Kerala and Tamil Nadu – going native in glorious South India

February 1, 2025

How do I even talk about India?

This is my third visit, and every time the task seems formidable – how to describe the indescribable.

So let’s start at the beginning.

The first time I was here, back in 2019, I got quite emotional in the taxi within half an hour of arriving.

Nothing in my 37 years of life up to that point had prepared me for the slums in Mumbai.

I’d been to some strange places, and considered myself (somewhat) worldly, but the sight of the shanties and the colorfully-dressed people picking through trash by the highway was too much for me.

I stayed in Mumbai for a few days, and hated it.

kerala banana fields
In the banana fields.

Later, Morena and I went to Goa, which was better. It had nature, and beaches, and hippies.

Then, three years later, we went to Kerala to get married. That was great.

In reality, India has a lot of regional diversity, and I’m happy I saw Mumbai first – because Kerala gains a lot in the comparison. Located in the tropics at the southern tip of India, I just spent another week there, and I have to say: I’m impressed.

Back in glamorous Kerala, India

Sure, you land at 3 in the morning, and in the dark, the city of Trivandrum looks like it’s been destroyed by a series of natural disasters. But still, it’s way better than Mumbai.

The driver takes us at breakneck speed down narrow streets, swerving around motorcycles and groups of stray dogs.

There are a few tea shops still open, and a mutton restaurant that looks like it’s just closed – two shirtless guys are mopping in the brightly-lit space.

Turns out, I still remember some of the geography from last time. Here’s an area where they sell flower garlands during the daytime, here’s the temple – not the one where we got married, but the one where we couldn’t get married because I’m not a part of the Hindu caste system.

After a half an hour or so, we’re at Morena’s house, and we collapse in bed. A few hours later, it’s light out, and already hot, and the honking of rickshaws and trucks going by outside the window wakes me up.

Grandma makes some instant coffee, and we sit down for a breakfast of chicken curry and vegetable medley flavored with black mustard seeds.

I stuff myself on curry and appam – a rice-flour pancake – and then go upstairs to sleep for another few hours.

Hey, India. It’s good to be back.

Some facts about Kerala

Before we continue, let’s get some facts about the state of Kerala.

Kerala is India’s least impoverished state – which doesn’t mean the most wealthy. But the cost of living is low, and most people seem to be living dignified lives.

They might not have a lot of “stuff”, or the trappings of a developed-world lifestyle. But it’s also worth mentioning that day to day, there seem to be more homeless people – and more people asking me for spare change – back in Barcelona than in Trivandrum.

The literacy rate is 96% – also the highest in India – and the life expectancy is 77.3 years. Guess what? That’s the highest in India, as well. (These things are, of course, estimates, and the data may vary a bit depending on the year and who you’re asking. I’m getting my info from Wikipedia.)

coconut palms kerala

The language in Kerala is Malayalam, which has about 35 million speakers. But India has around 1700 languages. Hindi is the biggest one, and English is often used as a lingua franca between people of different regions, even though it’s not the native language of any significant number of Indians.

People may speak multiple languages, or mix some English in with their local language. It’s a bit of a melting pot.

The biggest industries here in Kerala include tourism, rubber, religious pilgrimages, spices like pepper and nutmeg, coconuts, fishing, and remittances from abroad. There’s also a large “technopark” in Trivandrum, which employs 75,000 IT professionals.

About those remittances: there are over 3 million people from Kerala living outside India, mostly in the Arab states around the Persian Gulf (the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, etc) and the money they send home is responsible for a lot of the regional economic boom.

And if you will permit me to mention my own personal impressions, from being married to a Malayalee woman, I’d add that the people down here are hard-working and obsessed with education.

But back to our trip…

The Culture Shock is Real

After lunch, on day one, we go to Kunjamma’s house.

Morena refers to everyone in her family by some sort of respectful nickname – “Kunjamma” means “little mother” and refers to (in this case) a cousin of Morena’s mom. 

By this point, I’m a bit antsy from being in transport and then indoors for a day and a half, so Morena’s brother and his wife offer to take me for a walk through the banana fields near the house.

The road is made of packed red dirt, and we walk out to a big pond.

A family is bathing in the pond, kids running around naked. Dad is washing his clothes, beating them on a rock while standing waist deep in water.

And I’m happy as a clam walking on a dirt path through the jungle. The only problem is that Morena’s brother claims this isn’t jungle. Its just the neighborhood. Tomorrow, if I want, we can go to the jungle.

