On the Road again

https://youtu.be/Jcb-h8z1uQo

Having realised that school was closed today and tomorrow, rather than wait till Monday I headed across to Kovalam today. The journey of 150km was quicker than when travelling east taking only 3 hours as opposed to 4. The traffic was much lighter too as we were travelling at the weekend.
I had a lovely surprise when leaving my accommodation at Chittenden, Raja's wife and children came to see me off. I hadn't seen her for well over four years. His son is now 11 and daughter 4. Lots of smiles, I do value these friendships.
My blip today is two travel collages, the main blip:
The first half of the journey, travelling south west to go around the bottom of the Western Ghats. They are spectacular mountains running down the western side of Central India. The peaks are high and look inaccessible. The other two pictures are bananas at the Kerala/Tamil Nadu border and a stall full of water melons. Fruit is so plentiful here.
My extra has some of the traffic we met. Small lorries, bigger than the previous one I blipped, but still pretty small. I have no idea how they are strong enough to carry all those calor gas cylinders. Most homes here use bottle gas rather than electricity(or mains gas) to cook with. In addition many houses also have a semi outdoor under cover cooking fireplace too.
The coconuts, I was reliably informed, are red coconuts. They didn't look very red to me.
The last picture is just a typical busy village street shot, I included the place name so you could practice getting your tongue around it. As you can see, the tarmac surface of streets doesn't have an edge like a kerb, it just peters out so in heavy rain it's very easy for potholes to form. Lack of kerb also means that vehicles can drive right up to the edges of buildings and just stop leaving no space for pedestrians.
I'm back in Kovalam now and although it's several degrees cooler it's rather humid so feels hotter. I'm ready for a good night's sleep.