In honor of
our topic of the week, Supriya is running a post we first published in December 2010.
Of all the places I’ve visited, a tiny dot of a village
in southwestern India ranks as my all-time favorite.
From the time I got married, I’d been hearing about a
little farming village near Murdeshwar, in the state of Karnataka. It’s the
town from which my mother in-law hailed. One of her brothers still lives there,
in the original family home that their father built and where all his children (plus
a few grandchildren and even great grandchildren) were born. I’d often heard
how gorgeous this place was. In fact, it had been a running joke between my
husband and me that whenever we visited any beautiful place, he’d make the
inevitable comparison with his mom’s village outside Murdeshwar. Until several years
ago, when seeing was believing.
We’d made the trek from Bangalore, piling into a large
van, fifteen of us in all. We started early in the morning, our hired driver at
the helm, and stopping about halfway for a late lunch in the mostly
Muslim-populated town of Hassan, outside Mangalore (not to be confused with Bangalore). It was a long and sometimes
bumpy ride but eventually, we arrived, late in the evening, skirting the tiny
village where our relatives lived. All the adults, myself included, agreed that
I—yes, me alone—might not be able to handle the rustic accommodations in the
village, so instead we stayed at a lovely seaside resort in the neighboring
town of Murdeshwar. (How thoughtful of the others to “rough it” for my sake.)
But just outside our resort was the real treat, one of
the most phenomenal sights I think I’ve seen. A towering statue of Shiva, the
Hindu god of destruction, lords over the beach town. He’s 120 feet tall, made
of cement and steel reinforcements, and his shimmery, silvery form can be seen
from almost any vantage point in the area. While photos don’t do it justice, I
found it hard to pull away from this truly spectacular sculpture.
Okay, so there were no lazy days at the beach, no cocktails
with little umbrellas in hand. It was a different kind of vacation entirely. We
watched the kids dip their toes in the foamy waves as the sunset exploded into
a thousand shades of red. We climbed rocky cliffs, collected seashells, and
marveled at not being able to find a single bottle cap or cigarette butt along
the way. We took long walks, sharing quiet lanes with an ambling cow or two,
and watched the tall grass sway through the rice paddies on either side of us.
Of all the places I’ve visited, a tiny dot of a village
in southwestern India ranks as my all-time favorite.
I’m a city girl, so I was surprised by my affinity to
this quiet, coastal town called Murdeshwar. Since childhood, I’ve traveled to
India pretty regularly, at least every couple of years, it seems, and visited most
of the big cities. In my younger days, I made attempts to visit rural areas,
but never made it there, daunted by the lack of adequate roads and
transportation connecting the cities I visited to the villages I knew of.
Since we’d arrived at night, we couldn’t see much of the
town. We checked in and dragged the kiddos up to sleep, leaving our wide
balcony doors open, the blanket of stars shining in and the sound of crashing
waves lulling us to sleep. At breakfast, we sat in the seashell-shaped
restaurant that jutted out into the Arabian Sea, surrounded on three sides by
water as we ate South Indian comfort food, watched fishermen throw their nets out,
and felt the gentle sea breeze roll over us. That experience alone was worth
the twelve-hour journey.
We visited the area soon after the tsunami that
devastated parts of Southeast Asia. While this region of the South Asian
coastline wasn’t hit too hard, the gorgeous white-sand beaches had been wiped
out. It still looked pretty amazing to me, especially a particular strip of
beach along the nearby town of Manki, which was so pristine and untouched, it
looked as if we were the first to discover it.
Okay, so there were no lazy days at the beach, no cocktails
with little umbrellas in hand. It was a different kind of vacation entirely. We
watched the kids dip their toes in the foamy waves as the sunset exploded into
a thousand shades of red. We climbed rocky cliffs, collected seashells, and
marveled at not being able to find a single bottle cap or cigarette butt along
the way. We took long walks, sharing quiet lanes with an ambling cow or two,
and watched the tall grass sway through the rice paddies on either side of us.
At the old family home, we ate fresh-cooked meals, lovingly prepared
for us by an aunt who slid our food into a hundred-year-old clay oven known as a tandoor. The beautiful
old house also featured a bona fide cradle room where my husband’s eldest uncle
slept as a newborn some 85 years ago, followed by his ten siblings and several
generations of progeny. We spent a lovely evening around a bon fire while the
elders sang and the children danced. We drank from a real working well. (Okay,
I watched others drink from it.) We
toured the huge family plantation, a stroll that lasted a few delicious hours, as
we delighted in every variety of tropical fruit, peppercorn, and unusual herb
or vegetable we’d never heard of. Nearby, we visited stunning temples with incredible
historic significance, their stories appearing in ancient holy scriptures.
It probably isn’t the most exciting part of the world to
live in, and definitely not a destination for surfers or jet-skiers, but it was
one of my best-ever beach vacations.
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