Kerala and the back waters of Alleppy
After an uneventful train journey south we arrived in Cochin, also known as Kochi. The air is noticeably warmer and humid here and sweat was starting to gather on our bodies, which is a bit of a novelty this time around. Kochi is just a stopping off point for us as it is just another city – busy, confusing and big. We took a trip to Fort Kochi (the island) and spent a day there visiting (more) churches and listening to harmonic choir practice, and took a stroll along the sea front and had an ice-cream watching the huge Chinese fishing nets in action. These are huge constructions of wood stretching out from the shore. They drop a huge net held in a wide square and counter-weighted on the other side of a wooden pivot point. Fishermen walk up the struts to the net ends to add weight to the net end so it submerses into the sea. After about 4-5 minutes, six burly men tug down on long ropes that attach to the shore end of the pivot and sway in a regular synchronized manner pulling the counter-weights down to raise the net. It’s an arduous job and takes six men to work one net for the meager pickings of a few small fish (if any) each go. Still, it’s fascinating to watch for a while and a great photo opportunity. Unfortunately, tour day trips inundate the island, making it a crowded place and not easy to find a quiet spot with interest.
So that was Kochi, a quick stopover between Karnataka and the backwaters of Kerala where we are heading for the highlight of this visit to India. The backwaters are famous within traveler’s circles in India, the most common being the boat trip between Alleppy and Kollam. But we’re not going to do that, oh no, not with a packed boatload of travelers on an eight hour trip with only two stops and a menagerie of tourist-playing-up-to locals trying to extract the travelers’ dollar. We have something special planned… Ho ho. What exactly we had planned was a 24 hour backwater cruise on a traditional houseboat all to ourselves. At 3500 Rs it’s a little pricey but we’re worth it and considering what you might have to pay back home is seriously worth it. This is how it all panned out…
It’s only 2½ hours to Alleppy from Kochi by train, and Alleppey is the end of the line so the train is almost deserted. This means guaranteed seat, enough to spread out kind of space at the same cost as the bus and same journey time. The main difference is that the bus a mad rush of sweaty bodies in a manic free for all, first come first served, to get a seat thing at the bus station because the buses to Alleppey don’t originate from Kochi, therefore there are no reservations available! Three cheers for the train, it was all starting very nice thank you Bob.
The next triumph was that we managed to beat a 350 Rs room down to 200 Rs with a view of the canals in a swanky (almost anyway) hotel. Things were still looking rosy! That evening the boat owner came around to introduce himself, which I thought was nice of him, and to go over the menu for our trip. Now get this, knowing now as you do if you have been reading the last few entries, we are becoming connoisseurs of Indian grub, we were allowed to make up a menu fully from scratch to have what ever we wanted and how much of it. My tummy’s rumbling at the thought of it now, even though it’s all in the past now. So we laid out a precise and detailed menu with all the favorite foods we wanted just to see how he would take it, and he took it without blinking.
We had sorted out for ourselves a spicy Keralan fish curry with extras and mango pickle for lunch and the evening consisted of chicken vindaloo, Keralan fried potatoes, plus, plus, plus and of course, the good old mango pickle. Not a blink. We even requested absolutely no coconut and all food to be made true Indian spicy. He warned us that if we spent the trip crying because the food was too hot, he wasn’t to blame. Huh, he doesn’t realise that we eat raw chilies with our salads for fun. After all, the British national food is of course the Indian takeaway. Next day we laid our hands on a few basic supplies for the trip, (a bottle of rum, one of whiskey, mixers and half a case of London strong beer) and were picked up promptly by the boss man and carted off to the mooring place of our boat.
