Into Hindustan

DAY 5: Sri Mongol

My honeymoon period of regularity ends as the food gets the best of me at last. I suppose garbanzo bean soup from a street vendor was simply asking for it. Although I had it coming, it can't be said that my condition made the following 3 hour bus journey comfortable for any party involved. It's also not discouraged me from another food packed day. You only live once, right?

At noon we arrived in Sri Mongol, a town that approaches the Indian border from another side. Sri Mongol is distinct from other places I've been so far in that it demonstrates an inversion of the typical 80% Muslim 15% Hindu makeup.

Lunch is rice with curried green beans and a fish fillet from something Imlan calls rui. Afterwards we enjoy a pastry, if that's what it can be called. Jilapi is batter, spiraled into fry oil and cooked, then marinated in honey. Not only is it covered in the orange-pink hued honey but the goo has seeped its way into the pockets created within the fried batter coils. It's the shovel for honey that french fries are for ketchup.

Our motorized rickshaw, or CNG (#6), took us into the Finlay tea fields. Imlan and I strode through the bushes and streams with a raw tea leaf in our front gum like it was chew tobacco. Unlike tobacco, the spit can be swallowed since you're only really making tea in your mouth. Even after fully removing all the bits of leaf, my mouth was still (quite literally) steeped in tea flavor.

We watched for cobras at all times, even when we passed out of the tea bushes and into the rubber tree fields. I observed what looked like watery Elmer's glue snaking down the carved trenches in the tree bark and dripping into collection cups. We finally reached an outpost at which I could drink some of this tea, having been comically layered liked a specialty alcoholic drink, black on white on red on oolong on green.

Later in the day, we rickshawed around the city area, me with coconut in hand. A local boy had hacked it open and popped in a straw. I sipped on coconut milk as Imlan and I strolled through a Hindu temple. On our way back into town we got the same boy to sever in two my then empty coconut. I scraped the minimal "meat" and ate it with part of the shell. It was like ectoplasm, but I finished it politely.

To be continued tomorrow...