Backwaters and Beaches - Kerala

The following day, well rested and well fed, we set out to explore Ernakulum. We walked up to the top end, across to the river/sea front and back down to the hotel. The park we were aiming to see offered us merely a glimpse of its satisfyingly Vegas-esque signage and two securely locked gates. We saw little of the city as we were constanly watching our feet in order to avoid stepping onto or under one of the many tree roots, potholes and other assorted obstacles that make walking in India such fun. We returned to the hotel prepared, instead, to enjoy the luxury therein until our planned and very short journey to Fort Cochin the following day.

Vegas style signage in Ernakulam

Fort Cochin is the formerly colonial part of the Kochi conurbation. And it is even more colonial than most. Described in the Lonely Planet guide as “an unlikely blend of medieval Portugal, Holland and an English village grafted onto the tropical Malabar coast”, it is a delight of old houses, Chinese style fishing nets and big ships ghosting past the end of the street towards the oil refineries and port across the water. 

Medieval Chinese fishing nets alongside modern industry - Fort Cochin

Following our plan to book hotels via the internet as we went, we had chosen a traditional wooden Fort Cochin guesthouse for the following few days. And it was charming, if a little too old fashioned in places. 

Our hotel, Fort Cochin

View of the courtyard from the balcony of our hotel, Fort Cochin

View of the bedspreads, our hotel, Fort Cochin

We spent the following two days happily wandering the streets, watching cats and seagulls fighting over scraps of fish in the lee of the waterside fish market (talk about fresh: the fish were pulled from the nets, clubbed and gutted then plonked onto tables to await purchase) and sitting in the only bar we could find, a ceiling-fanned room full of mismatched chairs and tables and the sort of assorted clientele you would expect from the only bar in an economically varied area.

Fish 'market' Fort Cochin

Dutch Cemetery, Fort Cochin (complete with symbolic crow)

One of the highlights of our stay in Fort Cochin wasn’t in Fort Cochin at all, but on the other side of the island. The charmingly named Jew Town is a jumbled collection of (mostly touristy) antique and junk shops clustered around a 400 year old Synagogue. We walked across the island through increasingly small and poverty stricken villages (though each, it must be noted, had a library) and found that it was worth it, though mostly for the coffee and cake we had in a tea shop there.

Jew Town

Our next destination was Alleppey, where we intended to spend a night whilst we looked for a houseboat for the next leg of our journey. The houseboats of Kerala are the reason many people visit the area.  Designed like rice barges, they have between one and four bedrooms and you hire them, along with a driver and a cook, for two or more days, during which time you putter through the famous Keralan backwaters. In the end, we decided that the expense and the embarrassment factor of having a driver and a cook was just too much, so we opted instead to stay two nights in Alleppey and go instead on a half-day boat trip through the backwaters. Alleppey itself seemed at first to have little to recommend it. There was a phenomenal amount of traffic and the hotel room suffered from a constant and unbearable high pitched whistling sound from…well we never found out what it was from. We were re-roomed, which improved the noise, then we hastened down to the hotel bar in the basement. Which we loved. Despite the fact that Rachel was the only female in there and we were the only white faces, we felt welcome and enjoyed the copious amounts of food and beer to which we treated ourselves. It’s amazing how copious amounts of food and beer can brighten your view of an area! The following day, despite having slightly creaky heads, we set out on our tour of the backwaters. Trips through verdant, tropical backwaters seem to have become an integral part of our holidays: the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, the lakes and rivers of Chitwan in Nepal and the Li River in China to name but a few. The Keralan backwaters didn’t disappoint, from the first yellow flash of a water snake, through the frequent electric blue flashes of kingfishers to the final green flash of the local lighthouse was we docked back in town in the lowering dusk, it was fantastic. The locals travel by canoe, often with masses of shopping (the man carrying a huge, boxed LCD TV on the back of a crowded public canoe made me smile). 

