My first day in Kochi was spent recovering from the long transit from Ooty and Coimbatore the previous day. Overnight transit sometimes isn’t the time-saver that it might seem.
The homestay that took us in upon arrival at the ghost-town hour of 4:00 AM was a couple of kilometers south of Fort Cochin – the tourist center of Kochi – so the food outside our door wasn’t the standard tourist-ready fruit/muesli/curd and “real Italian espresso” fare. It was the painted-blue tea shop on wheels fried-dough-and-tea menu. So we ate vada (smallish doughnut-shaped, onion flavored rings of fried bread) and dark, semi-sweet fried bread balls that resembled hush puppies, and of course, milk tea.
I find that sometimes when ordering a “CHAI” by name at a tea shop, my request is met with puzzled looks. When I revise my order to a “MILK TEA”, the hot, sweet stuff starts flowing. But I suppose “chai” just means a generalized “tea” in Hindi, like “salsa” means any sort of “sauce” in Spanish.
schoolgirls crowd around to check Chloe’s photographic work.
Mathieu, Chloe and I wandered up to the old wooden Chinese fishing nets on the north side of the peninsula and watched the fishermen work the way they’ve been doing so for hundreds of years. The wide net, mounted on the spidery arms of the device, is lowered into the water as two men walk the length of the lower arms to add weight. The net sits for a few minutes or longer, and then the four-plus men operating it lift it out of the water with a cantilevered system of rocks hanging from ropes and body weight. It didn’t look like they were catching all that much.
500 year old fishing nets coexist alongside modern container shipping facilities in Kochi.
One of the must-do things in Kerala is a tour of the backwaters – an area of islands dense with palm trees and canoe-able inlets.
I prefer doing most everything on my trips as independently as possible, but in this case it made sense to sign up for a tour to save time and money: for 650 Rupees, we booked a full-day backwater tour through the Kerala tourist office and got picked up at our hotel at 8:00 AM by a tourist bus the next morning.
Fishermen on the backwaters.
A mini-tour like this can be a great way to just let your brain rest for a day, especially in a mentally/emotionally taxing country like India. No booking trains or buses, no deciding/debating where to eat, no planning. Just go wherever you’re told. Ah, subordinance.
The van ride from Cochin to the chosen entry point to the backwaters took a little over an hour after picking up the rest of the white people *ahem*, travelers/tourists. We started on a medium-sized boat (houseboat style) with 30 others and a loud guide with halting speech that really tried, but fell a bit short. The first tourist question hit hard.
“WHAT IS THE DURATION OF THIS TOUR?” a somewhat humorless Indian tourist interrupted/boomed/unintentionally insulted our guide from the back of the boat.
The rest of us weren’t feeling quite so impatient. Kerala’s backwaters were never supposed to be a thrill ride – more of a chilled out day.
The tour, as all tours do, involved a fair amount of time spent on witnessing local crafts like harvesting palm sap (the beefy dude who tapped the trees insisted that the product was “not” for fermentation) and making rope from coconut husks. We quickly grew bored and drifted towards photographing island puppies (on the island we decided is henceforth known as “Puppy Island”, of course) and cracking wise from a distance. Shockingly, there were only a few small sales pitches in the course of the tour. Available for purchase: things made of coconuts. Surprised?
denizens of “Puppy Island”
Much of the land in Kerala’s backwaters is inhabited, and the locals were working away like usual despite the tourist parade. Just beyond our camera-toting flock, a gang of local women were engaged in the taxing act of breaking up soil for planting something or other. I snuck a photo of them. They caught me in the act and waved me over. With much difficultly (and a fair amount of laughter from the women), I helped aerate a bit of soil, which was full of thick roots.
warm smiles from Keralan women. most of them, anyway.
The second half of the day’s transit was by canoe down small canals. Chloe and I sat together in the front of the boat while Mathieu exercised his Japanese with a lone Nihonjin that wanted us all to sing our national anthems. Thanks to persisting conversation, we never had to sing – but it would’ve been: France, Ireland, Switzerland, Japan, USA.
We saw about as much wildlife as I expected, but not quite as much as I would’ve liked. The odd kingfisher, a couple of snakes. A million huge crows. Some nice flowers that I can’t identify (but maybe you can).
The tour wrapped up around 4:00 PM and we loaded back into the vans for drop at our respective hotels.
Subsequent days in Kochi were spent walking the streets of Jewtown and Mattancherry, where the locals (even the rickshaw drivers) were friendly, and the architecture interesting. The light was nice, too. GOOD PHOTO DAY ENSUED!
The last stop for the triumvirate of Mathieu, Chloe and I was Cherai Beach – an area that Lonely Planet called “Kochi’s best kept secret”, but really was just a semi-trashy strip of sand with less-than-transparent water that took an hour and a half to get to. The overcast sky didn’t help things either. Skip this and spent your beach days elsewhere!
Haste makes waste. Three buses fighting for paved road space scrape one another simultaneously on the way back from crappy Cherai Beach.
Chloe and Mathieu headed off on a night train to Chennai. I stayed behind and plugged away on blog updates for a day and half without doing a whole lot else. Why? Because internet access (especially wifi) in India can be spotty and dysfunctional, and you have to work/write/upload when the situation provides. You think these pictures upload themselves? Oh no – it can take a half day or longer to get even medium resolution files up on the site. Between occasional power cuts, internet service provider failures and myriad other complications, the uploading portion of blogging is often fraught with problems. I’ve had to put aside full days just for things like this.
What’s more, by the time you throw in the necessity of booking train tickets, occasional airfare, and checking e-mail/social networking you can end up at the internet café for a half-day at times. Every once in a while, it’s nice to spend a few extra Rupees on a guesthouse with a reliable internet connection so you can upload pictures at night or book tickets at your leisure. It’s worth it!
Mathieu waits for the autorickshaw that never comes. Always there when you least want them, gone when you need ’em most.
After long periods of internet trouble, some posts were finally up. Hurrah! But now what? I had no real schedule for my next stop after Kochi.
Munnar? Wayanad? Periyar? Nah, I got on the government bus and went south to… A REAL CLIFFHANGER. Actual cliff included.
NEXT STOP: Varkala
