We rented a car for a week with the Corleys which greatly helped our efforts in hunting down needed shipboard items. We were able to clear customs after about ten days and US$1,250 in shopping. We said our goodbyes, hoping to meet up with the Corleys in India, and left on a Sunday morning at 1100, February 5th under clear skies, good wind, and I can remember being somewhat depressed in spirit at the prospect of leaving SE Asia.
We had a pretty good sail, although the weather was quite hot, all that day and night, and found ourselves close to the coast of Phuket again next morning, where we planned to break up a four-day passage to the Andaman Islands by sneaking in a good night's sleep in one of the many bays on Phuket's west coast. We were listening to Richard's Net each morning on SSB for weather advisories and learned from him that it might be best if we pushed on to India, as we were a bit late in the season in consideration of how far we had to travel. The NE monsoons are strong in January and early February in this part of the world, but tend to be weaker in March and April. So we precipitously decided to forego a visit to the Andaman Islands and changed course to directly west for the southern tip of Sri Lanka.

This passage was a pretty good one. We sailed downwind with the roller furling genoa out only (main down) for most of the time and soon fell into a tolerable routine of sleeping, eating, bathing, and reading. We had a few days of such light wind that we had to motor, but we were able to sail most of the way. One stretch of perhaps eight days passed when we saw not another boat, airplane, nor sign that anyone but us existed on this planet were it not for the occasional floating bottle and inbound email each morning, . . . just the way I like it! I almost get to believing it is my ocean and no one else belongs on it. A harmless delusion, eh? One day we had such good wind, perhaps 30 knots or more from astern, we were surfing along at over ten (10) knots occasionally according our the GPS. This was due to a strong favorable current of a couple of knots and surfing downhill on some pretty good swells. On that day, the Corleys on Windwalker III, about 100 nm behind us, suffered a broken boom during a gybe on their fifty-foot cutter!

The only other notable thing about this passage was our difficulties in dodging the numerous small fishing boats at night after closing with the Sri Lanka coast. In our favor, we had a full moon for most of this passage. It is amazing how much positive influence this simple fact has on a passage. On the negative side, we were often annoyed, perhaps harassed, by numerous small fishing boats who tried to flag us down, feigning emergency or near starvation, trying get us to give them food, money, water, shirts, whisky, cigarettes, or sell us fish. These people are terribly poor, and we do sympathize with them and try to help out when we can, but we do not have the resources to save the entire fishing fleet of India's west coast. We skipped Sri Lanka altogether, but the Corleys tried to put in at Galle for repairs, leaving after four hours of being ignored by harbor authorities, and pushed on for Cochin. We arrived at Cochin, India at around midnight local time. We don't like to enter unknown harbors at night, but this one was so easy and well-marked we had no problems. By 0100 we were anchored in two meters of water over mud just off the customs and immigration jetty. A port authority boat even met us and came alongside, directing us to a temporary anchorage. After saying they would be back next morning for entry formalities, we quickly put up our mosquito screens and turned in for what we thought was to be a good night's sleep.
Next morning, however, at 0530 the port authority boat was back, unnecessarily sounding a very loud horn to get our attention. After some preliminary paperwork in the cockpit with a white-uniformed customs officer, we followed their instructions and rowed ashore to complete the check in process. Basically, you have to clear in at three stations; port authority, customs, and immigration. At all three offices the authorities were courteous to us and the costs were minimal. All the offices were grouped within close distance to one another. But, oh, what offices! The ceilings were high with old style four-bladed rotating fans. The walls were lined with bookshelves heaped with stacks upon stacks of decaying old customs check in/check out papers. These were bound in twine, covered with dust, and the edges were crumbling to the touch. More stacks of old papers were lying in heaps beneath most of the old wooden tables and desks. There certainly was no shortage of personnel,  most of them sat around quietly napping and waiting their turn to copy out by hand yet another rendition of Active Light's check in papers. In the customs building, there was an extensive old style chemistry laboratory that could easily have served as the backdrop to a Boris Karloff Frankenstein movie. It was scary! On the positive side, we saw that many people were provided with employment and they all were at least not hostile to us as we moved like smiling cattle through the process, leaving multiple copies of our papers to be added to the millions already rotting there. We did see the occasional computer and file cabinet, but they seemed to be not heavily relied upon. As Terry and Andrea from Argonauta told us, "The British have taught them well!".
After check in was completed, we received permission to move over to the long term anchorage just off the Bolgatty Palace Hotel. We did so and settled in for a long stay. One of the first things we did was go ashore and explore the local town of Ernakulam. Here we were amazed by the numbers, the crush of people, the madness and daring of the drivers, especially the motorized three-wheeled tuk-tuk drivers (here called auto rickshaw), the dirt and smell from rotting garbage and open sewers, and the beauty of the sari-clad Indian women. Indian food is simply wonderful. It is not as spicy as we had come to believe we would find. And though certainly an underdeveloped country, India has an unusual preponderance of bookstores and booksellers. There is especially an active market in selling cheap copies of western college textbooks on technical subjects ranging from physics, mathematics, computer programming  (in fairly recent languages, too) to subjects like Comprehensive Railroad Exams and Business Administration. At one large bookstore I was even able to purchase inexpensive copies of my old college physics textbook (Sears, Semanski, & Young, a book I loved and  intend to reread while in Africa) and my beloved old Calculus and Analytical Geometry book by Thomas & Finney! These are printed by a photo process on truly cheap and thin paper, but the material is all there. Anyway, I was impressed. Indians seem to place great emphasis on education, a trait which should set them up for benefits in the future if the educated workforce stays in India.
One of the first things we did was to book a Backwater Tour with the Corleys. On our first Sunday  in India, we showed up at the tourist office on time, only to wait half an hour for the bus to arrive. We rode about a hour across the busy city, marveling at the sights, sounds, smells and the insanity of the suicidal bus driver. We arrived at a semi-residential home built along a small canal, loaded ourselves into a small wooden boat in deck chairs and were poled along through the fairly clear, two-foot-deep water by two men, fore and aft. The aft gentleman kept up a running commentary on the various trees, fruit, people, and canal-side homes we passed. People were using the canal to bath in and wash their dishes. We saw a lot of interesting things, kingfisher birds. cashew trees bearing fruit, coconut trees, palm fronds, orchids, hibiscus, and other beautiful flowers, and homes inhabited women cooking over wood fires while the men chatted earnestly by cell phone while watching cricket games on the television.

