Fellow Travellers

Alongside the friendly people of Kerala, we met a number of fellow travellers who were pleasant company. In particular, our fellow yogis at Hinterland were generally a nice group to spend time with – mostly European - divided between young women travelling on their own and ladies of a certain age, with a token male or two thrown in.

However, for the last few days we were joined by an American Israeli lady from Connecticut who was – to say the least – a little pushy, loud-mouthed and opinionated. Rather annoyingly, she made a special effort to get to the yoga sala before morning or afternoon tea to ensure that she placed her mat at the front of the class but would then always manage be the last to arrive for the class.

At Kaivalyam, we met couples from France, New Zealand and the UK who were pleasant company but we were slightly wary of an Indian family with a young child who screamed through most of dinner and then also screamed through most of the night. Our neighbours at breakfast commented on this and expressed their concern for the poor mother who had to live with this – but appeared totally unconcerned about poor me who had been trying to sleep in the room next door.

After the first two weekends of the Six Nations, Linda delighted in explaining to any French groups we met that ‘Les Bleus’ had been beaten by both the Scots and the Irish. Since there were quite a lot of French travellers, she had numerous opportunities to make her point.

At Thekkady, we were joined by a group of young Germans who were exploring India on hired Royal Enfield bikes – unfortunately one of them had a guitar and their evening singsongs on the rooftop went on a little longer than I thought acceptable. However, since there were 6 of them – and Jimmy C was far away in Hua Hin – I thought it best to suffer in silence. In contrast, we met a very pleasant, worldly couple from New York in the bakery and enjoyed a good chat.

At our Marari homestay, our neighbours were a family from Bristol who had live in Toulouse for 15 years or so and never made it down to the beach in the 4 days we were there.

Despite there being 17 or so other couples at Xandari, we never got more than 'good morning' from many of them and the majority just seemed to avoid any contact with the other guests.