No Pachyderms and No Palace

Luckily, before we left Fort Kochi, some very nice people washed our clothing for us. So after the houseboat, we were in a supremely relaxed and prepared state for our next part of the trip.


So we were gone for a month, which is a pretty long time to be out of one's own country, if you are not going someplace else to stay. And we had a fabulous time for about 75% of the trip--other than the getting Very Sick part, and the other part that I am about to tell you.




We rode the bus to Calicut, another city in Kerala. It's also another city which has had a name change, and is now Also Known As Kozhikode. We stayed in Calicut (at the Beach Hotel) for one night only, because there is really nothing to do there at all, and we wanted to break up the long journey between Fort Kochi and Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, our final destination.





The only fun thing about the Beach Hotel was the fact that it was our first full-service hotel since arriving in India. It allowed us to do things that were really mundane, but really necessary to revive our tired American souls.

So we ordered American food from room service, sat around in our underwear with the air conditioning on, and watched a 4-hour Looney Tunes marathon while drinking nice cold beer.

Then later, Breck took a bath in our Very Nice Bathroom.

A few words on American Food in India. If you order food in a restaurant, looking for comfort food that's something like food at home, expect the unexpected. They will try to make what they perceive American Food to be, not what it traditionally is.

For example, I ordered a turkey club sandwich from room service, that was made with un-toasted white bread, no mayo, turkey, and a slice of tomato. A little thin, but a decent sandwich.

Another example was a Caesar salad that had no anchovies, no croutons, no parmesan, and no Caesar dressing. But it was a fine, simple salad. One last example is the tomato soup.

We were advised by Beth to order the tomato soup in several different restaurants. It never tasted like plain old Campbell's tomato soup. Sometimes sweet, sometimes savory, always really different and you could never guess how it would be--but it was always really tasty.

We also went to our first Indian bar upon arriving at the hotel, where they served beer, Bacardi rum, Beefeater gin, and Royal Challenge whiskey (you also don't see women in bars in India, so the guys there looked at me a little odd for a moment). We hadn't had any whiskey since we left Chennai, so we opted to try the Royal Challenge (against Beth's explicit instructions NOT to drink the Royal Challenge).

Royal Challenge is absolutely as its name says it is. It smells faintly of fish. It's harsh going down your throat. It gives a little warmth to the belly, but then after any more than one drink, your stomach begins to feel Not So Nice. More about Royal Challenge later.

After a nice sleep, we took another shorter bus ride and then a jeep to Tholpetty, which is right outside of Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary--all of this took a little less than half a day.

We were told in Fort Kochi by the agent who helped us book our stay in Tholpetty that the hotel would be wonderful, and we would see a ton of wildlife.

LIES, LIES, ALL LIES!!!

This is a view from the top floor of Pachyderm Palace, the hotel where we stayed. Here, you can see one of the few nice things about the place--the view. The hotel had 4 rooms and a tree house--enough for about 10 people maximum. The rooms in the hotel seemed plain and clean, which was fine. I was disappointed that we couldn't stay in the tree house, because it was beautiful and cozy with plenty of sunlight, and it was slightly removed from the main hotel, elevated on its own tall foundation.

On the first evening we were there, there were some really nice guests at the hotel. Three people from England, a man from Norway, and a couple from the Netherlands. We ate all of our meals together, everything cooked by the hotel manager.

The hotel was on the grounds of a coffee plantation, and the farmer was the one who managed the hotel. After a while, I began to get the idea that he had agreed to a deal that was not exactly in his best interest, because he didn't own the hotel, he just ran it. And every chance he got, he would hover by the table while we ate and complain about how things were going for him as the hotel manager, and the problems between himself and the owner.

I wish I could tell you exactly what he complained about, but his accent was incredibly thick, and his English terrible, so one could get the gist of what he was complaining about, but couldn't really understand what he said. But he would go On and On, keeping you prisoner while you tried to have a nice meal.

He did all of the cooking, which was pretty delicious, so at least that was good.

There was also some problem with the plumbing and the water-warming deivce. A number of the places we stayed in had bathrooms that were like one big shower room (a room with a toilet, sink, mirror, and then a shower head on the wall and a drain in the middle of the floor).

