On Money

Now that I'm back in the tourist zone, I have noticed that everything is more expensive. Actually, that's not exactly it - what happens is that in the tourist zone only tourist products are available and these are expensive. The Indian stuff is still cheap but you can't find it.

The main issue for me is the price of food. I don't really buy anything else. Breakfast in Konark would cost me about 12 rupees. Breakfast here just cost me 85 rupees, and there was less of it. It wasn't even particularly good. It's just what you pay at tourist places versus snack shacks by the side of the road. A cup of chai costs 20 rupees here! In Ooty they cost 6 (admittedly they're a little smaller, but usually also better) at a restaurant and 3 at a chai stand. My dinner last night cost almost 300 rupees, which is outrageous, even if it was good.

Well the thing is you kind of have to look at these issues simultaneously from a local and a foreign perspective. The locals won't pay more than 30 rupees for breakfast. But 30 rupees is like 75 cents. So even the most expensive meal is only around maybe 5 dollars. So you need to try to keep your expenses down (that's the whole point of coming to India, right? Otherwise I could have gone to the Riviera) but splurge every once in a while, and just realize that when you splurge you're going to pay ten times what you're used to or maybe more.

- posted by Joachim @ 12:12 AM

 
Wow, no blog entry since Ooty! It feels like that was a long time ago, even though it was only a few days, really. I spent two days in another hill station, Munnar, with my friend Peter. Beautiful place, with more dramatic scenery than Ooty, but there's nothing in the town so we did't want to stay too long.

We tried to take a bus up to Top Station, where there's supposed to be a nice view, but a jeep accident prevented us from getting there. While we were looking at the wrecked jeeps, our bus quietly drove back to Munnar and left us stranded on the mountain. Luckily there were a lot of jeeps driving around the accident and we caught one. There were seventeen people in it before we got in, although I suppose if you don't count infants there were only fourteen. The two of us made it pretty tight but we did make it back to town. It didn't occur to me, until Peter mentioned it, that riding in an overloaded jeep with a crazy driver was a foolish thing to do ten minutes after seeing two of them smashed up. Oh, well, it's India and we certainly weren't going to walk.

Later that day I caught a bus to Kochi (previously known as Cochin). It's a sleepy island town that seems to have been run by the Dutch or Portuguese or both. It's pretty touristy, so there are plenty of art galleries and no cheap food. But I've been hanging out with other tourists and that's been a refreshing change. There's a big crowd of us at my hotel, and we all went to dinner last night. I picked my meal from the fish collection on ice at the front of the restaurant, and they tandoored it up and I ate it. It took forever but it was quite tasty. I had pomfret, which is some kind of flounder or something. One of us had baby hammerhead shark.

Dinner last night (the fish, plus fries, water and ice cream) cost me two hundred and eighty rupees. That's more than five dollars! Luckily, I'm sleeping in a dormitory so I don't pay much for my hotel. Still, I miss the Rs 24 all-you-can-eat thalis in Ooty. I hope I find some regular Indian food again soon.

I've already seen "jewtown" and the cantilevered Chinese fishing nets, so once I take in the Kathikali dance I will probably be done with Kochi. I may leave tomorrow. The next step is to take a backwater boat ride, possibly to wherever I stay next, and after that I'm going to the beach at Varkala. I only have nine days left in India! Suddenly two months doesn't seem like a very long time.

- posted by Joachim @ 11:58 PM