Kerala backwaters and Cochin

Posted: November 25th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: travel | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

With less than 3 weeks to go before I get on a plane and begin the 20 something hour journey from Mumbai to Toronto via London I decided that no matter how much I was enjoying Varkala I had better begin moving up the coast as per my plan if I didn’t want to have a mad scramble for my flight. Today I took a train, sitting in the regular sleeper class (the class below 3rd class) for about 3 hours to arrive at Kochi.

If there’s one thing about travelling that I find really annoying it’s the tediousness of the act of moving yourself and all your shit from one place to another. There’s a whole song and dance of figuring out which bus/train/plane to take, how much it will cost, how long it will take, how comfortable it will be, etc. The situation is not improved by the general lack of online booking, or online presence of any type, of most of the budget accommodation (at least here in the south of India) meaning you either book by phone at the same 10 guesthouses listed in every guidebook and/or tripadvisor, or you show up and lug your backpack around until you find a decent place. Long story short, I had a sweaty afternoon trying to find a reasonably clean, reasonably priced guesthouse.

And then I found twenty bucks.*

Kerala Backwaters

A visit to the backwaters of Kerala is one of those “must do” trips in all the guidebooks and literature about the region. There’s all sorts of romanticism about the system of rivers, canals, lakes, and marshy water that has been used to move spices and people around the region for god knows how long. After reading about it a bit I was a little bit leery of visiting the backwaters as I am travelling alone and it really seems like a romantic couple thing to do. I compromised by doing a group day-trip organized through my guesthouse in Cochin.

After driving for an hour and a half or so we were led to a small “houseboat” made of palm trees, coconut rope, and not much else. The day pretty much consisted of sitting in a lounger chair made of wicker and watching the world go by. There were two stops (other than lunch), one bizarrely to see how sea-shells are turned into calcium peroxide (IIRC), and then we stopped off at a place where we could watch coconut rope being made, starting with coconut husks that are soaked, the fibres then separated, and finally twisted and spun either by hand or with machine resulting in very coarse but surprisingly strong rope.

The highlight of the trip for me was the lunch, a spicy southern Indian vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf.

click the photo for full album

Overall I’m glad I only did the day trip, the backwaters are beautiful but really repetitive, with palm tree after palm tree everywhere you look. I imagine on a more fancy houseboat (they exist, I saw the flyer, some even have actual cabins!) with @pipesdreams and some friends it would be a great way to spend a day or two and really see a slow view of old Kerala.

Cochin

Cochin is actually a big south indian city, but one which I only really saw a small bit of the old Fort Cochin area which is essentially the old portugese/dutch colonial area of the city. Big old colonial buildings, falling to pieces for the most part, reminded me of Havana in some ways. As previously mentioned I did a whole lot of walking around this area carrying all my gear and my advice to anyone else coming to Cochin is as follows: just go to Burgar street, ignore the many many other guesthouses before there. If you’re lucky, Anthony at the Spice Holidays homestay has a room free, it’ll be clean, cheap, and he’s a super friendly and very nice man. My room ran me 450 rupees and was his cheapest, but he’s got nicer ones for those with bigger budgets. If he’s full up there every second building is a homestay or guesthouse.

Ahem. I didn’t really see much in Cochin, but I did visit the old dutch palace museum which is your standard depressing Indian museum. Exhibits are poorly kept and the placards for the artifacts don’t really tell you much (conversely the placards without any artifact attached seem hell bent on telling you everything, often in very small print), but it’s only 5 rupees entrance (same for foreigners as for Indians, a refreshing change).

One thing that stuck with me given my short stay in Cochin was how many churches there were, not just heritage churches left over from colonial times but active modern christian churches. India maybe 90% hindu but 10% of a billion people means lots of churches, mosques, buddah statues, and synagogues. Speaking of which I also visited Cochin’s “Jew town” which doesn’t really, as far as I understand it, have much of a jewish population any longer as they all up and left for Israel in the fifties. After visiting Jewish areas in europe where there were no more jews, this was a refreshing change and allowed me to explore the area without that nagging feeling of guilt that follows you when visiting the sites of atrocities.

* A phrase I use to denote that I know my story is going nowhere and needs to end.