Houseboats in the backwaters

Public canoe, backwaters

Fishermen, backwaters

We stopped at a shrine to a local Christian holy man who, the guide was at pains to repeatedly point out, did more than Mother Theresa for the poor many years before she was even born (a case of pureness envy?). When we reached the dock it was dark and we walked back through the town which seemed to in the middle of a carnival involving a man dressed as a Raj-era hunter chasing a man dressed as a tiger up and down the main street and in and out of shops with the rest of the town following close behind.

Our next stop was Varkala, one of the two famed beach towns of Southern Kerala, where we stayed in the grandly titled Varkala Marine Palace, which actually wasn’t grand at all, but was still extremely pleasant. Varkala Beach is mostly spread out along a cliff-top, with the beach itself at the southern end. We were staying right on the beach, with a hotel restaurant that looked out westward across the Arabian Sea. The first afternoon, we installed ourselves at a table with a great view and nursed food and beers for several hours until sunset. Which came eventually 5 minutes after clouds arrived and hid the horizon. Oh well. We dined on fish that had been still swimming less than an hour earlier and retired to our massive, mahogany, mosquito-netted bed (forgive the alliteration).

Hotel restaurant, Varkala Beach

Fishermen, Varkala Beach

Varkala Beach

Crab, Varkala Beach

Mongoose, Varkala Beach

Near sunset, Varkala Beach

It was in Varkala that we first witnessed the impressive sight that is Indians on holiday at the beach. Rather than the (much disliked by me) Western ideal of arriving, throwing down towels and lounging on the sand, they arrive in droves and then all stand in ranks facing the sea. And when the tide comes in, they continue to stand there, up to their knees, thighs or waists in water. A very strange sight. Possibly borne of the fact that the beach, in Varkala at least, was no good for swimming – the sea was just to wild. It was this fact that led Rachel to decide to cut short our stay there and head instead for Kerala’s other famous beach town Kovalam for our final three nights.

Local holidaymakers, Varkala Beach

The Arabian Sea (at least, some of it)

Local holidaymakers, Varkala Beach

Kovalam is spread over two bays. We stayed the first night on the beach with the most hotels, a strange looking affair given its naturally black sand. The hotel was perfectly comfortable and had a restaurant overlooking the sunset. Which, yet again disappeared behind clouds (and this time heavy rain) just before the main event. Again the beach became crowded with massed ranks of locals standing and facing out to sea. When it rained, they produced umbrellas and kept their position. Wonderful.

View from hotel restaurant, Kovalam Beach

The black sand of Kovalam Beach

Fishing boats, Kovalam Beach

Kovalam Beach

Local holidaymakers in the rain, Kovalam Beach

Some rocks

Fishermen in the rain, Kovalam Beach

Holidaymakers, Kovalam Beach

Kovalam Beach near sunset

Kovalam lighthouse

We decided that, as the next two nights were our last, we would spend them in luxury. So we booked into the Leela Kempinski, an impossibly luxurious hotel built into the headland that divided the two bays. I could write in detail about the time spent there, but to do so would be to delve into the Luxury Hotel Paradox – you spend a small fortune to travel to a distant country and the hotel is so nice that you don’t want to leave it. Apart from a trip to the off licence (the hotel bar was 5* in price as well as in appointment), we didn’t leave it. Suffice to say, it was very, very nice.

Road down to private beach, Leela Kempinski, Kovalam

Leela Kempinski Hotel, Kovalam

Leela Kempinski Hotel, Kovalam

Leela Kempinski Hotel, Kovalam

And that, apart from a three hour wait at Trivandrum airport where there is nothing to do but look at a wall, was the end of our Indian Adventure.

India - we had nearly as good a time as these people

From the beauty of Ooty to God's Own (Communist) Country.

Having read through my previous posts, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that in the interests of brevity and, well, interest, I chose not to mention every fort, palace, mausoleum and temple we visited on our interminable school-trip-like tour of Rajasthan. There were very, very many more. Very, very, very many.


