Cycle touring in Kerala

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November 13th 2010

Published: November 13th 2010

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Jacqui Knox

Fisherman in Cochin

And a Chinese fishing net for good measure.

Here's a little parable about India.

We were returning from a dingy bar in Alleppey when one of Kerala's chronic blackouts plunged the road into darkness. Our rickshaw had no lights so we got out to walk. I was thinking obscenities about India when Tom spotted a firefly, and we looked up to find the coconut palms sprinkled with their greenish lights. We stood watching for a minute or so, their hot little bums bobbing along, before the power came back and the streetlights made them invisible.

Our whole bicycle ride in Kerala was also an accident - we had given up on hiking in the Himalayas and needed something else to fill the time. But it turned out to be one of our best holidays ever in what is perhaps the cleanest and most relaxed part of India, with high literacy rates and a prosperous middle class.

We bought our bicycles in a backstreet of Cochin under the lustful gaze of a 10-year-old boy. Tom's was a single-speed blue Hero City Bike. Mine was much cooler: A red Hero Empress, complete with step-through frame, front basket and skirt guards.

Passers-by stared as we wobbled back to

Hero Empress

My bicycle, fully loaded.

the gorgeous Old Courtyard Hotel, where we were staying. Clearly we were pedalling objects of desire, and we felt guilty that we planned to dump the bikes after four days riding down the coast.

First, though, we spent a day exploring Fort Kochi and neighbouring Mattancherry. Both are fantastic. The grand Portugese and Dutch homes from the 16th and 17th centuries have been turned into heritage hotels. Orchids grow on mammoth trees, Chinese fishing nets dip serenely into the estuary, and the whole place has an atmosphere of decaying splendour like that of a temple abandoned to the jungle. We went to bed with stomachs full of seafood and out-of-date beer.

After an overnight storm we woke to no electricity and cold showers, then fumbled in the dark to get our cycling gear together. At dawn our bags were strapped to the bikes and we set off down the beach road heading south.

This road was shown on Google maps but on no other maps of Kerala. It would take us all the way to our next stop, Alleppey, and eventually to Kovalam, a beach resort in the south. Theoretically, all we had to do was keep

The Old Courtyard Hotel

Shady, cool, and the most pleasant hotel we've been to in India.

the sea to our right for four days.

Cochin - Alleppey

Within an hour we were cycling down the narrow causeway between the lazy backwaters and the sea. Every half hour we passed a church; twenty per cent of Keralans are Christians and even on a Thursday morning the churches were full. Later the road was lined with schoolchildren in their blue uniforms, and soon the morning's fishing catch was being brought in.

Much of the road was in excellent condition, having been rebuilt after the Boxing Day Tsunami. The rest was abysmal. At one point we found ourselves attempting to overtake a truck carrying unsecured logs while sticking to the narrow ridges between 20cm-deep potholes.

Mid-morning we passed a frenzy of activity on the beach and decided to investigate. It was a fish market. There must have been 300 people by the shore: businessmen waving notepads, fishermen repairing nets, women selling snacks and drinks, and the unlucky porters who carried leaking baskets of fish on their heads to the trucks, motorbikes and bicycles waiting on the road.

We reached Alleppey at about 1pm in searing heat. Lonely Planet describes its 'shady streets

Chinese fishing net, Cochin

These nets line many of the estuaries of the backwaters - at night they use lights to attract their catch

and canals' but we found belching trucks, honking rickshaws and leering twenty-somethings. Reaching our hotel on the shore of the lake, and finding the restaurant serving good food, was bliss. Our bicycles were still in one piece minus a few extremities. And most importantly, it looked like we would be able to take the bicycles on the tourist boat the next day.

Alleppey - Kollam

The 'cruise' to Kollam, at the southern shore of the backwaters, was due to leave Alleppey at 10.30am. By 9am we were at the tourist desk, where the officer reluctantly agreed to phone the captain about our bikes. He came back announcing we would need to pay an adult fare for each bicycle, and almost scowled when I asked him to take us to the boat captain to negotiate.

But once at the jetty, a strange thing happened. He became the most helpful bureaucrat in India and made sure our bicycles got on the boat for the princely sum of 50Rs, then waved us a merry goodbye.

Watching all this was a small man with transition lenses called Dileep. He struck up a conversation asking: 'Have you read any good

Canoe making

We passed several workshops like this between Cochin and Alleppey.

fiction lately?' Rather than this being a prelude to an invitation to visit his cousin's shop, he was actually far more knowledgeable about literature and current affairs than either of us and particularly wanted to learn more about regional differences within English. He even bought us a chai. We asked him where he learned English. He replied: 'Here. This is my Oxford,' waving his hands at the dirty jetty. 'Yesterday was a feast for me. There was a Kiwi couple here in the morning and a British couple in the evening.'

We left him with two bits of idiom to digest - 'Minging' from Tom and 'Cool bananas' from me - then settled in for an eight hour boat ride.

The boat follows major canals, rivers and lakes through the backwaters. We passed rice paddies being worked by women in umbrella-hats; thousands of ducks emerging from a duck farm; a boat-traffic-jam coming in from the sea; cement factories; broad, shallow lakes and weed-choked canals navigated by canoes.

It was a beautiful trip, but by 4pm a soupy heat hung over the boat and even the engine man was dozing. Only when the light went stormy and we

Cochin fisherman

Tom had another great photo of this man, when five people were pointing camera lenses at him and a tiny fish he caught

began crossing a huge lake towards Kollam did the crew buzz into action, throwing overboard a bottle of suspicious brown liquid as we pulled into Kollam just after sunset.

