Ticket to Ride to India: Too Many Cooks is the Best Thing

We signed on for a 10 day walking/camping tour with Explore, a company we liked the look of online. We normally just find a local tour and sign on for any activity we are interested in, but didn't trust that this would be easy in India, and we didn't have a lot of time to spare for visiting local tour offices, if they even existed. Explore hires local guides, drivers, and businesses - in our case camp cooks and helpers, boatmen, and specific guides for the hiking portion, game park, spice plantation, etc. We also liked that the company is carbon neutral and pays its key staff a wage, so that they are not 100% dependent on tips.

So we found ourselves with 4 other travel companions, all traveling solo - three women from England and one man from Japan. None of us knew each other. Age range: 40-78. What we soon realized is that we were with 4 fantastic travelers who had each traveled throughout the world for decades, 3 of whom had traveled extensively with other Explore trips. Not only well-traveled but well-read, well-lived, interesting, curious, good-natured and easy-going. We could not have been luckier.We got on like a proverbial house on fire.

And we knew we were with kindred spirits when we were asked if we wanted to take a cooking class in Thekkady, where we stayed after our camping portion of the trip. All our arms shot up, but were very clear that we wanted to participate, not just watch a demonstration.

Everywhere we go it is always great to take a cooking class taught by the locals. Here, we were under the tutelage of a married couple, who taught us how to make three different masala mixes (one for meat, one for fish and garam masala, which is just a fancy phrase for mixed spice) and then use them to make Chicken Masala, Kerala Fish Curry, Pineapple Curry, Potato Masala, Green Bean Thoran, Dhal Thadukka, Roast Okra and Parathha bread. The husband reminded us of the actor John Randolph, who played George Costanza's father on the TV show Seinfeld, only a benign version. He was constantly telling us mix or chop with a musical riff "mixing, mix---ing!" "stirring, stirr----ing!"

It was a huge feast and all quite delicious. Ingredients included spices all grown in the area such as cardamom, peppercorns, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, mustard seeds, turmeric, ginger, chillis, curry leaves, and fennel seeds. Other ingredients were coconut meat (that we learned how to extract manually using a very vicious-looking knife thing attached to tiny wooden seat) and coconut oil, garlic, onion, tomatoes, sugar, salt and lemon. The fish came from the Kerala backwaters and the chicken had been no doubt running around that morning.