White People at Kanniyakumari

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Spencer and I went to KYKM on the last day that we had before we went back to the ship.  There’s a very tourist friendly part with shops and beaches and temples and shrines that you can take a boat to right off the coast and crap like that, but Spencer and I were not really interested, so we didn’t go.  The guy selling sunglasses told us to go to Watakotai beach instead, so we paid a rickshaw driver something like $3 to take us there.

 

When we got there, there were a ton of people (all Indian) hanging around eating coconuts and drinking the milk.  It wasn’t expensive at all, so Spencer got one and they gave him a straw and I took a sip of the milk since they had seriously hacked it off in front of my eyes, so I knew it was safe.  I didn’t really like it though.  Spencer ate all the stuff inside, which was fine with me.  There was some dude there with a HUGE video camera having pictures and video taken of him and a girl, and he asked if he could have a picture taken with us.  I don’t really know what was going on, if he was just rich or what.  He said he was on vacation, I think, but I don’t think he really understood English, so maybe not.  In either case, he was pretty excited.

 

Anyway, we walked down the path to the beach and started to go east, toward the Bay of Bengal, and up on the beach there was a group of maybe ten college-aged kids.  They called to us and got REALLY excited and ran down to see us.  This one guy named Selvakumar was particularly excitable and hugged me a bunch of times and gave Spencer some warm beer which didn’t taste very good, but whatever.  The whole lot of them were actually pretty excited to talk to us and find out where we were from and what the hell we were doing here and why we were just walking toward what Selva called “a wasteland.”  We said we just wanted to see the nice beach.  But anyway, they shook our hands like five times each and hugged us and took pictures with us and I took Selva’s email before I left.

 

We continued to walk on from there, and at one point we decided we needed to get some water and food to last us for the last tiny bit of our trip, so we headed inland.  We called one guy on a bike over and he stopped happily and gave the two of us and our backpacks a ride on his little motorbike to the nearest “convenience” store, which in India means a small outdoor shack with one employee.  We got some Sprite there, and walked back.

 

We took a slightly different path on the way back, and we really wanted water in particular, so we decided to continue asking people for water, which was easily understood if you just said “bottle” with a slight Indian accent.  This one family – mostly a bunch of girls actually – took particular interest in us and went and got an old bottle and filled it with water from their tap.  We felt kind of bad taking it, not knowing how much they had access to, and also knowing that we couldn’t really drink it, but we kept it anyway to be polite.  The girl that ran to do it for us – Annu – was extremely beautiful and I wish I had taken a picture of her.  I went back later to try to find her again for a picture, but she was nowhere to be found.

 

After that stop, we walked toward the beach, and this time pretty much everyone that drove by us (which wasn’t many people) stopped to talk.  At least two full vans going right after each other had people stop to ask us where we were from, how long we were here, if we liked the girls, and things like that.  We also kept asking for water, and they told us to NOT drink the water from the spring that was right nearby.

 

One last person who stopped was with a friend on a bike.  He was a carpenter and he was a Christian and he was into karate or some form of martial arts, with his friend, and they had finished practicing because it was a Sunday and it was his only day off.  We told him that we needed water, and he drove with his friend to get a little food and brought water to us and we gave him like 40Rs for it (the water cost like 28Rs altogether or something).  Then they sat down and talked to us for a while.

 

Later, when I went to take a picture of Annu and couldn’t find her, I walked back and there was just this ENORMOUS group of kids walking to the beach.  Of course they were pretty mystified and excited by me, and asked all the standard questions, but didn’t speak a whole lot of English, so we couldn’t get too much across.  They were pretty damn excited though, especially the younger ones.

 

It’s weird to have people get all excited just because you exist.  It’s a little bit disconcerting actually, and I was glad to have it over when I got back to the ship, and I think I’ll be glad to have it not happen to me again when I get back to America, or go to Mauritius or Cape Town and maybe even Brazil.