The boat…
“Wow!” was my first impression. “Wheeeeee!” was close to my second. Everything was perfect and immaculate, down to the big bowl of fruit on the table in our private sitting area, lush! It turns out that the boat we were going to spend the next 24 hours on was over 60 years old and used to be owned by the former Maharaja of Mavelikkara, and was used to ferry members of the royal family around. Yes, I am being serious, this is what the guy said. Most of this style of boats were used to carry cargo around Kerala as it used to be the best and most practical way of moving stuff around. The back waterways were sort of the freight-shipping channels if you like, carrying everything from grain to building materials. But not this boat, this was a Royal boat…
Apparently newer boats are made of fibre rather than the traditional wood, and seeing some about we preferred our boat. Some of the newer boats boasted a covered sitting area up on the roof making it essentially 2 storey, which was quite enviable, and some even had solar panels attached to the roof to supply hot water I suppose. Still, we had all the essentials, a sizable cool box with a huge block of ice in it to keep our refreshments cold, a cozy bedroom with two big arched openings out over the water and a neat little toilet and shower. The boat itself was a wooden hull with a gracious cushioned sitting area at the front out in the sun, a table and chairs we affectionately christened the “Thrones” for we were the king and queen on this trip! The roofing was made of bamboo strips and palm matting hand tied with coir rope. Coir is the fibre from coconut husks and is a big industry in Kerala. Although the main hull may have been originally the royal boat, the roofing was obviously a refit, but it was still elegant and fit for the royal Jake and Eddie.
Chandred was the front steersman cum punter, and Buagis was the back motorman cum punter, and Sugis was our private personal chef, who had the unenviable job of impressing us with his culinary skills. We were pushed off from the shore and Chandred and Buargis slowly punted us out from our mooring point into the middle of the canal, slowly, gracefully and royally. Chandred’s spot was at the front so when the quiet hum of the little engine started he sat down at the old Ashok Leyland Bakelite steering wheel and steered us off into the backwaters pointing out various bird life and bits and bobs. The first hours are the best, the complete novelty of it all, a houseboat to yourself, a couple of crew at your beck and call and chef to cook whatever you ordered, this is the life.
So in the sun we started to enjoy Kerala. And this is real Kerala, where village life goes on away from the towns that cater for tourists both Indian and non-Indian, the towns of hotels and restaurants and “free tourist information” shops that pressure sell trips as soon as you enter. Little houses lined along the thin strips of reclaimed land separating the canals from the even lower land of the rice paddies on the other side. Where people wash dishes and bathe and collect water from the canals, it’s their lifeline and their livelihood. Without these backwaters none of these people would be here doing these things, living these lives.
Orange and blue dragonflies skim the water’s surface, herons glide effortlessly overhead and perch on palms, Kingfishers sit on posts by the water’s edge watching for unwary small fish and cormorants dive down below the waters on big breaths and emerge with silver fish in their beaks. Clumps of purple flowers float on the surface like a colourful carpet, it’s pure serenity and nature out here. No cars or mopeds, just the occasional water taxi purrs by, otherwise it’s all by foot, the age old way from A to B. Sellers of pots and pans, coconuts and vegetables paddle long thin boats from home to home, bringing the business to the customer, other larger boats carrying on the tradition of transporting cargo by boat, sand dredged up by hand to use for building stacked high on long river trains convoy along the shallows. Fishermen moor up alongside large clumps of floating vegetation and dive down below to set the nets in the shade, others collect shells to burn to make lime to whitewash the houses that are built with the sand that the fishermen live in. Even the women folk sit on the banks with babe in arms with a short bamboo fishing rod trying their luck for supper. Life goes on; just differently that’s all. Some things stay the same though, a family preparing for a marriage sets up a long thin awning along the long thin strip of land. Everybody is busy, a wedding takes time and organization, plastic chairs are boated in and stacked on the shore. An old man prepares the meat in the river, and others set tables and mill around overseeing and looking important. Proud dads, agitated mothers, brothers and sisters getting excited and fooling around.
