Saddles to paddles

Our journey has taken us back towards the coast to the beautifully serene backwaters of Alleppey, where we saw why they are widely touted as one of the highlights of any trip to India, before heading for some more wave action at Varkala.

This wraps up our stay in Kerela, which like New Zealand, call themselves god’s own country. With a significant part of the state still forested and protected by reserves, beautiful hill country, a golden coastline, hundreds of kilometers of beautiful backwaters and delicious cuisine, it certainly has been an enjoyable place to travel, albeit very briefly.

It’s certainly more wealthy than other parts of the country and we haven’t seen as much poverty or homelessness. Some of the people we’ve talked to attribute the relative prosperity of Kerala to a strong communist presence on a state government level. Images of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are everywhere.

It’s been an especially refreshing place to travel with the kids. There’s less of the stuff that they find a bit tedious like ruins, temples, big city chaos, people constantly taking pictures of them and many more active things to do like the mountain biking, horse riding, waves, theme parks, kayaking and novelty in things like house boats. Getting around has also been easy with short hops between the places worth being and simple connections.

We caught a ferry ride from Kottayam to Alleppey. We got phenomenal value for the $1.50 fit cost for the entire family for the three hour ride, taking in life on the waterways go by as the sun went down.

The view from “Keralan Homestay’ which was one of many properties severely hit by the flooding back in August. The tragedy was that it was preventable human error within the flood control service that caused the flooding, not excessive rain. For our hosts Soffiya and Baiju, this meant months of clean up and the loss of several of the uninsured bungalows at their homestay that were washed away. Any reimbursement of losses from the Government is highly uncertain.

We had a ‘tough’ day on our first day there. There have been a handful of days so far where small things excasibate into a bad mood day and this was one of them. With a year on the road, this almost certainly won’t be the last day like it and we’ve been having a few chats about the importance of attitude in working through days like this. This isn’t just a travel thing… like any family, we have days like this at home as well!!

…but these days always seem to be followed up with some of the best and that was certainly the case with this one. In the morning we took to the kayaks to explore some of the local narrower canals.

We had to time some of our paddling to follow houseboats to clear a path through the plants covering the waterways at this time of year.

Sofia met this guy during one of our breaks

Our guide showed us the water mark from the August `floods

Collecting sap from a coconut tree in a process known as ‘tapping’ to make the local alcohol concoction – ‘toddy’.

Drying peppers

We had a date with a houseboat so b-lined it back to the jetty

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Selecting a houseboat the day before. Liam’s soccer ball has been one of the best things we’ve brought on the trip and has got constant use!

After quite a physically exerting morning, the rest of the day was about chilling as we cruised the waterways by houseboat

Most of our time was spent just watching life go by

…we weren’t alone. The number of houseboats in the backwaters has exploded over the past couple of decades

This guy did good business from us

One of the highlights for Sofia and Liam was fishing off the side of the boat when we were moored

Despite lots of nibbles they didn’t catch us any dinner, but thankfully someone else had. The food was excellent!

Catching crabs

A cool way to get to school

The next morning we awoke to see where our dinner had come from

We left the backwaters and headed south to spend a couple of days in the pleasantly touristy town of Varkala, with cliff top restaurants overlooking a beautiful beach. The best thing about it for the kids was undoubtedly the surf and they spent hours and hours catching decent sized waves on body boards. The frisbee and Liam’s soccer ball also got a good workout!