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Published: August 7th 2007
In the land of travel guides and tour books, Kerala is always defined by its famed “backwater tours,” where boatloads of tourists hang off the railings of house boats, clutching cameras and staring excitedly and unabashedly at the people quietly living their lives in and along the water. We had avoided all varieties of organized tour so far, and the idea of joining the other staring tourists was faintly embarrassing, but like everyone else we were too temped by the appeal of such an honest and intimate view of South Indian life to pass it up. Kochi is a standard starting point for Kerala, and our decision to stop there instead of elsewhere in Kerala was based mainly on train schedules and time constraints. The extent of the impact of tourism in Kochi was made apparent by the enormous cruise ship docked in her port, spewing out groups of wide-eyed, name-tag clad tourists. The unfortunate result of mass tourism is, of course, the emergence of incredibly overpriced mediocre restaurants and trinket shops, but we avoided the majority of this by staying in Ernakulam, away from the main tourist area of Fort Cochin.
We arrived in Kochi in the
evening of March 6th and took a rickshaw from the train station to our hotel, the Maple Regency. (The name had been changed since the publishing of our book and it took a few minutes to verify that it was in fact the correct hotel.) The hotel was located a minute’s walk from the main boat jetty in Ernakulam, where we could catch a dirt-cheap 20-minute local ferry to Fort Cochin, the main tourist hub known for its huge Chinese fishing nets. Even with the sun long-gone, Kochi was the hottest place we’d been so far, but we opted for a non-a/c room to save money. After putting our bags down, we set out from our hotel to find food, walking away from the jetty and through the neighborhoods of Ernakulam. People were disassembling their roadside clothing shops, using long sticks to take down the rows of hanging collared men’s shirts and store them in boxes until the next morning. We decided to eat at a small place on the side of the road, with five plastic tables overflowing with locals and a tiny outdoor kitchen with huge pots of steaming food. The food at these places is unfailingly fantastic,
and we devoured our spicy fish curry and fresh chapati (flatbread) almost as fast as the locals, who somehow often seem to eat as if their lives depend upon the speed of their consumption.
After dinner we walked back to our hotel through the now-empty streets and attempted to sleep in our stuffy room. The mosquitoes were too thick outside to open the window, so the ceiling fan circulated the same hot air all night. We managed to sleep eventually, and got up fairly early the next day to take the ferry to Fort Cochin.
We stopped at a fruit vendor to buy a bunch of bright purple grapes for breakfast, then walked to the boat jetty to catch the ferry. At the jetty tourist office we made reservations for a recommended all-day backwater tour on Friday, and then we climbed onto a crowded ferry to cross to Fort Cochin. The entire crowd of passengers on the ferry craned their heads to stare at the enormous cruise ship as we passed her, our own slow-moving boat a tiny toy in comparison. We saw a brief news clip on a local TV station a few days later, talking about
the ship—apparently the first cruise ship to dock at Fort Cochin. Unfortunately, the cruise ship meant that Fort Cochin was packed with tourists, who—being tourists with a single disjointed afternoon to spend in India instead of travelers wary of vendors—eagerly purchased cheap wood carvings, giant seashells, cheap cotton clothing, and plates of outrageously overpriced flavorless seafood without even thinking to bargain. This, in turn, meant that we were bombarded with an unusual amount of cajoling by vendors who usually left us alone but were encouraged by the mass of cruise ship tourists. We spent enough time along the main shore to see and photograph the giant fishing nets and pay too much for a bland plate of shrimp, before leaving the crowds of vendors and tourists to walk further into town.
Away from the main tourist area, Fort Cochin was a charming place, with carefully tended homes and guesthouses behind fences wrapped in brightly colored flowers. We wandered through a the quiet streets until the heat became overwhelming, at which point we stopped in a small nondescript restaurant, full of locals quietly scooping rice and curries into their mouths with their right hands. We were ushered into a room
in back, away from the locals. This occurs fairly often, and we’re still not sure if it’s meant to hide us from them, hide them from us, or if there’s some other explanation. We asked for vegetarian thalis—set meals of rice and a variety of vegetable curries—and within minutes we were presented with huge silver trays full of white rice and six different curries. It was, without question, the best thali we had eaten so far in India. While we were eating three women sat down at the table next to us, mixed and drank a cup of chai each, and then left, all in under three minutes. We ate until we were stuffed, then paid and set out walking again, heading in the general direction of the boat jetty, ready to head back to our hotel for a shower and a break from the sun.