One of the things that had consistently amazed and delighted us about travelling through India thus far was the sheer numbers of people that manage to cram into public transport. Trains, buses, auto rickshaws – all look like their occupants are trying for a Guinness world record. People on the roof, hanging on the back, crammed into the driver’s foot well, spread-eagled across the side. We frequently watched in awe as ostensibly three-seated tuk-tuks left school gates with a class and a half of children on board. This ceased to be funny when we boarded our flight to Coimbatore. Obviously, the aviation-authorities-that-be frown upon passengers sitting on the roof and clinging to the tail of jet airliners, but Spice Jet more than made up for it by cramming people inside in alarming numbers. Over 200 of us in a Boeing 737. Which is a very small plane. After 4 hours of that, I have some sympathy with battery farmed chickens.

And to top it all off, about an hour into the flight, I started to feel somewhat unwell. I don’t know whether it was the (very good) food at the hotel or the (not so good) airline sandwich, but I left Delhi with a rapidly escalating case of Delhi-belly. And Rachel, still not over the previous bout of food poisoning also took a turn for the worse. By the time we got to Coimbatore, it was all we could do not to flood the taxi with pre-enjoyed food in assorted liquid forms. We got to the hotel and spent the rest of the day sleeping, groaning and evacuating various fluids in rotation. We did manage to get to a pharmacy where, armed with a list of brand names of antibiotics, we bought a couple of strips of pills the colour of raw liver. They did the trick and killed off whatever bacteria had come to call us home pretty quickly. We looked up the pills on the internet to find that they are banned in most western countries due to the potentially devastating possible side effects, including exploding ligaments and permanent damage to most, though not all internal organs. Needless to say, though we weren’t troubled by digestive indiscretion again, we spent the following days panicking over every (normal) twinge and ache.

It was a pity, because Coimbatore seemed like a nice place – a lot more prosperous and, well, real than most of the tourist places up north. Our hotel was right by the station, perfect for our planned 5.15am train to Ooty the following morning. The train to Ooty is, by all accounts, spectacular – a 1 metre gauge, rack railway occasionally pulled by steam engines. However, with diahorrea being such a recent friend, and having experienced the toilets on a first class train in Sri Lanka the previous November, we decided that eight hours of rail-bound fun just wasn’t for us and booked a taxi instead.

The taxi journey was quicker than the rail journey would have been, largely because the driver seemed to be suicidal. There are 36 hairpin bends between Coimbatore and Ooty, all of which we took at twice the speed limit on the wrong side of the road. By the time we actually reached Ooty, four or so hours later, we were too terrified to take much in. We had booked ourselves into the Holiday Inn as, after all the personal service of the Rajasthani hotels we fancied a couple of days of international anonymity. As is happened, it was a fantastic hotel, a couple of miles out of town and looking down over the valley.

The view from the hotel room, Ooty. The clouds were very low that day

The room was big and comfortable, the bar was welcoming and the food in the restaurant exceptional, though Rachel quickly discovered that she didn’t much care for the local specialities. On the first night, I almost passed out after walking the single flight of stairs up to our room. I know that I am unfit, but this seemed a little excessive. Once safely back in the room, I looked up Ooty on the internet. It turns out that we were about 2,500 metres above sea level. That’s close to twice the height of Ben Nevis. Higher than I have ever been in my life. Ooty is in the state of Tamil Nadu and was one of the three hill stations that the British lawmakers in the time of the Raj would escape to in order to avoid the brutal summers. The hotel had heating instead of air conditioning. All the local shops sold knitwear. It was still warmer than most Yorkshire summer afternoons though. Ooty is in the Nilgiri hills, famed for their tea plantations. Having already bought vast quantities of tea from Sri Lanka and Nepal, I proceeded to fill every available gap and cranny in my rucksack with small foil-wrapped packages of the precious local leaves. We spent two nights in Ooty, and though the town itself is tiny, could quite happily have stayed longer. The hotel was wonderful, though the service was occasionally a little over-attentive (I really started to worry that the barman was about to start topping my beer up as I held the glass to my mouth so insistent was he that I not run out).

Rachel in Kebab Corner in Ooty. A wonderful place!

