Bamboozled in Bangalore

We arrived for a day in Bangalore at 7am, in order to break up the 16 hour journey South. If you're intuitive and lucky enough to sense the passing of your desired destination and disembark at the right location on the long bus journeys, you will most likely still be dumped in some obscure corner of town in the early hours when little is open and rickshaw drivers are scarce. We quickly befriended an Israeli girl named Reevie and after several hundred meters of blindly strolling through the ghostly early morning city we spotted a rogue rickshaw and set off for Lal Bagh, Bangalore's famous botanical gardens. We convinced our driver to rev up the enormous sub woofer hashed into the back of the crumbling rickshaw, and bounced along blaring aggressively loud Bollywood bass lines. 

The gardens were gorgeous and home to an international wealth of trees and flowers, not to mention birds. A staggeringly vast White Silk Cotton Tree, native to Central and South America, is seated majestically in the West end of the park, offering shade to a colony of squirrels and the flow of well dressed Indian men in ear warmers on an early morning jog, stopping periodically to encircle various allegedly sacred trees.

After leaving the shaded serenity of the gardens, approximately one and a half hours of grievously traipsing the senselessly busy and severely polluted city instilled in us an exhausted and jaded view of the place. We opted to conform to the commercial vibe of the city and headed for the nearest cinema with the flimsy affirmation we might watch a Bollywood film. Our unpleasant taxi driver was intent on shafting us from the outset, promising a prompt 'shortcut' before he proceeded violently on a death defying course down a one way street, weaving shockingly yet skillfully through the blaring on coming traffic. After further enduring the contentious entrance regime at the cinema, not unlike the entry process at American airports, which consisted of several invasive thorough pat downs and the temporary theft of our electrical equipment, biscuits and half empty Nutella jar, the jadedness crept back in and we opted for an English flick which consisted of Ben Stiller embarking on an adventure along side Sean Penn, and National Geographic photographer - so vaguely topical at least. Snippets of cultural influences were provided by the utterly bizzare Hindi interval advertisments. 

After bidding a fond farewell to Reevie who was off to stay with her boyfriend in a monastery in the South, we boarded another sleeper set for the fishing town on Kochin in the middle of the coast of Kerela...