Kerala, aka "God's own country"

View from our canoe on the Kerala backwaters. No mosquitoes since the brackish water isn't stagnant.

Christy and Danny's paparazzi at a beach near the airport.

Our driver called these "Dubai houses."

Kerala was the final stop on our 10 day travels. Kerala is an interesting state since it has a communist government, the highest per capita income and the highest literacy rate in India. They have a market economy and we saw no beggars. It is about an equal mix of Hindus, Christians and Muslims and they all get along. The money comes from the Middle East, where many Keralan emigrants go to work and send money home. The streets are lined with colorful, single family homes, something I haven't seen anywhere else in my limited travels here.

We did a homestay with Vejeesh and his parents on Munroe Island. His mother made our meals, and the south Indian food was different from anything we've had up north. One breakfast was crepes stuffed with toasted coconut and steamed bananas  with watermelon or pineapple smoothies. YUM! The only bad thing about the place was noise-noise-noise from a local temple that began at 5:27am and continued until after we went to bed. The tinny loudspeakers blasted music and chants that brought to mind audio waterboarding as a form of torture. All was quiet for a couple of hours in the afternoon and we could hear the birds and other natural noises in our tropical paradise. Vejeesh showed us some fun local treasures, such as pepper, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon growing on trees. He stood on  one end of our canoe with a long bamboo pole punting us through the back waters at sunset, where we saw a farmer punt across the water to pick up two little goats who were grazing. Then the farmer went to a different grazing spot to fetch his cow, who jumped clumsily into the water and swam home beside the farmer's canoe. Vejeesh said that not during, but after the big Tsunami in 2014, the water has slowly risen, and is flooding out many of the homes. We saw brilliant blue kingfishers and kites (birds of prey sacred to Hindus), herons and fireflies.

The Western Ghats mountains at Ponmudi. (Elevation 3400 feet.)

This photo doesn't do justice to these verdant, mountains beyond mountains in Kerala's Western Ghats. I really am a mountain girl, and these hills fed my soul. The sky was blue and there was no litter! We hiked around for about an hour before we had to come down and drive to the airport. On our drive up, our driver told us that people had seen a tiger cross the road some months back! "Tigers are available," he said, but we had no such luck. We did see many rubber trees, with small buckets attached. Every day a farmer slits the bark and milky rubber drips into the bucket like maple syrup. We saw a man who mixed acid into the rubber and poured it into 15x19 pans where it congealed into stinky white sheets. He hung them over a line to dry before packing them up for delivery to the next person on the rubber chain. You learn something new every day.