Tea pickers, Ooty

But two days later it was time to move on to Kerala – self-styled as ‘God’s own country’. Everyone to whom we had spoken in India, and every Indian we knew in Dubai had told us that we had to visit Kerala. It is, by all (and I mean all) accounts, the best, prettiest and most welcoming part of the subcontinent. It is a narrow state, the strip of land right at the bottom on the left, sandwiched between coast and mountains. The night before we left Ooty, I read up about it. Kerala was the first place in the world to elect a communist government, and the communists are still (democratically) in control. It has 100% literacy and social services that compare with the best in the old and new worlds. It also has the highest rates of alcoholism and suicide in India (ignorance is bliss – the heightened understanding of the world afforded by reading well frequently leads to depression and drink problems. Discuss). Fine, I thought. A state full of literate, depressed, left-wing alcoholics. I should fit right in.



The journey (by taxi again, effete, old-world milksops that we are) from Ooty to Cochin was long. Really, really long. We had been told it would be seven hours. It was closer to ten hours. This was largely down to the driver, a very nice man who seemed absolutely terrified of everything else on the road. Driving in India is something of a state of cooperative chaos. You will frequently find yourself overtaking a car that is overtaking another car on a two-lane road with a bus overtaking a truck thundering towards you. Then at the moment when it seems inevitable that someone will shortly be picking your body-parts from nearby trees, everyone slides into tiny gaps the existence of which you had been hitherto unaware. And all this is done without any of the gesticulating machismo that accompanies the control of automotive transport everywhere else in the world. But our driver was too scared to even overtake oxen carts when there was nothing on the other side of the road all the way to the horizon. He also had to keep stopping for directions. Even when there were no other roads he could have taken. At one point, he stopped the car, got out, wandered around for 5 minutes looking for someone to ask (there were hundreds of people around – I wasn’t sure of his criteria for a director), eventually asked someone, came back, sat in the car, buckled his seatbelt, looked out of the windscreen for a moment, unbuckled his seatbelt and got out to go and find someone else to ask.



The only thing of note on the journey was our lunch stop. We found ourselves in a small, fly-blown roadside restaurant whose staff were delighted someone had turned up. The waitress brought a menu. We chose our food and the waitress went away. A few minutes later she returned – my choice was off, would I care to choose again? I did so and off she went. Then she came back. My new choice was also unavailable. I said I’d have the same as Rachel. A few minutes later she informed us that that was off too. We chose again. No luck. We asked what they did have. She indicated a section of the menu. ‘Everything here,’ she said. I picked a dish, almost at random from that section. A few minutes later, yes, you’ve guessed it, she came back to tell me they didn’t have that and she was sorry. It was eerily reminiscent of Monty Python’s cheese shop sketch. We gave up and bought chocolate from the supermarket across the road instead.



Our first impressions of Kerala were good – very green, very beautiful, acres of coconut palms, banana trees and rice paddies. The previous night’s research was visible in the fact that every tiny village had a public library and several bookshops, that the schools finished for the day at 4pm rather than the 1pm end we had seen everywhere else and that there were many, many state run off-licences (all with very long queues) and toddy-shops (toddy is the local moonshine brewed from coconuts). In fact, the only thing missing was a preponderance of shops selling nooses, garden hoses and razor blades.



So it was that at nine o’clock that night, a mere nine and three quarter hours after setting off, we arrived in Ernakulam, the mainland part of Cochin (the rest being spread out over several islands). We were tired, hungry, dirty and frustrated. We checked into the hotel to find that the room they gave us was not the one we had booked – we had booked (and prepaid for) a standard double. They gave us their best suite. We dined extravagantly, cheaply and very, very well at the hotel buffet and went to bed thinking that there might be something in this ‘God’s own country’ lark after all.

Daniel Sahib and Rachel Memsahib visit the land of the Kings (part two)

Eight hours further down the road (including stops for a couple of temples, of course) was Jodhpur, city of the stupid trousers. Actually, Jodhpur is known as the blue city – in much the same way as all of Jaipur’s houses are painted pink, Jodhpur’s are blue. This, apparently, is because blue discourages insects.

