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Published: June 22nd 2017
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Geo: 10.012, 76.2251
We headed south from Goa to Alleppey (or Allaphuza depending on who you talk to), stopping part of the way in Mangalore. Our night in Mangalore was the most expensive to date due to the location, the cheapest place we could find was a hotel in the city with air conditioning (our first taste of a/c since northern India), with breakfast included and a flat screen TV with plenty of film channels! We explored around and were happy to say there wasn't much that interested us so grabbed some food (in KFC!) and spent the evening watching films in our lovely air conditioned hotel room.
The next day included an overnight train journey which arrived in Alleppey at 4am. We got to our accommodation and learning from last time we told them about our early arrival so were able to roll straight into bed. Alleppey is famous for it's backwaters so we spent a day on a canoe which was bloody lovely! It was relaxing, we saw loads of fruit and spice plants as well as rice paddies, people living along the river, bathing in it, washing their clothes in it and using it to brush their teeth in
the morning. The beach in Alleppey wasn't up to much, plus they're in the middle of building a massive highway on the back of it, so we rented a 'scooty' and went for a drive to other beaches. Paradise!
On one of our last days we came out of the room to the owner asking us if we'd heard 'the news'. We nodded goofily and laughed thinking 'the news' was the Trump presidency... nope! The Indian president had just announced that 500 and 1000 rupee notes were now worthless. Our heads reeling from trying to work out how many of these notes we had, how we could change them, if it was worth the 5+ hour queues at the bank changing them and how on earth Donald Trump became president of the United States, we decided to not panic, take every day as it comes and hope for the best. We got through ok, Phil managed to somehow jump a queue of roughly 60 locals and 30 foreigners to change some of our money and the rest we managed to palm off in illegal payments!
After Alleppey came Kochi. Our final destination in India. We took the train, walked
to the ferry port (Sooz fell over, twisted her ankle and ripped her new Indian trousers) then we jumped on a ferry across to Fort Kochi where our accommodation was. At this point we realised that we still haven't tried a particular Indian street food dish called 'pav bhaji' (look it up... vegetables, spices, LOTS of butter and bread. Yum!). We bypassed it in Delhi to try other food thinking that we'd run into it on the way down. This didn't happen. So in a last ditch attempt, we googled pav bhaji in kochi. We found a place! It was a restaurant so we weren't sure it was going to be the same but we just HAD to try! The day before we flew out of India we set upon our 1.5-2hr trek to the pav bhaji place. We walked, we waited for our ferry forever, we floated across to the mainland, we realised it was Sunday and everywhere seems to be closed but we continued on our quest. We walked for another 40 minutes and hallelujah it was open! We ordered a pav bhaji while trying to withhold our excitement, and yes ladies and gentlemen, it was worth it.
Creamy, full of flavour, perfect spice, it was exactly what we were hoping it would be. These two foodies left India rather happy with ourselves!
Good bye India. We definitely had an experience. It was hectic, intense, interesting, overwhelmeing at times, educational and completely out of our comfort zone, but we're glad we did it. Overall feelings about India?... Get back to us after we've seen the rest of the world!
Next stop Sri Lanka!
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Christopher Carroll
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Great blog, interested in what you bought with your 'illegal' payments, the imagination runs riot! The package bhaji story is worth the read on its own! The punch line is not as expected as I really thought it was going to taste as bad as i
t looks keep up the having fun!