Destination: India – Kerala – Kochi, Backwaters and Munnar – The boring and
the beautiful…
The train is
3AC, which means we’ll be sharing with 6 other people. Ok, a bit depressing to be sleeping in a
crowd, coughing and sneezing all around. Wipes please? This country makes
things very hard for an OCD person. An elderly couple decides to talk and flick
the cabin lights on and off, so nobody can sleep. I tell them off, it works for
30 minutes… Another write off, who needs sleeping anyway? One night on a bus,
one night on a train, just get over it! The sweetest thing is, as soon as we are all
up, the elderly couple decides to take a nap and just sleep all morning.
We get to Kochi
in the afternoon and we are so pleasantly surprised by the accommodation, it’s
unbelievable. First time in months we have white (matching really) bed linen
and YES, white towels! Our friends from Australia arrive a bit later and we buy
some great seafood and take it to a restaurant to be cooked for us. The
overcook the crap out of it but it’s still nice to have huge prawns and crabs,
so we kinda don’t mind it at all.
The following
day we walk around Kochi and go for some curries in the evening. Nothing
memorable, just OK. Next morning we get picked up at 8.30 to do the Kerala
backwater thing. We go for a day tour instead of a houseboat as we’ve heard
mixed reviews about the houseboat tours. It’s a great day, just cruising the
backwaters on a nice group. The group is small and not too loud (we usually
don’t go for tours, it’s always a gamble) and the backwater is quiet and grand,
so much water and green. We see a funny scene, a lady washing her cows. We call
it a call wash! Lunch is awesome veggie food, finally great, simple, memorable
food! In the evening we go again to the
seafood market to get tiger prawns and this time they are perfect. A nice goodbye to Kochi. Tomorrow, off to
Munnar by taxi.
4-5 hours by taxi and we reach Munnar hillstation (tea plantation area at 1500 metres above sealevel). Homestay is ok and it's pretty cool at night. This was fixed by our good friends (Pete and Jen from Oz) who were kind enough to bring a bottle of Chivas Regal along. Can't remember much but must have been a good night as whiskey disappeared overnight...
P&J continue on to Periyar national wildlife park but Paul & I go on to Madurai in Tamil Nadu.
