For the last week and a half we have been in the southern Indian state of Kerala, which sits on the western coast of India's southern tip.We chose Kerala because we had heard rave reviews from friends about its beauty and rich culture.The reviews were not false - Kerala is physically stunning with beautiful rugged coastlines, dramatic mountains covered in tea and spice plantations, and dense jungles filled with animals.We had also heard that Kerala is not as poverty-stricken as other parts of India and thus is a bit easier for a foreign tourist to travel through.Given that this stop is our last on our trip, we decided that saving the craziness of Delhi or Calcutta for another time was not a bad idea.

Stepping off the airplane in the city of Fort Cochin was by far the most dramatic culture shock we've experienced on the trip thus far.The sounds and smells and colors that fill the air here are enough to send one's senses into overdrive and we both spent the first few days feeling a bit overwhelmed by how dramatically different India feels from anywhere else either of us has ever been.In Fort Cochin, we spent time walking along the coast, marveling at the elaborate wooden four-posted nets that the fishermen use to catch fish.The nets need at least four men to haul them in and while we were watching, a number of nets were taken up, at great effort, only to be empty of any catch.The sight was heart-breaking and an obvious example of the tinge of desperation that seems to fill the air here.While in Cochin we took another cooking class from a woman named Leena.The food was good but even better was the evening we spent sitting around her kitchen table with her and her daughter, talking about their lives and ours.

After leaving Cochin, we headed south to the town of Allepey, which is famous for the network of "backwater canals" that bisect the coastline.We rented a houseboat for a night and motored through the canals, seeing the towns and villages that sit along the canal's banks.We especially enjoyed the early morning when the women come down to the water to wash their families' clothes.The women beat the clothes against rocks to clean them - a practice we have seen elsewhere in Asia but never quite so up-close-and-personal.We have done the majority of our clothes washing by hand on this trip, hanging clothes to dry on lines strung across our hostel and hotel rooms, but we have always had soap and even then it is hard to feel that one's clothes get as clean as they do with a good ol' washing machine. Watching the women wash their clothes was a good reality check and a strong reminder of how much we take for granted and how little of our "daily necessities" are truly vital.We also enjoyed a late-evening stroll along the backwater canal's bank, listening to the chanting from temples along the way and watching as groups of boys played cricket in the fields beside the water.

After Allepey we headed southeast, away from the coastline, to the town of Kumily.Kumily is up in the mountains, which are covered with vast tea, coffee, and spice plantations.The plantations are absolutely beautiful and while in Kumily, we spent one day visiting a spice plantation.We both enjoyed learning about the spice plants - like pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves, to name just a few - that we use every day, and we bought bags of spices to bring home with us which are now filling our backpacks with delicious scents.

Although visiting the spice plantations was wonderful, the reason we actually travelled all the way out to Kumily was to visit the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, which sits directly beside the town.The day we spent hiking through the Sanctuary was incredible.The Sanctuary is dense jungle, dotted with occasional grasslands and lakes.We took a jeep around to the back side of the Sanctuary, which is less touristy, and spent the day hiking through the jungle.We did not see any tigers (which Periyar is famous for) but we did see elephants, monkeys, birds, boars, and squirrels during our time in the Sanctuary, along with beautiful flowers and trees.

The hiking was made especially exciting by the presence of very aggressive leeches.We wore gaiters while hiking but even with the gaiters, the leeches would hop (yes, they hop - who knew?) off the ground onto one's shoes and then inch their way up one's leg.Todd was wearing shorts and so had a small gap where his gaiters ended before his shorts began and a very industrious leech managed to climb up his gaiter and under his shorts, where it drank it's fill of blood before falling off.The resulting "wound" was rather dramatic and bled quite profusely.I immediately became rather paranoid and spent the rest of the hike hopping about quite a lot, flicking leeches off our shoes and gaiters with blood-thirsty (no pun intended) vigor.Perhaps seeing my response to the tiny leeches, Todd refrained from asking about snakes in the Sanctuary until our hike was over - which was probably a good idea, as our guide proceeded to tell us all about the cobras and various other horrific snakes that inhabit the Sanctuary.

Overall, our time in India has been good, although we have felt much more manipulated and taken advantage of here than elsewhere on our trip.We are not sure if this fact is due to our relative experience - perhaps we are just savvy enough after all this time on the road to recognize when we are being duped even though it has been happening all along - or if India is more aggressive than elsewhere we've been.Probably the answer is somewhere in between - certainly the degree of poverty and need here is greater than many of the other places we've seen, perhaps most similar to Guatemala.We definitely feel that we are only seeing a tiny piece of this vast country and our time here is only wetting our appetite for further travels in the north.