Life Happens when You're Making other Plans

We left Kanyakumari, the southern tip of India, yesterday, on a train for Kollam. We had our hotel picked out, and decided renting a houseboat was just too expensive. After all the hotels looked seedy or were closed for renovations, we negotiated a "special deal" where we spent a magical night on a houseboat moored on the water, with a private chef and a tour guide who took us to temples and churches and mosques and fishing villages, open fish markets and match factories, and coil (rope making) operations by candlelight and open oil lamps. After a brief tour around the backwaters in a rice barge (covered houseboat), we then visited villages by open canoe, to watch rope being made, spice gardens. Our driver bought us flowers for our hair, we drank coconut juice after a guy cut the coconut in half with a machete, watched snakes in the backwater canals, and visited a Hindu temple. We are in now in Varkala, a tiny tourist town, north of Trivandrum, south of Kochin, on top of high cliffs overlooking the ocean, dramatic and cool and beautiful, staying in a bamboo hut for $8/night. What more is there to say, other than, we have reached the point of completely mixed emotions: how much we miss all of you, how good it will be to have a hot shower and sleep in our own beds, and .... geez, if we only had three more weeks, think of what we could do? There are snake boat races only a couple of hours from here, and we have the train thing down. So, all of India feels accessible. Suddenly, in a very primitive way. K & T said this trip will either bond us or make us hate each other. I don't think either of us can think of a better travel companion for this trip, where we make decisions silently and simultaneously, bargain down to the exact same "bottom price", are ready to eat at the same time, call it a day at the same time, etc. The only "stretch" has been when Susan talked me into the hotel room in Kanyakumari that had a squat toilet!!! Who woulda thunk? We leave in 3 days for Mumbai, where we will spend a long hot 24 hours before flying home. Can't wait to see you. (WARNING: Don't ask about pictures unless you're available to come to a slide show. We have some amazing .... no TONS of amazing pictures.!!!) Keep writing, and sending any last minute requests. Susan and Maggi