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Published: August 16th 2018
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road out of Munnar
House & vehicles afftected by land slide Having spent an extra unscheduled day in Munnar due to the heavy rain fall we weren’t optimistic about getting out to Alleppey today either. We had another night of thunder storms and heavy torrential rain. The news reports in the morning were of further land slips, new dams having to open, red flood warnings in Alleppey and Kochin and of the US embassy telling its tourists to avoid Kerala completely. Despite this, and much to our surprise our taxi managed to get to us first thing in the morning. We decided being out of the area worst affected by land slides was probably a good thing, although going to an area below sea level didn’t seem the most sensible idea...
Almost as soon as we left the hotel we saw our first signs of the issues they had been having. Mud across much of the road despite the rubble having been cleared out of the way. Not long after part of the road was missing and a whole area of tea plantation decimated by a rock slide. There were trees across, boulders to avoid and bits of road missing where it had collapsed. The saddest sight was going past a
house which was demolished by another land slip, knowing 5 out of 7 members of a family had died in it. There were also wrecks of cars, scooters & motorbikes which didn’t look like anyone could have survived.
Pleased to be leaving the mountains we were soon wondering if it was a case of ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’ as we entered the low lands and saw all the flooding there. Fortunately it wasn’t. Alleppey itself, whilst on red alert, is currently ok.
We booked into our first Indian homestay which was somewhat dissappointing after our luxury spa hotel! The host, Jose, was very friendly and after dropping off our things we went in search of some food. Having failed to find the recommended cafe 500m from our room we decided to walk towards Alleppey beach. We still didn’t manage to find anything edible and resorted to eating bannanas under the porch of a building whilst waiting for a shower to pass. (The banana vendor clearly thought we were crazy as we massively overpaid by giving him 10 rupees!)
En route we went up the lighthouse which had fantastic views of the area, including
of the next door police academy which seemed to be having some sort of passing out parade. We then continued to the beach which is lovely and sandy but rather spoilt by a large overpass running behind it and quite a lot of rubbish.
Excited to have finally found a cafe to eat in we were informed the chef was on leave! Resorting to tea and a sit down we decided to get a tuk tuk back to the first cafe that was recommended. As luck would have it this tuk tuk driver had a friend with a boat....
Being driven down the backstreets of a strange city it did occur to us that this could be an elaborate mugging but we soon arrived at the waters edge and met the boat owner. Having seen some photos of the boat we agreed to a price (6500 rupees) to include all meals and an overnight stay, if we liked the boat after seeing it. The tuk tuk driver dropped us off for some food with a promise to pick us up at 930am the next day for our boat cruise....
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