Welcome to Kerala

We arrived safely in Kerala and I was excited to get to our place to write about our incredibly bumpy but beautiful busride through the jungle on an open-windowed bus. But then we got to RASTA and were shown all the spices and fruit that they grow, and I decided that instead, I would start by making a list of all the spices. But THEN we got back to our room and found a humungous, black, hairy spider the size of my hand…therefore that now takes precedence for this post J

The story goes something like this:

We came inside and several of us really had to go to the bathroom. One toilet was broken, and there had been a little spider in the other bathroom before (and by little I mean the size of my sunglass lens), so Melissa and I went in together, checking behind the door, under the sink, behind the toilet for spiders when I heard a bloodcurdling scream and looked up in the corner to see a spider the size of my hand hanging our up there. So what did we doo? Slammed the door shut and ran screaming like little girls, of course.

When Melissa stopped hyperventilating, we sat pondering how, due to this crisis, we wouldn’t be able to shower or use the toilet or even sleep for fear that giant spiders will crawl over us and into our mouths while we slept. Yes, we were a little bit hysterical.

After a bit, we decided that we at least needed to see if the toilet flushed. So we got up the guts to venture back into the bathroom [we were still a bit hysterical…don’t worry, we filmed it] and, lucky for us, it did flush, so no latrines were necessary. For me, that was more important than the spider issue J however, the spider was still there, and it was going to be a little difficult to use the bathroom in fear of him jumping down on us. That issue was solved, however, when our hostess brough us dinner and got quite a kick out of our spider scare and had it [and its brother in the adjoining bedroom] removed Phewfta. Now we could participate in all of life’s necessities in peace. We have since captured and released other medium sized spiders, and even ignoring when we came home to find probably a hundred small ones covering the wall…please be proud J

Oh. And for those of you who were wondering, the spices that they grow here are cardamom, vanilla bean, cinnamon, lemongrass, coffee, chives, ginger, pepper, nutmeg, as well as jackfruit, banana, mango, papaya, white tubors, yams, tamarin, and other legumes. So awesome.