Make yourself at home in Kerala

KERALA, India — Awakened at dawn by roosters and music from a Hindu temple, we were relaxing on our porch at Gramam Homestay when we first saw him — a man wearing only a white cloth tied around his waist, muscles bulging from his thin legs.

He shinnied up a coconut tree, emptied a jug mounted at the top into a pot he carried on the back of his waist, then slid back down and disappeared before we had the chance to ask him who he was or what he was doing.

"He's the toddy man," our host, Jos Byju, explained later that morning at breakfast.

Toddy men, called toddy tappers, collect the sap from the flowers of coconut buds to make toddy, a slightly alcoholic liquor that begins fermenting within an hour or two.

"Can we watch?" I asked Jos.

"Of course, but we have to wait."

Toddy tappers don't work on an exact schedule, but the man who taps Jos' tree usually shows up around 7:30 or 8 a.m.

The next morning, my husband, Tom, and I sat with Jos on the porch and waited.

A little before 8 a.m., the toddy man came, walking fast, almost running in blue flip-flops. Strapped to his waist was the jug along with a piece of bone and a meat cleaver.

He wrapped his head in a cotton handkerchief and put on a brown cap with ear flaps — protective head gear, Jos explained, in case he's hit by a falling coconut.

Kerala

Where

Kerala skirts the tropical Malabar coast of the Arabian sea in southwestern India. With a population of 30 million, it's considered a role model for developing countries, with a 90 percent literacy rate, a diversity of religions and high-quality health care.

Home-stay lodging

Home stays are an alternative to resorts and hotels, but that doesn't mean accommodations are primitive. Many are historical homes and villas where the owners have remodeled guest rooms using traditional furnishings and installed private, Western-style bathrooms.

See www.homestayskerala.com for a list of historical homes and villas with families that maintain cultural traditions.

Travelers posting reviews online gave good marks to Gramam Homestay near the old trading town of Fort Kochi. The owner, Jos Byju, also provides trip-planning advice. After exchanging a few e-mails, I asked him to help me set up a seven-day stay, part of a three-week independent trip to India in October. He booked three other home stays in Kerala, an overnight houseboat cruise through the backwaters, and a car and driver for the week. Total cost for two people, including most meals, was $1,150.

Any of the home stays can be booked separately.

Rates at Gramam Homestay start at $48 a night for two, with breakfast. Nicely-decorated rooms, each with a private bathroom. No AC. Dinner and sightseeing are extra. See www.keralagramam.com or call 011-91-484-2240278.

Rates at Kollenkeril Homestay are $80 per night for a double with breakfast. Spacious rooms with private bathrooms. No AC but Munnar is in the mountains and temperatures are cool. Dinner is an extra $3 per person. Info at www.homestayskerala.com.

The Thannikkatt family has two rooms for guests at its Thani Illam Homestay. Basic rooms with private bathrooms. No AC. Rates range from $40-$60 for a double and $25-$40 for a single. Meals included. See www.thaniillam.org or phone 011-91-484-2649679.

More information

www.keralatourism.org

Using a piece of wood as a stepstool, he scooted up the tree, and, working fast, he emptied the first of two ceramic pots mounted at the top where the sap had collected overnight.

Then he used his knife to cut a fresh bud, tapped it with the piece of bone to loosen the sap and put the pot over the bud to catch the next batch of toddy.

"Would we like a taste?" Jos asked, and brought a glass to the tree. The toddy tapper poured a little from his jug; it had a slightly sweet flavor, like a rice wine with a hint of vinegar.

I turned to say "thank you," but as quickly as he appeared, the toddy man had slipped away.

Beyond the beaches

Learning firsthand about local traditions such as toddy tapping is one of the bonuses of forgoing a hotel or a resort for a village home stay in Kerala, a tropical state that stretches along India's southwestern coast.

Kerala is one of India's most progressive states, with a high literacy rate and a socialist-style local government run by an elected Communist party. It's also one of the most religiously diverse, with a large population of Christians and Muslims as well as Hindus.

For visitors who can do without air conditioning and room service, home stays offer the chance to spend time with local families and explore village life, from the sleepy island towns along a network of lakes and lagoons called the backwaters, to mountain hill stations overlooking tea and spice plantations.

Jos, his wife, Lyma, and their sons, Abel, 13, and Noel, 10, welcome guests into the 75-year-old house Jos' grandfather built on a coconut plantation. It overlooks a lagoon in a backwaters village near the former Dutch and Portuguese trading town of Fort Kochi.

After prices for coconut oil plummeted a few years ago, Jos, 43, remodeled two rooms for visitors. Ours had twin beds, a large wardrobe, a Western-style bathroom and a shaded porch.

We stayed here two nights, combining sightseeing with meeting the local villagers and playing cricket with Abel and Noel.

One day we explored historical sites and spice shops around Fort Kochi's Jewish quarter where 14 Jewish families still live, descendants of people who migrated from Jerusalem 500 years before the time of Christ. Later, a group of fishermen invited us to watch them using big, Chinese-style nets that they lowered and raised from the water teeter-totter style, using rocks as counterweights.

Waiting for us when we returned home in the afternoon were tea and banana fritters. For dinner, Lyma made fish Moilee, a Kerala specialty steamed with coconut milk and spices. We ate it along with okra; soft, lacy pancakes made with coconut and rice flour; and finger-length bananas.

The next morning, Jos took us to meet his neighbors, the Neduveli family — Shani; his wife, Jose; and their son, Anu.

We drove to a grassy dike in the middle of the rice paddies, then walked for about a quarter mile and spotted a thatched hut.

