It’s all about the food, really

(Is that why I gained ten pounds?)

 Puri was a bit of a food mecca for us after months of thali and dahlbaat.Raven has started watching “Top Chef’ on HBO, so we are all better educated in the art of cooking! Not that we are eating at that level of fine cuisine. We ate almost daily at the Peace Restaurant where colourful tables are set in a walled garden, off the street. We would watch the geckos and huge bumble bees do their nature thing while we feasted. Occasionally a monkey would pause in his tour of the neighbourhood, looking down into the kitchen for food from the safe height of the neighbours’adjoining roof. The Peace served up our typical breakfast of vegie omelet and toast,with milk coffee. Raven has started to drink and enjoy sweetened milk coffee, too. They typically make it with Nescafe, it isn’t the rocket fuel espresso Heath and I love, but it does the trick. For some reason, since we have been travelling south, the masala chai tea has been disappearing. There are still roadside tea stands, but now we have to ask specifically for ‘masala’ (spiced)tea. Even so, that can be ‘hit and miss’. For some reason, it is not as commonly drunk in the south. Too bad for me, I am now back to the coffee.   

 

One of the favourites on the Peace Restaurant menu was OM rice. This consisted of fried rice inside a two-egg omelet, with melted cheese tucked in on top of the rice. Heath and Raven fell in love with their apple chapatti. Sliced apple and sugar baked inside a chapatti (Indian bread). Some kind of syrup was poured over the top. It was similar to apple pie, but a nice alternative to heavy pastry. Cinnamon would have made this dish ‘pop’.

We haven’t been eating many raw vegetables, no salads, due to vegetables being washed in potentially tainted water.  Salads are safer to attempt in a restaurant like the western tourist oriented Peace. Some restaurants claim to wash their vegies in ‘iodine water’, but even so, salads usually consist of two kinds of vegetables sliced and arranged on a plate, with no dressing to liven them up. Thalis usually have cucumber or radish slices on the side, which we may eat if they have been peeled, but generally fruit vendor purchased baby bananas and mandarins are keeping us from scurvy.

Golapur by the Sea was a lovely place to stay. Heath is writing of our adventures with turtles, ‘borrowed’ canoes and finding our way off the beaten track, so I won’t write how we arrived at our destinations! We found a funky and colourful hotel right on the beach. Heath and Raven spent hours in the surf, catching waves. After half an hour of being ‘washing machined’ by the pounding waves I usually have enough, so instead I lay in the sun in my conservative beach wear watching them. Itook beach walks every morning, before it got really hot. Even so, by 7 or 8am I can build up a pretty good sweat just by walking.There were less hawkers, beggars and tourists here, so it was enjoyable to spend time outside the hotel.The beach was 100% cleaner and nicer than in Puri, even though this is an active fishing town. The fishermen still use the tide line as an open latrine, but their areas are further away from the hotel beaches, unlike in Puri. The tsunami of 2004 affected this area a little bit, taking out some of the smaller fishers’ homes on the beach.

I’ve been taking pictures of food, intending to write about our culinary experiences. One highlight in Golpaurwas the rose ice cream that we discovered. Rose petals and caramelized nuts adorned the top, while the exquisite flavour of rose made every mouthful of this super smooth and creamy ice cream a scrumptious joy. We found it in only in one restaurant, and ordered them daily until they ran out.  It seemed a little expensive- at 35Rs (.70cents )each, compared to the 20 Rs for the revello style bars, but it was so worth it. I don’t like eating the ‘crappy’ sugar bars, and don’t usually eat them when Heath and Raven get them, so I could justify my one-a-day creamy and cold floral indulgence.

Fish has been on the menu since arriving at the seaside. A few times I have ordered a fish ‘burger’. It arrived with an amount of smaller fish that have been fried up- usually containing the bones and skin, in a bun. We have watched the fishermen unload their nets on shore with hundreds of these tiny fish flopping around. Restaurants and fish vendors sell bigger fish- they display a sample (not on ice) and you can choose which one you’d like.  So far I have shied away from this- I’d like to avoid food poisoning, and Heath and Raven aren’t too interested in sharing fish for dinner.