More or less the highlight of the three-hour tour was at the turnaround point where we got off the boat and walked a short way through a bit of a settlement to observe the coir rope (palm fiber) making process staged especially for us tourists by the local children. These were dressed in their Sunday best and had been obviously well-coached by their parents and tour organizers. Smiling and giggling, they went through the steps of spinning out the bundles of soaked and dried palm fiber and twisted it into a two-strand rope. This was a fairly interesting process. Manufacture of this rope is an import local "cottage industry", there is even a large building in Ernakulam dubbed the "Coir Rope Board". We all stood around and took photos. I believe we were more of a curiosity to the children than they were to us, although they were beautiful and charming. We bought a few hand woven mats of palm fiber and shook a lot of hands, visited a local Hindu shrine and took some more photos of people, trees, and canoes under construction.

Really friendly, curious, and beautiful children were everywhere.

Spinning out the cured palm fiber into two rope strands,

The kids loved to have their pictures taken, posing laughingly with their arms draped around their best friend of the moment and wanting to see themselves in our little digital camera windows afterwards. They were giggling madly all the while. They obviously had been exposed to digital camera technology prior to our arrival. They also had been forewarned not to ask for money, but that didn't stop them for asking for ball point pens. We quickly exhausted our meager supply, except for old Scrooge Neil who refused to yield his favorite gel pen from the family fanny pack.

. . . twisting it  into a pair by this bespectacled charmer.

Hey you guys, let's pose like this, . . .

. . . and then let's pose over here on this bail of coir rope.

Notice that one little fellow manages to get into almost every photograph?

Hey guys! The tall skinny tourist will take a photo of almost anything.

We bought a mat from this lady. It smelled so good.

Cashew nuts on the tree.

We will never casually eat a cashew again without pausing to reflect on the work and resources that go into each nut. The cashew tree is related to poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac. Allegedly, the black oil stored between its hard inner and outer hulls is so toxic that it can blister human skin on contact. Imported from native Brazil to India during the 1500's, those great days of the Portuguese explorers who discovered South America and rounded Cape Horn to find a water route to India, the days of Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama. But I digress! The tree has since become a major cash crop in India. Enough about cashews!

We wanted to see more of India than just Cochin, so we planned a trip across the waist of the south to Chennai, (formerly called Madras) India's fourth largest city. We booked "two tier/air con" berths on the Allepey Express and showed up at the train depot at six the next evening wondering how we would survive this 12 hour journey. Two tier/air con seats were in a class just below the twice-as-expensive First Class private cars and more expensive than the 2nd class seats, with several grades of torture in between. Our accommodations were moderately clean and the fold-down bunks long enough that we actually were able to get a fairly good night's sleep. Nancy spent the early hours of the evening, as usual, staring out the window at the passing countryside and "scribbling" her observations in her journal. In spite of my pretensions to be a writer and being educated far beyond the limits of my modest intelligence, she is the one who is turning into a writer during this travel experience we are sharing.

