Toward Cochin

 Cochin has a small airport at the southern tip of India near the Malabar coast in a region completely covered with coconut palm and banana trees.  The contrast with Delhi was amazing.  We went walking the night in Delhi, and with one turn from our hotel we were in a very poor area where people were roasting food over open charcoal fires in the street.  If it had been winter, it would have looked like a scene from Dickens.

But the drive in from the airport to Fort Cochin, the little beach town where our hotel was, was rife with green and water everywhere as we crossed rivers, bays and estuaries to get to our town.  Took two hours, plus we landed an hour late because the runway was being repaired.  We passed signs for "Special Monsoon Offers" and "India's Best Fertility Clinic," loads and loads of gold, and "M4Marry.Com," where "Malabaris go to marry."

And thanks to the other billboards, now I know where they go to make babies.  There were goats and oxen beside and in the road all the way, lots of roadside shrines - though most were Christian.  Turns out that Kerala, the state there, is 80% Christian thanks to Dutch and Portuguese colonization.

We also passed a sign for "The Art of Driving" driver's ed school.  Our driver, swerving wildly to avoid oncoming trucks and cars and tuk-tuks and oxen, was quite competent.  Jody, already making the mistake of actually looking at the traffic zooming our way instead of just clamping her eyes tight and hoping for the best, asked him if he had ever had an accident.  "By God's grace, no," he answered.  He then proceeded to sorely test that state of grace by immediately - I mean within two seconds - veering into a mile-long section of the highway where we were the only car going in our direction, in a lane where all the other vehicles were definitely not going our way.  I'm not saying we were driving the wrong way in a one-way section - I'm just saying no other car of the thousands on the road chose to emulate our driver's path.