Note: This is an on-the-road blog post. To find out more about why I am on this trip, please read, Next book: From Kerala to Shaolin.

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As soon as I board the plane in Changi, I regret not having bought duty-free booze. Half the Malayali men around me are carrying sealed plastic bags full of whisky and beer. “Don’t bother with Changi, just buy my Heineken beer in Trivandrum airport,” was the message Babu Uncle delivered, in his desire to minimise my beer-carrying time. “Buy as many as they will sell you. Remember, Heineken.” Sure enough, when I get to Trivandrum’s DFS shop, they have only Anchor.

Food and drink is one way to delineate the two sides of my Indian heritage. My maternal relatives, Hindu Marwaris from Rajasthan, are vegetarians who don’t drink and generally lead austere lives. My paternal relatives, Christian Malayalis from Kerala, are prone to imbibe every delight known to man. I like to joke that when I visit Kerala, my uncles won’t let me into their cars until I’ve handed over the Johnnie Black and Dunhill. The next morning, the seven cans of Anchor are still sitting on the backseat of his car.

(Incidentally, Kerala boasts the highest per-capita consumption of alcohol in India, followed closely by Punjab. In other words, if you’re going for a piss-up with “Mallus” and/or Punjabis, please bring your best liver along. For more on this, here’s a good piece on Economist.com)

Trivandrum is Kerala’s capital. It is remarkably clean and green, and is unburdened by the mind-numbing gridlock one finds in many other Indian cities, befitting of a state locals call “God’s own country”. Babu Uncle is in no doubt that Trivandrum is India’s best city to live in; over the course of the next week, I will be spoiled by his hospitality, humour and his mum’s renowned cooking. We will spend hours debating our favourite topic: he arguing that “India needs a Lee Kuan Yew” and my responding that 1bn Indians would never tolerate his methods.

Since first visiting Kerala in the late 1990s, I have returned on average once every three years. It is lush; the food is divine; and almost everybody speaks English—although it took a while for my Chinese friends and relatives to realise when Malayalis call them Yello, it is not a reference to skin colour but a greeting.

What I like most about Kerala, however, is that there are innumerable gorgeous places for you to do nothing. You can do nothing on Kovalam beach, where the water rages and women come in pairs or groups or with their families, nervously entering the sea, their shalwar, pants, stuck to their skin, worried more about waves than wantons, celebrating life in this proudly matriarchal society. You can do nothing at a local tea stand, where men stand around in short-sleeved shirts and with their lungyis tied up exposing their skinny calves, cheering the high literacy and great healthcare in the first place on earth to democratically elect the Communists to power, in 1956; and then hear them grumble about corruption, money politics, worsening inter-religious ties, and the fact that nothing gets done.

You can do nothing in Fort Cochin, while sipping a Kingfisher, eating “fish fry”, and admiring the fishing nets that Admiral Cheng Ho and his Chinese fleet built in the 15^th century.^[i] You can do nothing on a houseboat in Kumarakom, the wind sometimes in your hair, the mosquitoes sometimes on your feet, drifting down hyacinth-covered backwaters that snake through padi fields, on whose banks you will occasionally spot a Toddy shop. And you can do nothing in Munnar, with a light sweater on, gazing blissfully over acres of rolling tea hills, which in their greenness hide what Rastas roll up the mountain for: Kerala Gold.

Some come to God’s own country and want to run around, as if needing to check off every stop on a treasure hunt. I suggest doing nothing. Bring a book, and cards, and somebody whose silence does not disconcert you.

Just. Breathe. In.

Kerala is India 101, an intro for beginners. It is the way it is partly because of communism, matriarchy, greenery, fish fry and Kerala Gold. But perhaps most important are the years of miscegenation and cultural mish-mashing. For more than two millenia, Kerala’s spices have attracted people from all over the world. In Kerala you will find what are believed to be India’s oldest mosque, church and synagogue.

The vestiges of foreign genes will sometimes surprise you, as with the extremely light, hazel or blueish eyes on some Keralites, including Arjun, a 28-year old kalarippayattu student, who you will get to know better in a future post (pictured).

In A.D. 47, Pliny, a Roman philosopher, wrote about a Kerala port as primum emporium indiae. There were more than 14 centuries of peaceful, bustling trade between Kerala and the outside world before Vasco Da Gama arrived in 1498, the prelude to European colonialism.

The agricultural tradition continues today, and if you are here for more than three days you will invariably marvel at the number of mango trees around; the sweetness of the bananas; and the size of the cinnamon barks, so long and broad they could pass for ancient rolls of parchment that the maharajahs of Travancore might have used in centuries gone by.

(As part of a nationwide drive for linguistic unity in the giant Indian Federation, Kerala was formed in 1956—nine years after independence—through the merger of three predominantly Malayali-speaking regions: the principalities of Cochin and Travancore and the Malabar state.)

In return for spices, riches flowed in. Where are they now? Seeking answers, on Day 1 I find myself outside the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple (pictured) at ten am in the morning, wearing only a white lungyi. With me is Kirit Kiran, a photographer who will be accompanying me on this three-month sojourn across his homeland. Kirit is an ethnic Rajput with a trademark handlebar moustache whose ends he periodically twirls, as if trying to accelerate their growth. Having only just arrived from his home in Delhi, he appears a bit startled that our very first outing together will be spent bare-chested in the company of God.

Being neither very pious nor proper, I worry that this temple’s iron-clad security might instinctively repel my heathen ass. Luckily we are with Raju (not his real name), an elderly driver who “knows people” from his days of driving a senior civil servant around, and who assures us he can get us in. After Raju nods and winks to the rifle-bearing policemen, Kirit and I are soon strolling in the temple’s open corridors, between magnificent stone pillars, alongside Hindu pilgrims, singles, couples, families, most of who appear lost in calm serenity.

There are many policemen around and Hindu holy men. We are ushered into an inner central sanctum, where I am blinded by gold. A throng of people are huddled in front of three windows;  I tip-toe and manage to make out through the leftmost window a giant golden hand, which is about the size of a Tata Nano. Only later when Kirit points out a depiction of Lord Vishnu’s statue do I appreciate the enormity of that entire structure (pictured, with hand in lower left).

When India underwent its place name indigenisation process, with Bombay becoming Mumbai, Lord Vishnu kindly gave his name to Trivandrum—which is actually now Thiruvananthapuram, rivalled perhaps only by Antananarivo in the city tongue-twister tournaments.

But I’m not here to see an aeroplane-sized Vishnu. We walk around the entire complex again, trying to figure out where the “secret vaults” are. In 2011, after a lawyer challenged the Maharajah of Travancore’s custodial rights over the temple’s riches, the Kerala High Court ordered the opening of the two vaults—then subsequently known as Vaults “A” and “B”—that had remained dormant all these centuries. Inside Vault A they found unimaginable riches, including giant 100-carat diamonds, a golden bow and quiver of arrows, a solid gold idol of Vishnu, valued at some US$30m, and about 100,000—or, in Indian parlance, “one lakh” of—gold coins, including specimens from the Roman, Napoleonic, Mughal and Dutch eras. A conservative estimate valued Vault A’s riches at US$20bn.^[ii]

^[i] Some believe the Portuguese built them

^[ii] The Secret Of The Temple, The New Yorker, Apr 30^th 2012