Xi'an's Og

Another great trip to India in association with the bi-yearly Winter IISA (International Indian Statistical Association) conference, including the opportunity to visit Kerala since the conference was taking place in Kochi (formerly Cochin). And a relatively smooth and relaxing trip as well! (And involuntarily repeating the Forsterite title of the earlier post.)

We left (as earlier) Paris on Xmath day, with de Gaulle airport busier than expected, including by the staff there, since a shortage of both border police officers and of luggage handlers caused a one-hour delay, with a full airplane to Bengaluru. Our flight took a rather circuitous route to avoid less secure air spaces, namely Ukraine, Israël, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, but also staying away from Houtis, hence turning sharply over the Sinaï to fly over Saudi Arabia. Massala chai onboard! My next seat neighbours sounded busy rescheduling their vacations (or others’?) to a visa-free country as some members of their party had apparently been denied boarding for that reason. (And I indeed had to frantically search through emails to recover the confirmation message from the Indian e-visa service provider at the boarding gate. But I had a great time reviewing grant proposals for most the flight!)

We were hoping for a smoother e-visa processing in Bengaluru than at our earlier visit for IISA 2022, and were indeed rewarded by no wait at all, leaving us more than five hours to switch between terminals for the leg to Kochi (and only too late realising too late there was an hotel inside the airport)! Single checked-in luggage was there at arrival in Kochi and prebooked taxi as well, to take sleep-deprived-us to a remote lodge in Mamalakkandam, at the foothill of the Western Ghats. Had some horrendous drives in this area, with small roads ill-equipped for crossing tourist buses, requiring several minutes and people directing vehicle choreographies from the pavement at times.Very relaxing stay, with tolerable temperatures, although we missed the elephants if not their multiple and fresh tracks and droppings! And managed to see a couple of Sri Lanka frogmouths, who really look like ChatGPT rendering of a chimera between a frog and a starling! And visited a small rubber farm thanks to the half-taxi-half-farming owner (with cocoa, cardamom and pepper parting gifts!).

This passage was also a foodie’s dream trip, as we discovered many new dishes, like a spicy chicken cooked in bamboo stick in an open fire and many local breads, e.g., illyappams, parathas, idlis, vellayapams, puttus, challas, and orottis, plus plenty of local dishes. Bought all kinds of spices. Celebrated New Year’s eve in Kochi by a light dinner with friends, at a local Saravana Bhavan branch that actually differed much from the one around the corner from Gare du Nord, Paris! I could not recognise most items in the menu, besides their landmark dosas and chaats, and some orders proved quite unexpected if pleasant surprises (albeit too spicy for my companions!) and was awaken a wee bit later by fireworks all over Kochi that seemed to get on forever. I could not reach a tea plantation near Munnar and further found it impossible to buy local tea, until reaching Kochi where some shops had green teas of unclear origin. It proved equally impossible to spot Munnar tea sold by reliable online tea companies.

The last station was Kuramakom, on the shores of the huge Vembanad Lake—longer than the Finger lakes surrounding Ithaca, New York—, where we saw plenty of birds as we were ferried through the backwaters at dusk. Visited the local bird sanctuary, at dawn to optimize our chances, but they remained low enough to only see a … tortoise crossing the path and a large fruit bat flying away. Day temperatures were such as making reading in the shade almost compulsory, which helped cleaning the pile of books I had taken with me.

The trip back was uneventful and reasonably delayed, considering that Delhi airport was shrouded in heavy fog and pollution, and as cold as Paris. With the incredible coïncidence of Didier Fraix-Burnet (IPAG) travelling the same flight Delhi-Paris as me, him returning from visiting Asis Chattopadhyay at the University of Calcutta—whom I visited over New Year’s Eve almost a decade ago And made it back to Paris, with our bags of groceries, with a -23⁰ temperature drop, instead of the -38⁰ drop we would have experienced a day earlier.