Further up the coast of Kerala is the town of Cochin, or Kochi. Our accommodation was a Homestay, where you basically live in someone's home a few days. The family lived in a spotlessly clean house in a nice neighbourhood in the suburbs and we had the run of the whole first floor. As part of the cost of the room, we had home-cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner included. Our host was not the chattiest guy in India, and there was a definite language barrier, so we weren't too excited about the prospect of eating with the whole family. However, it turned out that our meals were served separately and we thought we had been spared some awkwardness...until the host pulled up a chair at the end of the table to sit and sat to watch us eat. He did this at every meal and we desparately tried to come up with topics of conversation to break the silence, often met with a confused expression. He was a very nice man and did ask a few questions himslef, but conversation invariably dried up after a few seconds and we were back to the sound of cutlery scraping on plates. Just to make us feel really at ease, the wife would then come and stand silently in the doorway and watch as well. My habit of eating too fast came in quite handy at those meal times.
For a small extra cost we were driven around in the family car (cue more awkward silences) and we really liked what we saw of the town, especially the fishing harbour of Fort Cochin where the big levered fishing nets are an iconic photographic subject.
On our second day in the area we took a boat trip on the famous Kerala Backwaters. In a group of about twenty, we were punted around in a former rice barge, or Kovallum, through the beautiful palm-fringed lakes and narrow canals. When we stopped at an island for a traditional thali lunch, a few of us took the option of going in a small wooden boat for a short journey. Joining us in the boat were an army of biting red ants and a massive jumping spider. The latter arrived right next to Ben and he nearly toppled the boat in his efforts to get away. It was even more alarming when the foreign-looking spider jumped away somewhere and nobody knew where it was! Despite the wildlife, it was a very peaceful way to spend half an hour and I even managed to punt us a few feet without falling in. After lunch we were all so full of tasty food, and the water was so quiet, that most people dozed off in their chairs on the way back.
That evening we were taken to watch the traditional performance in Kerala, called Kathakali. To the untrained eye it involves a few men wearing a lot of facepaint wiggling their eyebrows a lot, pointing their hands and stamping their feet. Still, it seems to be a big deal to the Keralan people, so maybe we were missing something. Or perhaps it was all just a bit too 'eyebrow'...;)
After our final meal-under'surveillance, the wife kindly fried us up some bananas for the train and we headed off to Panjiim in Goa.
