Cycling in Kerala-Day 4

Day 4 was New Years Day, and I will write about the evening in a separate blog.  Here we went through the area of Kerala hit by the tsunami in 2004.  Though Kerala is on the western side of southern India, it actually still got hit.  We rode through an area in which one woman personally did a lot of fundraising to build new houses.  The fundraising was really effective and she built new houses, including a behemoth for herself.

Fishermen repairing their nylon nets.

My Superhero husband.  This is actually impressive as the bike is quite heavy.

Our tour guide Jerry.

More of my fans.  See they have decorated their spokes with paper airplanes!

Riding by the area of destruction.

So cute!

This is where the ocean meets the freshwater. On the right is the ocean, on the left, inside the bend is the freshwater part that goes into the backwater.

So picturesque

This is us standing on the wall you just saw.

These guys are fishing, and all they caught was an eel, which you can see on the rick next to our guide (with the backpack).  They just left the eel because they think it is inedible.  We asked Jerry to throw it back, and he did.  Save the eel!

At one point we had to take a ferry.  This scooter came with us.

Sandip on our ferry ride.

These guys were on our ferry ride.

They brought a bad of fresh sardines.

So we crossed the ferry, rode a bit and came across this beautify scene we just had to get a photo of.

People have asked-were the roads all good to ride on?  Not all, and that is when we packed up the bikes.

See the traffic? Oh and this is pretty light.

Random bus stop on the side of the road.  Literally just this pole-you would miss it otherwise.

Ah the beloved coconuts end day 4 of riding...

Kerala cycling-Day 3

Day 3 we went from the backwaters to a "resort" just 40 km down the road.  We started on the beach, rode on the main road for a while (including past women selling chickens, though didn't get any good shots of that) and ended at this resort which was, well let's say not our idea of resort.  How is it not fun though?

We started at the beach-see the women in background sweeping up trash?

Here they are dumping the trash over the wall onto the beach.  There was a fire below burning the trash.

Ready to go!

We stopped here to change the tire on our guide's bike, and use the toilet.  The priest of the church you see in the background let us into his house to use the toilet-so hospitable.

This is the place we were catching the boat to the resort.

Once at the resort, we took this boat from the check-in.restaurant area to our room.  There is a guy behind me driving.  Hard to tell from picture, but there is a long bamboo stick he has in the water that he puts to the bottom and literally pushes the boat.

View from our room.

We went for a walk on this path through the nearby village and these kids wanted us to take one picture.

There is no zoom on this picture.

Day 4 coming right up...

Roaming Pinkhead?

Yes it is true, I now have pink hair.  Hopefully it will only last for a grand total of 24 hours.  How did this happen you may ask?

A bit of backstory please...

Many of you know I did my own hair for years.  One day, Meg brought me to David who was more than happy to play with my hair-red with blonde streaks, deep mahogany, short, a bit longer, just doing his artistic thing.  Several times I would say "come on David, please do pink."  The answer was always emphatic NO.  He told me I would look ridiculous.  I actually thought to plan visits back to David just because I was freaked out about what would happen getting my hair done here. Still, the first time was decent enough-a bit too layered and long, but doable and she did fine on color.  Back to the real story.

So yesterday I go into the same person and am like, ok kick up the color like we did last time (and I pointed to the nice strawberry blonde) and cut less layers, but shorter.  So she mixes the color and comes out to put it on.  The color as paste was this bubble gum pink, but I was like, well sometimes it looks different in the bowl than on the head so whatever.  She rinses and what do I look like? An advertisement for Hubba Bubba.  She tries to correct it, to no avail-it is just bright pink with orange tones. I was furious, late for my date to go to the British High Commission Bar with my friend Amy, and starving.

Friends Amy and Greg said "own it" and Sandip said "can they at least make it black? It would be better."  David has said black is ALMOST as bad as pink.  So I am going back to the salon soon to see if they can correct it.  I don't have high hopes, but I do hope that I at least will not look like a 19 year old, at which time pink (or blue, purple, green, rainbow color) is perfectly normal and acceptable.

David I PROMISE I will never ask for pink again.

Stay tuned...