Even we know the pace of this trip is insane. We have had more one night stands with cities in India than either of us care to remember. Most of my postings have been done on the fly, on a computer with a dickey keyboard.


During the 12 – yes 12 – hour journey from Madurai to Cochin, across the Western Ghats (means steps but they are actually low mountains) we saw some of the most incredible scenery. I wish it could have been a shorter trip – the last three hours were like a bad dream – but I would not have missed this country for the world. Spices have been grown here and traded for thousands of years. We saw tea plantations – hills and valleys as far as you can see covered in manicured tea plants guarded by a few lonely palm trees to hold the soil – the eunuchs taking care of the harem. Rubber trees are everywhere, looking like wounded accident victims off any Indian road you care to name, with the gashes and wrappings that allow the sap to be taken from the trees.

Our companions on this southern leg are a tag team of driver, Shuja, and manager, Vinesh. Shuja is young and quiet and his English is somewhat rudimentary so the office sent Vinesh who guides the trip and is responsible for our safety in what remains a volatile country. Vinesh is the one we talk to. Shuja smiles and opens the car door and listens, trying to improve his English. Vinesh is Roman Catholic and from Gujarat. Religion is one of the first things you find out about a person in this most religious of countries. Where they were born is the second.

He is two years into a BA in English literature and he has the demeanor of a poet. He tells us he likes the wordings of the Leonard Cohen songs we play. We trade music, his from India or from England where he used to have a girlfriend, ours from Canada or the States and sometimes England.

Vinesh and his family seem to me to be part of this new middle class in India, the kinds of people you see in the airports and our hotels, the kinds of people who would allow their son to have an English girlfriend and to be unmarried at the age of 27. He has taken this job because his family fell on hard times when his father died two years ago in a motorcycle accident. Since then he and his brother have been working and gathering the family assets so they could restart the family trucking business that became moribund with the death of his father.

Like Kimi, our driver in the north, Vinesh works hard, is smart and can manage situations as they inevitably arise. We have been very lucky with the people who have cared for us here and will hopefully stay in touch with both.

As for the south, it’s amazing the changes prosperity brings. In Tamil Nadu and Kerala, you don’t see the constant, grinding, crushing poverty that you see in the north. Food is easily accessible and cheap. There are long standing agricultural industries like rice, rubber and tea and spices. Chennai is the Detroit of India with Toyota, Hyundai and their parts suppliers all building cars there.

On our driving trip in the north I once saw a couple of small huts, painted, with well tended grounds and asked Kimi why more houses were not kept this way. Question was no sooner out of my mouth than I knew the answer – when your choice lies between starving or painting, survival will win.

Now, in the South, I see lots of brilliantly painted houses – so that is my leading indicator of prosperity here – a bright, clean colourful spectrum of blue, fuschia, chartreuse and pink.