We took the ferry back to Ernakulam, showered, then set out into town to escape our stifling hotel room. We returned to the main road where we’d eaten the night before, and stopped in front of a large movie theater, lured by the possibility of air conditioning and the familiar comfort of eating
popcorn and watching larger-than-life characters on a screen. The only English-langue movie playing was “Ghost Rider,” an American action movie starring Nicolas Cage, which I would probably have never bothered seeing back home but which sounded novel and exciting in a theater in India. It was starting almost immediately, and we hurried to buy popcorn (almost the same as back home, with just a hint of Indian spice) and get seats in the wonderfully air-conditioned theater. The only differences from seeing it at home were the frequent reactions of the rest of the audience—clapping, cheering and shouting—during exciting scenes, the momentary break in picture and sound during the changing of reels, and the abrupt intermission halfway through. The movie was entertaining enough, the air conditioning was wonderful, the audience was amusing and, all in all, it was a great way to spend the evening.
That night we were informed by our hotel staff that there would be a state-wide strike in Kerala the next day, meaning that many shops and businesses would be closed. Sure enough, the streets were surprisingly subdued the next day, with corrugated metal doors pulled over storefronts and fewer taxis and rickshaws than usual in
the streets. For lack of much else to do—we had no real plans for the day—we wandered away from our hotel in the midday heat, stopping occasionally at an air conditioned coffee shop (most restaurants and coffee shops were still open) to escape from the sun. After a while of wandering we were enticed by a sign advertising “Hotel with A/C Bar.” We entered the hotel and asked about the bar, and were ushered past a door clearing marked “BAR” and into a deserted restaurant with white starched cloth napkins folded on the tables. When we turned away and headed back to the bar, frustrated at being separated—once again—from the locals, the hotel employee looked uncomfortable but opened the door to a quiet, dimly lit bar, with crisply-dressed men crowded around low circular tables. We sat at a table in the back corner and ordered a beer from an incredibly polite waiter, and then drank it slowly and watched the people around us, all businessmen celebrating the strike with a drink (or a few). Eventually a man stumbled to our table to say hello, introducing himself and explaining (too loudly) that he was from north India, where “people actually know
how to run a business.” He told us that he wanted the television turned on in the bar, but the waiters had refused, which, in his opinion, was very bad business, and reflected the problem with south India in general. He rambled for a while and then drifted away, arguing briefly with a few waiters about the TV before returning to our table to complain again. A friend of his tried to pull him away, but he wouldn’t be moved, and continued to talk until his frustration with the TV situation apparently became unbearable. He grabbed the half-empty bottle of water from our table and mumbled “I’ll fix this.” We watched him stagger towards the large flat-panel television and raise the bottle as if to smash it, at which point he was grabbed by a number of waiters and shoved to the floor. The skirmish ended quickly and he was removed from the bar, and everyone retuned to their drinks. The TV remained off. We chatted with a few other people, who came to say hello and apologize for the situation. When we left the bar manager stopped us to apologize profusely, and we assured him that it happens everywhere
and was not a problem at all. We left the dark air conditioned bar and headed back through the streets of Kochi to our hotel, chuckling about our water bottle’s near involvement in the destruction of the television.
That night we went to see a Kathakali performance, at a small family-owned theater a short rickshaw ride from our hotel. Kathakali is a type of dance particular to Kerala, where elaborately costumed dancers act out Hindu stories, using specific movements of their eyes, jaws, hands and feet to convey very particular meanings. Although it has been made into a tourist attraction, Kathakali’s roots are deeply devotional and the dancers are exquisitely trained in their art, giving a depth to the dance that I’m sure I didn’t begin to understand from the few hours I spent watching. The particular performance we saw was put on by a family that has been dancing every single day for generations. The stage was small, and there were only 7 of us in the audience, but the narrator and director smiled widely at his small audience and spoke as if his speech was new, instead of repeated nightly for years. He was 76 now and
no longer danced himself, but he spoke at length about the origins of Kathakali and told us about his father, who had danced until he was 97.
