Arriving in Kerala

 Immigration at Calicut was straightforward, but having seen the excess baggage the returning expatriates were importing, I was prepared for delays getting through Customs. But I was wrong. The officers waved through the procession of trolleys piled with flat-screen televisions, computers and goodness knows what else in the seemingly endless flow of sturdy cardboard packing cases that were further secured with tightly-knotted washing line cord.

As I reached the crowd of anxious relatives, one man stepped forward with a broad smile: “Meester Harwee?” – and my suitcase, glistening in its industrial-grade cling film, was whisked away out into the warm night air. He introduced his other passengers, who had actually been seated just behind me on the flight, though we hadn’t met, a Dutchman and an Icelander with whom I would be sharing the same experience for the next 28 days.

The drive to the location would have been hair-raising if I had not decided to resign myself fatalistically to being driven on the wrong side of the road, overtaking on blind corners and trusting that oncoming trucks would always reveal their presence in the night by their headlights shining ahead of them. Amazingly, we wound our way through jungle and villages for three hours, without so much as a serious swerve nor a jolt of emergency braking. At times the road was smooth pristine tarmac, at other times the driver picked out a route between pot-holes and rocks, zig-zagging across a rough unmade road. We finally arrived at the estate just before midnight.

No electronic key-cards here

Once I’d completed the paperwork requiring a tourist to be registered with the local police I was escorted to my room, which was the size of a Junior Suite in any other country, but primitive in its naked bulb lighting. The bathroom was functional but Spartan and the furniture consisted of a crude wardrobe, a moquette sofa with two matching armchairs, a large but hard bed with a thin mattress and – inexplicably – a towel rail high on the bedroom wall. None of this worried me in my exhausted travel-worn state, and I doubt if it will trouble me over the coming weeks.

I took a quick shower and collapsed into a deep, exhausted sleep.