Day 11

Day 11 was spent in the mountain city of Munnar. We started the day off with the event that had convinced Christian and I to choose this course over all others, the elephant ride. This sounds very exciting but as soon as I had bought my ticket I looked closer at the situation and started having second thoughts. The whole concept seemed really wrong to me. I'm sure the trainers feed them and bathe them and all that but it made me really sad to see such amazing creatures being smacked with sticks and spending every day of their lives walking up and down the same slow trek just for human entertainment. I did get on the elephant after much moral debate but that will be the one and only time in my life. If I ever try to become head of an animal rights org these pictures will be sure to haunt me.

After the elephant ride we spent a good chunk of time filing in and out of the van to take gorgeous landscape photos. We also got to do a little shopping and I completed one of my goals which was to successfully haggle. Of course this victory of getting the man down from 250 rupees to 200 was dwarfed when Christian got the same thing for 150 and an Indian woman got it for 70. Whatever, I tried. I also took an ego hit when I excitedly haggled for a bottle of wine for the price of about 2 US dollars (alcohol is a hard find here) and then realized immediately after I bought it that it was nonalcoholic gooseberry juice.

 

 

That evening we attended two shows. One was a traditional Kerala performance art which we had already seen a version of on New Year’s called Kathakali. The performers are in elaborate costumes and face paint in order to tell a nonverbal story. We had no idea what was going on but my roommate’s pretty sure that it was about infidelity and a husband killing his wife because she was getting it on with someone else. The other show was a traditional martial arts demonstration which was pretty awesome. They were incredibly well choreographed to be able to fight each other with swords, knives, spears, and other weapons that really could have hurt each other if they messed up.