Before the performance began the dancer applied his makeup, sitting cross-legged in the center of the stage, patiently drawing careful lines with a thin wooden stick dipped in brightly colored paint, repeatedly checking the symmetry of the design in a small hand-mirror. The paint was applied in a particular order, all of it done slowly and meditatively. When he finished the color application another man came to glue folded paper to his jaws, creating bright white paper jowls that made his face look round and exaggerated. The dancer then disappeared backstage to dress, and the narrator spoke again about Kathakali until the dancer was ready. A drummer settled himself in a corner of the stage, the narrator picked up a tambourine, and the dancer came on stage draped in enormous skirts and ribbons, with a long braid of fake black hair down his back. He danced to the continuous accompaniment of the drums and tambourine, making elaborate gesticulations with his hands, alternatively squinting and widening his eyes, twisting his mouth in various
exaggerated expressions, crouching and leaping and twirling in his layers of skirts. Each particular motion or expression was a word or part of a word, and he told silent complicated stories with his face and body, like a mime but with the added dimensions of music, dance and spirituality. I wish I’d known the stories he performed—as local audiences would—but it was still fascinating and enchanting to watch the precision with which he used dance to express his wordless narratives.
On the way home (we decided to walk, after realizing that the rickshaw ride hadn’t been very far) we passed a gleaming American Pizza Hut, and completely in contrary to the Keralan authenticity of what we’d just done, we couldn’t resist the allure of good pizza. We ordered pepperoni—a real gamble, after getting hot dogs as pepperoni on our pizza in Bahrain, the last time we’d tried Pizza Hut—and were thrilled to get the crispy, greasy circles that we knew from home. After gorging on American food, we walked back to our hotel in the quiet darkened streets, stepping over giant cockroaches as they scurried from shadow to shadow. Back in our hotel we set an alarm to wake
up early the next morning for our back-water tour, and slept listlessly in the thick heat of the small room.
At 8:30 the next morning we walked to the main boat jetty next to our hotel and waited with a few other young couples for the tour guides to arrive with vans to take us to the boat. We were driven through town, past parades of kids in matching school uniforms, the girls with the hair in two braids tied into teardrops and tied with bright red ribbons. The city was already bustling, the roads filled with barefoot men pushing carts of vegetables, plastic buckets, and bananas, city busses crammed with people on their way to work, and women carefully sweeping dirt from their front steps. The vans parked and we walked down a shady road to a small dock with a mid-sized boat tied up, its deck scattered with comfortable folding cloth chairs and covered with a thatched roof. Jeff and I sat down against a railing and said hello to the 20 or so other passengers, all of us equipped with a few bottles of water and a camera. When we were all settled the boat driver,
sitting under a thatched umbrella in front of the boat, steered us away from the dock and our guide went over the itinerary: a few hours on this boat, with a stop to see a calcium factory, followed by lunch on the boat and then busses to a new location, where we would take small canoes for the rest of the afternoon in the narrower waters.
The entire tour was actually very pleasant, and we got an intimate view of fishermen neck-deep in the water beside their small boats, the children splashing in the water by the shore, the occasional stark white egret hunting for fish in the shallows, the women whipping wet clothes against rocks, the men hauling enormous baskets of sand on their heads, and the occasional bright blue kingfisher sitting quietly in a tree branch. Many of the fishermen smiled and waved as we passed, even though they probably saw the same boat and similar tourists every day.
Mid-morning, the boat pulled up at a dock and we climbed out into what seemed like a snow-covered landscape. The palm trees, bushes, ground and nearby buildings were all coated in a layer of fine white powder.
As we looked in wonder at the enormous piles of discarded mussel-shells and the sparkling white palm trees, our guide explained the process by which calcium was removed from mussel shells. He took us through the “factory,” which was a mostly-empty building with scattered tools and burlap bags, everything dusted with white. He then led us a little ways into the palm trees behind the building, where the white gradually disappeared and the forest reclaimed its bright greens. For an hour or so he pointed out specific plants and trees, explaining their flowers and fruits as we all crowded into the shade beneath the bigger trees. Eventually he led us back to the boat, and we were offered a snack of fresh mussels mixed with coconut milk and spices (for a small extra fee, of course). We were also offered bottles of a particular coconut drink, which if left out for a few hours ferments and becomes alcoholic. It smelled bitter and unappealing, but somehow tasted sweet and aromatic. After our snacks the boat pulled out again onto the water, to carry us back to our first port for lunch.