A street flower vendor at the Pondy bazaar.

We arrived pretty refreshed next morning in the heart of Chennai and carried our own luggage past the line of frenzied rickshaw drivers vying for our favor, to a nearby Indian restaurant where we had several delicious sweet, chocolately Indian coffees and a breakfast consisting of masala dosa (a thin pancake bread with something like potato salad inside) with four or five sauces in little stainless saucers. We opened our India Lonely Planet and began looking for a hotel in the price range we wanted. With lots of enthusiastic help from the restaurant staff and our handy little cell phone, we soon had a room booked, half an hour later we were standing, bags in hand, in front of our home for the next eight days, the Sarovara Hotel. We looked at a couple of rooms and took one on the second floor, air con, with its own bath, Indian squat toilet and a GREAT shower with hot water, 70 channels of cable TV (mostly Indian, but including BBC, CNN, and a couple of English movie channels). On the down side, the pillows were ancient, the linen clean but thin and worn, and the bed mattress was a very tired three inches of foam over plywood. To this room each morning, we had four cups of Indian coffee delivered for 95 cents (25% tip included), and an English language newspaper (free). From this room each morning we sent our daily laundry which came back next day washed and ironed (usually for around one dollar). Our hotel was on a side street in the center of the center of Chennai and it cost US$20 per night.
We soon found a wonderful nearby restaurant on the ground floor of nearby Hotel Senntur where we took all our breakfasts and most of our dinners, our extravagant ten rupee tips and charming American charisma endearing us to the restaurant staff. We were treated like movie celebrities there. The food, Indian vegetarian, was really good and we were often coached on the various menu items by our waiters. In this restaurant, each morning after breakfast we would break out the faithful earmarked Lonely Planet and plan our adventure of the day. Our first was to attend the Chennai Government Museum, hoping to learn a bit about local history. The museum was okay, lots of carvings and examples of Ganesh and Shiva, one statue, of Nataraja, quite famous. We were not allowed to photograph them, so you'll have to imagine it all. India's history is hugely ancient and very influential in the art and religion of both Thailand and Cambodia, with which we are a little acquainted. In truth, we found the open air street markets to be at least equally interesting and we spent a lot of time walking about just gawking like a couple of old tourists.

During the early days of Madras settlement (the 1600's), there was contention for dominance in trade between the Portuguese, Dutch, French and English. The English, of course, won out, in part because they built a bastion behind which they could hide during the ferocious French attacks (usually with hired Indian mercenaries). This edifice was known as Fort St. George, and is today a little bit of a museum, a Indian army base, and a place where Indians come to dispute their telephone and utilities bills.

We toured the museum and found it pretty shabby with the highlight being a portrait gallery of old English governors and their wives on the second floor. The entire ground floor with the most interesting holdings of period pieces was closed for renovation. Outside, however, we found a beautiful church undergoing reconstruction. There was a lovely garden on its left side where we sat for a while to cool off from the afternoon's heat and gaze at the church's  tall white steeple. The walkway on the right-hand side consisted of burial markers of prominent local citizens.

North of Fort St. George lies the section of Chennai holding the bulk of local wholesale industry and supply for the area. This section is known simply as Saint George and it is where the residents of Chennai go to buy when they want to get the best deal. Saint George makes the rest Chennai look positively upscale. I was looking for stainless steel machine screws and was unable to find them in Cochin, so we asked a rickshaw driver to take us to this place and we simply started walking and asking questions. We wound up at Haji's Tools and Hardware at 45 Sembudoss Street. Haji is a wonderfully honest, modest, and helpful Muslim man who quickly found us six dozen 304 stainless 4 mm flathead screws for less than one dollar. His wife works the books and cash register while his son quickly climbs the shelves in this cubby-hole shop to fetch the requested parts.

My sixty-third birthday was coming up, so Nancy bought me a new electric razor and we took time to get me fitted for new bifocal eyeglasses. I am quite happy with both. Shopping in the Pondy Bazaar district again, we also found a couple of Indian silk sari outfits for Nancy. I was amazed at how good and natural she looked when she put them on back at our hotel. I encouraged her to buy several more. Meanwhile we continued to look, without success, for needed shipboard provisioning items like canned beans, canned long-life milk, and toilet paper. (That's right. Indians, like most SE Asians, do not use toilet paper. You figure it out.). We finally solved the latter problem back in Cochin by purchasing a half case of paper dinner napkins. We never did find good beans, though!

