Spices, Tea, Too Much Oil, and "Mixing, Mixing"

The days remaining on this excursion are dwindling rapidly, but it seems that each one brings something more wonderful than the last. Our second to last real day of the trip, brings us to Thekkady and a return to the state of Kerala.

Thekkady is on the border of Tamilnaku and Kerala (literally as the border was at one end of the little town and our hotel was at the other end) and is known for its spices and tea production. 

We arrived early enough in the day that we had a few hours to wander around and explore the place. The main part of the town is on street that runs through the center and doubles as the main highway. Along the street are the usual tourist souvenir shops with small hotels and a few restaurants. The additions, that aren't seen in a lot of the other places we've been to, are the spice shops (selling every kind of spice you can think of, oils, creams, and extracts) and the Ayurvedic massage and healing centers.

Since we had some free time and I wasn't interested in having someone try to sell me yet another scarf, I decided to go visit one of the healing centers for a massage. I have to admit that part of my wanting to try this particular massage style was that Kate was telling us such hilariously horrible stories about her experience with Ayurvedic the last two times she was in India, that I just had to see for myself...I'm slightly crazy that way. 

So the end result is that Kate wasn't exaggerating: I was slightly more relaxed than when I started, I had enough oil on me to be my own slip and slide, and I was grateful that I was never going to the see the masseuse again. To get an Ayuredic massage, you have to be very comfortable with your body in front of another person cause they give no quarter, care naught for modesty, or ingrained American prudishness.

So an hour later I rejoined the group, along with the other five oily travelers that tried a massage, and we headed off for a spice plantation tour and a hands-on home cooked Kerala dinner.

Our spice tour was held at the home of a local family who has been growing this forest of spices for generations. Our guide lead us on a walk of the grounds and pointed out all the different spices and plants in the area. As he pointed them out, he'd explain the name, use(s), and let us sample it if it was something you could eat as is. It was a wonderful little walk and very interesting to see the harmony of all these plants (clove, cardamom, pepper, banana, coffee, jackfruit, tumeric, coriander, chilies, and many others) living together. I'm glad that I wasn't in charge of this place as with my black thumb, I'm pretty sure everything would have been withered and death in no time.

Although the day had been wonderful so far, the best was yet to come. We went to Bar-b-que for a cooking class and dinner. Bar-b-que is the home of Shirell, his wife, and their two young children. All of us got to try our hand at tradition southern Indian cuisine as Shirell looked on with his duplicate words of praise and constant head bobbing; "Stirring, stirring", "Tasting, tasting", "Chopping, chopping". By the end of the evening, we were all talking with double words. The meal was delicious and seemed easy enough if you had all of the spices, a mortar and pestle, a coconut shaver, and years of experience. 

My favorite part was the paratha (aka porotha) making, which is a light, fluffy bread made from water, salt, sugar, and baker's flour. You use the four ingredients to make a dough, hand kneaded it, let it sit for a few minutes (so it can rise), flatten it, toss it like a pizza crust, twirl it into a ball, smash it down again, and then put it on a hot grill for a few minutes on each side. The best part though, is that as soon as it comes off the grill, you smushed it together repeatedly from all sides and then smash it down a few times for good measure. All the smushing and smashing makes the layers we added in puff up and become flaky. It's a lot of fun to make and delicious to eat. 

The food in general for dinner was one of the best meals I've had in India overall and I loved the variety: fish curry, multiple veggies curries, parathas, popadoms, Kerala rice, and amazing spice fried chicken. The entire experience was thoroughly enjoyable.

The next morning, we checked out of our hotel and headed on our way to Alleppy, our last new experience of the organized part of our trip. Along the way, we stopped at a Tea Plantation and were given an introduction to the process and a tour of the factory. The plantation we stopped at is called Connemara Tea Plantation (named after the home of the Scottish architect that designed it) and employs 400 families. The nice thing about this company is that the families aren't just there for the work and then gone again; the factory pays for their homes, their health care, and schooling for their children, as well as providing them a salary. That's a pretty sweet gig. 

It was interesting to learn that there really are only two tea plants in the world that make up most of the teas (blacks, greens, and whites) that people drink, although there are hundreds of varieties of this type of plant. Based on what part of the plant is picked, when it's picked, and how it's processed after it's picked all play a part in whether you're getting a top of the line tea or "Lipton" as our guide helpfully stated.

The factory itself is a giant warehouse with so many wonderful things to photograph, that the ban on pictures made many of us quite sad. We got to see the drying rooms, the filtering, grinding, fermenting, oxidizing, and tasting rooms. I never knew how much work went into the production of tea. I am writing this as I sit drinking a cup of Strawberry Green Tea in a small tea shop that looks like its straight from England, but in Fort Kochi, but I'm getting ahead of myself. There is one more adventure before we arrive back at the beginning.