On the way back, we stop for lime soda at a very primitive little shop. One of the old guys goes into the back and mixes lime juice, soda water and sugar. We stand around drinking. A milkman is unloading big metal cans from his truck outside. Everything about this is super weird, but I seem to be the only one who notices.

Someone pays the guy a few rupees, and we walk back to the house, where Kunjamma serves us tea and fried cauliflower, and we sit on the front steps and eat.

Welcome to the jungle

The next day, as promised, we go to the jungle.

This involves driving to the border with Tamil Nadu, Kerala’s (much larger) neighboring state.

There are the usual street scenes along the way: chaotic traffic, shops displaying large bunches of bananas and stacks of onions and elephant yams, guys on motorbikes carrying bundles of sticks or leaves to feed their goats.

We swerve around a dumptruck full of manure with two guys sitting on top of the pile.

Other trucks are loaded with logs.

Indians have a way of making buildings look both dilapidated and still under construction at the same time.

Actually, I don’t think it’s an illusion – people move in as soon as there’s a roof to keep the rain out, and figure they’ll put the final touches on the building at some later date. Then they run out of money, so the houses remain half-built for years or decades. Nothing ever gets a fresh coat of paint.

As we’re driving along, I see something furry leap up onto a railing next to the highway. It’s a monkey, and he’s got four or five friends. Two of them are having sex, monkey-style, right there on the railing. The male monkey looks angry at the interruption. Still thrusting, he turns and bares his teeth at us as we move past.

fish head meal tamil nadu
Typical south Indian cuisine.

We stop at a restaurant. There’s only one thing on the menu, and at a signal from the old lady who runs the place, the waiters start bringing it out: they put a plastic placemat down for each of us, then serve several little dollops of colorful pickles. Then a large pile of reddish rice, and a few fish curries. The main event is a softball-sized fish head placed in the middle of the table.

We eat with our hands – a process I find a bit messy and unpleasant. Morena, as usual, eats the fish’s eyeballs.

The bill for all five of us (including the driver) is 1140 rupees – that’s about 13 euros.

Pineapples and rubber trees

After lunch, we wander through rubber farms. The trees are tapped and dripping sap, and sheets of natural rubber are drying on clothes lines or on the edge of the road.

At one point Morena wants to show me something.

“Look, pineapples!”

I look high up into the trees. “Where?”

“No, over there!”

I look up in some other trees. I can’t see any pineapples. Morena, exasperated, says “On the ground!”

I’d just assumed pineapples grew on some sort of palm tree my whole life, but it turns out they grow in spiny bushes right on the ground. A lot of people plant them on rubber farms – allowing them to make money from the pineapples while waiting for the rubber trees to mature. This practice is called “intercropping“.

We stop at a small waterfall and temple surrounded by pilgrims. The temple is closed for the afternoon, but people are standing under the waterfall. Some adults hold babies, naked but for a golden thread around the waist, or some anklets. The mist is heavy in the air. It’s pretty surreal.

Specialty coffee in Amboori

Our last stop of the day is Amboori. The lake there has a bridge across it that’s too narrow for a car. If a rickshaw is coming, pedestrians (and other rickshaws) have to wait a few minutes for it to cross.

amboori kerala bridge
The bridge at Amboori.

On the other side of the bridge, a guy is selling coffee brewed with cinnamon and cardamom for 10 rupees. His little shop is made of sticks, and it’s dark inside. He tells us that there’s a tribal settlement up the hill.

These days the tribes are integrated into society, but they live in remote areas like this one. We walk through a bit of real jungle. On the way we see wild coffee plants and pepper vines.

I was always pretty bored in school when the teacher would talk about Columbus trying to go to India to buy pepper. But this is where he was trying to get to: pepper grows everywhere in Kerala, a nondescript vine climbing up the trunks of the trees.

Back at the bridge, we’re waiting for a rickshaw to pass. Four tribal ladies walk down the hill, one with a large bundle sticks on her head. They chat with Morena in Malayalam for a few minutes, presumably trying to figure out what some white guy is doing all the way out here.

Like I said earlier, India has 1700 languages. Not all of them have millions of speakers. This tribe – the Kannikkaran – speaks Kani… and there are only 19,000 of them.

Meat tubes and gold chains

The plan for the next day is a bit different. Morena’s brother and his wife are back at work at the Technopark. On the other hand, Mom’s off. That means we’re going jewellery shopping.