Kollam-Varkala

New York has the Statue of Liberty at the entrance to its harbour; Kollam has the Goddess of Light. She is ample-busted and magnificently-buttocked compared to her American counterpart. She too has a torch which she thrusts towards the sky. She also has an antenna poking out of her head.

We could have used her help as we set out to find our hotel in Kollam. Cycling down an Indian highway at night without lights or a helmet, blinded by oncoming trucks and with fireworks exploding left and right because it is the festival of Diwali, left me almost weeping with fear.

Fortunately our host was waiting for us down a side road in his car and escorted us to our tucked-away accommodation. It was shabby but he had put beer in the fridge and we could sit on the verandah with the sea just metres away. Pretty perfect, really.

In the morning we woke to find our host again, this time standing the base

Keralan fishing boats

It takes about 10 people to paddle one of these boats out through the waves. On their return, they are rolled up the beach on logs.

of a coconut tree which had come crashing down during the night. He had already warned us that the coast road had been washed away in parts during the monsoon, so we started riding at 6am to tackle the highway. Aside from endless honking, it wasn't too bad, and by 9am we were back at the beach enjoying breakfast just 10km from our destination.

We arrived in Varkala to throngs of Diwali pilgrims visiting its main temple, the women dressed in saris and the men bare-chested in cotton longis. A water tank was lined with people washing and bathing, and beach was packed with Indians standing knee-deep and fully-clothed in the water.

Our hotel was expecting us mid-afternoon. Instead we arrived at 9.50am, but were greeted with cardamom and cashew biscuits. We had had fleeting smells of cardamom since Kollam, and the biscuits were just as delicious. The staff then put us in the wrong room - the luxurious roof terrace room - which we managed to dirty with impressive thoroughness before the error was noticed and we were moved to more humble lodgings.

Back in town a transformation had taken place. The beach had emptied apart

Backwaters near Cochin

More fishing nets, more canoes.

from a smattering of white bikini bodies and another smattering of Indian men watching them.

Varkala is neatly split into two parts - the 'Indian' village set back from the beach and the 'backpacker' village perched on the coastal cliffs. We preferred the next beach south, where teenage boys were fishing with blue twine and others were diving under the breaking waves to collect mussels from a rock.

However Varkala does one thing exceptionally well: Illicit cocktails from unlicensed bars. Tom had a Long Island Iced Tea, cryptically described on the menu as 'V, G, T and R'. I had a Gin Fizz described as 'G, Lime and Soda'. Despite the giveaway in its name, the waiters make a big show of hiding any bottles, which made me think the police must be in on the game. This suspicion was later confirmed by a cheerful waiter in Kovalam.

Varkala - Kovalam

Our final day started with a bang. Tom was pumping up his tyres when the inside of the valve popped out and the inner tube deflated. He tried again with a new inner tube and the same thing happened. He was about to try a

Fishing nets and canoes

The canoes were loaded with sand and had just a few centimetres clearance from the water. We later saw one bailing out.

third - our last - when the gatekeeper picked up the old tube and simply put the broken valve back together.
The first tube hadn't broken at all - Tom had just unscrewed the wrong bit.

Despite the late start followed by heavy rain, the first hour of riding was the prettiest of the whole trip. The hills meant we could see the thatch beach shacks and boat covers from the road, and we were surrounded by coconut and rubber plantations.

Sadly we needed to head inland to avoid an estuary, and soon we were back among busy towns. Butcher shops proliferated. One had a skinned buffalo head outside, with a dog next to it eating the remains of its face. I made an involuntary 'ewww' noise and heard the butcher laugh.

The towns were a navigational challenge, too. At our first junction I checked with a shopkeeper that we were heading the right way for Kovalam. He waved us on, but added the next 5km of road were very bad. 'Too many cattle' apparently.

It was indeed bad, and hilly to boot. It also led back to the highway.

It took three more errors

Fish market

I think they were sardines in the basket.

before we were cycling down the right road again an hour later. In the process we crossed the railway line three times. Uncannily, the level crossing barriers were down each time.

These crossings are quite an experience. They are operated manually, which partly explains why Indian railways employ 1.6 million people. As soon as the boom drops, queue jumpers spread themselves across both lanes of the road. Everyone turns their engines off and it goes quiet. Once the train has passed, one brave rickshaw starts his engine, and suddenly you are surrounded by noise and honking again as everyone follows suit. For a minute the track becomes a battlefield for two warring armies of cars, motorbikes and cyclists.

By this time the flowers somebody had draped over my bicycle the day before had gone brown and soggy, so I threw them away. It was another 25km or so to Kovalam and once we hit the suburbs of the capital Trivandrum the roads were astonishingly bad. At one point some children lobbed gravel at me - minutes later they did so again as we doubled back from another wrong turn.

The last few kilometres were on the highway

More fish market

Pity the porters who carry the catch on their heads - the baskets slop fish juice all over them.

again. It was so hot we were overtaken by two children sharing a bicycle. In my eagerness to arrive we turned off early and hit the coast one beach north of our destination, then had to carry and push our bikes through hotels and across beaches to another road, where we took one last wrong turn up the hill, before finally freewheeling down into the solid wall of restaurants lining Lighthouse Beach, Kovalam.

Neither of us had energy to find the hotel, so we dived into a beachfront restaurant and watched the surf. It was to become a very familiar view as we spent the next 24 hours eating and displaying stunning ineptitude with boogie boards. At 3pm we finally found Hotel Varmas, dragged ourselves to our room, turned the air-conditioning on, and collapsed.

Google has since confirmed our distance for that hot, weary day.

It was 59km.

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