A Jain temple, Jodhpur

View of the hills from the Jain temple

Jodhpur, the blue city

Our hotel, another homestay, was on the outskirts of the city. It was run by Indian Christians who also had some sort of link with an art and furniture export company – the place was stuffed with antiques: a Victorian billiard table in the upstairs room, old horned gramophones in a quantity that almost qualified as an infestation and, in pride of place between living room and dining room, keeping a pair of beady glass eyes on all who ate, a faded and slightly sorry-looking stuffed tiger. I mean that in the sense of taxidermy, rather than a cuddly toy.

Jodhpur hotel dining/living room. Note the tiger on the left.

That evening, we got a lift into Jodhpur with a view to wandering the streets as we had in Pushkar and Udaipur before. Jodhpur, though, is something like 50 times the size of Pushkar with a population around the million mark. It was crazy. We walked through the dust and fumes of the main bazaar, had a quick look round the purported tourist area then panicked and headed straight for the nearest expensive-looking hotel. As it turned out, our panic served us well and we ended up in the Lonely Planet restaurant pick for the second city running. The atmosphere was marginally spoiled by a rainstorm that Noah might have found familiar, but we returned the following evening for several beers and a perfectly wind-cooled, clear-skied end to the day. The day that was spent, surprisingly enough, looking round a fort. Jodhpur fort though was probably our favourite, on account of the informative (but not over-informative) audio-guide that came with the price of admission. It is a spectacular thing that fort, never once taken by force in all its existence. And it had a nice shop too.

Jodhpur fort

The sati marks by the fort's gate - each of Maharaja Man Singh's 31 widows left a hand mark on the wall as they made their way to throw themselves on his funeral pyre in 1843.

Musicians in Jodhpur fort

A camel cart - a very common mode of transport in Rajasthan

From the blue city, we headed to the golden city – Jaisalmer (golden due to the colour of the stone rather than the houses being painted in this instance). Jaisalmer is on the edge of the great Thar Desert and we were booked for a night in a hotel and a night in a desert campsite following a camel safari. The hotel, at first, seemed a little far out, but it turned out that Jaisalmer, despite having a fort that is visible for many, many miles around, is actually very small. The hotel was new (therefore clean – the habit here seems to be to build an hotel then run it until everything stops working through an accumulation of grime and lack of care, then gut it and start again, rather than the conventional hotelier’s program of ongoing cleaning and maintenance) and very comfortable. The rooftop restaurant served excellent vegetarian food with a fantastic view of Jaisalmer fort on one side and of what was optimistically termed ‘the lake’ on the other (in actual fact, with the monsoon season only just starting it was a tiny patch of mud with a few wild pigs rolling around). That night a storm of a magnitude never before witnessed by either me or Rachel hit. Jaisalmer frequently goes for years – often up to seven years between showers. But it more than made up for it that night.

The old and the new - mausolea and wind farming in Jaisalmer

Cricket in Jaisalmer

The next day, for a change, we went sightseeing. Jaisalmer fort is a living thing, with houses, hotels and businesses within its walls. The problem is that it was designed 500 years ago for a few hundred people. Nowadays, the millions of gallons of extra waste water coursing through its drains cut into the porous rock upon which the fort is built, undermining the entire edifice. Several parts of the fort have already collapsed into rubble and the whole thing is slowly sinking into the desert. The museum part of the fort was another with a free audio guide. However, the incomplete nature of the museum as a tourist attraction and the desire of its curators to be perceived as giving value for money meant that a great deal of the audio guide was given over to long and largely decidedly uninteresting stories about… well I don’t know as I stopped listening.

