Visiting Kochi, India: How Travel Can Really Choke You Up (Apocalypse Edition)

Spices at the Market in Kochi

I could barely breathe. My whole body seemed to refuse to obey the command my brain was sending out to inhale. Just pulling air into my lungs was an exercise in mind over matter.

I wheezed.

I coughed.

I gasped.

And I slowly staggered through the thick smoke that filled the early morning air in the city of Kochi, in India’s Kerala.

Kochi was trying to assassinate me! I panicked.

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We had arrived the previous afternoon on a bus we had taken from Alleppey to Ernakulam and then a rickshaw to the port town of Kochi. We hadn’t had too much time to explore Kochi right after arrival, but we did get out into the streets to wander a bit.

We immediately noticed something different in Kochi: rubbish was not scattered all over the streets of Kochi. Nope. In Kochi, the rubbish in the streets had been raked into orderly piles that dotted the town of Kochi. It wasn’t that there was less rubbish in the streets in Kochi. It was just that the rubbish in Kochi was pushed into little knee-high piles scattered about.

It was like someone had asked a toddler to clean their room, and the toddler—bless their heart—just pushed all the chaos into little mounds and declared victory.

Or, at least that was what we thought at the time (mini-lesson: “be curious, not judgmental” -Ted Lasso).

While it did seem a bit odd to us at first, it absolutely made Kochi feel cleaner, more orderly than the other places we had been (or would be in the future) in India.

A Few Words About Kerala

If you're not already familiar with Kerala, let me introduce one of India's more surprising states. Kerala sits along the southwestern coast of the subcontinent, and in many ways, it feels like it’s playing a slightly different game than the rest of the country. The literacy rate here is over 96%, the highest in India. Life expectancy is up. Infant mortality is down. Kerala is the version of India where a tropical paradise decided to prioritize health care and education.

In terms of economic development, Kerala punches above its weight. It's not India's industrial powerhouse, and it doesn't have the tech buzz of Bangalore, but the quality of life here is better than in many other places across the country. There’s a strong public health system, a long tradition of overseas remittances (especially from the Gulf), and a sense of civic pride that doesn’t always show up the same way elsewhere.

And speaking of civic pride—Kerala is waging a real, visible war on littering. Signs reminding people not to trash their own paradise are posted in multiple languages around cities in Kerala. Recycling bins even occasionally exist. I mean, the battle is far from won, but the fact that there’s a battle at all? That’s something. You get the feeling that Kerala, unlike so many other beautiful places in the world, is trying very hard not to drown in its own plastic wrappers.

But instead of letting those plastic wrappers build up in the streets (and waterways), Kochi decided to burn them.

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Dawn of the Dead (Lung Edition) Or: How Kochi decided to clear its streets by carpet-bombing them with carcinogens

So, we wandered through the almost geometrically spaced mounds of rubbish, raked neatly into piles and wondered at the care that had gone into cleaning up the streets of Kochi.

And then we had dinner, and gently drifted off to sleep. I had my camera gear set out so that the next morning I would be able to wake before the sunrise, quietly sneak out of the hotel room without waking my wife, and do some early morning photography in the streets of Kochi.

Little did I know . . .

The family out wandering the streets of Kochi

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I sensed something was wrong almost immediately after I stumbled, still partly asleep, out of the homestay and into the streets in the early morning darkness.

The city was too dark. Lamp posts in the distance seemed too dim, their light barely reaching my eyes even though they were only a block or two away.

Was it rain? No, I wasn’t getting wet.

It must be fog.

But it didn’t feel like fog. The air didn’t feel damp and heavy. Instead, this air felt brittle. It felt like it had teeth. It didn’t cling gently to me; it clawed at me.

And then I started to feel it clawing at my lungs. Scratching at me from the inside.

I wheezed.

I coughed.

I gasped.

I pulled my t-shirt up, over my mouth to filter the air.

And I retreated.

Back to the homestay. Back to bed. We would be in Kochi for a few days, so I could try again tomorrow.

Hopefully, by the time the sun came up and my family eked into motion, the city would no longer be launching an all-out assault on all those who dared to wander its streets.

Hopefully.

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It turned out that sometime, during the night, someone had gone to each of those little piles of rubbish in the streets . . . and set fire to them.

In the morning, there were no more piles of rubbish. Just piles of ash.

And a lot of smoke.

But by the time we were through with breakfast, the streets were walkable, although the air kept up a diminished version of its attack on our lungs. My wife developed a significant cough. In fact, it became bad enough that the rickshaw driver we hired to take us around the sights of Kochi the next day expressed concern for her and took us to a pharmacy where she bought an inhaler.

Note the piles of smoking ask as the daughters try to breathe

One Step Forward . . .

It gave us something to think about as we wandered through colorful, atmospheric, beautiful Kochi, which, despite the persistent coughs we all developed, was one of our favorite cities in all of India.

Those streets, swept clean by day and set alight by night, left us oddly impressed and also mildly asphyxiated. Kochi was one of the cleanest cities we visited in India, at least at ground level, and we admired the effort.

But we also coughed our way through the irony of it all: the absence of litter replaced by the presence of smoke. It was tidy, yes—but the air itself had opinions.

And, assuming what we experienced was a regular occurrence, we wondered what the health impact on the local population would be.

There is something honest about Kochi and its efforts. A city doing its best, imperfectly, visibly. And because travel, I started wondering what parallels I have in my own life, where I may be taking steps to solve one problem, and in doing so, I create another. I wonder.