Can't help it
Well, I said I wouldn't write so much this time, but I can't help myself. I have to tell you a little bit about where I am, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure.
Here I am, sitting in a little house typing. Nothing special. Except that the house is in the middle of a tropical forest, on the banks of a man-made lake which I know for a fact houses at least one crocodile. (Yes, people have been eaten...) Before I came here, I stopped off at the local tea-shop (or restaurant, as the owner likes to call it). While I was eating my fruit salad, I watched the owner cross the dirt road to cut a leaf off the banana bush. He told me he was preparing the dishware for tomorrow's breakfast.
Earlier, I took a cab into the next town. The thing you have to know, is that the place I'm staying is situated inside a huge nature reserve. The area has an enormous amount of waterways, little rivers and bays, and the government put up a dam to hold the monsoon waters for the dry season. (Talk about the monsoon, we're in the tail-end of it now. So we have our proper rain, the way you would expect it - daily - but the rest of the time the climate just drips...) Then they declared a nature reserve in the whole area around the dam, and they fenced the lions in, so they wouldn't eat the population. (You can get a bus-ride to see the lions, which I wrote about last time I was here.)
What I didn't write about was the spectacular scenery from the dam itself. You can walk along it, and on one side you have the lake. On the other side, the dam plunges down several stories, and aaaaalllllllll the way down there is a park, complete with all kinds of tropical trees and bushes, and in-between them - colored life-sized statues of people - either kathakali dancers (a weird dance style peculiar to this area, based more on facial expressions than anything else), or various Hindu gods (Krishna, blue-skinned and playing his flute, leaning on his trusty bull), or just plain people (for some reason, a guy hammering a hole in the road became the subject for one of these statues). And if you look into the distance, you'll see some amazing mountains - amazing mainly because they usually have a cloud or two around them, like a shawl. We climbed one of those mountains once (yes, I nearly died panting) - and the view from there was just as spectacular.
I've been really lazy this last week. My excuse is a Pancha-Karma treatment. This is an Ayurvedic treatment, designed to cleanse the patient (which would be me) thoroughly - inside and out. It's done exactly the way you would expect it to be done, and let me tell you - it isn't meant for the faint of heart. The full treatment is 14 days (I'm doing half that) - every day you get a massage (strong enough to leave you with sore muscles as if you were the one giving the treatment) and dhara, which is a weird (buttermilk?) concoction that they drip on your forehead for half an hour. But the real killer is (ready for it?) - the enemas. They start off by giving you some kind of sweet paste in the first evening, that makes you run "all night long" (just like in the song). Then, when you've recovered from that, you get your daily you-know-what, which really and truly - literally – takes it out of you - all of it.
I hope you weren't on your way to lunch... sorry, but I really had to share. Anyway, today was my last day of treatment, so I don't have any more excuses to lay around doing nothing. Tomorrow I will be bending and stretching with the best of them.
Let me know if my descriptions get too graphic, I know I tend to get carried away. Anyway, the daughters of the guy who runs this one-computer-joint have come home from school and they're sitting on the floor next to me doing their homework (or just staring at me, as so many Indians love to do). So maybe it's time to quit.
P.S. - turns out they're not his daughters, and there are more than I thought - he's also (what he calls) a social worker and these are the local girls, he's giving them a lesson in Hindi. Maybe I'll join them next time...