We drive across town to a place called JoyAlukkas.

Morena and her mom walk up to the counter and sit down. The shop assistants are wearing white shirts and ties. Someone brings us bottles of water. I’ve been through this before – it could take a couple of hours.

After two minutes, though, I’m bored.

I get out my Kindle.

James Swartz, in The Essence of Enlightenment, writes about Vedanta – an interpretation of the Hindu Vedas that has a lot to say about the relationship between awareness and external worldly objects.

The basic question is: what am I doing here on Earth in this meat tube? Who am I? What is life all about?
If I could figure it out on my own, I would have done so by now. But the problem is too tricky. [Vedanta] reveals the hidden logic of our own experience and convinces us that if we are rational, it is to our advantage to abandon the pursuit of objects and to go for freedom directly.

I’ve given more than passing thought to the question of what I’m doing here on earth in this meat tube. And as for the pursuit of objects, well, I could really use a coffee.

The futile pursuit of objects

Elsewhere in the book, the author suggests that whereas luxury is virtually nonexistent in India, we pampered Westerners live lives in pursuit of pleasure, where “luxuries have become necessities”.

I look at the wall of massive gold chains. The rings and bangles in every possible shape. It all reminds me of the stuff an Aztec priest would wear, while preparing to sacrifice virgins at the top of a pyramid.

I don’t know who this James Swartz guy is, or how he decided that Indian luxury is “virtually nonexistent”, but he’s obviously never been shopping with my mother-in-law.

jewelry at joyalukkas trivandrum
Virtually non-existent Indian luxury.

Morena buys a bracelet for her mom. And actually, I have something to do here, too: the gold necklace I’ve been wearing since our wedding needs a sturdier clasp.

Thomas Sowell, in Basic Economics, explains that Indians have so little trust in their banking system that they prefer to wear their wealth as gold. This limits the amount of money available for investment in (for example) infrastructure. But it’s true: look around, and almost everybody is wearing some gold.

Babies wear gold chains from the time they’re 28 days old.

Since marrying an Indian, the amount of gold I own has also increased dramatically – this necklace was blessed by Lord Shiva at our wedding, and may help to ward off evil spirits.

I hand over the old clasp. They weigh it, and agree to trade it in on a new one. The scale works to three decimal places of a gram.

A few minutes later they’ve melted down the old clasp – it’s now a little gold pill, ready to be turned into something else. We walk out of the jewellery store, no closer to enlightenment.

Time for some biryani.

Luxury at Lulu Mall

Later, we’re at the Lulu Mall.

Lulu is a chain of hypermarkets that’s big in Kerala and the Gulf States.

They’ve recently expanded into full shopping centers, and this mall in Trivandrum is an oasis of luxury in the middle of the dusty and dilapidated tropical scene.

Our first stop in the mall is the Starbucks, for some real espresso. Feeding my coffee habit in a tea-based society is a bit of a challenge. Lulu has everything a global citizen needs, though: not just a Starbucks, but also a Costa Coffee, a Cold Stone Creamery, and a Taco Bell.

Synapses lit up with caffeine twenty minutes later, I wander around while Morena and her mom are shopping for clothes, buying a book called Nehru’s India at the little bookshop upstairs.

When I get back to the shop where I left them, the security guard greets me and says, “One mama inside. Big one!”

He probably thinks I’m looking for the only white lady in the place, but I’m not.

I tell him I’m looking for two Malayalee women – one small and one medium.

“Oh, no, sorry…” he says.

Morena and her mom appear from somewhere, and we walk down to the hypermarket at the opposite end of the mall, which apparently sells every food product in India.

Morena’s mom wants to make a beef curry, so we go back to the butcher section. He’s got buffalo brain, boneless beef, and biriyani cut – among many other things.

Eating beef is controversial in India, but Kerala has a mix of Hindus, Christians and Muslims, and they’re happy to make a beef fry now and then. People in the north are furious about it. Some even gloat when there are floods or landslides down here – claiming it’s God’s judgement for the locals’ treatment of cattle.

We buy the beef, and a couple of bags of random groceries, and drive back across town to the house.

Fried peppers and Tamil martyrs

Right outside Morena’s gate, there’s a guy with a coconut stand.

For a few rupees, he’ll hack off the end of a coconut and give you a straw to drink the water inside. When you’re done, he splits the coconut in half so you can eat the meat.