The family built the house from coconut wood and palms. Inside were two rooms — one, a combination kitchen and bedroom, and the other a sitting room. Outside was a concrete slab with a sink and a dozen or so metal jugs filled from the public tap with fresh water for drinking and washing dishes.

With rice farming on the decline — a combination of low prices and not enough people for the harvest — the family depends on the winter prawn farming season for its income.

Shani and a helper cast their net three times and caught a half-dozen white prawns — not a large catch, but enough for Jose to fry in coconut oil spiced with chili and turmeric and fresh onions. We ate them with a dal of yellow lentils and drank sweet, milky tea spiced with cardamom.

Up until now, I thought we had eaten our best breakfast at a fancy hotel in the North Indian city of Jaipur. But here in Kerala, things just kept getting better.

Walking in a spice jungle

"Come carefully," Joseph warned, leading us down a path into his jungle spice pantry.

For the past 20 years, Joseph A.K, 52, has been the caretaker of a 12-acre cardamom, coffee and pepper plantation perched 3,500 feet atop a cliff in the mountains below the tea plantations of Munnar in Kerala's Western Ghat mountains.

"Taste this,"' he said, kneeling down and plucking a seed from the base of a broad-leaf cardamom plant. "Very good mouth freshener."

Joseph was our host at Kollenkeril Homestay, where we arrived with our taxi driver, Pankaj, after four hours of uphill driving from the coast into the mountains along a two-lane road filled with hairpin turns.

I felt so car sick that all I wanted to do was lie down.

Nonsense, said Joseph. There was a plantation to explore, so he settled us on the veranda with a tonic of ginger, lime and honey, and before long, I was recharged and ready for a tour.

Joseph pointed out nutmeg trees and had us chew on fresh clove buds. He scraped a piece of bark from a cinnamon tree.

"Taste it, it's sweet." My mouth was getting numb, but there was more: Curry plants, allspice, bananas, vanilla beans.

Joseph and his brother, James, manage the home stay for a rubber-plantation owner who once used the house as a vacation retreat.

Made of rosewood and wood from the jungle jackfruit tree, it had three large bedrooms, all with private bathrooms; a living room; and a veranda with wicker chairs where the brothers served afternoon tea.

The air was cooler than in hot and humid Kochi where we had trouble sleeping without air conditioning. Here, we pulled covers over us at night. Joseph told us to listen for the whistle of a marble thrush at dawn, but we awoke first to the sound of the Muslim call to prayer broadcast by loud speaker from a nearby mosque.

Ten miles up the road and another 1,500 feet higher were Kerala's tea estates — around 30 in all, covering steep hillsides like giant green carpet squares — and Munnar, an alpine town filled with shops selling spices, cashews and flower oils. Higher still was Eravikulam National Park where mountain goats roam wild on a rocky mountain top.

Kerala's cuisine usually includes fish, some form of coconut and often beef, unlike in other parts of India where most follow the Hindu custom of not killing cows for meat.

The brothers whip up what they call "homely" food. Dinner our first evening was cauliflower curry, vegetable fried rice, steamed vegetables and chapati. For breakfast, James fixed puttu — rice flour and coconut roll-ups steamed in a bamboo tube. He served the first portion with cooked vegetables, and the second with bananas and cardamom honey.

Like doting mothers, he and Joseph coaxed us to take more.

"You come next time and stay for one week," Joseph insisted, as we got up from the table. "We make you fatty!"

Mysteries explained

India brims with mysteries that baffle the Western mind.

I'd been saving some questions for Santhosh, 34, our host for the last night we spent in Kerala near the town of Kalady, a pilgrimage center and the birth place of Sri Adi Sankara, a philosopher who led a religious revival in India and influenced the spread of post-Buddhist Hinduism.

The Thannikkatt family — Santhosh; his wife, Sreeja; and their two daughters, Kunjava, 3, and Saalini, 1 — are Brahmin Hindus, members of the highest caste in the Indian system of class divisions.

They live with his parents in a 150-year-old wood-and-stucco home, surrounded by ginger and rubber farms.

Sharing Indian culture with foreign visitors is their passion. With Santhosh, we visited a yoga center, a Hindu temple, the village market and an elephant training camp.

India is changing, but most couples still opt for arranged marriages, Santhosh explained as we talked one afternoon on his porch under a ceiling fan. "How can you tell in a five- or 10-minute meeting that this is the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life?" I wondered.

"Love" marriages became fashionable in the '80s. But a high divorce rate convinced many young people to go back to the old way of allowing their parents to hire matchmakers.

Santhosh and Sreeja, 27, met each other once for five minutes and another time for 15 minutes before they became engaged and then married three months later.

They were attracted to each other, but how did they know they would get along, or what the other thought about important life issues?

That's where astrology comes in, Santhosh said. Everyone has a horoscope done before they begin looking.

Santhosh had other requirements. He's Brahmin, so that meant he had to find a wife of the same caste. He's also 6-foot-3, so he had to find someone who wasn't too short.

But if the stars don't line up, nothing else matters, he said.

"Our horoscopes told us everything we needed to know."

The family, like many Hindus, maintains a vegetarian diet and avoids alcohol. Sreeja served meals in her open-air kitchen on metal plates filled with mounds of rice, cooked vegetables, curries, pickled mango and chutneys.

Most people eat with their right hand (reserving the left for toilet duties), and she encouraged us to try. Indians mix their food on their plate with their thumb and first two fingers, then roll it into a ball or use bread to dab it up.

I made a bigger mess than the couple's 3-year-old, but sitting here, laughing with the family as I scooped up dinner with my fingers, I felt right at home.

Carol Pucci: 206-464-3701 or cpucci@seattletimes.com