Day 13 to 17: Alleppey, Southern Kerala

---

Described as the Venice of the East, Alleppey (now called Alaphuza, but no local calls it that 😊 is a beautiful place of backwaters, coconut trees, paddy fields and complete silence if one chooses so.

The resort, I was staying in, was a very interesting collection of wooden rooms, bamboo rooms, tree houses and normal rooms. I experimented with the tree house there first, but found it too cramped up and moved to the bamboo room. Really nice place to stay, completely different experience than normal life

I arrived in Alleppey, unsure of whether I would be doing a houseboat trip (didnt make sense doing it alone). But the place I was staying at had lot of tourists (think I was the only Indian there) and I met Isabelle and Wolfgang, two travellers from Germany, who I joined forces with to do the houseboat trip. We explored the boats first (there are more than 700 houseboats and the numbers are always increasing, so its best to look around and decide the boat and the price that makes sense for you. Never pre-book), then decided on a relatively small boat (got the best deal, bankers can never refuse one of those 😊

We did an overnight trip, with food being served on the boat (good fish and man, in Kerala they can make some amazing stuff out of bananas 😊. It was fun explaining a hindi movie to Isabelle and Wolfgang, thankfully it was "Sarkar Raj", so it was a short movie and not one of the Manmohan Desai twisters 😊

The backwaters themselves are so serene, despite the large number of houseboats, that you can just keep staring at them for hours (if you have the right music with you). It cleans up the mind, lets one accept life as it comes. We stayed awake for most of the night watching the waters and listening o the birds and in the morning were drifted back to shore (in between we did manage to step out to Alleppey beach, a nice place for Indian families to hang out on a sunday evening)

The last day in Alleppey, we took the local ferry to see a local village (Chennagiri), we walked around the village looking for food (found Toddy shop, but no one to sell 😞 It was a fun experience to see how integral backwaters are to local life, with children coming back from school on the same ferries, people towing bicycles across the water on boat to get to their work

We also spent some time looking at paddy fields, the fact that farming is done below sea level here, makes this even more interesting. Human ingenuity, knows no bounds 😊

After that, it was another train trip to Trivandrum (first time for Isabelle and Wolfgang 😊, en route to Kovalam

---

Comments

[Gouri]

nice pics....
i'm longing to experience the silence....... ur pictures r just increasing my longing.... :) nice pics....