A lot of Kerala’s economy seems to be based on coconuts. Climbing the trees is a job out here, as is pressing the coconuts for oil. In the afternoons, in Morena’s neighborhood, the air fills with smoke, as people cook dinner over piles of burning coconut shells.

The smell is very unique, and once I got used to it, it became another thing I enjoy about being in India.

Across from the coconut guy, there’s a tea stand.

It’s a primitive setup serving fried peppers and chai to whoever wants to stop along the road. Located across the two lanes of asphalt from Morena’s house, you get there by dodging rickshaws and motorbikes – crosswalks being a rare thing around here.

Standing, then, across the street from Morena’s house, and drinking a cup of sugary chai, I comment that the owner has put up a picture of a bearded man who looks to be Jesus.

I want to say it’s in the rafters of his establishment, but the word “establishment” is being a bit generous – it’s a couple of tables with a tarp over them, and the picture is attached to one of the metal bars holding up the tarp.

“That’s not Jesus”, someone tells me. “It’s a Tamil Saint.”

So it is: Devasahayam Pillai, a layman martyr of the Catholic church who died in 1752. Tortured by the local establishment for leaving Hinduism, paraded between towns sitting backwards on a buffalo – a serious insult, at the time – and eventually executed, he was made a saint by Pope Francis in 2022.

temple tamil nadu
The temple gate in Tamil Nadu.

There have been Christians in Kerala for many centuries – the original church claims to have been founded by Saint Thomas in the first century AD. But the mix of religions hasn’t always been convivial.

Driving around now, you can see large mosques, churches with red neon crosses, and – of course – plenty of Hindu temples. Almost every house has religious decor as well. Religion is a part of people’s identity in a way that isn’t common back in Europe.

Narayana Guru’s Rock

The next day we’re visiting another relative.

She feeds me egg roast and slices of sweet potato sprinkled with a bit of chili powder. Morena later reports that everyone’s impressed by the fact that I’ll eat large quantities of almost anything.

I’m just trying to be polite. And also, I’ll eat large quantities of almost anything.

After that huge mid-morning snack, we drive up to the top of the hill behind the house, where there’s a view of the jungle – or maybe just the neighborhood. In any case, there are miles of green forest and palm trees spread out below us.

Everyone talks about plants, pointing out the tamarind tree, and the banyan.

The driver kicks off his flip flops and climbs a gooseberry tree. He brings down a handful of very sour berries.

Next to the little temple nearby, there’s a large flat rock where Narayana Guru once sat. It’s now got a fence around it, with an inscription explaining the importance of the event.

Narayana Guru is the one who started the temple for all castes – the one where Morena and I got married.

Caste Struggles in Kerala

Officially, caste is no longer a big deal in India. Younger people try to avoid the topic. But it still comes up, from time to time. When we wanted to get married, we had to first find a temple that would accept me, a Christian. (I’m not officially a Christian, but people around here look at me and assume things.)

And caste was definitely a big deal in previous centuries. In the first half of the 19th century, the “Upper Cloth Revolt” was a decades-long struggle by lower caste women – women who climbed coconut trees for a living – for the right to wear coverings over their breasts.

Later, Morena tells me more. Narayana Guru was a member of her caste, which at one point threatened to convert to Christianity en masse in order to pressure the local brahmins for greater social equality. In 1888, the guru founded his famous temple – consecrating a stone idol of Shiva despite being the wrong caste to do so.

sign in english malayalam and tamil
English, Malayalam and Tamil.

His slogan “One caste, one religion, one God for all” was a call to eliminate caste differences – the Guru’s Wikipedia page suggests that his thinking on the issue was influential on Gandhi’s campaign against untouchability.

Still, caste exists. The Brahmins in most of the temples are Brahmins – it’s a caste, and a job. And the Dalit caste (formerly known as the untouchables) are still suffering from discrimination.

Allegedly, that sort of thing happens more in the north. Here, the influence of Christianity and of people like Narayana Guru have made caste less of a daily concern.

Purification by fire

Later, we visit more relatives – Morena’s great aunt and her mother, who’s 94 years old. She sits up on the bed, kisses me, then holds Morena’s hand and chats for half an hour, somewhat confused (at times) about who she’s actually talking to.

We’ve brought fruit, because we have to bring something if we’re visiting. They feed us fried plantains and chai, because they have to offer something to visitors.