Jaisalmer, from the top of the fort

Autorickshaws (Tuctucs), Jaisalmer

We enjoyed Jaisalmer, though our day there was somewhat tempered by my constant fretting about the camel safari and desert camping. I don’t know what the hell I had been thinking when I agreed to it. Nothing, I suspect. As three o’clock drew near, I fretted more and more, coming very close to deciding to call the whole thing off. But we went through with it. Sort of. We were driven about an hour (though bearing in mind the roads, that was only about 25 miles) out towards the Pakistani border and the Sam sand dunes in the Thar Desert. We were dropped at the ‘campsite’ – a fly-blown collection of dank concrete huts ranged around a small stage. From here, we were hefted onto a camel each and led off into the desert. Oscar Wilde famously said that one should try everything once with the exception of folk dancing and incest. I can confidently add camel-riding to that. I have never (thankfully) experienced anything like it before, but if you can imagine being on a very smelly see-saw opposite a fat man on amphetamines who occasionally reaches across and hits you in the testicles with a mallet, you’re halfway there. I hated every stinking second. Unfortunately, towards the end of the ride (an hour! A goddamned hour!) my camel sat down suddenly wrenching my hip. This meant that because of the hard beds at the ‘campsite’, we couldn’t spend the evening there watching Rajasthani folk-dancing. Instead we had to return to the incredibly comfortable, air-conditioned hotel and have a fantastic supper and several cold beers before getting 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep. Damn those camels.

Rachel on a camel. She was a lot better at it than me.

The camel that tried its level best to kill me

Next came Bikaner. It rained like the end of the world, which was apt as Bikaner looked like the end of the world. We were supposed to spend 2 nights there, but chose not to. The hotel looked like it had been quite something 10 years ago, but in keeping with Indian hotel tradition, hadn’t been cleaned or maintained since. The room we were put in had minimal air-conditioning and a fan that sounded like a Spitfire. Rather than moving us to another room (of which there were hundreds free) we had to wait an hour while they buggered about trying to fix things. Then they moved us to another room. Which was a little better. Only with no hot water. We gave up, ordered room service and went to bed. The room service poisoned Rachel and she was quite severely unwell for the next 24 hours. We decided to leave the next morning. We drove up to Bikaner fort, but it was swamped by Indian teenage boys on some sort of trip who kept trying to take photos of Rachel. In her poison weakened state, this got on her nerves. To say the least. The fort wasn’t open for another hour, it wasn’t reckoned that highly by Lonely Planet and AFFS had well and truly set in, so, at the driver’s instigation, we set off to Mandawa, a small town that would break the ten hour drive between Bikaner and Delhi. On the way, we stopped at Deshnok to see the Karni Matar Temple – according to legend, rats in this place are the souls of storytellers and are thus revered. So the entire temple is given over to the worship of rats. As you might imagine, it’s a bit smelly in there. It’s supposed to be lucky if you see a white rat. We nearly saw an orange rat as one ran within range of Rachel’s first jet of vomit.

Rats!

Our last night in Rajasthan was spent in Mandawa, a small and very muddy town that, we had been promised, would make the following day’s return trip to Delhi much shorter. The hotel was a old Haveli – a large and somewhat stately house brightly painted. It was truly beautiful, with only one initial problem – the room we were given at first was one of the more impressive original ground floor rooms – large and interesting and fabulously decorated. Unfortunately, the bathroom was also old and Rachel, who planned to spend a lot of time in there with her stomach upset, balked at its condition. Consequently we chose a newer upper floor room that was less interesting but had a cleaner bathroom. That afternoon I ventured into the streets to find a chemist, but discovered that without the name of a drug, the chemist could only offer Indian medicine which I was told, in no uncertain terms, was no good for westerners. I tried a doctor too, but he (in his office that looked like the back room of a long abandoned newsagents) refused to do anything until he had examined Rachel – fair enough except she wasn’t well enough to leave the bathroom. So she just had to sleep it off, which she did with admirably little fuss.

Haveli hotel Mandawa

Interior courtyard

The next day we returned to Delhi. We had decided to stay in our original hotel, but in their best room (at a princely sum of about fifty quid) so Rachel could have a bath rather than a shower. She was feeling a lot better by this point, so we ate at the hotel restaurant, which was exceptionally good, and completely failed to get an early night in preparation for our 3.30am start to travel to Coimbatore the following day. It was our last night in Northern India – over all we had enjoyed our time there very much, but were looking forward to two weeks of indolence, sunshine and a complete absence of forts, palaces and temples.