Travel Day

The next day we set out early and took the train from Kochi to Calicut (the home of Calico). This was a highly entertaining journey with the on board official "Meals on Wheels" service competing with the local Del boys to provide the passengers with a full range of snack food and drink. Every 30 seconds or so a vendor would pass by calling out his wears. Chappaties, pukora, samosas, kulcha, veg curry, chicken curry, chocolate, crisps, nuts and fruit. Tea, chai, masala chia, coffee, water, coke, fanta and lime soda. Certainly knocks the British Rail tea trolley into a cocked hat.

It was great to be out of the city and speeding through paddy fields and rubber plantations. As the train entered the hills and gained altitude the plantations changed to tea and coffee. The mountains were spectacular, not at all what we would have thought of as a typical Indian scene.

We were met by our bus in Calicut and after a fabulous lunch of chicken byrianni cooked in a clay pot we were off again throughout the tea plantations and farms to our overnight stop at Wayanard.

From 1997 through to 2004 a series of natural disasters, elephants rampaging uncontrolled through fields and a crash in prices knocked the bottom out off farming in this district. The government failed to intervene to support the farmers and as a result 150,000 farmers, on the verge of starvation, committed suicide over these 8 years. This was a national disaster and was apparently widely reported at the time but I have no recollection of these events being reported in UK.