Restaurant fish storage....

We found the best snacks to eat in Golpapur as well. They had pre-popped Act II brand popcorn with flavours such as masala cheese and regular cheese. Yum! Small 50-calorie snack bags. I think we may have cleaned out the town of these, too. Raven also discovered these small coconut candies. Made with real shredded coconut.Yum.Yum.Both of these have not been seen before or since.Ahh..the good life….having all the time in the world exploring the culinary snacks of another country.

One day at Golpapur I went for a walk with ‘Irish’, (What was his real name?)- I’m talking about the talkative Irish guy we spent a few days with. Heath is writing about him, too. We walked up the main road, away from the sea. When we stopped to take pictures of thishuge carved and painted face on a temple, a couple local men came up to talk to us. 

One fellow had better English than the others, and he introduced himself as ‘Tony’. He said that he was a retired fisherman and used to be a life guard here. Hethen invited us to his home to see his pictures of his family, other tourists and people that he’d met from Australia and England. We met his daughter, as well. Tony invited us all for lunch the next day. I accepted, as it felt like small town Nepalesestyle hospitality. The next day our family arrived at noon. He showed Heath and Raven all the old photos, then led us to the airy table upstairs. When we were seated 

his daughter brought upafeast of rice and vegies, dhal, as well as masala crab and pan fried fish.

This was the first ‘big’ fish I have eaten in India, since being a bit leary of restaurant freshness.  I am not sure what kind it was, but it was tasty. Thecrabs in the masala crab were of a small size- a little bit bigger than the size of the crab we would play with on the beach.  Masala just means that they were cooked in curry sauce. Think a less saucy butter chicken, but crab. They had been cut in half before being cooked. Spoons are typically the only utensil we westerners are given to eat with, as Indians eat with their right hand, so I asked Tony how to eat the crab. 

We were to eat them with our hands! I watched how he did it- since the crab legs were not big enough to really crack open and suck the meat through, like we would, he popped a half crab in his mouth then crunched up the shell, ate the meat, then spat the shell  out! Given that the shells of these small crabs are pretty thin, this is the Indian way of doing it, but like not wanting to eat my dhal and rice with my hand, I really didn’t want to attempt this, either. (Talk about a closed western attitude!)There are only a few things I am reluctant to ‘go Native’ on, and eating with my hands is one of them.

I ended up crushing the shell with my fork, then getting my hands super greasy holding the little guy while I tried to alternatively suck and poke the meat out. It was super yummy.

I was hoping that Tony had invited us out of the goodness of his heart, but as our meal was ending, Tony’s friend and his adult son arrived. They wanted our address, so we could help him get a job in Canada. Of course we exchanged email addresses, not that we can really help him that much. Did he think we knew about Canadian Immigration? We directed them to the Canadian Consulate, online. After they left, Tony digressed into an account of his financial difficulties- telling me how expensive it was to pay his monthly bills, then how expensive lunch was for him. This was awkward. Was he asking for a donation towards lunch? We didn’t show up empty handed, I had brought along some quality Cadbury’s chocolate as a thank you gift. I asked him why he didn’t just invite us for tea?He dropped the topic after that. We will help his friend, if we can. Why does it appear that every Indian has an agenda? (Get money from white person).

Unfortunately the theme arising in this country is this: Indians see tourists’ dollars, not individual people, and they always try to extortion the most money from us. It is like they have no long term sustainability plan when it comes to tourists. Get as much as you can NOW, no matter how much you piss them off. They don’t think about the long term – what happens when tourists tall other tourists to skip their town because the sellers are too insistent? It is super annoying how many times you have to say ‘no’ to a seller on the beach or the street. Our game plan is typically to say ”No” politely a few times, then ignore them.  You are screwed if you act interested in their product- sometimes the things are really pretty, but you are never left alone.

