Mmmmm..

My Masseuse with the wonderful hands
Today is "take care of myself" day. No work. So this morning I went down to the Ayurvedic (traditional Indian medicine) clinic of a friend of my friend Vinod's. What an amazing experience.

I've had massages in Canada before, but this is different. The massuese was a woman named Sunhita .. she did the whole massage dressed in an elegant blue sari. It was a very oily affair ... hot oil drizzled on just about every part of my body. And the oil didn't have that typical North American pharmaceutical smell .. it smelled of green plants, earth and a little bit of woodsmoke.

First she massaged my head. For twenty whole minutes. Around my eyes, my ears, rubbing hot oil in my scalp. Then the shoulders, down the arms. She even massaged each finger and toe and cracked each knuckle. She pinched, lightly slapped, patted and rubbed. All this took placed over 90 minutes or so.

Then she left, leaving me lying on the massage table wondering what to do next. The table was dripping with oil and so was my body. I got up and started towelling off the oil.

Then she came back in with two buckets .. one with a pink kind of soapy water. She said it was Ayurvedic medicine of some kind. Then she had a small bowl of a light brown powder which she mixed with water to make a paste. We went into the shower room. She spread the paste all over my naked body, all over my face and into my hair line. Then she took the pink liquid and washed down my entire body and hair.

It's been a long, long time since anybody else scrubbed me down. It felt really incredible.

Now I am in an internet cafe dodging the early afternoon rain showers. The monsoons are over so they should be subsiding by now. But it still rains in the early afternoon.

I just had a nice lunch of prawn biryani (a rice dish) with cashews and dried fruit with a kind of yogurt dressing. The food all over India (except for the night when I got food poisoning) is great. Food in Kerala is even better. Just spicy enough, and they use lots of coconut milk and fruit.

Better still, it is very hard work to spend more than $5 a day on food here. And even that's a stretch. Most of my meals have topped up at 100 rupees, which is about 2.40 Canadian. And at that, I can't even eat it all.

More later. Still assessing the situation in Sri Lanka and wondering whether to come home early. Don't know what to do ...