Late addition

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Just adding photos, and realised that I seem to have totally left out the most surprising event of all in Kerala... After having decided to ditch the elephant festival in favour of a trip to Ernakulam and buying our train tickets, we sorted ourselves out a couple of excusions - one to the famous Keralan backwaters, and one to the Wayanad wildlife sanctuary that I've already written about.

Trip to the backwaters was extremely relaxing, if a little odd. Drove past a massive festival on the way there (with evidence of the elusive elephants) and, more to the point, the sort of fireworks that would have gone down well in the trenches at the Somme. No pretty explosions - not really worth the effort at ten in the morning - so they could just concentrate on making the biggest explosion possible. And they did a good job. Real window-rattling explosions that you could feel right in the pit of your stomach. This, early on a weekday morning. Never let work get in the way of the chance to blow things up and decorate the town...

The backwaters themselves were beautiful. I can see the attraction of hiring your own boat - could really have done without the extremely overweight American who grilled everyone and anyone about India, and never failed to mention her 'very good Indian friends' that she'd met through her work on bank call centres for HSBC. Call centres, HSBC, overweight loud American... how could we not warm to her...?

Anyway, that aside, the day was really good. The morning was spent on a big boat, cruising the river itself, followed by an absolutely great Keralan lunch on the boat, and then a trip in four man canoes down the winding backwaters. Very weird - almost like a trip into a documentary, with people getting on with their lives on the riverbank, and a strange mixture of the modern (plenty of bright synthetics) and the ancient - still washing clothes by bashing them against rocks in the river, and making coir by hand. Minor, if childish, highlight was eating our own coconuts that were picked from the tree in front of us. OK, the green coconuts might be an acquired taste, but the fact that the bloke had just climbed up the tree to get them made all the difference...

The craziest part of the whole day, though, was getting back to Kochi. Turns out that it was a good job that we hadn't hung about the day before to catch the elephant festival. In a classic example of 'India time', we drove straight back into the middle of the festival, the day after it was meant to be on. Cue plenty of shouting and screaming as me, Fi and an Norwegian bloke who had been on the tour with us dived for the door of the minibus and left the rest to get back to their hotels.

So we got to see the elephants after all. Amazing to see them just there, on the street, quietly munching away on coconut palms. And even more amazing to see people driving past, showing absolutely minimal interest. Me and Fi might have been beside ourselves with excitement about seeing elephants on the street, but for most locals, it didn't seem to be much more noteworthy than catching sight of a fairly decent car parked at the side of the road...

Perfect evening of sheer blind luck was capped by arriving at the Chinese fishing nets just in time to see them being raised. Again, a fantastic sight, especially with an incredibly dramatic sunset setting them off. Some great photos but I can't really take credit for them - as proved to be the case through all of India, taking great photos is like shooting fish in a barrel. Point the camera in whatever direction you want and you'll see something absolutely fantastic.

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