On the way home, we stop at the temple in Neyyattinkara – the one where we couldn’t get married, because of the caste system.

It’s nighttime. Theres a pre-recorded chant playing – Om namo narayana – and several dozen faithful.

We leave our sandals at the gate, and I take off my shirt. We walk inside, to a wall with hundreds of tiny oil lamps. The Brahmin lights several more lamps in the little chamber with the god, then sits and chants. The theme of the evening seems to be purification by fire.

In all this the electric light goes out and its fully dark except for the light from the brass oil lamps.

When the chanting is done they bring a big lamp out, and everyone crowds around. We put our hands in the flame, then press our fingers to our foreheads. It’s beautiful.

Driving to Tamil Nadu

The next day we’re up before dawn.

I do some yoga on the porch while drinking my instant coffee. When the driver shows up – two hours later than we agreed – we’re off to Tamil Nadu.

I keep mentioning the Tamils here. They’re the other group of people at the southern tip of India – there are about 80 million of them, and their language has over 2000 years of history.

Morena’s language, Malayalam, is from the same Dravidian group, but only has about half as many speakers.

Tamils also travel a lot: Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore all have massive Tamil populations. Driving along the highway towards Nagercoil, their state seems like a more populous and densely urbanized version of Kerala.

kerala street scene
Kerala street scene.

There are dark, steep mountains in the distance, framing the bright green rice fields and the warehouses selling sheets of granite. The amount of commerce – improvised and otherwise – is impressive. I don’t know how many people are paying taxes out here: a lot of what’s going on is just people selling things by the roadside.

After a couple of hours we stop near the Thanumalayan Temple.

Breakfast is vegetarian – dosa with potato and lentil curry in a café outside the temple. You’re not supposed to visit the gods if you’ve recently eaten meat or eggs. The food is great, all served on a banana leaf, and afterwards you bus your own table: folding up the banana leaf and throwing it away in a big tub next to the hand wash.

Going native among the Tamils

Before going into the temple, we take a moment to use the squatting toilet. It costs some small number of rupees – it’s not clear how many, because the attendant charges us all different prices.

Morena complains, “Whenever someone sees you with me, I end up paying double!”

It’s probably true. As a six-foot-tall bearded ginger, I stick out like a sore thumb everywhere we go. But Morena looks pretty touristy herself, here in Tamil Nadu. She’s wearing pants, and she’s adopted some Western mannerisms in her time abroad.

In Barcelona, she looks like the quintessential Indian woman. But out here, she doesn’t quite look local.

Inside the temple, I give a few rupees to rent a mundu – a sort of sarong I have to wear over my shorts. An old guy with a white beard and a crutch announces that he’ll be leading us around the temple. It’s not clear who works here and who’s just hanging around asking us for money.

Morena and I after the temple visit.

Is this guy an official temple guide, or just a local idler?

Either way, he shows us the main parts of the temple – the carved stone columns and the several gods – with an explanation in Tamil, which Morena translates.

Worshipping the monkey

Years ago, long before I met Morena, I read an article by an Indian girl who’d grown up in the US. She was exasperated by Americans’ ignorance of India – for example, questions like “Oh, you’re Hindu. Do you worship a monkey?”

I read this article, and understood where she was coming from. At the same time, I’d also read that the Hindus have upwards of 100,000 gods, and I knew from The Simpsons that one of the main ones was an elephant named Ganesh.

Is it so unreasonable, then, to ask a Hindu if she worships a monkey?

The author of the article seemed to think so.

In any case, the main god at this temple is Hanuman, the monkey god. He’s represented by a statue made out of a single block of granite that’s 22 feet high.

Hanuman may be a son of Vayu, the god of the wind. And if you want to split hairs, he’s not really a monkey – he’s a god, in the shape of a man, with the head and tail of a monkey.

However, according to one of Hinduism’s sacred texts, the Ramayana, he once led an army of monkeys (at the behest of the monkey king Sugriva) to save Rama’s wife, who had been kidnapped by a demon in Sri Lanka.

All this to say, the question of whether Hindus “worship a monkey” or not is a bit complicated, but it looks like they probably do.

hanuman batu caves kuala lumpur
Hanuman, in Kuala Lumpur.

Approaching Hanuman, the monkey god, someone puts a red dot on my forehead.

Morena tells me to have a wish in mind.

“Tell him that if he grants your wish, you’ll come back to this place to give him a garland of vada.” Vada are, apparently, savory donuts made of lentil flour.

