Nagarcoil day 2

What a difference a full night of sleep makes.  I was up early as I'm accustomed to, and I got to walk around the property of our hosts.  They have animals and lots of flower garden plants and vegetables.  They also produce spices at another location, and these are processed in a room of their house.

 We left after a wonderful breakfast, and I've found that the bus rides are some of the most interesting ways to see the country and take some pictures. There are small stores everywhere, and almost everyone has bananas for sale of stalks that have just been picked.  The streets everywhere are covered with trash.  If it is cleaned up, it is usually burned, including the plastic that gives off noxious fumes.

Kumar, our host, showed us around and took us to  his family's rubber plantation where we got a good look at the process.  The trees have about a 30 year productive life span and can produce latex in the seventh year.  A strip is cut each year, and the latex starts to run immediately.  The workers empty the bowls every three days.

This is a labor intensive process.  The latex is processed on site and pressed into sheets that are cured and eventually sold to the tire companies.  The smoking or curing keeps them from developing a mold.  The trees had just started to leaf out from the previous season.  In another month, the monsoon season will give much relief to this very dry region.  Also, as the trees start to bloom, they are used by local beekeepers to produce honey.

The workers then served us coconut juice made by chopping off the end of fresh coconuts.

 This is a refreshing drink and provides a lot of the liquid that is drunk by the workers.

After the rubber plantation, we made a brief stop by a place where ayurvedic medicnes were made. These are mostly herbal remedies.

Our next stop was quite different from the manual process we had just seen.  We visited a totally automated thread factory that starts from the raw cotton and ends with the threads that are sold to mills to produce items like the tee-shirts that we wear.

 I did maintenance work in cotton mills during summers when I was in college, so I was prepared for the heat and noise, but this was the first time most of the people on our trip had been in a textile factory.

We got to see another manual process--collecting the rice hay to be used for animal feed.  These guys sure can load a truck.  As you can imagine they hang out over their lane and are not legal to drive, so they drive them at night.  Any traffic fines are usually handled right on the spot and are between the driver and policeman (wink wink) unless an accident is involved.

Another prevalent institution is the walls everywhere.  However, the advertising industry gives the owners money to paint ads on the walls, so in some of the most scenic spots, they are covered with signs (which in some ways divert your attention from the trash).

Our next stop was at a snake temple where most people observed the rites.  Before going in, you poured milk on some statues, and you could wash in the public bath if you wished.  Then you went through the temple. I have to admit that when I saw Adam come out, it looked like he had been shot in the forehead.  We did get some strange looks by the locals, and I felt pretty uncomfortable here--like we were intruding.

Finally, we got dropped off in town for a brief shopping stop. Most of us went up on the 6th floor of the Hotel Pioneer Paradise to take pictures from the roof.  We captured some of the beauty of the area that contrasted with some of the poverty in this land of extremes.  It was all intensely interesting to see, and the people were mostly very friendly and helpful.

My last adventure was buying a scarf in a dept. store.  I selected the scarf with the help of 3 clerks.  Then one of them took my purchase to to a checkout area where one person wrote up the ticket, a second person checked it and initialed it, a third person took my money and gave me change, and a fourth person placed it in a bag and handed it to me.  I'm pretty sure this is a reflection of the wages that they get to be able to employ so many people.

Time was up so I had to skip the bakery, and we headed back to our hosts to pack, and after another sumptuous meal, we bade our super hosts goodbye and with our thanks for two full days, we headed for the train for our overnight trip to Cochin.  What a super time we had.