This setup worked perfectly fine in every other place, because the water would drain out and the floor would dry pretty quickly after a shower, and then sometimes the maid would come in and give the floor an extra cleaning to boot. Most of the showers we encountered would automatically run cold water unless you turned on the electric water warmer (which warmed the water in the pipes somehow), waited 20 minutes, and then turned on the water.

At Pachyderm Palace, however, things worked very differently.

You could turn on the water warmer and wait an hour, but the water was always ice cold. This would not have been too bad in most of the other places we visited, but Tholpetty was at a much higher elevation, and was not as hot or humid for the most part. So a hot or at least warm-ish shower would have been very welcome--if it were available.

When I finally did take a cold shower, I found that the drain in the floor was extremely slow, and because it was cooler there, the water did not evaporate quickly at all. So, after taking a shower, you were forced to walk in filth every time you went into the bathroom (a nice mixture of soap scum, shampoo/conditioner, water, and dead skin cells). This also made the bathroom tile wonderfully slippery--especially nice in the middle of the night when you took a groggy trip to the loo.

The food that the manager cooked was pretty darn good, even if you did have to listen to his incessant complaints while you ate. And he brought us beer, which helped our mood somewhat.

Do you see tiger tracks?

I don't know about you, but all I see are TIRE tracks. We were taken out in a jeep every day at dawn and dusk, and driven around Wayanad in hopes to see some really great wildlife.


Here is a wild boar.

This is about the closest we came to any wildlife at Wayanad. Yes, I know their website boasts of plenty of animals, and of course the guy who booked our trip promised, PROMISED that we would see elephants. But there were no elephants. And there were no tigers.

Here is a deer (I promise you, it really is a deer).

For those of you who have never spent much time on the East Coast of our great country, I will tell you that this region is LOUSY with deer. You can't peek out of a sliding glass door or drive your Chevy Suburban around a Cul-de-Sac without seeing deer crossing the road or grazing about your lawn. They are extremely plentiful around here.

Every time we saw one in the Sanctuary (and we saw quite a few), the driver would stop the jeep, and we would have to sit there and watch it eat, or stare at us until it decided to walk off into the forest.

Not that I don't like deer. But, well, when you're ready for elephants, a deer just won't do.

Here is a photo of a snakeskin, freshly shed from the snake, with Breck's shoe for size verification.

This is all very exciting, no?

To be perfectly honest, we actually did see one young elephant on the first night that we were at Pachyderm Palace, on a late jeep safari outside of the Preserve. He was right next to the road, eating bushes.

I would like to show you a picture of him, but because we were asked not to use flash photography at any time while in and around the park (because it has been proven to cause elephants to charge).

So, as much as I would like to show you a photo of the nice young elephant we saw, no flash means no possible way to see the subject of a picture taken after dark.

Breck went on about six safaris, and I went on about three. I was just not as hopeful as he was. And we saw NO MORE ELEPHANTS. Not one.



We did get to see some lovely patches of forest in the Preserve, though.

The longer we went without seeing an elephant, the more often the jeep drivers would make us sit and look at every single deer we saw, for a long time.

As a result, I was not shy about being a bit fed up with the whole experience, and elected to spend the time they took everyone else on safari to read and catch up on sleep.

In addition to the other little annoyances we had at the Palace, a whole new crop of people showed up after the nice first group left. There were two German couples, and a couple from San Francisco around our age. The two German couples were not travelling together, but they each had a very "winter-spring" romance thing going on, one with an older man/younger woman, and the opposite with the other couple.

The German couple only really spoke to each other, and the couple from San Francisco was, well, really annoying in this way that I couldn't exactly put my finger on, but this fact did not make them any less annoying.

And we still had to have every meal with these people, plus share the safari jeep, plus continue to wander around in our own filth in the bathroom from morning until night.

When the final day came and we were ready to leave, we could not have been more done with the place.

I wrote to the good people who create the Lonely Planet guidebooks about our time there, so that hopefully fewer tourists will be waylaid at the Palace in the future.