Lunch was a good Indian-style mix of rice, curries,
breads and curd, served on the boat as we sat docked near where our vans had dropped us off. Next to our boat a group of men hauled sand from a small rowboat onto shore, carrying heaping loads of the brown sand in baskets on their heads. Sand distribution is one of the two most popular trades in Kerala, despite being completely illegal. Jeff went to take their pictures from close-up, and after talking with them for a few minutes came hurrying back to our boat to drop off his camera, telling me he was going to try to carry some dirt on his head. A grinning worker helped to carefully set a load of sand on Jeff’s head, and the rest of the workers laughed and stared as he slowly carried the load to shore. He told me afterwards he couldn’t believe how heavy it was, but the men did it all day, smiling and joking with each other as if the sand weighed nothing at all. We tossed the workers the rest of our bottle of coconut juice, figuring they’d enjoy it whether now—as a refreshing drink only—or later, as an after-work treat. Then, after finishing lunch, we
all returned to the vans and drove to the afternoon part of our tour.
The vans parked in front of a small stand selling drinks and snacks, next to which an old woman was deftly weaving twine out of coconut hair. She held a bundle of the threads in her arms and twirled them into thicker rope with her fingers, while backing slowly away from a wooden spinning wheel. We watched for a few minutes, then filed down the road, down a path and to the shore of a narrow river where three small longboats waited for us. We climbed into our small boats and our rowers, standing in front and in back of each boat and armed with long poles for oars, pushed us away from shore and into narrow canals lined by thick trees and scattered thatched houses. People bathed in the water as we passed, scrubbing themselves with bars of bright red soap. We saw more bright blue kingfishers, along with grazing cows and goats on the riverbanks and a small water snake sliding along with the current through the clear sunlit water.
After a while we stopped and climbed out of our boats, followed
by our rowers hauling bags of coconuts. We were each given a coconut—its top hacked off with a machete—and a straw with which to drink the milk. Our guide demonstrated how to climb a palm tree, using a rope to tie his feet together and another to hold in the hands, looped around the back of the trunk. He invited us to try and about four of us did, myself and Jeff included. It was easy to get up, but a lot harder to get down. After our drink and climb we got back into the boats, went a little further down the narrow river, then turned and headed back to where our vans were parked, marking the end of the tour.
That night was our last in Kochi, and we decided to splurge on an air conditioned room so we could actually sleep. (It was 700 rupees instead of 285, but worth the extra $10 for a night of comfortable sleep.) After basking in the cold air for a little while, we set out to get dinner again… and found ourselves gravitating towards Pizza Hut again. The employees (nearly all the same as the night before) seemed thrilled
to see us again, and we were thrilled to see them again too, since they brought us our real-pepperoni-real-cheese pizza. At this Pizza Hut, like at most American fast food chains found outside of the U.S., the food was better and the wait staff and atmosphere were what you might find in a pretty good steakhouse. I suppose this is because it’s a coveted job abroad, unlike in the states where it’s every kid’s first job and everyone’s joke of a career track. We told our waiter that the pizza was far better than back home in the U.S. (it really was!) and he positively beamed, and soon you could tell he’d told the cooks and all the other waiters because all of them were grinning at us. Our waiter brought us two customer feedback forms, neither of which was actually relevant because both were about specific meals we hadn’t tried, but we filled them out very positively and left a very happy group of Pizza Hut employees behind. Pretty funny, but glad we made their day.
We packed up that night and left Kochi the next morning, to take a train to Madurai in Tamil Nadu. Overall, we
got a really warm feeling from the people in Kochi—we even had a vendor apologize after we said no thank you to the memory cards he was selling, and we had a rickshaw driver take less money from us than we had agreed upon before a ride, because it took so little time to drive us there. The staff at the hotel were incredibly friendly and helpful, and everyone we met or chatted with in town seemed genuinely kind and well-meaning. The majority of the people in all towns we’ve been to have been friendly and helpful, but Kochi seemed to have an unusual (and refreshing) lack of people out only to get our money. We were actually a little reluctant to leave, but it was time to head to Madurai, to see one of the most elaborate temples in India.
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Anna
non-member comment
I've noticed how much more confident you two look in your photos as you become more and more experienced travelers. Take care!