We had been worried about a small bite Tony’s baby goat had given Raven. We had been in email contact with a doctor that assists tourists in Chennai, and he assured us that goats are not common carriers of rabies. Of course we washed her cut out really well, but we were a little concerned. We had also needed to buy a new cord for Raven’s IPOD, it had broken a few weeks ago, but we needed a big city selection to be able to replace it. We had thought we would see the ocean beach and a 400 year old banyan tree, but the ‘tut tuts’ wanted an exorbitant amount of money to take us across town. It didn’t really seem worth it. We saw a few square blocks of this town, did a little shopping and eating, then left for another beach resort area.

We had a bit of a confusion with a driver taking us to the wrong bus station out of Chennai. The police were called. One awesome thing about being white in this country- we are never wrong! For what it was worth, the policeman was on our side about the bus station misunderstanding, but we still needed to get across town. We finally landed in a huge bus station.  I think it claims to be the biggest bus station in the world. It was well organized, had clean bathrooms and even luggage carts! 

We took a bus to Mamallapuram (Tamil: மாமல்லபுரம்), a tourist town 60 km south of Chennai famous for its stone carvings. It took about two hours to drive here along the coast. We found a lovely and clean hotel, the Sunrise Lodge, about 10 mins from the beach. Mamallapuram dates back to the Tamil Pallava dynasty in the 7th-9th century. The structures here, mostly carved straight out of granite, are among the oldest existing examples of Dravidian (South Indian) architecture. My favourite was Krishna’s Butter ball- a huge rock resting on a slope, defying gravity by not rolling down it. 

This forested area is full of paths meandering between carved 9and eroded) temples, and boulder piles.  One morning I took my rock shoes to see if there were any decent bouldering spots. The area reminded me a little bit of Squamish. The granite was lovely, but there wasn’t much I could play on. I walked off trail, between the different boulders, looking for a bouldering spot. I interrupted one man’s private dump spot (Really?!?Here?!?! This behaviour leaves me speechless.) . I managed to find three spots to have a few minutes of fun, but the rock was either too smooth, or inaccessible by plants, or higher than I wanted to attempt solo. In one spot I was accosted by mosquitos and an early morning silk-paint seller. Time to have a shower before breakfast!

The waves weren’t as great as the ones to the North of Chennai, but because there were more bathing suited tourists here, we felt we could show a bit more skin on the beach and not bother with the T-shirts over the bathing suits.  People surf here, in fact there is a surf school, but the beach and waves were better at Golapur on the Sea. There was a temple just off the beach we swam at called the Shore Temple. It is the oldest structure in the area, built c. 700 AD, this temple has been here for more than 1400 years. However, unlike Mamallapuram's other monuments, the Shore Temple is a building (not carved from rock) and the bulk of the current structure is a reconstruction after it was struck by a cyclone. It's not particularly large, and the carvings have been badly eroded by the wind and the sea, but this adds to the sense of antiquity. It was in a ‘pay area’, so we didn’t go inside it. The viewing was just as good from the beach.

The forested area around Butter ball hosts other structures are carved straight out of rock. The scenery within the hills is also quite unusual, with smooth rock rising out of the forest and carved stairways leading between the mandapas (pavilions), caves and carvings. Carving is huge industry here, we could have bought a ginormous Buddha for the yard.

Raven wanted to learn to carve rock, too, so we took a ‘lesson’ Indian standards- he gave us a little chisel and a file and kind of showed us what to do, then left us to our own devices. Raven gave up after a couple of hours of focussed attention, with two of her creatures breaking. From the template of a gecko she ended up with a snake due to the legs breaking off, then a worm from the end also breaking off. I had more success. After my first attempt at an OM pendant breaking, I chose to switch to an easier object, a surf board, and created a beautiful pendant. I am pretty proud of my achievement. A neat hobby, like I need any more.

 Just at the beginning...

Because Mamallapuram is a French European tourist town, the food available reflects that. We dined in one that served salad.  Salad! Real salad! With dressing! There is rice in everything, but this was so fresh and tasty.

 

Raven ate pasta with white sauce, while Heath sampled the rest of the menu. Beer is available in restaurants if you ask, but because there are a high number of Muslims, it appears it has to be served on the stealthy side. 

Road stall samosas