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Published: February 18th 2007
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After Munnar we went down the mountains into the state of Kerala, where we met up with Lena and Camilla again in a friendly little homestay in a town called Allepey. Kerala is boiling hot, especially having just been in the cool mountains. A lot of people walk around with umbrellas for shade, which still makes me confused when there's no rain! Quite a good beach in Allepey, and strangely it was very deserted apart from a large amount of giant crabs. Our whole no ice creams in India rule has kind of gone to pot as we found a great ice cream palour, and were averaging around 2-3 ice creams a day, each. Evenings were spent playing carom, a game kind of like pool but it's on a wooden board with little checkers pieces that you flick into holes. The guys running the homestay taught us to play, but we were all really bad and I think they found it vaguely amusing as we took hours to get all the pieces in, and they usually play rounds and rounds of it really quickly.
After a few days we decided to blow our budget on renting an exspensive houseboat, as
Allepey is the main entrance to Kerala's backwaters. We were on the boat for 21hours and it was definitely worth the money. It had a dinning room/sitting area at the front under a shade, a sofa thing to lie on in the sun, a bedroom, bathroom and a kitchen with a chef! It was so relaxing to lay back and drift through the backwaters, passing little villages on the edge of the canals. The food was fantastic, we had lots of fresh fruit, and the traditional Keralan meals cooked for us were some of the best we've had in India. We stopped for the night by the village that the boat driver lives in, and he showed us to his house and we met his family. It was such a beautiful little village, the houses line the canals, and everyone gets around on little rowing boats, on the other side of the houses were huge green paddy fields, where a lot of the villagers work during the day. The whole area is very green, with palm trees everywhere. We watched the sunset from our boat and in the evening watched the stars.
After our backwaters trip we caught the
bus up to Kochi as Lena and Camilla had befriended some super rich Indian guys in Munnar who were letting us stay in one of their many properties just outside Kochi. Well actually it turned out to be pretty far outside Kochi- had a very interesting time getting there. The guy that was supposed to pick us up was really late, and we ran into these other guys, who he happened to know (he seems to know most people), who wanted us to be extras in a random Bollywood film. So we decided we may as well and went along to the shoot, but it turned out we weren't needed for another 2 hours and didn't have time. They also wanted us to be in a 'party scene' at the weekend, but unfortunately we had our train booked, so we missed our chance of Bollywood stardom!
After stopping to pick up Melinda, a friend of Lena and Camilla, another random guy showed up with another car driving insanely fast and playing insanely loud trance music and we drove to a really really fancy house owned by another young rich guy who was hosting some kind of gathering with a
group of other young rich guys. They gave us some Chai and we waited for this other guy to come who was taking us to the house. They all were really nice, I think they spend a lot of their time sitting in their big houses and going to parties, most of them seemed to be sons of rich business men. In the end Absi turned up, the guy whos house we were going to, and drove us to the house. The house was really nice and posh, right by a huge river surrounded by palm trees. Apparently this is just one of Absi's many properties! Despite being vaguely far from anywhere it was really fun just hanging around in the fancy house for a few days, it's been ages since we've actually cooked for ourselves, and it was suprisingly fun just making myself cornflakes in the morning.
We said a final goodbye to everyone and caught the overnight train down to Goa. We arrived at Palolem beach at around 7:30am checked into a little bamboo hut and ate pancakes on the beach- it's good to be back! We plan to relax on the beach and do as little
as possible (besides shopping) for our last week in India.
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Liam Taylor
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Welcome to 2007
Seems than nobody's commented on this bloody blog since December 27th. So let me take this opportunity to wish you a happy New Year. And hope you've learnt to deal with cockroaches on houseboats...