police at the gate. Usually, they check our passports and let us go. Sometimes they do not even check the passports. This time the guard requested a permit for the car! We did not have one. He sent us to the other gate. There they requested rental papers – what rental papers!? We returned to the gate to the port hoping someone would take our shopping and we would just leave the car there, since we can go but not the car. Carolyn decided to have a go at the policeman. She won! He let us go!”
We wish Robert and Tina, Fatty and Carolyn, and the many other cruisers that we know that are headed to the Red Sea safe travels through the Gulf of Aden. We will certainly be anxious to know they have arrived in the Red Sea safely.
Day 113, Year 5: In Memory of My Brother
Date: Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Weather: Hot, Hot, Hot
Location: Bolgatty Hotel Anchorage, Cochin (Kochi), India
It is 7:30 pm and it is still 90 degrees F inside the boat. A week ago the temperature inside at t his time of the evening would have been in the mid-80’s. That was hot, but this is stifling. We have to keep the fans blowing directly on us all the time. There was a nice breeze outside during the day. But no complaints. We both prefer hot to cold.
I want to thank everyone that sent messages of support to me. I will write each of you individually, but it might take a day or so. Just know that I am so appreciative. I talked with family this morning and hope to talk to my brother’s sons and their families tomorrow morning. My brother’s funeral is at noon which is 1:30 in the morning here, so I will talk with them about 9 pm at night their time. I wanted to get home from the mountains so I could talk with family while they are gathered together, but somehow talking to them makes it even harder than ever for me to feel okay about being here instead of there. But I am here, and I’ll just have to make the best of it. I wrote what I am calling An Ode to Dickel (a nickname) in memory of my brother’s life. I think his two sons are going to read it at the funeral and I want to share it with you. Here’s my tribute to my brother, Richard Lee Martin.
When my brother Dickie was a senior in high school, he played the role of Frank Butler in the 1953 Nitro High School senior play, “Annie Get Your Gun.” I was six years old at the time, and sitting in the front row. I was totally enthralled with the play and with my brother’s starring role. One of his classmates gave Dickie a painting of him front and center singing “The Girl That I Marry.” Unfortunately, that painting has been lost, but it will be forever imprinted in my mind. I can still hear Dickie singing, “The girl that I marry will have to be as soft and as pink as a nursery. The girl I call my own will wear satin and laces and smell of cologne . . .” A decade later, my brother found “that girl” and married my sister-in-law, Conda. She was the love of his life and she stuck with him all through the years. They had Tommy and Todd, and now eight grandchildren. I last talked to Dickie to congratulate him on the birth of his newest grandson, Kyler Channing, just a little more than a week ago. He will not get to see those grandchildren as they grow through the years, but I hope that those grandchildren will always carry with them the same wonderful memories of their grandfather, as I have wonderful memories of my big brother.
Dickie was almost twelve when I was born and many of my very first memories of life are centered around him. There was the time when we caught a green snake in the back yard and somehow let it ‘escape’ up brother Bennie’s pant leg. When Dickie was in high school he seemed to care less about girls, but they were always trying to get his attention. We had a mother cat that had more kittens than we could deal with, so when Dickie was trying to find someone to take those kittens, there was always a line of young girls willing to take one. They always wanted boy kittens so they wouldn’t have to deal with the babies, so Dickie would let them pick out the kitten they wanted, then pick it up and flip it over. He’d get this very serious look on his face, take a close look and say, “Yep, this one’s a boy.” Of course, he had no idea, but we got rid of lots of kittens that way. When it was time for my first day of school, Dickie took me by the hand and carried the old dark red stuffed rocker to the trash dump. He told me I was too old to be rocked because I was a big girl now, and on my first of day school, it was not my parents that walked me to school, but it was my big brother Dickie. On Wednesday nights when I was little, a whole bunch of Dickie’s friends would gather at our house and watch the Gillette-sponsored boxing. I thought I was just one of the guys and would bet my dime on my pick of the night. And then the really exciting day came when he got his first car, a bright red and white 1955 Chevy Belair. He’d take my long braids and stick them under a baseball cap that he put on my head, backwards of course, and off we would go in that car. I don’t think my parents ever knew he was taking me along when he was drag racing on the Old Winfield Road, but as a first grader, I thought this was the coolest thing in the world. Dickie wanted me to be able to play the piano so badly and he paid for me to take lessons. Year after year, I never got beyond playing “Scampering Puppies” as a recital piece, so he finally gave up on that dream. Then the time came when he was called into the Army. I have a picture of him standing in the doorway with his suitcase saying goodbye. I was devastated. But he would send letters home and while he was in Germany, he sent me this beautiful orange mohair sweater. I thought I had died and gone to heaven until my father told me nice girls don’t wear orange. Well, that didn’t stop me from wearing that sweater. When I was in high school, I wrecked my dad’s new baby blue and white Rambler. I stopped at an intersection, looked to the right and then to the left. And there was Conda and Tommy, so I waved and then drove across the intersection without looking back to the right. Not the best idea I ever had, because I was hit broadside by an oncoming car. I wasn’t hurt, but the car sure was. Daddy was just a little more than upset with me, but Dickie came to my rescue. And this happened over and over as the years went on. Dickie was always there for me when I needed him.
The memories go on and on, but the last memory I will share is about salmon cakes and potato salad. These were some of Dickie’s favorite foods but they had to be made just the right way. The onions had to cut just right and you had to use Heinz apple cider vinegar. No other brand will work. So look out up there in Heaven. If you don’t know how to make salmon cakes and potato salad the Dickel way, you’ll soon be shown how . . . because it’s “a family tradition.”
