Creatures large and small, and piercing of flesh

I just returned from a weekend trip about 4 hours by car northeast of Aranmula, where I have been living. A gaggle of us girls went to another one of the tourist "must-see" spots in Kerala, the Periyar Animal Sanctuary, which is very close to the border of the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. We left Friday night, arriving around 10 PM at our homestay in the nearest town outside the sanctuary, Kumily. We just returned to the school at 5 PM today, Sunday. It feels like at least 4 days have passed; so many things I have never seen before, more assorted stimuli to take in. I feel like a fish, floating around, gills fluttering, letting the water flush little invisible nutrients into my system.

Again, I want to write more than I will write, but this would take hours, so I'll just jot a few things. Saturday morning, wake at 5 AM, so early that (I think) many minutes pass before the alarm actually penetrates whatever part of the brain serves to wake one up. 5:30 AM, little jeep arrives to take us to the sanctuary. Pitch black, beautifully refreshing cool air, I get the front seat as the others rotated it the night before driving up the mountains. Since our package tour (I am ashamed to say, I did a package tour) was officially entitled the "Jungle Safari Tour", it felt particularly apropos that I was half dangling out the side of the jeep during our ride.

Driving the half hour to the sanctuary, the roads were remarkably empty, though already there were large groups of people walking. I kept thinking how it's too bad that I'm not an early riser, as pre-dawn hours are so still and subtle. I still remember taking the Greyhound bus in high school from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, where I had visited my sister. Riding back home in the early morning, I was amazed that sunrise, unlike sunset, seems such a large gradual process without the sun's movement as a focal point. Instead, just a gradual shifting from pitch black to black to near black to the most awesome indigo indigo less indigo and then suddenly, it's daylight. Being in nature, especially in changing weather or light, truly makes you realize how lacking our verbal language is to describe the vastness and variety of life. During this indigo time of morning, we passed into tea plantation territory, and the blankets of terraced hills in that light couldn't have been more beautiful. And then, daylight. But it was a sweet daylight, as the fog and mist of the mountains didn't burn off until about 9 AM.

We entered the park after passing the tiniest most shack-like structures I have seen yet. When I asked if they were actually occupied homes, Riyas, the totally awesome guy who drove us for the day, said that refugees from the fighting in Sri Lanka actually lived there. Ah, Tamils in Sri Lanka were originally from Tamil Nadu in India. Now, generations later, some of them had returned to this government land on the border of their ancestral home to escape the fighting.

And from that dip into human suffering, the focus shifted to the more frivolous matter of scouting for elephants. Well, scouting from the car on the main road through the park. As we started the hunt, Riyas announced that his group had seen 16 elephants the day before. "Oh shit," I immediately thought to myself (no swearing aloud here, please). That much luck the day before would surely mean no luck for us. And, I was pretty much right, at least in terms of elephants. But Riyas was pretty damned dedicated, jumping out of the jeep suddenly a number of times to bolt up the hills to look for elephants. The first time he did this, I was following a long distance behind him, and suddenly he motioned for me to hurry. It was about 6 AM at this point, and despite the relative poetry of the morning, A) I never run, B) It was 6 AM, C) I hadn't had my coffee yet, D) Despite the daily yoga, I've had no cardio exercise in 4 months, and E) (so I don't sound pathetic) we were at a fairly high elevation. So, I reached Riyas just in time to see the back of a mommy elephant walking away, more quickly that I would have thought possible. That was my one elephant in the wild sighting. Though I wanted more, it was good enough for me. And that was to be the one and only elephant our group ran across.

(We now move into the abbreviated version of my narrative, as writing at this pace will indeed take several hours. Here we go...)

Next, monkeys! We stopped under a towering banyan tree, heard news, turned around, and rather far in the distance saw a group of monkeys in the mist jumping tree to tree. The next bang for our buck was flying squirrels. These critters were the largest squirrels I have ever seen, and actually had colored faces and yellow underbellies. And actually, the ones we were staring at for a stupidly long time, urging them under our breath to "Fly! Come on, Fly!" were actually giant squirrels, not flying squirrels. Oops. I think Riyas was laughing at us, wondering how long we would stand there waiting for one of them to jump and spread its wing-like arms.

At some point, Riyas decided to offer the jeep up to one of us 4 women, so I moved from the front left seat to the front right seat. YEAH! First time I have driven in almost 4 months, on tiny curvy, potholed roads with a massive cliff drop to the right. Such fun! I can't believe the driver or my companions let me take the wheel, but it was good fun, I killed and injured no one, and delivered us safely to a little hotel in the middle of the park where we had breakfast.

At this point we entered the jungle portion of our Jungle Safari. The only thing I have to share about this portion of the adventure is this question for you to ponder: how many leeches does it take to make a girl scream? Leeches. Hundreds and hundreds of leeches...little, squirmy, invasive, intrusive, upsetting, incredibly tenacious, disgusting leeches. We saw no wildlife in the jungle. Only leeches. No more need be said about this.

Ah, but there were cinnamon trees. And incense trees. There is such a thing as incense trees? I've been burning that stuff for about 20 years now, and never knew it was actually from tree sap.

We came out of the jungle intact, though mortified, from the leeches. We all retained our blood. And what did we happen upon, but a local Hindu festival. There was drumming, dancing, praying, and ritual self-mortification. We had actually timed our hike through the jungle to watch the festival, as our guide had intrigued us enough with his spotty description of facial piercing that we wanted to see what he was talking about. Most of the people were only attending the event, but there were about 10 people dancing to the music, and working themselves into a trancelike state. Our guide told us there were no drugs involved, but another guide says the dancers do take something for the pain of the piercing. The dancers (almost all women) take turns moving to the front of the crowd, where they are surrounded by a group of men who hold white clothes in a tent around their heads. The men take a small piece of rope, which is actually braided tightly and finely together so that the rope is basically like a tiny spear or a very large toothpick, and pierce it through the flesh of the dancer. This is not a quick process. I saw one woman pierced vertically through the forhead. Another women's tongue was pierced. A few other women's mouths were pierced through from cheek to cheek.

I was wincing throughout, but tried to keep my noisy reactions to myself, until I noticed that the oldest woman in the group was dancing around with strings coming from her back. I then saw that a man was holding all the strongs, pulling them taut, and when I could get close enough through the crowds, I could see that her back was pierced through with 4 large hooks. At this point I was hit with a wave of nausea. At the same time, I was hit with the need to take photos, and made my largest faux-pas yet. I crossed from where I was standing at the front of the crowd, past a line of praying men, and jumped onto an empty square of dirt. It turns out the empty square of dirt was part of the holy space, and I was standing right in the middle of it with my shows on. Dear god. But I got the photos.

I need to research what festival this was exactly...I believe it was very local, and from what I could understand, was a type of symbolic sacrifice of self in thanks for being cured of a prior illness. It was so insanely intense...many of the Indians there were also trying to get close to the dancers so that they could snap photos. For the first time in my life, I literally felt like I was inside a National Geographic special.

This is all for now. I bought a half bottle of Indian red wine (more on that curiousity later) at the fancy hotel restaurant last night, and have it sitting next to me with a bummed cigarette. I'm going to go relax for a bit with those two toxic treats before dinner.