Varkala, Alleppey - India

India, a country that should actually be its own continent! A country with 179 languages, in which Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Daoism and many other religions are practiced right next to each other and Indian domestic tourists feel like foreigners in their own country. I've been wandering around this country alone for six days now and I love it!

After my 17 hour journey from Sri Lanka to the south of India by TukTuk, plane, bus, train, boat and a lot of walking, I managed to arrive in Varkala in the evening. The country greeted me with the monsoon rain pa excellence and I trudged with my flip flops through the rivers that formed on the streets, carrying not only the smell of the dirty streets, but also all the causes of these smells. Since I got a few sores on my feet while surfing and a coral reef tried to amputate my pinky toe, as a used plaster flowed past me in the trickle I was standing in, I figured that this was it were. In my mind I was already picturing my foot becoming more and more inflamed, getting thicker, redder and warmer until at some point the fever sets in and I succumb to sepsis somewhere in India. The Nipahvus outbreak in the province of Kerala with a mortality rate of 40-75% where I was also made me think that my trip might end early in a coffin in India. But I didn't feel like it, if it was going to happen, I would rather be burned traditionally like in the northern city of Varanassi on the Ganges and then thrown into the river while the residents bathed there. But I would love to travel on to Nepal alive, so that evening I bathed my foot in alcohol-free antiseptic and watched the wound healing closely until it was well healed.

When I arrived at the accommodation in the evening, the guests greeted me with a dance session in the entrance area to Bollywood music. I was absolutely exhausted and after having my SIM card set up for 1½ hours in a snack bar at 9 p.m. I was actually sure, after the seller took a photo of my passport and called several different people on the phone to set it up, that it was me After causing my own kidnapping and identity theft, I just wanted to sleep. (In this snack bar I not only bought a SIM card, but also a chai massala, batteries, a razor, toothpaste and a needle and thread... an interesting snack.)

But I started laughing with joy because I just realized that I would now be traveling alone across India for the next 50 days and the music got into my bones. So I danced a little more and the Indians tried to teach me traditional dances to no avail. Then I fell into a long, deep, dreamy sleep.

The next morning, feeling a bit lonely and lost in this new country, I rented a scooter to cruise through Indian villages and look at a huge (really HUGE) eagle statue. She is a figure from Hindu mythology and to me the existence of this statue seemed as inauthentic as the story behind it. Carved entirely out of stone, it was incomprehensible to me how humans could create something like that. In the evening I looked for beautiful rings that were sold to me at exorbitant prices and even after minutes of buying the wrong ones nothing could be changed. Later, a local also told me that I could get something exactly like that in Goa for a tenth of the price. I felt a little proud that I didn't fall for the dealers, despite my incredible desire to buy exactly that jewelry. Reason prevailed and my patience still has to wait. Then I took part in a sunset yoga class with a sea view of the Arabian Sea and was calm in the evening until the Bollywood music played again and I had to show what I had learned the evening before. Before I went to sleep I sewed a few holes in my clothes and the Sri Lanka patch on my backpack and finished Stephen King's "Pet Cemetery" with goosebumps and the hair standing upright on the back of my neck.

When I arrived in Alleppey, I went to a beach bar with a few people and drank a banana and peanut butter smoothie and damn did it taste good! I couldn't live out my peanut butter obsession, which I know how to cultivate so well in Germany, here in any way, so for me this jar was like the holy grail from Indiana Jones. Afterwards I felt just like Indiana Jones: immortal and still angry at Nazis ;D

I especially got along really well with an Indian man, his name was Nanid. He was super nice, interested, helpful and insisted on paying for my meals so that I could travel as long as possible with my money. We talked about politics, culture, cuisine, studies, education, love and family and played Jenga as clumsily as Parkinson's sufferers (I hope that wasn't too mean :/). The next morning we took kayaks to watch the sunrise through the famous "backwaters" of Allepey. In the city's outskirts, hundreds of canals flow between small land masses on which locals built their homes and use canoes as their only means of transportation.

Others also took part in the kayak trip and from then on that day I unfortunately only had contact with people who I could only shake my head at. The others only recorded the kayak trip through the camera on their cell phones while everything was simultaneously posted on Snapchat, Instagram, BeReal, etc. I also realized quite quickly that this was not a documentation of the experience to be remembered for later. Experiences and emotions are necessary for a memory, but I just find it difficult to believe that these people noticed anything about their surroundings because they were busy thinking about which song would be best to put under the video. The documentary was just there to give an unrealistic portrayal of her supposed "everyday life" in order to, I guess, get some sort of recognition from her thousands of followers. When one of them proudly showed me his Instagram profile, he told me that he wanted to appear as authentic as possible, but in reality he only uploaded pictures that could be printed on any travel brochure.

It is an attempt to present a perfect image without realizing that the person who strives for perfectionism has not understood what it means to be human. So why do so many people strive to share negative feelings and experiences? Doesn't the mere existence of good mean that there is also bad? One causes the other and is no less natural or valuable. Just as death becomes immediately unavoidable when you are born. Only through the ratio of bad to good is one of them given real status. Is it perhaps the fear of becoming vulnerable? Unfortunately, I don't have any answers to all the questions and I'm also aware that I'm part of this problem myself. But I'm also trying to get more used to not always just showing the bad side.

Nevertheless, I tried to enjoy the scenery and not concentrate on it. I managed to do this until two of the people simultaneously turned on music on their cell phones at maximum volume. One Linkin Park and the other some sentimental pseudo-poetic music. I don't have such a big problem when people design their own experience like that, and by God I don't want to claim that the way like travel is the only true way, but I just find it rude to influence or limit others with your travel style. Neither of them asked themselves for a second whether they might disturb others. So we paddled through the otherwise calm landscape with a loud mishmash of music, bawling tourists who became one with their cell phones. The incomprehensible and annoyed looks from the inhabitants of the canals towards our group made me feel ashamed and I tried to distance myself internally and externally from this collective as much as possible.

In the afternoon I set off towards Vagamon and completed the first stage with a four-hour boat tour, which drove like a bus through the canal infrastructure of the backwaters past mini boat stops, where there was usually only a single house. I enjoyed the view and thought a lot about how others perceive me and my own values. When three local men next to me ate their paratha with chicken wrapped in aluminum foil and then, without giving it any thought, casually threw the wrappers over their shoulders into the river where I had seen a dead varan floating in the plastic two minutes earlier, that was me angry for the first time on this trip. I simply couldn't understand how one could destroy one's own nature so consciously and at the same time unconsciously. Especially since, as I later found out, there were three engineers who spoke English fluently. So it wasn't necessarily due to the level of education and the infrastructure in this province also exists to ensure garbage removal. Nevertheless, there was apparently a lack of understanding of any form of environmental awareness. What's the point of separating waste in Germany with around 85 million inhabitants when a country with 1.5 billion inhabitants scatters their waste like fertilizer?

Of course, it's easy for me to judge from my high horse as a European, while our CO² emissions per capita, at around 12T per year, are 10 times higher than those of an average Indian. But in these moments I succumb to the limitation of human consciousness that what you see visually seems worse than what you don't see and is therefore not as tangible.

Jane Austin's old-fashioned picture of society from her book "Pride and Prejudice" continued to reinforce my temperate mood. I have to say that the title hits the nail on the head. The title could only be more accurate if “toxic relationship” and “sexism” were included. Then it's enough to just read the title and grab another book.

When heartbreak came in the evening, all I longed for was a hug, a cocoa with a hot water bottle and an exciting episode of “Three ???”. I was able to put the latter into practice and fell asleep with the feeling that tomorrow would be better.