Day 112, Year 5: T-E-A
Date: Monday, February 15, 2010
Weather: Another Beautiful Day
Location: Bolgatty Hotel Anchorage, Cochin (Kochi), India
We are back home on Windbird after a whirlwind two day visit in the mountains. Today we actually managed to visit a spice garden just outside Kumily, drive on to visit tea plantation and factory, catch a bus just outside the tea plantation as soon as our tour was over, and get back to Ernakulam by 5 pm. By 5:30 we were on Windbird, so it was a much faster trip coming down out of the mountains than it was going up. It is always good to be home, but we did have two great tours this morning before hopping on the bus.
Our first stop was Abraham’s Spice Garden. This spice garden has been going since 1963. It is small, but jam-packed with flowers, spices, and fruits. The tour cost us a whopping $2.25 US and for one hour we were given more information than we could possible process. We learned that the difference between green, black, and white pepper is simply the way it is dried. We learned that cloves come from harvesting the blossom before it actually flowers and that allspice comes from one tree instead of being a combination of spices. We saw the world’s tiniest bees in little honey pots that evidently make wonderful honey and learned how tumeric, cardomon, and vanilla are harvested and processed. It takes an entire year to process the vanilla bean, thus the higher cost for that. It was such a surprise to us that the leaves of the cinnamon tree, the allspice tree, and the clove tree smell just like the spice although the spice does not come from the leaves. It was just a great one-hour tour, and then we were on to the tea plantation.
We traveled to the Connemara Tea Plantation, established in 1941. We learned that if a tea plant is left alone, it will grow into a tea tree that can grow to be about 50 feet tall, but that doesn’t happen with tea that is being grown to harvest because it would be impossible to harvest. So tea trees are now tea bushes that are just the right height so that you don’t have to bend over to pick the leaves. Tea “bushes” are kept in production for 150 years, but are cut back every five years. Only the two leaves surrounding the bud and the leaf bud are harvested, every fifteen days. All tea comes from the Camellia sinensis plant with black tea, green tea, tea leaves, and silver-tipped tea just being prepared and cured by different methods. Again, in a one hour tour, we were overwhelmed with the information passed on to us. We walked through the plantation of tea bushes, watched a PowerPoint presentation on how tea is processed at Connemara, and then walked through the processing plant. Here’s what happens to tea leaves that are hand picked. First they are placed on screened racks and air-dried or withered. The leaves are still green after withering, but are then sent into the CTC process. This is C-crushing, T-tearing, and C-curling. Just as an apple or banana browns after being cut, so do the tea leaves. So when you see them coming out of the crushing and tearing process, the tea looks like finely ground, wet coffee grounds. Then it is sent through the curling process on rolling screens and on to the fermentation process. Fermentation happens in something that looks like a cement mixer that keeps turning while heat and moisture are applied. From here it goes through something called a ball breaker, that simply looks like a huge vibrating colander that shakes the product so that any balls of tea are broken up. Then the tea is sent to the drying room where any fiber from stems is removed as waste and the good tea is sent on to the grading room. The best black tea is like powder and the lighter tea is much more granular. After seeing this process, we got to taste the best black tea from the powder and the lighter tea from the granular mix. Our guide was fantastic and we really enjoyed each stage of the process. He told us that the word tea stands for T-taste, E-energy, and A-appetite. He kept telling us about all the good things tea can do for your body. The only thing we saw that disturbed us was the spraying that has to be done to control tea leaf fungus. If we understood correctly, the sprays used are copper and nickel-based, so the next time I buy tea it will be organically grown!
Our guide helped us stop a local bus that would take us Kottayam where we would catch another local bus to Ernakulam. This local bus stops for people all along the way and makes detours in each major town to their bus station, but it was much faster than the super deluxe bus that we took on our way out to the mountains. Of course, on our way to the mountains, we were climbing all the way. Today we were flying down the mountains, but even when we reached the flat lands, the local bus seemed to be faster. But the local buses are crowded. We were often sitting with three of us on a two-person seat, along with our two huge backpacks. At one point, an Indian woman got on the bus and there were no seats. So Mark offered her his seat. She was probably younger than me as she still has a son in secondary school. Her name was Philomina. She spoke a little English and she wrote the names of her daughter and son for us and explained that her daughter could speak English and would call us tonight. And indeed, she did. The daughter explained that we were the first foreigners that her mother has ever met and that she would like us to come for dinner. That is difficult because she lives south of here about an hour and half bus ride away. I explained that it would be easier for us to come in the early afternoon so we could still get home before dark and I suggested this coming Sunday afternoon. I also said four of us would be coming. I included Lynne and Ed of Constance, as on Sunday we should be returning from a festival south of here. The daughter took in all the information and said she would call back. The logistics are a little crazy, but it would be wonderful to go to Philomina’s home. We’ll just have to see what happens with this one.
It is good to be back home and we made it just in time to say farewell to Judy and Dave on Freebird. They are leaving tomorrow morning for Oman. We will miss them and wish them safe sailing.
Welcome to The Voyage of Windbird . . . and Beyond. My name is Judy Handley and I live on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. For six years of my life, my husband Mark and I sailed around the world. I documented that story, one day at a time, in this blog that was then just called The Voyage of Windbird. Those daily logs from 2005 to 2011 tell the story of our circumnavigation.