As it happens, I have a wish for Hanuman, and it’s a pretty good one. I’ll gladly spring for that garland if he grants it.

Later, you can also whisper your most secret desire into the ear of a large stone cow, who will pass it along to Lord Shiva.

Mom pays the Brahmin to chant a prayer including the names of everyone in the family. I’m flattered to hear someone praying for me in a language I don’t understand.

The Palace of the Travancore Kings

Later, we visit the Palace of the Travancore Kings.

They have a special ticket price for non-Indians, which is 20 times the price Morena pays. Typical.

Inside, the palace has no glass, just windows made of wooden slats.

This appears to be a common feature of traditional Kerala architecture. I guess they didn’t have much of a glass industry until recently.

The palace complex has several big buildings – all dark wood and polished concrete. Pretty sparse. There are ladders between floors – maybe they didn’t have a staircase industry, either.

palace of travancore kings
Inside the Palace of the Travancore Kings.

Towards the end of the visit, there’s a gallery full of paintings. I get the idea that someone out here went to an art museum in Europe at some point, or studied painting abroad, because these are different than most Indian art – they use perspective, and they look a lot like the paintings of the exploits of the old European kings you’d see in the Prado Museum in Madrid, for example.

A bit of Travancore history

One of the paintings that catches my eye is of a Dutch military commander surrendering to the King of Travancore.

This took place as a result of the Battle of Colachel in 1741, in which South Indian soldiers (with the help of local fishermen) beat the Dutch East India Company’s army by blowing up their stores of rice in a siege, forcing them to surrender or starve.

They surrendered. And according to Wikipedia, the captured commander, named Eustachius De Lannoy, agreed to serve the Travancore King. He became the commander of an army which he modernized along European lines, eventually going to war with some of the surrounding peoples and expanding the Travancore state.

Along the way, Lannoy also converted Devasahayam Pillai to Christianity – Pillai, the Tamil martyr and eventual saint I mentioned earlier. I wonder about the lives of people like Lannoy. He was down here in South India for 37 years, and his final resting place is in a local fort. Did he spend decades yearning to return to Holland? Or did he adapt to life among the Tamils?

Travancore as a political entity lasted from the early 1700s to 1949, when they begrudgingly joined an independent India. And the Travancore Royal Family is still around – the titular Maharajah is the custodian of the massive temple in Trivandrum I saw last time I was here.

Simple tropical lifestyles in Kerala

On our first day here, on our walk, I asked Morena’s brother about the people washing their clothes in the pond. Could they not afford a washing machine? Or is it something cultural?

“Washing machines are really cheap these days,” he explained. “It’s probably just something they do on Saturday afternoons. Like a family tradition.”

Back at the house, on our last day in Kerala, we’re packing for Kuala Lumpur.

I want to do laundry before we go – dress this meat tube up in some cleaner polo shirts for the Malaysians.

The only problem is, the washing machine is broken. Allegedly. It also might be the case that washing machine use hasn’t really caught on in Morena’s family. Either way, we have to do things by hand.

south indian wedding
At the wedding a couple of years ago.

So we go out back into the hot tropical sun. Morena fills a bucket with water, and soap, and she scrubs the clothes against a large rock that’s here for this purpose. Then she rinses them, and passes them to me, and I wring them out.

I go up to the roof – where the clothesline is – barefoot and regretting the heat on my soles. The coconut guy is there next to the road, sitting in a plastic chair and staring at his phone. The tea stall is across the street. The rickshaws and the motorbikes whiz by on the road, along with occasional brightly-painted buses and ladies in saris on foot.

I always find it a bit hard to believe that India is real – that all this is happening, even when I’m out in Europe living a totally different lifestyle. A whole civilization, so unlike my own. It really keeps things in perspective.

An hour later, I go up again, and the clothes are dry, and they smell like the smoke from the burning coconut shells.

That night, we drive back to the airport for the flight to Kuala Lumpur.

Yours,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. Well, that was longer than I expected. If you want more, check out my Indian wedding report from a couple of years ago. I’ll have an article about Kuala Lumpur sooner or later as well. Thanks!

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About the Author Daniel

How did I end up in Spain? Why am I still here almost 20 years later? Excellent questions. With no good answer... Anyway, at some point I became a blogger, bestselling author and contributor to Lonely Planet. So there's that. Drop me a line, I'm happy to hear from you.

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