We left the temple and started walking east, looking for St. Thomas Cathedral on the beach front. We stopped a couple of times to ask directions and found a local long distance calling shop where we called to wish Nancy's mother, Betty, a happy eighty-first birthday. She was glad to hear from us and had a long chat as they caught up on all the Carson news. Just outside the shop was a bridge over a typically fetid Indian city-bound river. The smell was so very awful you had to hold your breath as you walked past. I am sorry we sound so effete or cynical about this, but these rivers, both in Cochin and Chennai are really foul. Local market rubbish and raw sewage must dump directly into them because the water is green and it bubbles like a rural cesspool. There are some government attempts to influence public attitudes about cleanliness and environment health, but the country has 1.1 billion people with a population density two and a half times that of China and twelve times that of the USA. The situation's bleak.

A beautiful, all white edifice.

We found the beautiful dazzlingly white St. Thomas Cathedral alongside a heavily trafficked road paralleling the beach. It is claimed that the remains of St. Thomas (Doubting Thomas) are interred in the basement of a building in the rear, making this allegedly only the second church in the world to contain the bones of one of the original apostles, the other site being, of course, St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome.

St. Thomas Cathedral with its lovely crosshatched arching wooden ceiling.

View from the right (south) side of the cathedral.

While it is possible that his bones were later transferred for burial to Ortona, Italy, there is little doubt that Thomas died here in 53 AD. We found the church to be stunningly beautiful, walking around both inside and out. The grounds were kept immaculately clean and neatly swept. Nancy wanted to see India's east coast so we stepped outside the church walls and walked a short way to the beach. Here everything was dirty and littered as usual, people living and selling goods from street-side lean-tos and sun shades. It could be a beautiful beach front were it cleaned just a little bit.

One of the prettiest churches we have seen.

The rest of our time in Chennai was spent shopping, browsing the many bookstores, waiting for my eyeglasses to be finished (I am really happy with them), and just walking about town. We caught the evening sleeper train back to Cochin, but the delight of our return trip was marred by a tenacious night cough we both picked up somewhere. We are recovered, but I did not sleep that night. We had an easy time getting back to Active Light via rickshaw and ferryboat, to find everything just fine aboard, thanks to the watchful eyes of neighbor Dan Corley. Our remaining days in Cochin were dedicated to keeping an eye on Windwalker III while the Corleys went off to northern India to see the Taj Mahal and hopefully, a tiger in the wild. We spent our time shopping and with the onerous task of catching up on one year's worth of web page. It took both of us about two week's effort at three to four hours per day to turn out these last four web pages.

We were invited several times to the home of Bernard, the boatman attached to the Bolgatty Palace Hotel. We visited his (Catholic) church on a feast day, had lunch, met three or four families of his brothers and uncles, and were invited into Bernard's home for dinner, tea and snacks. He has a wonderful family and these visits showed us perhaps the best experience we had in India. Everyone was very kind and gracious to us and we got to see what a real Indian home and family were like. His entire village residential area was very clean, quiet, and attractive. His oldest daughter, Neenu, was finishing high school exams this week and bound for college to study Business Administration. We were served interesting dishes; steamed rolls of sweet coconut and rice, prawn curry with banana stalk heart, and rice noodle rolls with sweetened coconut milk. It was all delicious and exotic.You cannot get those dishes in a restaurant, according to Bernard. It was great to get to know these good people a little bit.
The only other interesting item we have to show you is a single photo of one of the many local tour boats which pass close to Active Light every day. By this, we mean they detour over to us purposely, probably because they find us an interesting attraction, perhaps because we always wave at them. We can hear the guide on the PA system say something in Tamil about the "boat American", then all the Indian or foreign tourists crane their necks, wave and snap photos. We usually think it is hilarious that they  find us an attraction, that is until we try to take our evening shower bath on deck with the tour boat in the distance heading straight for us!
It is our intention, as we soon shove off for the next legs of our Indian Ocean crossing, to try to record in pictures and words what a passage under sail is like. We thought you might be interested in some of the detail of everyday life en route, as it were. Our destinations are, in order, the Maldives, Chagos Archipelago, Seychelles, and finally Kilifi Creek, Kenya, where we will tarry for several months, waiting for good weather to proceed south. So this will be a continuing webpage. We will be writing more later. Goodbye, our love, and good luck to all our friends and family.