I remember back in 1990 during my first trip to India, I did the Alleppey to Kollam backwater trip, which I think cost more than it does now. But I think it’s a lot different now, boats packed in with as many tourists as possible. Back then there were about only ten or twelve of us and it was a nice leisurely ride with a few stops to see coir making and palm tapping. It used to be a common sight to see a whole bunch of coconut husks floating on the water with a kind of outside restraining ring to hold them all together. These floating husk platforms were about three meters in diameter and strong enough for a punter to place a wooden board on it and stand punting the husks down the river. I’m told that that sight is no longer seen and the husks are just carried by normal boat. How things change. There are still the stops for food and snacks where you are sold coconut water at inflated prices. I climbed the coconut palm for our coconuts on our trip. Which actually ended up with me covered in red biting ants in the process and sliding down the tree so fast that I had grazes all down my chest. I couldn’t get the ants off me and to the amusement of my traveling companions I had to strip of down to my underwear and douse myself with water from a well to remove the biting little buggers! The Alleppey-Kollam trip is lined with the traditional Chinese fishing nets like the ones in Kochi which our trip wasn’t, a pity really as they are impressive to watch as you glide by, but we had enough to amuse ourselves on our trip so that wasn’t a downside.
Our first stop, lunch! Did Sugis do a good job? Yes he did, he did us proud. Mounds of food arrived; spicy sear fish curry Keralan style, ladyfingers in garlic and herbs, braised shredded carrots in a tangy sauce, lush salad, poppadoms, chapattis, local boiled rice and mango pickle… He warned us that we needed to eat every scrap as he had slaved hard over a hot stove to conjure up this magnificent feast, or words to that effect. It was scrummy, some of the best food I have guzzled in India this time round. Eddie fagged soon but I was being a bit of a pig, and managed to pretty much polish the lot off. With distended stomach and full of satisfaction we lay under the shade of swaying palms heavily laden with green coconuts and lazily drooping mango tress plump with fruit. A walk with Chandred was taken, amongst the paddies and a photo with a young girl who said hello shyly.
After a little rest on the boat our crew shoved us off and we slipped slowly back into the backwater canals. We just lay there soaking up the sun and sipping cool rum and cokes. We stopped at a church that had foundations dating back thousands of years and at a boathouse that covered a famous snake boat that they race each year. We picked up some local toddy, a local brew made from coconuts, milky and smelly, promisingly strong.
That evening we moored up again on the canal bank and Sugis prepared another mouth-watering medley of food, which we ate in the twilight on the cushioned front of the boat, watching for the first visible star to make a wish. We watched the egg yolk sun reflecting off the still waters dip down below the silhouetted palms. Almost perfect mirror images bounced off the water and little twinkles of early evening fires and low voltage lights started to dot the water’s edge. We lit candles and lanterns and spent the evening telling each other scary stories while shinning a torch up onto our faces from below the chin “Blair Witch Project” style, then lay staring up at the stars and at Orion’s Belt, the only star constellation I recognized, reminiscing about old friends and places we’d been, stuff we’d done… It all went a little deep after more rum and cokes, like where did all the matter come from that made up the stars and the planets, and why do they gather together to form stars and planets at a particular time, where does all this stuff originate? Forget about the chicken and the egg, what about matter coming from the nothingness of space? Weird, eh?
The next day was short and we finished back at Alleppy at 11:00, and although the trip was unforgettable, things that were promised didn’t materialize, like the coir making factory. And although we stopped to buy toddy (which the boat crew sneakily drunk without telling us, leaving nothing for us to sample, which I was a bit pissed off about seeing as I had paid for it!) we were also promised that we would be able to see toddy being made. Neither of these materialized which was a pity, but that’s what you get for having expectations.
We had just enough time to get a rickshaw to the government boat pier to catch a waterbus to Kottayam where we had train reservations for Bangalore the next day. That two-hour boat trip took us through wide water highways stooping at little piers along the way to pick up and drop off the odd person in way out of the way places. Down little canal alleyways as we neared our destination where we had little bridges lifted so that we could pass through, Dutch style. So there we stopped for the night, our last night of our brief tour of Kerala. We only really made it down here for the backwater trip so we achieved what we came for. The next day we would travel north again, slowly heading back to Calcutta via Bangalore, Ajanta and Varanasi.
